From a Whisper to a Scream/notes

 

DirecTV offered a movie package free for five days. HD Net is pretty much like MGM HD, with the impressive MGM library plucked for these packaged channels. As part of their Saturday Night Screams, HD Net offered Jeff Burr's From a Whisper to a Scream.

"Lovecraft and Poe...I'll drink to those two masters of horror." - Julian White (Vincent Price)

Revisiting this film one last time, I got to say that this is really start to finish a cruel, mean-spirited, vicious little horror anthology. 

I read Price worked like two days for Burr, but being that this was an anthology, the great horror icon could be spread out across the film, wisely used in the framework. He is the "librarian", the "speaker of a town of violence". He's the historian, the voice of a century of evil that dates all the way to the Civil War.

• Voodoo is used to force an items swallower to endure a gruesome death as all the things he put in his mouth and dumped in his body explode out of him when he tries to flee from a carnival's witch owner, 
• a "life elixir" that was used by an old black magic practitioner to help a sleazy dirtbag survive a bullet hole only for that ungrateful asshole to try and "steal" away the potion through violence
•  a creepy grocery clerk with slick blond hair, wearing glasses shaped with bottle top lenses, obsessively attracted to a woman at his job who has no interest in him whatsoever and yet is unwilling to take no for an answer
• parentless kids during the Civil War know how to deal with three vile soldiers...and they have no idea until visited upon by violence just what they are capable of.

Watching a witch revel in the death of her glass swallower, forcing his girlfriend to replace him after she visits the two in a blood-drenched hotel room, the Louisiana swamp black magic practitioner chopping and burning a junk of a human being and dropping that scumbag off to live another 70 years, kids playing pin the body part on the headless torso not long after the soldier's leader snapped the throat of a one-eyed girl he promised to adopt, and a creep visit the body of a woman he strangled in his car and left in the road to fuck her corpse with the result a spawn that provides nightmare fuel, I guess it is understandable why Vincent Price might have felt upset he was supposedly "tricked" into the film project. I recently read that for the first time. I knew about Burr approaching Price at home to be in his film, but not Price's regret for being in it later. This anthology is loaded with bad taste content, though.