The 1979 film, Screamers was released to the home viewing market a few months ago with little fanfare. Here's our review.
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| "Dude. This place is boring." |
A bizarre time-capsule of the later days of drive-ins and the
early days of VHS, this semi-notorious Roger Corman-ized Italian horror flick
has, against all odds, been resurrected for the digital age by Scorpion
Releasing. Screamers is one weird film – a pulpy, rather camp mash-up of
Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Island of Dr. Moreau
filtered through a Lucio Fulci-esque Italian exploitation lens – but the story
of how it came to exist (in this form) is even weirder. Made fresh on the heels
of Fulci's Zombie, Screamers appears to have been strongly
influenced by that film in its setting, style, and use of Richard Johnson (Zombie's
Dr. Menard) as the villain. American distributor Roger Corman also seems to
have wanted an answer to that film, for the drive-in circuit that increasingly
wanted more gore and sleaze in their horror flicks. But director Sergio Martino
(Torso, Slave of the Cannibal God)'s film just wasn't that kind
of movie; it was more of an old-fashioned fantasy/adventure tale, largely
without gore despite the occasional exploitation elements. That wasn't what
Corman wanted, so in a decision pretty typical of his sensibilities (one that a
studio could never get away with today, as it would be considered highly
unethical) he hired a team of his own filmmakers to shoot additional scenes of
gore and creature attacks to splice into the film, and had them totally redo
the movie's structure and pacing. And so, the more mild and leisurely-paced Island
of the Fishmen, as it was originally called, became the patchwork oddity
known as Screamers. And what an oddity it is: around this time, most
Italian imports to the U.S. had substantial amounts of gore removed to fit the
confines of an R-rating, but this is probably the only one that had substantial
amounts of gore added to earn it.
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"So, what did you say about that Creature from the
Black Lagoon lawsuit?" |
The team that Corman hired to shoot his additional
creature-attack inserts is quite a who's-who of 80s sci-fi and horror,
including filmmaker Joe Dante, visual effects artist Miller Drake, and producer
Gale Anne Hurd. They took their job very seriously too, providing some strong
special effects, and a whole new opening sequence that works great on its own
as a nifty little short monster movie. It has little to do with the rest of the
plot, and features guest-stars who aren't even in the original (including Mel
Ferrer and Cameron Mitchell- again, pure Corman), but it's a cool, atmospheric
sequence that starts things off with a bang. The rest of the film concerns the
survivors of a wrecked prison ship who wash ashore on an uncharted island
inhabited by fish-monsters, and ruled over by a megalomaniac (Richard Johnson,
chewing the scenery like a poor man's Timothy Dalton) who has set himself up as
a god over the creatures. The influence – or blatant theft – from The Island
of Dr. Moreau is immediately obvious, but the plot hardly stops there.
Through wacky twist after wacky twist, the movie becomes progressively sillier
and more unhinged, throwing in every possible monster-movie plot trope you
could want, and turning it into a delightfully cheesy cauldron of B-movie
ridiculousness that's a lot of fun, if nowhere close to actually good. Like Zombie,
it even manages to work in tropes of voodoo, in its totally camp – if casually
racist – portrayal of the native islanders. Add in a couple of major
actors looking for a paycheck as their careers decline – Barbara Bach and
Joseph Cotton, whose tired performance just screams “what did I do to deserve
this; I used to work with Hitchcock, dammit!” – and you've got a film that a
certain type of bad-movie aficionado will find difficult to resist.
Film purists may understandably find it dubious, if not
artistically reprehensible, that Corman so freely chopped up a director's work
and cobbled it back together with someone else's footage, but a strong case can
be made that Screamers is in some ways an improvement over Island of
the Fishmen. The plot and character development (such as there is) seems
fully intact, so all the scenes that were cut from Fishmen were likely
less than necessary. Given that camp appeal is pretty much what the movie has
going for it, speeding up the pace certainly doesn't hurt things, and just
makes for a more fun experience as the crazy moments come fast and furious.
