It’s October. Time to talk horror. This year I’m reviewing a different horror movie each day of the month.
My DVD copy of Scalps opens with an apology. The filmmakers regret to inform us that this is a partially lost film. According to the director’s commentary, they’ll never be able to make the definitive cut because the footage simply doesn’t exist. To recreate the original theatrical release, which was butchered by the distributor, they had to pull from a variety of sources. Most of the movie is pieced together from excessively blown-up and washed-out film. At other times, they had to pull snippets from VHS tapes, including all the death scenes, because their main sources (a German print and a Canadian print) had heavily censored that stuff.
I’ve heard about the legendary badness of Scalps and expected to enjoy it in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 kind of way, but even those guys wouldn’t touch it because there just isn’t enough dialogue to rip on. There’s only so many times you can make fun of the awkward pauses and clumsy transitions between scenes. Long sections of it are like watching a stranger’s vacation footage on Super 8 film. At one point, during an extended scene of a car driving down a desert road, my girlfriend got up to let the dog out. When she got back, they were still showing the same scenery. At which point she decided to go to bed.
There’s one Native American in the entire movie and, according to the director, he was a Scientologist. This actor, who could be a stand-in for Keith Richards, gets perhaps two minutes of screen time, which is hilariously misguided when your movie’s moral is “white people should respect Indian culture.” Taking an obvious inspiration from Evil Dead, the spirit of a “renegade Indian” possesses one of six whiny white people who are on an archaeological vacation in the desert. The evil spirit then proceeds to pick off the rest of the camp one by one. One of the actresses, while running, takes care to adjust her shirt for the camera even though her back is full of arrows.
The filmmakers claim the movie they shot is not the movie you see. While the movie was intended to be a slow burn until the climactic carnage, the distributor edited the movie to maximize the shocks per reel, which was done at the sacrifice of continuity. There’s a human-lion hybrid who watches the campers from afar, but has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. One character manages to watch himself arrive to the area. At various points, you see characters’ dead bodies before they get killed.
I should probably point out that the gore effects are surprisingly… well, I was going to say “good,” but let’s say “not bad.” The scalping looked realistic enough. A decapitation was satisfyingly bloody, even though the head came off before the blade struck the neck. I’ve seen much worse so I’ll take what I can get.
I have no idea how Scalps would have played to a large audience, but I’m sure there was no shortage of snickering. The best part about the DVD is the candid nature of the commentary. Right off the bat, the director admits he hasn’t seen this movie in a long time because it’s just not something you show off proudly. Aspiring filmmakers will probably love listening to him talk about his troubles. It actually does sound like there was a better movie than what we got and he’s not just shifting the blame.
Sometimes you’ve just got to make something to get somewhere in the film business. Sometimes it turns out to be Scalps.
Come back at midnight Central Time for the next movie.
The Goug' Blog 