cinema), exchanging barbed words with Whitelaw (a sexy, mature sec- ondary heroine), ranting like a lu- natic as she drags the coppers out yet again for nothing and turning vicious when cornered. It’s mostly the sort of thing that could have been done on TV in the US or UK—as a MOVIE OF THE WEEK or an episode of Brian Clemens’ THRILLER—but it winds up with a couple of murders that are as bloody as any Hammer or Tigon horror of the ’70s. Genre fixture Hayden gets a small, wordless but significant part as a perhaps-spec- tral girl who figures in the climax. The Warner Archives disc looks fine with the 1.78:1 fram- ing enhanced for 16:9, but has no extras (not even a trailer).
SCREAM PARK
2012, Wild Eye Releasing, 83m 58s, $14.95, DVD-0 By Chris Herzog
Devotées of ’80s slasher films may enjoy this rather slavish homage to the genre. Financed
through Kickstarter and shot in Pittsburgh, the film makes the most of its reported $40,000 bud- get with atmospheric lighting and realistic gore effects. The plot, which moves from slasher trope to slasher trope in ritualistic pro- gression, concerns a group of horny teenagers who decide to throw one last party at a dilapi- dated amusement park which is about to close. All the familiar faces are here—the sensible Fi- nal Girl, the Jock, the Floozy, the Geek—going through their paces as they have in a thousand other films. The film provides a death- after-sex scene, hand-on-the- shoulder scares and two killers, a cackling wisecracker and a silent, masked force of nature. In addition to a full slate of the slasher form’s greatest hits, the film also strikes a number of its traditional sour notes. The one-dimensional characters, played by an inexperienced cast, are difficult to take seriously. The visible seams of the thread- bare production sometimes
become distracting. The Fright Land Amusement Park seems to be largely a collection of tem- porary carnival rides with an un- marked chain-link gate for an entrance. A plot point involving car keys is carefully set up and then forgotten about. If the viewer manages to overlook such details, the film does pro- vide a fair share of thrills. Its use of gore, in particular, is realistic and gruesome without becom- ing gross-out camp. Cameo ap- pearances by Doug Bradley (HELLRAISER) and Ogre, lead singer of the band Skinny Puppy, lend some needed genre-cred to the proceedings. To be fair, SCREAM PARK is clearly intended as an earnest love letter to the slashers of yore, rather than an unimagina- tive aping of other films. A wel- come commentary track from writer/director/producer Cary Hill makes this clear and pro- vides a straightforward account of the project’s trials and tri- umphs. Other extras include a
An odd couple from Cary Hill’s affectionately bloody slasher valentine SCREAM PARK.
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