Afouotos
Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.
Teddie Blake
The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.
Aneesa Wardle
The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
Climinator
Scream, also known as 'The Outing', is the only film where I've seen pretty much every review pan it. I decide to check it out of curiosity. Oh the horror! The horror when the cameraman slowly pans over to a lantern for the third time! The shock when a man wakes up to find...A DOOR OPENING SLOWLY!'Scream' is so bad, yet oddly enjoyable in my opinion, it deserves at least a remake. If that happens maybe all the mistakes could be corrected.Anyway the plot sees a bunch of rafters sailing down the Rio Grande river. Only they get lost along the way. They then decide to camp in a nearby deserted town (which looks like a set from Blazing Saddles). However when night falls they start to get killed off one by one by an unseen killer.The premise itself is interesting so what can go wrong? Everything. Nothing is explained. It's never explained whether the rafters are family or friends or work colleagues. This defeats any kind of characterisation, making it difficult to care for the victims. Veteran actor Woody Strode enters the film as a sailor (who looks more like a 1940's noir Detective! lol)called Charlie. His performance is the most interesting and still has bad dialogue. The cast are mainly lead by Pepper Martin (the guy who beats up Clark Kent in the diner in Superman 2). Why give somebody with such little experience in acting the lead? Add to that the lighting is bloody awful. There is no gore and you can tell that there are no stunt doubles. This is because you can blatantly tell when the actors are doing the stunts! A scene that I find unintentionally hilarious is when a woman runs across town at night and obviously JUMPS ACROSS THE WIRE-TRAP THE CHARACTERS SET MOMENTS BEFORE!! Lol. The titles theme is god-awful. It sounds like it came from Starsky & Hutch.The opening and ending sequences have hardly any links to the main plot at all. I only had a rough idea but what they consist of is a mantel piece, clock, three porcelain figures. The opening ends with the Butcher having decapitated the Baker and the Candlestick Maker. Then when Charlie shoots the killer the Butcher is decapitated too!!! Dumb dumb Dumb! There's also a painting of who the killer is at the very end. When the end credits rolled I had become so excited I fell off my seat.My advice...Stick to Wes, Neve, Courtney and David.
TheLittleSongbird
The best and only real good thing about Scream is the creepy ghost town setting. Even with a very familiar concept, Scream could have been promising but was spoiled by terrible execution to the extent that important components were almost non-existent. The movie is very badly made from a visual standpoint, you can't enjoy the setting properly because the photography ranges between haphazard and indulgent the entire time and the movie is far too darkly lit that you cannot see what is going on properly or work out who's who and who's been killed. The music had its atmospheric moments, but that is a big emphasis on moments, much of it is pretty much one speed and mood which is ponderous and over-bearingly monotonous, doing nothing to enhance what's happening. The dialogue makes next to no sense and sounds very random and improvisatory, almost like an incomplete rough draft, while the execution of the story is most likely the worst thing about Scream, it starts bizarrely in an opening sequence so strange and almost irrelevant it makes the jaw drop. It's also completely predictable and moves at just one pace which is excruciatingly dull, it doesn't explain anything(the ending can't even be called an ending for reasons that have been covered in previous reviews who explain the movie's problems very well), there's no suspense, scares or fun whatsoever, and for a slasher the deaths and the gore are incredibly tame in a way that it doesn't feel like a horror in any way. The characters are underdeveloped ciphers and some of them, especially Lou, are irritating too(the most rootable is actually the unseen and never revealed killer), while the direction is barely competent and the acting is atrocious, the annoying Joe Allaine being the biggest offender, making the most bored-looking zombies imaginable seem more animated. Woody Strode is the least bad and has a decent introduction but that's not saying a lot, his character is far too weakly written for him to count as a saving grace. In conclusion, a real clunker, whether it's the worst slasher is debatable but it's down there. Not to be confused with the 1996 film of the same name which actually is a great film. 2/10 and that is only for the setting. Bethany Cox
FieCrier
Starts off with a slow pan across an old room, with a painting of a ship rolling in rough water, and over to a mantel. The mantel has three figurines on it, a butcher, a baker and (I'm guessing) a candlestick maker. Above the mantel is a painting, which we don't get to see, and on the mantel is also a clock that is striking 12 o'clock.The camera then pans back to the figurines, and the baker and candlestick maker have lost their heads. Both heads are at their feet, and the latter's appears to have blood on it, while the former is still rocking. The butcher has blood on his apron. Then in a close-up, his eyes move.From here, there's a rafting trip. They stop in a ghost town to stay the night. None of the people are given any identities. Some people get killed offscreen. The only time blood is seen is when one of the weapons is shown, since the killer apparently can't be bothered to clean the blood off them. The rafts disappear. The people decide to stay in the town, rather than walking to a real town, or just floating down the river without the rafts. A few other people show up, but they're not much help.At the end of the movie, the room from the opening scene is shown again. We see the painting, and also the butcher has also lost his head, and there's some voice-over, but I couldn't understand what it was saying at all. Bad.