Given that the film feels an awful lot like a Fulci flick in terms of style and
tone, it also isn't a bad thing that Corman's crew added more gore; it feels
right at home, as the one missing ingredient in Fishmen's eurotrash
recipe. There still isn't too much – certainly not a Fulci-level amount, so
don't go in expecting it – but it spices things up a little, and feels totally
appropriate for the drive-ins, grindhouses, and 1980s mom and pop video stores
for which the film was destined. It also helps a lot that Miller Drake and Joe
Dante's added effects are really cool, whereas Fishmen's creatures are
not much more than 1960s Ultraman quality. Sure, the creatures veering
from well-done to Halloween-costume may be jarring, but that's just part of the
charm; this is a Roger Corman production we're talking about, so clearly he
didn't intend for it to be taken too seriously.
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| "This hat is certainly villainous." |
The re-editing isn't the only thing that's unscrupulous about
Screamers, though: this title does have a bit of notoriety attached to
it, but it isn't the film itself that's notorious, so much as its shameless
marketing, courtesy of New World Pictures' marketing director – and future
trash movie guru – Jim Wynorski. If you browsed video store horror shelves in
the heyday of VHS, you'll undoubtedly remember Screamers' eye-grabbing
cover, boasting the tag-line “They're men turned inside out! And worse...
they're still alive!” accompanied by a gruesome drawing of a creature meeting
that exact description. Many a horror fan got pulled in by that artwork and
tag-line, expecting an inside-out-person splatterfest... and many a horror fan
was disappointed and angered by the shameless bait-and-switch. As the above
plot teaser should have told you, this movie has absolutely nothing to do with
men being turned inside-out; it's safe to say, nothing even remotely close to
that ever happens in Screamers. Apparently Corman and Wynorski didn't
think “they're men turned into fish!” would have quite the same draw...
although it certainly would have made this Old Gregg's favorite movie. Even the
title is a bait-and-switch, cashing in on distributor Embassy Pictures' recent
success with Scanners; the scaly man-fishes of this flick don't actually
scream at all (not even for a creamy-beige glass of Bailey's). Not
surprisingly, this marketing scheme backfired at first, as Screamers
began its life with a very bad reputation for totally failing to deliver on the
promise of its ads. It was only later, as viewers were able to see it with
better expectations of what the film really was, that it gained somewhat of a
cult following on VHS.
With such an odd, dubious history that could never happen
today, Screamers is very much a relic of the age of drive-ins,
grindhouses, and mom and pop video stores, and most people probably suspected
that it would fade into the past with that era. It had been out of print since
the demise of Embassy Home Entertainment, and in a way that seemed like an
appropriate fate. So I was totally shocked when a couple weeks ago I stumbled
upon Scorpion Releasing's brand-new blu-ray of the film at Barnes and Noble,
with that same old cover promising “men turned inside out! And worse... they're
still alive!” The disc had actually come out a few months ago, but I'm sure I
can't be the only one for whom this will still be news. Against all odds, here
we have the Corman-ized Screamers in HD, with a shockingly high-quality
remaster, in its original aspect ratio for the first time. The remastering
makes the Corman-produced creature inserts even more obviously different from
the Island of the Fishmen footage, but again, that's all part of the
movie's weird, campy charm. Personally, this is the sort of film that I find
more fun – and much more authentic to its roots – when viewed on that scratchy,
faded Embassy Entertainment VHS, but I'm nonetheless glad that it's now
available on modern formats, and I really appreciate how much love Scorpion has
shown for this formerly-forgotten film.
Perhaps even cooler are the disc's special features: a series
of interviews with the people from New World Pictures who turned Island of
the Fishmen into Screamers, including Joe Dante, Jim Wynorski,
Miller Drake, and even good old Roger Corman himself. Scorpion has done a very
impressive job lately of bringing long-out-of-print, obscure 1970s and 80s
horror films to DVD, and they seem like a company to watch closely if you're a
fan of that era in that genre. Who knows- maybe they could grow into the same
league as companies like Blue Underground and Scream Factory. Their disc of Screamers
is certainly worth picking up if you're a fan of Fulci-style Italian cult
flicks, Roger Corman productions, or delightfully cheesy old-school monster
movies. It's an odd time-capsule, and I'm glad that chopping up films,
inserting new footage, and turning them into totally different movies is no
longer an acceptable practice, but if you bring your sense of humor there's
still a lot of fun to be had with Screamers.
-Christopher S. Jordan
