DVD review: Scalps (1983)

 

Impending doom is in store for a group of college students digging in a cursed Indian burial ground, where an evil indian spirit lies in wait to possess the living and cut a bloody swath of vengeance across the land! Scalps is written and directed by John Ray, T.L Lankford and Fred Olen ray who also is the director. The acting is bad,  the camerawork is decent but the editing is pretty poor especially when it comes to the nighttime scenes. I will say that Scalps has severe lighting problems during the scenes which take place at evening/night. One minute the characters are in total darkness and then the next scene will look like it was filmed in the morning or the afternoon. This happens several times, once in awhile it looks like there is daylight. It´s so bad that I actually laughed out loud. The soundtrack is decent but they looped it over and over and over again. The pacing is bad, there isn´t much happening during the first half but it does improve in its second half. It´s pretty gory, there are some pretty nice kills and the fx highlight is when a female character gets her throat cut, it´s brutal and it looks fanf*ckingtastic! The possessed fx design is pretty bad. There´s topless nudity courtesy of Carol Sue Flockhart. There is a rapescene that is pretty effective.
This review is based upon the region 1 DVD release from Retromedia Entertainment.
Rating: 2½ out of 7. Even if Scalps has its flaws I did enjoy it and would recommend it to slasher movie completists.

/JL