RareSlashersReviewed
Dull as ditchwater supernatural adventure which was obviously rush-released to cash-in on the FRIDAY THE 13TH inspired craze that swept the early eighties and gave us many a duff budgie! This was let loose in the US under the moniker of SCREAM, which of course, became the title of Wes Craven's blockbuster slasher some eleven years later.Well it all commences creepily enough; the camera leisurely pans an old looking room until the shot halts at an ancient clock, which stands beside a small statue. As the hour hand on the timepiece reaches 12o' clock, the eyes on the small figure move and suddenly, the words THE OUTING shroud the screen… Skip to 12 tourists heading down the infamous Rio Grande river of Texas, on small boats. The hapless gang of campers - who are cheerily sporting cowboy hats and baseball caps – ditch their rafts and begin to hike up a remote mountain where they find what looks to be a small desolate ‘old western' town. As soon as they've stepped upon the soil, one lassie keeps things routine by stating that she has `the strangest feeling'… Hmmm, indeed! The group set up camp in the abandoned site and settle down to rest for the night. Just after darkness has filled the lonely star studded sky, one unlucky guy heads out for a midnight stroll and to cut a long story short, he ends up hanging from the ceiling with a rope around his neck, killed by an assailant whom we don't get to see! Before long, another victim has been butchered in an inexplicable way and the posse at first suspects that one of there own luckless pack may well be a psychopath. As more of the friends wander off, only to fall prey to the remorseless assassin, it becomes evident that a bizarre supernatural force is at work. Stranded on the secluded region and without any weapons, the band realise that they must somehow defend themselves against this ruthless murderer…It's a real shame that first (and last) time director Byron Quinsenberry didn't make good use of the advantages that his flick had started out with. Although there were obviously visible financial constraints to contend with, the excellent set location could have been successfully turned into a decent backdrop for a satisfying bloodbath. Instead we got a lazy inane mess of a movie that doesn't even manage to resolve itself…With 14 typically hapless cast members to ‘cut up', you'd think that there'd be a body count to rival that of a snuff movie, but I'm afraid you wont find that hidden anywhere near here. Instead we get 5 or 6 meagre murders with no special effects or any engrossing gore at all, whatsoever. In the first, a guy gets hung from the ceiling by a rope. We only see his suspended corpse for half a second, obviously because the dummy that they were using was so unrealistic! Another gripe (and don't worry I've got loads to mention) is how we never got time to get to know any of the cast. The only one who was slightly memorable was the traditional annoying fat guy, who was more or less the star, only because he got at least three scenes to himself!
We don't even get an explanation as to who or what is killing everyone and his identity and motives are left unsolved. Towards the finale, an old, strange looking cowboy pulls up on a horse and sits down to talk to the terrified victims. I immediately thought that he would tell us a bit about the assassin or maybe even a loveable clichéd tale starting with something like `Didn't you know the story of…' However as an alternative and totally incoherent gesture, he tells the campers that he used to be a sailor and then gallops off into the gloomy midnight sky! What the hell?! And then to add insult to injury, the most brain boggling ending ever to invade my TV screen left me totally bewildered!Even fans of eighties cheese will be disappointed; there's hardly any un-contemplated laughs, except maybe for the way that the casualties fall prey to the lacklustre killer. It's a real horseplay filled ride. Watch how one guys gets killed, another goes to search for him, and then gets killed etc. And even when the survivors are aware that there's some kind of strange evil surrounding them, they still find time to wander off into doors that mysteriously open by themselves or go out to find out just what that creepy noise was! Maybe one day I'll find a slasher where the victims actually have brains!To be fair, I think that this attempt may have suffered some problems throughout its production. Filming began in 1981, and it didn't come out until '85. Maybe that's why there are so many inconsistencies in the story and why it looks so rushed. Still, that's no excuse to release a film as bad as THE OUTING. At times this felt like a helicopter without a propeller because no matter how hard it tried, it never managed to take off! Unfortunately this is one to be avoided.
