Scream Park (2012)

"Death is the new attraction"

Plot

On the final night at Fright Land before its permanent closure, the group of teen workers and their manager on shift are killed off one-by-one by two masked killers. Unbeknownst to the group, the owner has hired the two men in order to create a media sensation and attract a new breed of ‘dark’ tourists to the park.

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The rising trend of low budget horror films getting their big breaks via crowdfunding continues with Scream Park, a derivative throwback to 80s slasher films with a meagre budget that most likely covered Doug Bradley’s appearance fee and that’s all. Can’t pitch your slasher film to a younger, modern horror market weaned on found footage horror and gimmicky ‘killer entity’ films (Insidious, Sinister, The Babadook, etc.)? Then pander to the adult horror crowd who grew up on the home video slasher era and throw in a few nods to old school slashers. Scream Park clearly has a director/producer/writer who has seen a couple of old school slashers and thought “I could do that for a living” and tried to make their own with diminishing results.

The problem is that Scream Park needed to show off some sort of creative spin on the old formula because it ends up being wholly derivative and not very good at that. There’s a reason that the sub-genre died out in the 80s and that was because it was done to death. The 90s saw a post-modern self-aware revival but that was short-lived. Since then, we’ve been getting ‘80s throwbacks’ but that doesn’t mean to say the material is any less stale than it once was. This is a cheap tactic which is designed to make us remember the glory days and play upon on our nostalgia to pretend that these modern films are better than they are.

I’ve ranted a bit too much, unfairly aiming a lot of the sub-genre’s current problems onto this one film, so time to get more film-specific. Scream Park’s most glaring issue is that the filmmakers had a potentially great location to utilise but fail to do almost anything novel with it – the majority of the film could have been shot inside a murky barn for all the viewer knows because there’s so little done with the park itself. Only on occasions does the film attempt to showcase some of the rides and more sinister attractions of the theme park – one of the film’s highlights involves a hanging from a rollercoaster. It’s these little unique kills related to the location which Scream Park should have been championing from the very start. It’s almost a wasted opportunity.

But it’s almost a blessing to be fair because even if the theme park had been used more, the people inhabiting it would have killed off the mood. The acting here is, to put it mildly, diabolical. The actors mumble through their lines, sounding bored, lifeless and definitely without rehearsing beforehand. There’s no urgency or emotion in voices – one character’s reaction to seeing one of his co-workers brutally slain is laughably pathetic. It never helps actors when the script is as bad as it is here but that shouldn’t stop them from actually trying. Look back at some of the turkeys that horror legends like Vincent Price, John Carradine and Peter Cushing starred in and listen to some of the dialogue they had to recite – at least they put effort in to make it sound like the most dramatic thing ever!

The only person with any remote sense of talent in the acting department is Doug Bradley, he of Hellraiser infamy. He is the token genre name in the cast and he pops up far too late and with a role that is limited to a solitary scene. Bradley’s character provides the necessary exposition to explain just why the employees are all getting killed off and the speech comes slightly out of leftfield in the context of the scene. I guess we’re just meant to accept the fact that the guy proposes outright murder and the person he is speaking to just bluntly agrees. Researching more about the film, it appears that Bradley shot his scene a few months before the production commenced in order to sell the concept to get more crowdfunding – I’m sure the donators expected to see more of him than the solitary scene they had already seen!

With a soundtrack that owes a lot to Halloween and Friday the 13th, Scream Park at least gets a few brownie points for trying something a little different. It’s a pity that the dialogue comes and goes at times because the sound is generally solid throughout, adding just the right amount of tension even if some of the music is a tad overplayed. Technical issues should not be making it this far into a production which is a shame.

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Final Verdict

On occasion, the low budget shows but this is the least of this film’s problems. A right slog to get through, if this was a real theme park, Scream Park would deserve to be closed down for good. You’ve all been on bigger, better and scarier rides than this. And you're probably better off going on them again, rather than checking out this inferior clone.

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Scream Park Director(s): Cary Hill Writer(s): Cary Hill Actor(s): Wendy Wygant, Steve Rudzinski, Kevin 'ohGr' Ogilvie, Alice Marie Marcucci, Doug Bradley, Nicole Beattie Duration: 85 mins