Scream of the Banshee - ***

Directed by Steven Miller. Starring Lauren Holly, Marcelle Baer, Lance Henriksen, Eric F Adams. Horror, USA, 87 mins.

Released on DVD on 15th July 2011.

The SyFy channel is notorious for making and screening low-budget, poorly scripted blockbuster knock-offs with a vaguely famous actor as an audience draw and a ridiculous premise – Asylum films like TRANSMORPHERS: FALL OF MAN, Roger Corman-inspired outings like SHARKTOPUS or tenaciously-linked entertainment such as THE LOCH NESS TERROR (actually set in America, not Scotland). SCREAM OF THE BANSHEE, co-produced by SyFy and After Dark Originals, is one of the more notable made-for-TV movies, directed by Steven Miller.

While collecting artefacts for a special archive project, Professor Isla Whelan (Lauren Holly, previously seen in DUMB AND DUMBER) discovers she has been sent a mysterious box containing a medieval gauntlet and a map of the storage space within the unnamed university. A short time later, her rebellious daughter Shayla (Marcelle Baer) has discovered a crate hidden behind an oddly soggy fake wall, which is then opened with little caution or preparation and found to contain a ghastly severed head. The banshee has been unwittingly re-awakened, and its scream signals a world of terror for the professor, her daughter, the tiny class of two and an unfortunate security guard.

The scares come in thick and fast from the film's beginning and, while they are wholly unoriginal, they are surprisingly effective. Lights go out, disembodied heads open their eyes, mirrors shatter, taps drip, air vents whisper and groan, and people brush aside blood-soaked sheets to peer under the bed, but the sheer volume of classic techniques ensures at least some of them will succeed in their aims. The effects are, particularly for a SyFy movie, fairly convincing – the banshee itself undergoes several transformations, ending up as an ALIEN-inspired eyeless ghoul, but it is well conceived, and Miller cleverly minimises the use of CGI. The dreaded computer effects are used, however, and are single-handedly responsible for revealing the film's budget – a giant arm reaching out of a projector screen is both unbelievable and irrelevant.

Due in part to the haste in providing one scare after another, the film is fast paced, which is beneficial in that it distracts the viewer from the numerous plot holes and fact that the archivists find most of their information via a blatant Google rip-off search engine. The script generally succeeds in its purpose, although at times it slips to soap-opera standards, particularly when the characters are discussing their emotions. Nearing the film's end, Shayla's boyfriend meets a particularly gruesome death as he is abandoned, alive but skewered and trapped, by the film's heroine, the professor. This is a less-forgiveable slip in plot standards, but at this point SCREAM OF THE BANSHEE plays its trump card, introducing Lance Henriksen (THE TERMINATOR, PUMPKINHEAD) as the former-professor-turned-mannequin-obsessed-cultist responsible for the whole wretched mess.

By using familiar shocks to good effect, and taking inspiration from classic haunting tales, SCREAM OF THE BANSHEE is reminiscent to recent cinematic outing INSIDIOUS. What is most surprising is that it, a TV movie made for genre hack channel SyFy, is by far the more successful, and scary, film.

Becky Bartlett.

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