Death Screams

Plot synopsis:
Ted and Angie are out kissing on a motorcycle, waiting for the train, which apparently arguments their dual orgasm, Unfortunately someone unseen shows up, kills the couple and kicks their bodies into the river.The next day, Sheriff Avery is at the general store looking for Ted, who has not shown up for work. Bob and Kathy are at the ball field, assisting baseball coach Neil Marshall. They see the slow and weird Casey watching them and he runs away when he realizes that he has been spotted. Neil takes the assistant out for a pitcher of beer, and Bob walks Kathy home. Bob asks her to the river, but Kathy says she has to work at the carnival tomorrow and she asks him along to help.The bodies of Ted and Angie continue to float down the river.The timid blond waitress Lily leaves work and heads home, continually looking around for anyone following her. She gets home to her grandmother.The next day at the carnival, Tom and Ramon hang around with Sheila, Walker, Sandy and the irrigating Diddle. At the booth, Bob tells Kathy that he think that he is in love with her and the two kiss.
Nearby, Lily is rolling her grandmother in her wheelchair; they speak with Agnes. Sheriff Avery asks the six friends if they have seen Ted or Angie recently. The group later tells Bob and Kathy about their bonfire party that night. Lily walks out with Neil, and he tells her that his mother used to live in the town when he was younger. Bob and Kathy tell Neil about the party, and Neil asks Lily to accompany him. She politely declines, but accepts his invitation to a potential movie in the future.Sara, upset that Neil seems more interest in Lily then her, covers his car in shaving cream, which Casey evidently witnesses. Later Sara, sitting by a fountain, is shot with an arrow. She runs to an abandoned merry-go-round and the ride starts moving. A plastic bag is thrown over her head and she is suffocated to death.At home, Casey's mother Agnes tells her son that it is wrong to steal things like ball field equipment (which Casey has been accused of).Bob is dropping Kathy off and they both tell Lily she should go to the party. At her house, Lily's grandmother expresses her skepticism of Neil and she calls his mother a common whore.Neil is in the shower when Ramona walks in and kisses him. Neil carries her to the shower and turns it on. He tells her to go home, and he lets her know that he does not like "cheap thrills" because he had a lifetime to that with his mother. Ramona storms out. The sheriff sees her outside and he mocks her for her flirty ways. Ramona says something about Avery's son and he becomes irate, but Ramona tells him that Casey was driving.Agnes cannot find her son, and she calls the police station to talk to the sheriff.Out in his garage, Neil sees a soccer ball fall from the upper level. He climbs the steps, and a machete is swung at him.Out at the bonfire, Ramona is upset and she tells Tom to leave her alone for a while, but she later hugs him and apologizes. Diddle is seen dancing with Sandy, but he passed out drunk right when Sandy wants to go for a swim.At Neil's house, Sheriff Avery sees something on the windshield of Neil's car, and something falls from above.At the lake, no one wants to swim with Sandy, so she goes off alone out in the water. She bumps into the floating corpses of Ted and Angie. She screams and gets to shore and gets chopped to death by the machete.A little later, Diddle want to go looking for Sandy so he, Tom and Walker look around. They meet Bob, Kathy and Lily and they all sit around the bonfire, deciding that is the time to go to the cemetery. Lily is reluctant, but Bob suggests laving a note by the fire in case Neil arrives afterwords.At the Sunset Cemetery, the group arrives and sits in a circle, each holding a lit candle, and Lily is chosen to tell a ghost story. She tells of a frightened girl staying alone during a storm and her dog constantly reassuring her by licking her hand in the dark. The girl hears a dripping sound and she checks her shower and find her dog hanging, bloody and dead and a message written on the mirror in the dog's blood saying "maniacs lick hands too."The group runs to an old house when it begins to rain. Diddle goes back out to occupy the outhouse. Tom suggests scaring Diddle, and after giving him some time, the group heads out tot he outhouse to find Diddle hanging, bloody and dead. Tom exclaims "somebody slit him from ear to ear". They carry his body inside. Walker heads for the truck followed by Sheila. When Sheila