Scream of the Banshee (2011) – Film Review

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS. ‘SPOILERS’ SEEMS LIKE A STRONG WORD, BECAUSE THE PLOT IS COMPLETELY STUPID. BUT, STILL, BEWARE.

Scream of the Banshee is a silly film. Let’s get that out of the way. It is a silly, almost stupid film. It’s got a big stupid plot and stupid scenes, stupid dialogue and stupid characters. The film is about a group of historians who discover a box containing another box. Inside this second box is the severed head of a banshee. This head can spontaneously reanimate itself and somehow possess those who hear its scream. We see the banshee getting killed at the beginning by a group of Christian warriors hailing from Limerick City – making the third biggest city in Ireland sound more like a city in Pokémon than an actual place in the real world – who stab her with a trident and throw a shield shaped like a cross that turns into a cube and both severs and captures the head. It can only be unlocked by a special gauntlet glove and… snore.

Anyway, as stated before, this film is stupid. The banshee’s scream can only kill you if you scream at the same time, presumably to prevent the death of every character in the film in the first twenty minutes of the film. The film-makers were at least smart enough to know that there needed to be some chink in the armour – pun intended – for there to be any dramatic tension at all. Luckily that tension dissipates completely when the awful special effects and awful acting takes hold.

The characters are baffling, both in their manner and in their actions. When the banshee head first screams, everyone shakes and covers their ears. When removed, all three discover their hands covered in blood – there’s a lot of slow staring at blood-covered hands in this movie – and that the blood is coming from their ears. Any normal functioning human being would immediately go to the hospital, but the characters in this movie don’t mention their BLEEDING EARS at all to each other, and in fact act like nothing has happened. EVERYONE’S EARS ARE BLEEDING, you want to scream at them. CAN’T YOU SEE? There’s also a romantic sub-plot that has no build-up, and no conclusion – it’s seemingly only put in so that when the woman scratches her own eyes until they are open wounds on her face, we feel sorry for her. It’s difficult not to cheer when she does it, to be honest.

Aside from the story, the acting, and even the sound and the editing, the film is fantastic. The cinematography is phenomenal and makes what would be otherwise intolerable only un-watchable. The film comes together with a bogeyman who is introduced three quarters of the way into the film and the finale is your bog-standard mess of a third act. It’s all predictable once that first scream is out of the way and, no kidding, there’s actually a scene when someone asks the lead character what she’s going to get, and there’s a slow zoom in, and she loads her shotgun and says ‘leverage’. They actually do a non-ironic zoom-and-load. Unbelievable.

Anyway this film is rubbish, avoid it unless you’re a fan of completely unironic and straight-faced tat.