Scalps

Defiling the graves of the dead will only anger their souls.

Scalps I would have to say is perhaps schlock/porn director, Fred Olen Ray’s most fascinating film, early in his career, very mean-spirited and graphically violent. Absent is the tongue-in-cheek humor and bawdy sense of fun so commonplace in Fred Olen Ray’s movies that would come after. This film’s rather dark tone could be representative of the time when it was made, considering the flavor of popular horror during this period was the slasher genre. I mean, seriously, we get poor Carol Sue Flockhart literally scalped—and heinously raped—by her boyfriend after he is possessed by the evil warrior Indian spirit of a renegade named Black Claw. We see Richard Hench (who would star in other 80s films directed by FOR) suffer some sort of grotesque skin malformations to his face and chest (some rather cheap gray-ish make-up) before chasing after a horrified Flockhart (who never appeared in another film, and I can understand why after what happens to her character here; her Louise is put through the ringer, for sure), eventually catching and scalping her in grisly detail (the throat slicing is very impressive and the camera holds on the wound as it spits blood).

The plot is relatively simple: a group of archeology students head into an ancient Indian burial ground in California, trying to find bones and artifacts despite warnings from their professor (who really would prefer they do disturb the area, himself warned against plundering burial grounds by his superior because of laws dictating such grave digging) about such illegal activities. They also encounter an old Indian named Billy Ironwing (George Randall) at a gas station thirty miles from the Black trees spot of the buried bones forewarning them of potential harm resulting from any tampering of sacred ground. He mentions that the warriors of past had a great battle and that once dead, the men buried there became part of the soil, part of the nature of that area. The students obviously scoff at such an idea, spirits remaining at a spot where bones are buried, and their disbelieving, skeptical attitude—nothing stopping them, no qualms about raiding the graves of the dead—will be a price they pay with their lives.

For those who have listened to FOR’s audio commentary or read a little about the movie, distributors cut footage in places against his wishes, people in animal/hag masks mimicking Indian spirits, an old face mask often turning up as a reminder of the spirit terrorizing the characters at the camp site near the burial ground. The most objectionable, stupid act of these nameless pricks who took it upon themselves to toy around with a finished product was showing murders at the very beginning that would occur to members of the cast, ruining the impact of the murders as they happen. It informs us, instead, of who, among this group, would die. Why invest in the movie at all if it tells us ahead of time how and who the characters in it die before they even get to the burial ground?

Like a lot of low budget filmmakers, the score sounds like it was from a Casio piano and the audio is crude at best. The VHS rip I watched Friday night was really dark and murky (my first viewing of it was the Retromedia release, with the aforementioned FOR audio commentary, but the print was still rather unimpressive), and the cast isn’t all that spectacular. We throw around “raw” and “rough around the edges” in describing horror films made on peanuts, put together by amateurs learning as they went. With this particular setting (the hot California desert really looks unforgiving and sweltering), I thought to myself, “Hills Have Eyes”, except this time the eyes were of the supernatural and psychopathic kind. While a great deal of time and effort is put into the score’s attempts to establish the menace and doom of the place where the characters are heading, I think it suffers from too much tinkering, too much of the intrusiveness of others.

I’m guessing this movie will be most notable for the rape because Fred Olen Ray was not happy he had to do it, essentially buckling under the pressure of his financiers. It isn’t erotic in the least and is instead rather savage, as bad as the scalping. You see other characters get it badly, too. Tomahawk to the back of the skull and a decapitation, one pretty girl running for her life, the Indian spirit using a bow and arrows to take her down.

The coup de grace is the decapitation as the hands reach for a head no longer there—this is right out of Friday the 13^th, folks. The movie, as mentioned before, has the kids warned repeatedly not to go to the burial ground, yet ignoring such warnings is typical of body count slashers…heeding warnings they don’t take seriously always leads to certain death for most of the characters. Scalps is no different.