reaches the truck, Walker is there but his head falls off his body and Sheila is grabbed. Tom finds both of them in the truck dead and headless. He runs from the still-unseen killer but falls into an open grave. When he tries to climb out, the killer chops off both of his hands.Kathy hears someone approaching. Bob opens the front door in time to see a raised machete and quickly slams the door shut. The killer breaks the window, and Ramona heads for the stairs and falls through the unstable steps. Bob tries to pull her up, but Ramona's body gets sliced in half at the waist. The three remaining survivors of Bob, Lily and Kathy run upstairs with the killer close behind. They run into a room and barricade the door, and Bob it hit when leaning against it. Neil then bursts into the room and yells to Lily that he never wanted to hurt her but she is just like all the others.A flashback is shown with Neil's mother having sex with a stranger as a young Neil watches her.With Neil distracted by this flashback, Lily picks up a glass shard from the broken window and slices Neil's throat. Neil attacks again. Lily moves out of the way and Neil flies out of the window. Sheriff Avery arrives, sees Neil laying on the ground still alive, and shoots him several times until he is finally dead. Avery walks Lily to his squad car and lets her inside.

Tags: cult, murder, violence

Review:
The movie does a good job of establishing a bucolic small-town setting (perhaps, it's not a coincidence that the director is the grown-up David Nelson of "Ozzie and Harriet" fame).
Another victim wanders away from the town carnival and is struck by an arrow, but instead of screaming for help or anything, she staggers over to an abandoned carousel and sits down so the killer can (somehow) finish her off with a plastic bag.The actors are all ridiculously over-aged considering they're supposedly high school students, but this is actually a good thing considering the male protagonist is a "coach" who apparently both parties with and dates his students (which they tend to frown on in real high schools).
Kiger stays dressed, but there is some gratuitous nudity, of course, including the girl on the motorcycle, a girl who showers with her bra on (which quickly becomes so transparent you wonder why she bothered), and a pretty blonde girl who goes for a full-frontal skinny-dip (which ALMOST keeps you from contemplating the absurdity of why anyone would go skinny-dipping in a RIVER).I don't want to imply this movie is in anyway good, but it sure is weird..
(** out of *****) The titular `house' only appears in the last ten minutes or so of this overly familiar, early-'80s horror flick.
If you can make it past the interminably long carnival scene -- with a group of young, vacuous girls and hunky, meat-head guys walking around making jokes and playing games -- you'll get a few so-so chills and thrills (and mostly off-screen machete murders) once the gang winds up in the cemetary to tell ghost stories (the lead heroine tells a lousy version of the classic urban legend about the girl who's home alone and thinks that's her dog under the bed licking her hand.)  Other than a decapitated head or two, there's more nudity than gore, including an interesting, role-reversal shower scene in which a man is stalked in his apartment while taking a shower.
There's some minor backplot and attempts at character development, but there are also gaping plot holes and a weak attempt to make the killer's identity a mystery (you should have no trouble figuring it out.)  The film quality's pretty crummy, and the out-of-place, Sesame Street-sounding soundtrack is one of the worst I've ever heard.HIGHLIGHT:  Speaking of the soundtrack, if you do happen to run across this movie at the video store, go ahead and rent it solely for the opening credits sequence -- the music that plays over this sequence is so hysterically over the top that you will not believe it.
This is by no means a good horror flick, and one too many times teeters on being an incoherent, stupid mess.
The story focuses on a small town festival and a group of "teens" who want to hang out in the local cemetery and tell ghost stories to celebrate the last day of the town carnival???
Slow moving at first with some ridiculous death scenes--example: a girl at the local carnival gets viciously attacked and shot with a bow and arrow by the killer, but instead of running back to carnival or to anywhere where people are at, the dumb broad seeks refuge on an old merry-go-round where she is prime meat for the killer!!
