Scream at the Devil

"A beautiful schizophrenic woman is pushed over the edge by her husbands illicit affairs" Let's start with the description written by the director. I am sorry but the lady is a grandma! A beautiful schizophrenic woman sounds more like a young student character not a grandma! Okay lets move to the story, narrative, and character. The main lady character acts like she was 30 years old who wants to be pregnant again when she looks like she is at least 50 years old. She also has a very annoying character. Basically a dumb aggressive old woman refuses to take her meds and instead suffers from weird hallucinations. Acting is amateur, directing is basic and the story is very simple. Overall, the movie is awful.

"A beautiful schizophrenic woman is pushed over the edge by her husband's illicit affairs, and when her hallucinations become reality the Devil comes to take his due."

Nothing in that description is actually true. The woman is not "beautiful" and "her husband's illicit affairs" didn't pushed her "over the edge" nor "her hallucinations become reality".

So when a movie says "the story is about unicorns" and it's actually about horses...you have a serious problem at hand.

The movie tells the story of Mirium Jones, a woman suffering from schizophrenia that decides to "leave it all behind" when her husband cheats on her with a younger woman. She also lost her unborn children due to a miscarriage. See? And you thought your life was bad.

So she decides to take a trip to Venice and goes to a Basilica (a very old and magnificent church) basically to pray to the Devil (?) for a chance of getting pregnant again. Because everyone knows that if you need to make a Pact with Satan...the obvious place to go is a church.

Then without any kind of explanation the emotionally scarred woman decides to go back with her husband, who buys a huge house in the mountains and builds a "studio" for her and her paintings.

But then...everything goes to hell when all of a sudden all the characters become like corrupted versions of themselves. Again, without any sort of real explanation.

Strange things start to happen all around Mirium and the obvious question Writer/Director Joseph P. Stachura wants you to ask is "is it all real or not?" "are all these due to the schizophrenia or is the Devil's work?". A very interesting idea (albeit not an original one at this point) that Stachura completely ruins with his awful directing job and a worse script.

The acting in this movie is an insult to the senses and not even Tony Todd is able to deliver a worthy performance. Shari Shattuck as Mirium is a complete mess and most of her performance just jumps from overacting to plain pathetic acting. The rest of the cast is just...well...let's just say "bad".

Photography is forgettable, except for the Venice portion of the movie (the first 7-8 minutes of it).

The SFX are something straight out of a B Movie. The Syfy original movies' FX are almost something out of Industrial Light & Magic compared to these ones.

Oh...and the ending completely disregards everything you see just minutes prior to it.

Seriously, this movie couldn't be any more worse even if it were 90 minutes of still pictures of grass.

Just do yourself a favor and skip it. This is probably one of the worst movies released in 2015.

Scream at the devil... More like scream at my mother for making me sit through five minutes of this before I decided to leave the room, pack my bags and flee the country. This movie had me more confused and turned off than ever. I'm flabbergasted this made it to picture... Like nobody thought... Wait what were making is garbage and the effects are not building suspense but making the viewers laugh? 2.5 is not a low enough rating and I wish I could rate lower than 1 because I have no words.

SCREAM AT THE DEVIL is an awful and pointless independent horror production. The cover has been designed to make it look like your standard possession flick, but this is nothing like. Instead it's the humdrum tale of your ordinary housewife who begins to suffer from mental illness and finds herself assailed by weird, demonic visions and other phenomena.

I'm not sure what the market is for a film like this, which so obviously must have been a non-starter for those making it. It lacks a single sympathetic character in the whole cast and for 90% of the running time the viewer is saddled with the below-par acting of Shari Shattuck, an ageing former TV star who fails to hold the attention at all. Oh yeah, and Tony Todd cameos as a cop, but he's no reason to tune into this silly and pointless production.

I know some might think me giving this 5/10 is crazy, which is fair enough, though I was referring to the movie or its theme in general. And I do know, that the movie has flaws. Beginning with some of the acting, the shot selection and the script. Some might even take offense because this does pay tribute (read copies!) some classic horror movies (Rosemarys Baby to name just one).

But generally speaking there is appeal. There is appeal in the really out there, trip this is offering. And you don't have to be on a "trip" to get it or to like it either. It's about paranoia, it's about seeing things that may or may not be there. It's about mental health and about demons. Or just one rather than the other? But which one? If you are able to watch this, with a mindset like that, you will be entertained enough to like it (despite all the flaws)