Night Screams

Rating:
Summary: In the dark, no one can see you leave the theater
Review: The original cover of this teen slasher epic featured a close up of a guy with a plastic bag tight around his head, his mouth wide open in terror. The caption read: Tonight....their cries will fall on dead ears.

I would much prefer that cover, because the current one had a picture of the house where this "night of terror" took place, and one of the character....who have an expression on his face like someone had put something up where the sun don't shine. The caption this time reads: In the dark...no one can see you scream.

Or leave the theater for that matter.

Night Screams like a typical teen slasher movie in which you watch to do the body count. And the body count in this flick reaches double digits.

As if that is not enough, the film started with this ill fated couple watching a horror film in which nubile females are offed by a fencing sword. Perhaps they are going for triple digits?

Anyway, basically, David, the high school football hero who have to take medication for hyperactivity decided to invite some friends over to his parent's palatial home when they went out to dinner (and it must be a loooooong dinner). And guess what, someone started to knock off the party goers, and in true slasher fashion, everything on the list is used: axe to head, electrocution, poison gas, strangulation, plastic bag suffocation...and yes, even the reliable knife in the back. And of course, in between killings, we get to watch David's parents wine and dine and started to get suspicious when they couldn't get through to the house via telephone.

And like all slasher movies, this one also have a twist ending....and everybody amazingly stupid. Like the guy who was suffocated with a plastic bag. Why didn't he just rip it off with his TWO HANDS?

Ultimately, Night Screams is standard fare....the acting is average (okay, so it is not Shakespeare), the gore effects is okay. But it is not a scary movie, it is very predicatable and you know when somebody is about to "get it". But if you are in for a film with a high body count, this one is it.

Rating:
Summary: Night Snores
Review: This is the story (...yaawwn...oh..pardon me) of a high school football player (David), his team mates, the cheerleading squad, and his girlfriend Joni who are having a party at his parents house as they are going away for the weekend to a business dinner (I presume; it was primarily stated that they would be away for the weekend and at dinner that evening}. To complicate matters, two escaped convicts find and hide out in his parents home. As the party is taking place, the guests are being killed off one by one; each in a different fashion (what did you expect in a cliched slasher film). The most obvious and annoying trait of this film is its slow aimless pace. They took a plot that would barely fill a half hour TV show and padded it (unsuccessfully) to an 85 minute movie. To that they added poor acting talent brought down even further by pitiful scripting. The scriptwriter(s) basically took lines from other teen slasher flicks and inserted them into this story. What you end up with is something you have seen and heard before, but brought down several levels on the entertainment scale. The direction of this film is good, for another genre, but does not work for a horror movie as it provides no suspense or shock value. The special effects are minimalist with the exception of the shootout with the convicts in the early part of the film which was fairly well done despite the bad acting which littered the scene. Joe Manno who plays David does a good job with the majority of his lines. Megan Wyss who plays Joni does a mostly good job. The stand out performance is Janette Allyson Caldwell as Lisa. She is a good actress and is particularly noticeable among a pool of poor actors. Unfortunately when her character dies, approximately 1 hour and 4 minutes into the film, any entertaining part of the film also died. The honorable mention for worst performance goes to John Hines as the convict Snake. He so overacts his role as to make any appearance of him on screen cringingly annoying. Fingernails across a chalkboard is more entertaining than his character delivering his own brand of coffee house poetry solo into a mirror. In summary, 'Night Screams' is a dull ineffective attempt at a cliched slasher film in which a good performance is near drowned in a pool of bad performances and may well have you asleep before you can find out who was responsible for this mess in the end credits.--Bob