The redeeming qualities come at the end of the film when the group finally gathers at the old cemetery.
But like I said, not a total waste..if you like machete murders, the last 20 minutes of the films should satisfy you.
When I was very young I always caught this on tv, it showed up on A&E a lot for some reason (I honestly don't know why), but when I saw it for the first few times, it sent chills down my spine.
Today, after finally hunting down the long-gone video copy (under its more well-known title, "House of Death") of this eighties slasher thriller, it was fun to look back but this isn't really that great of a movie at all.
It's true, the people who created this movie could've made it a whole lot better if they had at least put a little, oh, I don't know, thought, into it.
First off it had a few good aspects of it that still impress me today, and this includes the way the director captures the eerie atmosphere of a small town with the killer lurking in the shadows.
There are effective shots of deep, dark, misty woods and wind-swept cemeteries which create an extremely unique atmosphere, and put together with a very scary, when he is at least hinted at or briefly onscreen, psychopathic killer who prowls around in bloodstained black "psycho gear" complete with his bloody machete at his side.
The plot, as I've mentioned, makes basically no sense and neither does the killer's "motive", which really isn't even explained when he shows his face in the last few minutes.
Even so, I still can't get over some of the aspects of this movie which still can send shivers down my spine, like the killer prowling through the cemetery while blonde Playboy Playmate Susan Kiger tells the "drip, drip" story to her wide-eyed friends, or the "double decapitation in the truck" sequence (this does have some pretty graphic deaths) as well as the scene where a girl falls through the stairs and has her belly violently ripped open by the machete-wielding killer who is waiting beneath.
It sounds like I love this movie a lot, doesn't it, but actually the finale of the film just holds a special place in my "slasher movie watching" history, it's basically the only good thing to watch in the whole film, which wastes too much time with teenagers at a carnival or at a bonfire.
Nothing really starts happening until about an hour into the film, when the always talked about "blonde skinny dipper gets her throat hacked out with a machete" sequence occurs, which is a definite must-see.
I saw this film under the title "House of Death".
Despite the mysterious disappearance of a teen couple, Ted and Angie at the riverside in north California a group of the nearby-town teenagers goes having ghost story in the local cemetery.
I think the only one uniqueness this post-Friday-the-13th-Part2 film has is its expressive way of the first and silliest two victims, Ted and Angie who originally tried to have a woodland-****-on-a-motorcycle in the middle of the cold night.
Although I find this coupled-bodies-with-their-coupled-expressiveness interesting I have to say the most of the elements of this film are nothing but those of a bad B-movie; Dee Barton's old-TV-movie-like easygoing music is entirely unsuited to the 1980's horror film especially to its horror scenes, and Worth Keeter's special effects are not only cheap but also unnatural, and so forth..
--Death Screams, or House of Death as it is known here, is one of the most absurd horror films I've seen next to Drive-In Massacre.
I had friends over while watching this movie, but afterwards I think they considered me their worst enemy after putting them through this trash.--The first 40 mins.
Before that, just some cheesy killings.--House of Death has the most funniest death scene that is the only "plus" side to this movie** IF you get pierced in the shoulder with an arrow, go and scream for help.
I know most characters in horror flicks don't think...
but c'mon!--I do not even know who the killer was, it was revealed, but House of Death has more holes than a fish net I was confused.
A group of teenagers attending a carnival are stalked by a mysterious, hidden in the shadows psycho who proceeds to stalk and kill them after they leave the carnival and party at an old run down farm house.The identity of the killer is very easy to figure out in this not very surprising slasher film that features an over the top finale that will produce unintentional chuckles instead of having you shiver in your seat.
"I don't know"?The above exchange between two characters are the last few lines of dialogue in the film, which might explain how you could feel after watching this one.One of the strangest and vaguest 1980's (although it looks more late 70s) low-budget slasher films I've ever witnessed.
