SCARED TO DEATH (1980)
Recently on Facebook, I posed a challenge to my like-minded peers. Feel free to play along. Name a great monster in a not-so-great movie. There are endless options, and I received some excellent answers (like the hideous sun demon in - you guessed it - The Hideous Sun Demon), but I did have a movie in mind. I first encountered Scared to Death at our local video store in the late 90's. Cool cover, although I never took the bait. And while I'm sure I could stream it somewhere, I insisted on grabbing a grubby, begrimed VHS copy for the purposes of this review. It just felt right. Could I see every detail during scenes set in the sewer system? No. Hell, I couldn't see every detail when the action was in broad daylight. That's not the point! The point is...um, give me a second. The monster in this flick is swell, so swell that producers bankrolled a quasi-sequel just so they could use the monster in a subjectively "better" setting. The result was Syngenor, a term used here. It stands for SYNthetic GENetic ORganism. I might review Syngenor, but hey, one thing at a time.
So Scared to Death (not to be confused with the 1947 thriller of the same name starring Bela Lugosi and George Zucco). The upside? I've used the word "monster" eighty-seven times in an effort to delineate the appeal of this creature feature. The suit has an H.R. Giger vibe to it, and man, it cuts an imposing silhouette. The downside? Scared to Death will bore you to death. Trivial moments drag on and on for no actual reason. An illustration, if I may...instead of simply showing us a hospital, we have to see the main character write a note explaining that he's heading to the hospital. And then we see the hospital. Guess what? Nothing happens at the hospital. It's a frustrating situation, mainly because director William Malone is seriously talented. There are red arrows in Scared to Death that point to a top-shelf spookshow. Unfortunately, the viewer is denied access to such a spookshow. I forgot to write a synopsis. Um, a laboratory experiment does what laboratory experiments do in these budget pictures. The plot reminded me of The Kindred.
Watch The Kindred.
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