SECRET SCREAMS
"When malicious ghosts start haunting her quaint inn, frightened Iris seeks help from a paranormal psychology expert who investigates the situation."
Have you ever seen a headless ghost bury a ghost baby before? You will if you watch Secret Screams, which may or may not be a point in the film's favor, depending entirely upon how strange a person you are.
The plot of the film follows Iris, the owner of a rural bed and breakfast that is haunted by a very annoying specter. She pays a visit to our hero, professor David Shaw (Paul Le Mat), who has been on a three-year-long bender ever since his wife committed suicide after suffering a miscarriage. He comes out to the bed and breakfast, and the resident ghost almost immediately throws an egg at his face. Some stuff happens, David Warner shows up for a
After this exciting incident, Iris suddenly remembers that the ghost haunting her place of business is in fact her late father, who raped his daughter a year earlier and got her pregnant. Nine months later, he stole the newborn baby boy from his physically and emotionally exhausted daughter and buried him alive in the back yard, fleeing the scene in his car that same evening, when he skidded off the road and slammed into a tree. The impact severed the man's head, which bounced off into the woods, getting stuck in the bed and breakfast's water pump, where it lay undiscovered for months, until a visibly drunk Lee Ving (that dead guy from Clue) found it while working on Iris' pipes.
Immediately after Lee finds the severed head and stuffs it into a burlap sack to take home as a nifty trophy, he stumbles across the dead rape-father's ghost car, because I'm sure that kind of thing happens all the time in rural communities. Ghost Dad shows up to haunt Lee Ving, and being in such close proximity to his disembodied head causes the head to melt away, enveloping the transparent asshole in an ethereal blue light. As the light fades away, Ghost Dad is revealed to be complete once again, now no longer a ghost but rather a very solid milky-eyed zombie. So Zombie Dad crushes Lee's head like a coconut and tracks down his daughter and David at the baby's burial site, and he just kind of stands there while David and Iris invoke the spirit of her dead baby to surround her old man in a golden whirlwind, which causes him to explode into a torrent of fireflies and that's it. That's what happens in Secret Screams.
It's an hour and ten minutes of serviceably shot, serviceably acted, horribly paced, low-key haunting bullshit like levitating books and slamming doors, then David and Iris follow Ghost Dad out into the back yard and watch him bury his inbred spectral son/grandson, and it all goes off the rails. The movie never even attempts to rationalize any of this nonsense. I could practically feel the director shrugging with indifference at potential audience reaction when the absolute bonkers third act unfolds.
Why does the ghost become a zombie when he is reunited with his head? How does a dead baby exorcise a zombie-ghost? How did Paul Le Mat know a dead baby could exorcise a zombie-ghost? Why did the ghost dad waste so much time playing the merry prankster with his daughter and the good professor at the bed and breakfast when the end of the movie illustrates that he always intended to kill them both? Why do so many haunting movies pull this shit? That's why I can't take the Paranormal Activity movies seriously. 95% of those movies involves ridiculous "bump in the night" shenanigans, and then the ghost/demon/thing kills everybody right at the end when it should have just done that at the beginning of the fucking movie.
And why are Iris and David having sex at the end of the movie? Literally the previous evening, they exhumed the body of her dead son and were hunted and almost killed by her insane zombie father, not to mention the fact they just returned from the local graveyard where Iris finally gave her son a proper burial. And suddenly they're basking in post-coital bliss in her king-sized bed, giggling like stoned teenagers and rubbing their stuff together under her antique blankets.
Whatever. This movie wasted Lee Ving in a throwaway role, and that is unforgivable. He was Johnny C. in Flashdance, dammit! He deserved better than this! And why is the Netflix version of the film called Secret Screams? The film's original title is Grave Secrets, and that's much more appropriate. Fuck this movie. Fuck you, Secret Screams! You asshole!
YOUR TIME IS RUNNING OUT!
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