At best very unconventional in its story threads.After the obligatory opening death scene, the thirst three quarters slowly plays focal point to small town atmospherics, carnival traditions and teen dramas/fooling around.
Like it was trying for a "Halloween" vibe, especially in how it was shot and early on it has the killer slowly stalking his victims in the background.
There's one or two more death scenes sprinkled throughout to remind that you are watching a horror film.
One of those needs to be seen, to be believed, because of how bizarre and stupidly it plays out.But it really doesn't come into its own until the confined hysteria-laced backend, as the teens (although they do look much older) start partying; boozing, skinny-dipping, making out by a lake late at night then moving onto a cemetery to tell spooky stories.
I just wished the carnival setting could have been put to better use.We only get to see the killer's arm and machete throughout, until the final reveal.
You know playing it safe, as if he's watched too many horror films.
Susan Kiger made an agreeable heroine of sorts and Susan Kiger added some life with her floozy character."Death Screams" aka "The House of Death" is an oddball, if at the same time unimaginative rough-around-the-edges slasher..
It spends a lot of its 90 minute run time with character development saving the action for the final 15 minutes.
"House of Death" is a totally sordid and fatigue effort, and the worst thing of all involves having to acknowledge that the whole premise actually had potential and a handful of sequences were even marvelously staged.
Too bad even granny can't save "House of Death" from complete boredom and irredeemable stupidity.
A group of obnoxious teenagers attending the town's carnival is stalked and viciously murdered by a machete-wielding killer."Death Screams" by David Nelson is an okay slasher flick.The script is highly unoriginal and the acting is weak,but who cares.The location sets including a town's carnival,a graveyard and finally an isolated house add a lot of creepiness to the overall atmosphere of a quiet little town.The pace is quite slow,but during the carnival bloody murders are set in motion.The gore effects are fairly effective with decapitations,throat slashings,stabbings and chopped off hands to boost.The score by Dee Barton is also surprisingly moody.Overall,I rather enjoyed this rare slasher flick and you should too,if you are a fan of hack 'em up movies.7 out of 10..
OK, so the film goes on with a boring carnival scene for like 35 minutes, the acting is pathetic, the soundtrack is garbage and the special effects are not too hot but it is still watchable.
This film is more commonly known as HOUSE OF DEATH.
Just when the flick starts a couple is being killed while making love on a motorbike.
And there's a bit of it in it, the first minute it's already bare naked breasts, there is even some full frontal nudity when one of the girls goes swimming in the noticed river...at night...without somebody watching...naked, guess what's coming next.
They become wet after a few seconds showing everything...The first killings are so strange, one with an arrow but watch the girl go running to a merry-go-round.
Death Screams or as i rented it under House Of Death has to be one of the worst horror movies ever made.
the movie is so boring like the 35 min carnival scene.
The movie takes over an hour to even get to the "House of Death", the characters are under-developed and not memorable, and - not to give away the ending - I was staring dumbfounded at the screen for a good six minutes after the credits rolled.
Former Playboy Playmate Susan Kiger was the star...you can't expect a big budget thrill knowing that :-P I gave it 8 stars for high 80's horror camp at it's best..
Rating- 3 *** out of 5DEATH SCREAMS or now called as HOUSE OF DEATH is not all that good.
I think I'll email Mr. Ebert with an entry for his Movie Glossary Guide: FAT COP SYNDROME -- A Dead Teenager/Slasher Horror film formula element that establishes a sense of hopelessness by casting an obscenely obese 'comic relief' character in the role of the small town sheriff.
I glommed onto most of the interesting looking/sounding horror videos and have been enjoying some vacation time just chilling and watching tapes.
Shelf space is a commodity around here, life is short, and some sucker out there will want NIGHTMARE HONEYMOON, I wager.We'll probably keep HOUSE OF DEATH though; Decent looking college aged women get utterly stark naked, there's some acceptable Hackage & Dismemberment, and I like the low budget settings of the carnival and spooky old rain shrouded house.
