In short: Scream (1981)

A rather diverse group of rafters makes a stop in their wet adventures to overnight in an old ghost town. They probably should have stopped somewhere else, for an invisible force starts killing off party members, and sabotages the boats, leaving them stranded in the mountain desert ghost town with barely two brain cells to rub together between them. Two motocross dudes who’ll drive through aren’t going to be much help either, though biking types look rather fetching draped dead over a horse, it’ll turn out.

Byron Quisenberry’s early slasher is really nothing to write home about. Though the ghost town isn’t a bad backdrop, there’s only so much these filmmakers can make out of it, and in practice, “ghost town”, means “two bare rooms and a store front”.

Under different circumstances, the characters would be supposed to make up for the affair’s general lack of suspense, but they tend to the grating. And not the good kind of grating, either, but the sort of boring stiffness that’ll lull you to sleep instead of making you watch in astonishment.

From time to time, Quisenberry hits on a moody scene or two. A couple of the murders are certainly effective and a bit clever, and there’s a lovely sequence where house favourite Woody Strode, dressed in black, rides into town to provide pipe smoke and exposition about what’s going on in town in a dramatically misplaced but pretty fun scene. Not that there’s any reason for the characters or us to know, mind you, it really has no bearing on the plot at all, but then, if you could get Woody Strode for a scene, you’d probably find something for him to do.