Once upon a time, aspiring filmmakers wanted to make movies. Today, it seems they only want to make one kind: the slasher film. That would be fine if the young pups came equipped with a new twist to offer; barring that, I’d settle for capable execution (no pun intended). In Scream Park, neophyte writer/director/producer Cary Hill obviously has the subgenre’s recipe in pocket, but doesn’t necessarily pay attention to the proper amount of ingredients. Therefore, it comes out of the oven hardly resembling what it was intended to honor.

Due to dwindling (read: nonexistent) attendance, the Fright Land theme park has filed for bankruptcy and is going out of business. On its final night, the high schoolers who work there conspire to hold an after-hours liquor party, with their butt-cut-haired manager (Steve Rudzinski, Everyone Must Die!) supervising. Making their young lives miserable are a killer in a raggedy burlap-sack mask and a killer in a more fashionable creepy-bird mask. It’s the former, however, who is more creative, what with shoving the post-coital girl’s face into the boiling grease of a deep fryer. No more fries for you, hon!

And no fun for us! With an actual amusement park in Pennsylvania as his setting, Hill makes good use of the merry-go-round, roller coaster, haunted house, etc. in the various kills, and poor use of Doug Bradley, the Hellraiser series‘ Pinhead, who cameos as the park owner who proposes a tough-to-swallow solution for turning his business around. It’s even too incredulous to ask of an audience — even one just waiting for the next onscreen slaying.

Those grisly scenes are pulled off without any panache. Free of scares or suspense, Scream Park is flat and ponderous, with some sleepy performances to match. As is the case with the majority of low- to no-budget slasher homages these days — hitting DVD within a few months’ time frame were the near-interchangeable HazMat, Murder University, Bloody Homecoming, Sorority Party Massacre and the very similar Killer Holiday — the order of the day is wasted creative force: no imagination, all imitation. That, to me, is depressing. —Rod Lott

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It’s not a party until a Templar Knight beheads someone. For the Portuguese villagers holding their annual Burning Festival, it’s going to be a party. They just don’t know it yet.

Amando de Ossorio’s Return of the Evil Dead, a sequel to his Tombs of the Blind Dead of the previous year, revives those undead Knights Templar in more ways than one, starting with a 14th-century prologue that shows why and how those dastardly killers lost the gift of sight. Why? Human sacrifices in the name of God. How? Torches.

Their ancestors’ act of revenge is what the villagers commemorate at the Burning Festival, complete with effigies of the knights. Hired for the event is a fireworks specialist who chain-smokes — not the profession’s smartest of habits. His name is Jack (Tony Kendall, The Whip and the Body), and as luck would have it, the former love of his life (Esperanza Roy, It Happened at Nightmare Inn) not only lives there, but is engaged to the corrupt, repugnant mayor (Fernando Sancho, The Big Gundown).

However, the one dick Jack really needs to worry about is Murdo (José Canalejas, Horror Express), the village idiot whose mouth is a freakish diagonal rictus. When he’s not being pelted by rocks hurled by kids, Murdo longs for the resurrection of the Knights Templar; his bloody murder of a local lovely causes them to come a-crawling from their graves. It happens during the celebration, and as anyone who saw the previous movie knows, the horse-riding Blind Dead are attracted to noise.

Silence is golden for fans of Spanish horror who are likely to find their bodies clenched as terrified villagers do their best to pass through a gauntlet of zombie knights by remaining as quiet as possible. The very idea is chilling, and de Ossorio plays it to the hilt, bathing his film in eeriness that exists even in the obvious day-for-night shots. This is a strong sequel that extends a good idea, rather than just rehash it. —Rod Lott

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