Thursday 1 September 2016

NIGHT SCREAMS

CONTAINS SPOILERS, WHICH IS MORE SURPRISING THAN ANYTHING IN NIGHT SCREAMS

Yet another 80s slasher obscurity crawls miserably through my YouTube connection. The spectacularly unexcitingly named Allen Plone can't be accused of making a film in which nothing happens: this one has a house full of partying teen football jocks and cheerleaders (who cumulatively could barely outthink a Jaffa Cake), two vicious criminals who have escaped from prison and hidden in the same house's wine cellar, a blatantly obvious mystery killer released from the nuthouse as they're no longer considered dangerous, four pre-credit kills (two of them in footage taken from Graduation Day) that are so badly edited together it looks like two of them are being watched on TV by the other two, and a dance routine.

Sadly, for all the incident Plone has packed in, Night Screams (an utterly generic title that could be applied to pretty much every single teenkill epic of the period) is pretty rubbish. It's impossible to care whether lunkhead quarterback David is going to cop off with this or that girl, or whether he's going to take up the scholarship or not. It's also curious that the movie's main killer takes a hell of a long time to bump off half a dozen high school cretins when there are a couple of convincts hiding in the basement who had earlier killed four people in a diner in as many minutes.

This is yet another of those movies that has no current UK distribution: like so many films, it's fallen down the back of the post-VHS, pre-DVD sofa and in all honesty there's no particular reason why this one should ever be rescued from the murky wastelands of YouTube, It's never actually boring and it's certainly not the worst teen slasher movie you've ever seen, but that is literally all it's got going for it.

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