“Now, if the sweater has a reindeer on it,
Or is a funny color like yellow,
You can’t get away with a sweater like that”
— Meryn Cadell, “The Sweater”
One of the many guys in 1979’s Screams of a Winter Night wears a sweater at one point that has a deer of some sort on it. It could be a reindeer. The sweater also might be a shade of yellow, but it is hard to tell, given the unfortunate condition of the print used here. More on that later.
I kept thinking about the sweater (and the song “The Sweater”) because there wasn’t enough of interest on the screen to keep my mind from wandering at times. I couldn’t even tell you which actor this was in the film. His only other defining characteristic is he has a mustache, but there’s another guy with one, too. Then there’s a guy with a beard. And there’s at least two clean-shaven guys. There are also numerous women. Except for one woman who is extraordinarily bitchy, I could only tell people apart by their most obvious physical traits.
For a film set almost entirely in a decrepit cabin deep in the woods, it has way too many people in it. This is one of those weird films that has the cast contract and expand as needed. I’m not even sure how they all fit in the van that takes them there, unless that vehicle is some sort of TARDIS or maybe a clown car. They definitely weren’t all in it when they stopped at the obligatory creepy, run-down gas station.
That was the first real scene in the film and it showed promise not otherwise demonstrated over the course of the runtime. There are various weird going-ons around that place, such a two children who run past with a box containing something that is squealing like a pig. I know—I get the Deliverance reference. But the kids look back at an observer of this scene with genuine malice. This scene ends with the only moment in the movie I reacted to, and that was a laugh when the van pulls away, to reveal what must to be the entire population of the town watching them drive away.
Unfortunately, that scene was the high point of the film. The rest is a portmanteau, where we see reenactments of some of the ghost stories different occupants of the cabin tell around a fire. There will be either three or four stories, depending on whether you choose to watch the theatrical or the “long, thought long-lost” version. I watched the longer one, which you may want to keep in mind as you read this essay. It extends the runtime from 90 minutes to 2 hours, which is a bit much.
The first story concerns a couple who run out of gas in the middle of nowhere and get stalked by some sort of thing covered with moss. It is basically the “hook on the door handle” archetype, and is easily the worst of the lot.
Story number two has three guys in a fraternity hazing ritual where they must spend the night in a supposedly haunted hotel. Under no circumstances are they to explore beyond the first floor. Naturally, noises from above motivate them to explore those higher levels, and the men become separated as they do so. There is some decent suspense in this scene, but it builds up to an unsatisfying conclusion.
The longer cut is the only way to see the third story, and I’m on the fence as to whether it is worth seeing. The entirety is two guys running around a cemetery as they flee a flying witch with glowing eyes. This scene had a couple of moments that were genuinely unnerving (or, at least, intriguing), but then the filmmakers ruin the moment by showing the “witch” for too long, and we can see it is just a decoration you could buy at Halloween Express.
The fourth story has a young woman turn homicidal when Gil Glasgow tries to rape her in his car. I mistook Glasgow for a pre-porn Ron Jeremy. The moment where she fumbles for a weapon is so obviously influenced by a certain Hitchcock film that I’m going to call this story Dial M for Stabbing a Young Ron Jeremy to Death. Alas, this was probably the second worst story, placing it even behind the scant third tale.
I have seen many such portmanteau films like this before, but never one where the wraparound story was so disproportionately given screentime. The total duration of the stories might be less than that of the dross around them.
For the most part, I couldn’t work out the relationships between any two people. Everybody just mills about in this cabin, having aimless conversations where many responses seem to be unrelated to what had been said immediately before. It’s almost a no-budget, hayseed Last Year at Marienbad.
What is really strange is the quality of the print. I have little doubt this looks better than it ever has, probably even more than it did in its original theatrical run. But there are occasional rounds of blue splotches which intrude into the image. This first happens at night inside the cabin, and I thought it was supposed to be lightning. It took me a while to realize this was some sort of defect. No fault of the anybody involved in the production, but I found this quite distracting.
I usually take into account the likely budget of a film when I critique it, but there’s no amount of handicapping that can push Screams of a Winter Night into the “win” column. It is three (or four) rather poor horror stories padded by uninteresting happenings in a cabin. Avoid.
Dir: James L. Wilson
Starring Glasses, Beardy, Mustache #1, etc. And then there’s the guys.
Watched on Code Red blu-ray