“Hey, let’s all pile in the pickups.”

Drake’s rating: Rated H for Holy crap! This is bad!

Drake’s review: The early 1980s was quite the time for the slasher film. Kickstarted by John Carpenter’s Halloween and spurred on by the success of the Friday the 13th movies, low-budget filmmakers sought to emulate some of that success and churned out their own flicks in the hope that they too might cash in on the cinematic craze. Sometimes the results were surprising, and a director with a little talent and a lot of ambition was able to make a memorable slasher that bucked the odds and carved out a place for itself in the crowded market.

But just as often, if not more so, you ended up with something like Death Screams.

A regional slasher with a sparsity of talent on both sides of the camera, Death Screams is a rather unfortunate entry into the genre, a plodding affair that ambles along at a leisurely pace for the first seventy-five minutes before coming to the realization that it’s supposed to be a horror film and filling the last 10 minutes or so with frenzied, yet ineptly staged, slasher kills.

Granted, we do start off with the death of an inconsequential couple whose demise is both quick and confusing, but then we have to suffer through an hour of our motley crew of twenty-somethings engaging in small-town life before gathering together at the town’s tiny carnival. And honestly, you figure that that’s where the thrills will begin, right? After all, a carnival is a great setting for slasher, especially once the sun goes down and the lights of the attractions flicker to life.

Well, squelch your understandable expectations there. Aside from an unlikely kill on a carousel that looked like it was shot in an entirely different county, our characters’ time at the carnival is filled with naught but aimless wandering and sad attempts at characterization under a brightly-lit afternoon sky. And then they all go off to a campfire and tell spooky stories until the director gets bored and jams in the slasher bits with wild abandon and then the movie’s over.

Death Screams is a bad movie, with wooden actors reciting stiff dialogue that is too often nearly unintelligible thanks to the lousy sound production on hand. The most interesting thing about it is that it was directed by David Nelson, the oldest son of show biz couple Ozzie & Harriet. Not that he does a good job here, since at best the direction is merely below average while at worst it’s a confusing mess that often fails to feature killer and victim in the same frame. Think Coleman Francis, the man behind the camera for such easily-riffed MST3K fare as The Skydivers and Red Zone Cuba, but with even less interest in plot, characters or coherence, and you’re pretty much there.

I hate to so thoroughly dismiss a movie without at least listing a few highlights that might make it salvageable, but even the appearance of the usually energetic Susan Kiger (H.O.T.S.) can’t save Death Screams from being nigh unwatchable. This one is a straight-up dud that doesn’t deserve your time, so spend it on a better movie.

Like maybe Megaforce. Justin’s always looking for a few new “Megaheads” to gush over that flick with.

Intermission!

• Man, those bodies just keep on floating down the river.
• The microphones keep picking up the motor and fan sounds from the carnival.
• She took that arrow to the shoulder pretty quietly. I’d be yelling up a storm and alerting the whole carnival. If that carousel is even at the same carnival. It’s really hard to tell.
• Skinny dipping…right into the bodies. That seems fairly unhygienic.
• That was one slow-moving machete. Hard to see how it had any cutting power.
• Yeah! Let’s go to the cemetery!
• Whoops, sudden storm! Oh no! Now it’s time to crowd into the abandoned house.
• Man, what is with this 1970s TV cop show soundtrack?
• And now we have bad latex work to go along with the bad acting, sound and direction.
• I have no idea what Tweetsie Railroad is or was, but now I’m morbidly curious.