It’s October. Time to talk horror. This year I’m reviewing a different horror movie each day of the month.
When a movie has Vincent Price, Clu Gulager, and Rosalind Cash, you don’t need to do much deliberating. Just watch the damn thing. That’s what I did. Then I groaned when I realized it was an anthology film.
I’m not saying anthology films suck, I’m just saying even the best ones tend to have at least one shitty entry. The first segment in From a Whisper to a Scream is weak, and it embarrassingly cops out before showing us what we all really wanted to see. Nevertheless, the second story tops it. That’s not exactly hard to do when you set the bar so low.
These stories mostly adhere to the rules of EC comics: something terrible must happen to an innocent person. In the end, the instigator must get what they deserve, usually in an ironic manner. It’s a little old hat and there’s not much room for suspense. From a Whisper to a Scream tries to deviate from the formula, but when it does the outcome is needlessly cruel.
The container story begins with the lethal injection of a deranged woman. A reporter who witnesses the execution later ends up at an old library cared for by Vincent Price. Price tells the reporter their town is haunted. He presents his case by showing the reporter four stories from various points in the town’s history.
In the first story, Clu Gulager plays the part of a hallucinogenic old man who falls for an uninterested younger woman. In the second story, a gunshot victim, played by Terry Kiser (Weekend at Bernie’s), ends up betraying the swamp-dwelling man who nursed him back to help. The third story is about a woman who falls in love with a glass-eating circus freak who’s bound by voodoo to remain in the carnival for the rest of his life. Pretty standard stuff.
Then there’s the fourth story. Like I said above, it’s hard to play around with such a simple formula, but when you have a real piece of work like the protagonist in this story, you’ve got yourself a great throwback to the stories often seen in The Vault of Horror and Tales from the Crypt. This one reminds me of a cross between Vic Morrow’s story in The Twilight Zone: The Movie and the classic Star Trek episode, And the Children Shall Lead.
The unreasonably prolific Cameron Mitchell plays a Union sergeant who doesn’t mind gunning down Confederates (or his own soldiers) even after he’s learned the war has ended. He and his group of immoral soldiers are taken captive in a town run by children. It’s later explained that their parents were massacred in the war and the kids decided to form their own society. When, at last, they reveal the oft-discussed “magistrate,” it’s wonderfully bizarre.
As a whole, From a Whisper to a Scream is pretty solid, even if some of its elements are structurally weak. Vincent Price doesn’t seem particularly enthused to be here and three of the five stories are meh. But Terry Kiser’s and Cameron Mitchell’s stories make the slog worth it.
Come back at midnight Central Time for the next movie.
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