Powerful

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Scalps (1983) * 1/2 (out of 4)Some archeologist students head out to some Indian land where they plan on digging bodies up so that they can take ka variety of items. It doesn't take long for them to unleash an evil spirit who decides to teach them a lesson.Fred Olen Ray's SCALPS has become a cult favorite over the years and in all honesty I can see why. The film certainly borrows some elements from THE HILLS HAVE EYES but back in the day when VHS was all the craze, something like SCALPS would be the perfect example of the type of film that made that format boom. Yes, the film is quite poor and very boring at times but there's still some low-budget charm to it.The biggest problem with SCALPS is the fact that the middle section is just downright boring. The film kicks off in high gear as we see a decapitation right off the bat and you get ready to see this type of thing throughout the 88-minute running time but it doesn't happen again for quite a while. The entire middle section of this picture is downright boring as the characters do nothing but talk about what we've already seen them do and talk about what we're about to see them do.The horror elements finally kick in and that's when we get some more fun, gory violence but it takes a very long time to get there and by the time it does come it's just too late. I will say that the film has some charm if you're a fan of these types of movies. The cast range from poor to okay but you do get Forrest J. Ackerman playing a small role.

So, it's about six people where they go to the Californian wasteland to dig up around in an Indian burial ground for artifacts, and then they unleash the evil spirit. The spirit possesses one of the group and begins slaughtering them one by one. The plot sounds similar to The Evil Dead, right? It also reminded me on The Hills Have Eyes because of the location. Since The Evil Dead is successful low-budget horror film and well done, but is Scalps also good? No, it's not at all! It has a bad editing, ugly cinematography, terrible makeup, bad acting and ridiculously bad dialogues and lines. I didn't care for any character, they weren't memorable. I liked the ending though, it was a bit creepy. The plot is interesting, but this movie could have been MUCH better.I'm fine with it that it's really a bad movie, but it's somehow enjoyable and I could give it a 5/10, but it's way slow for filming while driving etc., so I gave it a 4/10.

I think I've got Fred Olen Ray's schtick down now. After watching however so many of his movies, I think this is his approach: to take a completely trite excuse for a story that anyone who has ever seen a horror movie could recite in their sleep and then suck it of any of the life and possibility of interest it ever could have had. His movies are usually short, barely clocking in at over an hour, and that entire first hour will be "characters" wandering around doing absolutely nothing of interest and certainly nothing that will invest them with a personality, or give you any reason whatsoever to care about them at all. After he has lulled you to sleep better than your grandmother could when you were six months old, he'll start deploying with the actual "horror" movie stuff, ie. gore, but as I said, you'll be asleep or perhaps even comatose by this point.In the first hour of a Fred Olen Ray movie, he carefully constructs as many barriers between you and caring about his movie as he can. In the last ten or fifteen minutes, he throws the things you probably watched the movie hoping to see at you, ie. the blood and guts, but you probably gave up at barrier 3 or 4 and have long since stopped paying attention to the movie and started doing something else."Scalps" has a few extra barriers between you and it, aside from its most sturdy, ie. the tedium of it. These are the picture quality and the sound. The movie looks like it was filmed through mud. You can barely make out what you are seeing, anyway, so even if it wasn't boring and pointless, you wouldn't be able to see it.The sound was obviously all recorded in post production, making it stick out like a sore thumb and sound entirely unnatural and distracting throughout the entire movie. It makes you want to watch the characters lips at the beginning at least, knowing it's probably totally out of sync, but then you realise that you can't really see their lips - remember? The movie was filmed through mud.The plot is something to do with college students (I guess) going to stay in an Indian burial ground. They wander around doing nothing and saying nothing of interest for an hour until they are killed in a variety of admittedly gruesome ways. One is clubbed from behind by something that looks like a topless Dame Edna Everidge. In the movie's most noteworthy scene of violence, a woman is, indeed, actually scalped, so at least there was a reason for the title other than the racist exploitation of Native American myths the movie engages in.The scalping scene may not look all that realistic, but it must have cost some actual money. If they could afford to do that, why couldn't they have come up with a plot for this mess, a boom mic, and a camera lens that wasn't covered in sludge?

"Scalps" is a pretty decent, if overall unspectacular slasher.**SPOILERS**Heading out to the desert, archeology students D.J., (Jo-Ann Robinson) Randy, (Richard Hench) Kershaw Ellerbe, (Roger Maycock) Ben Murphy, (Frank McDonald) Louise Landon, (Carol Sue Flockhart) and Ellen Corman, (Barbara Magnusson) prepare for a field trip assignment. Using local maps, they try to locate a burial ground that contained Native American remains for them to study. Finding the proposed site to study, they come across an old Indian legend concerning the movement of artifacts and bones from their graves would unleash the spirit of a warrior from it's resting place. As they manage to get the bones out of the ground, they suddenly find a series of strange events befall them and come to the realization that the stories were right and are now being stalking by a maniacal killer, who could be one of the students possessed.The Good News: This one here does have a couple of rather nice areas that work. One of the main ones is that this one decides to forgo the usual matter of having it be an Indian burial ground and instead uses the storyline of making the artifacts removed from their land bring about the curse. That offers up a little amount of ingenuity, and makes for some really tense moments when the group begins digging up the grounds knowing full well that it will lead to them getting killed off. Those are quite fun and do have some nice amounts of tension to them. The kills themselves aren't terrible and do offer up some pretty gory moments. One is whacked in the head with a tomahawk, another has an arrow shot into their eye at close range, another has their throat slit before being scalped, all done in extreme close-up and another has a slew of arrows shot into their back and legs, among others. These here do spill a lot more blood than expected, which allows them to have some appeal to the gore-hounds out there. The final half-hour, which is where ninety-five percent of the action takes place, is a lot of fun. It's fast-paced, contains all the best scenes and kills, and is something that allows for plenty of fun to be had. The other good part is all of the pop-up scare tactics where the head of a deformed Indian head appears out of nowhere to offer up a few nice scenes. The fire-pit is the best one, since it's the best out-of-nowhere gag among them, and really works nicely. These here make the film watchable.The Bad News: This one isn't that bad, but it does have a couple of rather important flaws to it. The first one is the fact that this one takes so long to get going. After the opening murder, this one takes until the forty-five minute mark to knock off another, and that is just way too long for the film. That leaves unending scenes of them complaining to no end about the seriousness of what they're doing and how it will come back to hurt them. Those scenes are just irritating, no less as the heroine is the one complaining about it, and rather than trying to take the obvious route or reasoning with the others, this one decides to have them focus on just ranting out a long series of statements that are supposed to get the viewer to side with the heroine, as they're arguing for the right cause, but this is done in such the wrong way that it finally gets too much and those scenes are annoying to watch and just make the film a chore to sit through when they're on. Those also hurt the film due to it's length, as this one could've really been stretched out a little longer. The fact that it doesn't even make eighty minutes is something of concern, as there's a little more that could've been done to make the film a little longer without it feeling stretched out at all. The confusing way it ends is something else, and when viewed, it will be obvious what is being criticized since it's easy to spot and makes for a rather head-scratching moment. These few areas here are what keep the film down.The Final Verdict: While this one isn't that terrible as far as slashers go, the incredibly long period of time in between activity is what hurts this one the most. See this one only if you're a hardcore slasher fanatic or have a need to see trashy films, otherwise there's much better ones out there to see rather than this one.Rated R: Graphic Violence, Language, Brief Nudity and Rape