Scared to Death (1980)

"Is it alien? Or was it once human?"

Plot

An ex-cop, now working as a novelist, is called out of his retirement to help solve a series of puzzling murders which seem to be the work of a serial killer but are in fact being carried out by a Syngenor - a synthesised genetic organism.

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A schlocky low grade flick which has clearly been studying Alien quite a lot, Scared to Death doesn't work on many levels, if any. Director William Malone’s first crack at bringing monstrous mayhem to life (he would later go on to direct Creature, an even more blatant cash-in of Alien, but more successful cheese with the remake of House of Haunted Hill), it seems like he built up a story solely around the novelty value of one huge creature which feeds on human spinal fluid. But credit to Malone, he really wanted to become a director and apparently sold his car, loads of belongings and mortgaged his house in order to fund this. He constructed the suit himself and shot the film in four weeks for a total cost of $74,000. The first deal alone, one to distribute the film in Malaysia, allowed him to recoup his initial outlay (and thus save his car and house from repossession) and even made a tidy profit. Talk about commitment to achieving your life goal.

Unfortunately for him, the film never managed to gain the sort of low budget notoriety as The Evil Dead, The Blair Witch Project or more recently, £50 zombie film Colin. Though it did make a profit, almost no one I know has heard of it. That’s for a very good reason mind you – it’s not that good. A perfect example of the old school men-in-rubber-suits school of effects, Scared to Death at least has some charm when delivering up a gooey, green-eyed killing machine. In the few occasions that you do get a glimpse of it, the creature doesn’t look too bad, if a little similar to H. R. Giger’s infamous alien creature. Maybe the director should have a little bit more faith in his monster instead of relegating it to the side lines. If you are going to watch this, make sure you watch the recent remastered version of it - the old copy I originally saw years ago was too dark and grainy to see what was going on but the cleaned up version really allows you to see the Syngenor in all of its glory. To say Malone built the suit himself, it looks excellent. It's a pity the thing moves so slowly (you'll wonder how it ever manages to catch anyone) but at least the costume itself has some manoeuvrability during scenes where it has to do more than just stand there.

The Syngenor likes to carry its victims back to its underground lair where it kind of cocoons them and slowly drinks their spinal fluid, leading to a few scenes of dying characters covered in slime regretting their decisions in life. It also an extendable tongue which it uses to ram down victims' throats and start draining them of the goodness it needs. The sequence where you see what the Syngenor does to its victims, in this case a young rollerskater, is particularly grotesque and revolting. There are no real reasons why the monster has to do these things in the script, other than to copy the Alien tropes that audiences would be familiar with. Scared to Death started filming in 1979 but was released in 1980 so would have been one of the first out of the block to copy Scott's masterpiece.

That’s about where the positives end. As I touched on earlier, the idea was obviously to build a monster and then come up with some sort of story to showcase it. But the end script is a mess, resulting in a film which serves no real purpose other than to offer up some monster attacks on partially lit sets. All of the greatest build up in the world (not that Scared to Death offers any) can be ruined if there's no meat to the bones of a story and whenever the creature isn't around, it's dull. Most of the running time is taken up by a bunch of really bad actors that have little to business being around a film set, let alone acting in one, swamped by a nonsense love story and some police procedural guff that goes nowhere. "Feed them to the Syngenor" you'll be shouting by the end of it and thankfully, quite a few of them are (just not enough). Lead actor John Stinson was a last minute substitute and so you can give him the benefit of the doubt as to not having the prep time to get into role.

Scared to Death does very much run like a slasher film in structure, only substituting the masked maniac for a synthetic organism but still including plenty of the slasher tropes that the 80s was to become familiar with such as POV shots. Therefore, there are few surprises when it comes to narrative beats and predicting the next scene. The soundtrack is also derivative, a mix of Bernard Herrmann's screeching violins and violas from the shower scene in Psycho with Jerry Goldsmith's beautiful but threatening score from Alien. It definitely elevates the material more than it deserves but you'll notice the cues from the other films a mile away.

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Final Verdict

The behind-the-scenes background story behind Scared to Death is much more interesting than the dreary and uneventful end product. Bored to Death would be an appropriate alternative name. However, despite it's shortcomings, Scared to Death somehow managed to find a sequel being made nine years later in Syngenor, which ramps up the action and gore to something more acceptable for a low budget monster movie.

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Scared to Death Director(s): William Malone Writer(s): William Malone (story & written by), Robert Short (story) Actor(s): John Stinson, Diana Davidson, Jonathan David Moses, Toni Jannotta, Walker Edmiston, Pamela Bowman, Mike Muscat, Freddie Dawson Duration: 93 mins