Depends on your point of view.But this is about the sixth slasher flick I have seen this week with a really FAT small town cop who is supposed to be "funny", and it got me thinking about how the role of the bumbling, inept small town lawman -- usually knocking back a half pint or slobbering down large sandwiches -- is so vital to making the audience feel as though the people in the story have absolutely zero hope of seeing daylight.
We are definitely onto something here.They all must go to the same Big & Tall Shops For Fat Movie Cops Outlet Store too, specializing in making you look utterly useless in an emergency.
I can live with that, and fans of 80's horror will be amused by this nasty little relic.But again and again, the bottom line with these movies seems to be that breasts will hopefully be bared and lives may be lost, but at least the fat sheriff will get to enjoy the rest of that sandwich..
I'll just echo and augment previous reviews warning that the juicy bits (here, there, everywhere) only occur in the last ten minutes of the movie, the identity of the killer is unclear (with his motivation irritatingly muddy), and quite frankly these 'teens' should've worn name tags, because I couldn't ID one from any of the others.
The name brings to mind a plot setting similar to EVIL LAUGH or HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY, but funnily enough the actual house of death' isn't featured until the last ten minutes!
A psychopathic killer with a very large machete seems like he has his own idea for a party Although most of the acting in HOUSE OF DEATH was painfully rank amateur, I quite liked ex- Playboy playmate Susan Kiger and believed that she made a sufficient lead.
David Nelson gave us a pretty spooky atmosphere at times, along with some good photography from Darrell Cathcart (who also worked on FINAL EXAM).
And when the killer is finally revealed in the last few minutes I wasn't even sure at first if he was someone from the story or just some unknown psycho.
HOUSE OF DEATH also plays host to one of the dumbest ever slasher murders: a young girl gets shot in the shoulder with a sharp arrow.
When I saw a better version, well I actually kind of liked this movie, It's nothing spectacular and not as great and as a lot of the other 80's gems but In my opinion this movie falls somewhere in between.The spooky atmosphere is nicely done, and the forest scenes are nicely done and beautifully captured, although the night scenes are still really dark on my second viewing of this movie and the last ten minutes of this movie are really frantic and delivers thrills and excitement and the gore is nicely present and interesting.Okay like I said before this movie isn't quite up there with some of the other classics during this period, it starts off well with the double murder but then It takes way too long for another murder to happen, and there is also no attempt at characterization with the young cast, personally I couldn't tell some of them apart and the stupidity of the cast is unbelievable like when a girl gets shot with an arrow at a carnival, instead of running to the crowds, she runs to an abandoned carnival down the road and gets killed and the unmasking of the killer at the end was a bit of a letdown and way too rushed.All in all not a bad movie, just not a great movie, bad lighting and sub plots that never go anywhere, but the kills are decent and fast paced..
Even if you enjoy a good 'bad' movie (which I am partial to) this should be avoided.
After all, DEATH SCREAMS should be a pretty big deal to Paul C.
I read ALL of the comments (22) as of today, and about 50% of them say the killer's identity in DEATH SCREAMS is TOO EASY to figure out.
I know the killer's face is shown clearly during his killing orgy of victims #6-#10 during the final minutes of this film, before the sheriff (who is clearly the brain-damaged guy's dad) blows off the top half of his head with his service revolver.
I would prefer that explanation to the alternative that the killer is some previously not seen character who appears ONLY in the finale, and whose identity is NEVER revealed (or that he is the guy who got brain-damaged while driving with town slut Ramona-the-barmaid, since the killer definitely did not look brain-damaged at the close--until the guy who may or may not be his own dad blew off the top half of his face!).
So, c'mon Paul, now's the time to 'fess up--get this thing off your chest--please tell us who killed the first ten victims in your magnum opus, DEATH SCREAMS!