Main cast: Felissa Rose (Angie Newborn), Dave Sheridan (Detective Phil Anderson), Darby Hinton (Otis Taylor), Jeffrey Druce (Mick Thompson), Vincent M Ward (Carter), and Glenn Morshower (Doctor Doubleday)
Director: Bob Cook
According to IMDB, the bulk of the cast of Scream Test also made what seemed like three dozen films together over the last two years, so I imagine they probably all belong to the same company or something. Now, Felissa Rose is still most well known her role in Sleepaway Camp, and she seems to have embraced her role as a scream queen now that she is an adult. As a fan of the genre, I am all for such a noble goal, but then again, she could have been more discriminating in her choice of roles, perhaps.
Scream Test on paper sounds interesting. Angie Newborn, a scream queen whose career is on the downhill slide, is the middle of shooting for a particularly atrocious movie when she develops a throat condition that prevents her from screaming. She drags her long-suffering manager Mich Thompson along with her to this isolated resort (where phones, tablets, and what not are not allowed) to recuperate. Sure enough, the staff and the guests soon begin to die in ways that mirror the kills in her movies. What is going on here?
Sigh, I don’t know why movies like this one exist. Who will like to watch this kind of thing? The movie can’t hide its super-low budget—the bad lighting, horrible choice of clothes, and atrocious make-up for the cast (especially for Ms Rose) all suggest that the bulk of the money is spent on renting the cheapest location they could find, and everyone had to improvise thereafter. Because of this, deaths are either shown off-screen (the camera never closes in on the corpse), or for one particularly unfortunate scene, the special effects look like they had to hire someone to do them using coins they could find by rummaging behind and under the sofas of Bob Cook’s house.
The story isn’t interesting enough to make up for the eyesore that is the movie. Too much time is spent on poorly written characters played out horribly by actors that look like they are cast because they don’t have anywhere else to go or anything better to do. Oh, it is likely like the bad acting is deliberate, but the problem is, deliberate bad acting needs a witty and clever script to make things palatable. Here. the conversations are The Asylum-tier kind of badness, and the less said about the wit the better. The plot isn’t very clever either, as it turns out: I correctly predicted the twist early on.
Felissa Rose and Glenn Morshower are pretty good in their roles, as is Jeffrey Druce. They inject some much needed over the top awfulness that their roles desperately need to bring on some camp value to this movie, but the lines they are saying and the things their characters do in this movie are neither amusing or entertaining. The whole movie, in fact, is a joyless, entertainment-free drag with neither clever thrills nor good humor to make up for the absence of scares or gore.
The best Scream Test can aspire for is to be stumbled upon and seen by accident by poor sods such as me, and that’s really sad. Let’s hope Felissa Rose’s character here isn’t some kind of meta reference to her career trajectory. Is it that hard to pick some better roles in the future?
