Dee Cooper | Through the Shattered Lens

Since today is Friday the 13th, I decided to review a film called Scream….

No, not that Scream.

This Scream came out in 1981. It’s a slasher film but instead of featuring the usual collection of teenage victims, the victims in Scream are largely a collection of middle-aged tourists who are played a motely collection of former sitcom stars and western veterans. Even Ethan Wayne, the son of John Wayne, makes an appearance, playing a potential victim named Stan.

The film imagines what would happen if a bunch of tourists who were exploring the Rio Grande decided to spend the night in an apparently deserted ghost town. Speaking for myself, I would have never decided to sleep in a deserted town, especially one that isn’t even on a map. I mean, those places are called ghost towns for a reason. Even if they’re not haunted by ghosts, they are probably home to snakes, spiders, and all sorts of bugs. Considering that these people have camping gear with them, I’m not sure why they decided it would be smart to just sleep in an abandoned building. This is where the film’s use of adult victims really backfires. It’s easier to accept teenagers and 20-something doing something stupid. When it’s a bunch of people heading towards 40 and 50 (and even older in some cases), you can’t help but feel that they have no one but themselves to blame.

The murders begin on the first night. Needless to say, the survivors decide to find somewhere else to sleep but they discover that their rafts have been cut apart. They’re trapped in the town. Some of them leave to try to find a nearby ranch. Everyone else stays in the town and tries not to fall victim to the unseen killer.

And then Woody Strode shows up.

Oh, poor Woody Strode. Woody Strode was in his late 60 when he appeared in this film. In his youth, he was one of the first black men to play in the NFL. When he went into acting, he became a favorite of John Ford’s. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, he was John Wayne’s best friend. In Sergeant Ruteledge, he had a rare lead role as man falsely accused of murdering a white woman. In Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, he was the gladiator whose defiant death sparked Spartacus’s rebellion. In Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West, he was one of he gunmen waiting for Charles Bronson at the train station. Woody Strode had a long career and he broke a lot of barriers.

In Scream, Woody Strode plays Charlie, who claims that he’s spent forty years searching for the invisible killer who is currently terrorizing the tourists. It must be said that Strode gives the best performance in the film. He delivers his dialogue with a natural authority and, if you needed someone to defend you from an invisible killer with a scythe, Charlie is definitely who you would want to call. That said, Charlie wanders off for a good deal of the film. We never really find out where Charlie went off to. He returns eventually but not before the remaining survivors have managed to do several stupid things.

Scream is a pretty dull film, one that doesn’t even take advantage of its potentially atmospheric location. Watching it, one gets the feeling that everyone involved just made it up as they went along. It’s interesting to see a slasher film in which the victims are not a bunch of teenagers or camp counselors but otherwise, Scream is nothing to scream about.

There’s another range war brewing on the frontier. Big Jim Kirby (George Chesebro) knows there’s plans for a new railroad so he wants to steal the land from the ranchers so he can make a fortune off a selling it. Kirby calls in everyone’s mortgage, knowing they’ll never be able to pay. Rancher Tom Grant (Buster Slaven) reaches out to Cheyenne Davis (Lash LaRue, a look alike for Humphrey Bogart)) and Fuzzy Q. Jones (Al St. John) for help. Cheyenne raises the money but then he makes the mistake of trusting Fuzzy to deliver it. Fuzzy takes a knock to the noggin and now, he’s got amnesia. Where’s the money?

This is a standard B-western and you know the drill. Big Jim’s henchmen don’t want that money to get paid. Cheyenne is on the side of the angels. Fuzzy provides comic relief. Lash LaRue appeared in several B-westerns. He never became as big a star as some of his contemporaries but he did have a gimmick that made him memorable. Most westerns stars used guns. LaRue had a bullwhip. When LaRue was first offered the role of Cheyenne, he lied and said he could crack a whip. After he struggled to teach himself, tiny production company PRC hired a professional trainer. That was a huge expense for a poverty row studio but it paid off because LaRue became proficient with the whip and he had a surprisingly long career. He was born Alfred LaRue. The studio came up with the Lash nickname. Many western stars, like Johnny Mack Brown, played characters who shared their name. Lash almost always played Cheyenne Davis.

Lash LaRue’s movies were cheap and never that memorable. In this one, Lash barely appears and most of the action is carried out by Al St. John as Fuzzy. But Lash LaRue did play an important part in Hollywood history when he briefly came out of retirement to teach Harrison Ford how to crack a whip for a little film called Raiders of the Lost Ark.