“Scalps” 1983
Rarely seen but excellent 1983 horror film from Fred Olen Ray. A group of archaeology students go to dig up a Native American burial ground and battlefield. An elderly Apache warns them that the land is cursed by the souls of those who died there and now rest in it. They ignore his warnings and strange things begin to happen that culminate when one of the group is possessed by an Indian spirit called Black Claw and begins to murder the others in very gruesome ways.
Although it may at first seem like one of the many films of the slasher cycle of the early 80s, it is more unique in that it also adds heavy elements of the supernatural to the slasher formula, in the vein of films like “The Evil Dead” and “Superstition”.
This film is loaded with creepy atmosphere as the students trek farther and farther into the California desert. The sense of isolation gives one the impression that they might as well be on the moon they are so isolated. Combined with an unsettling score by Drew Neumann ( who composed music for “Aeon Flux” and “Rugrats”), gruesome gore effects and tight direction by Fred Olen Ray you get a very scary movie that makes even the vast deserts of the south west seem claustrophobic.
One of the great tragedies of this film is that the original negative has been lost. Its not known if it has been destroyed, but hopefully it has been simply misplaced and awaiting rediscovery. When released on DVD, Ray describes in the commentary that he had to reconstruct the film from several different sources, including VHS sources. The film was censored in one way or another all over the world, so many film elements had to be used.
Hopefully the original negative will be rediscovered and the film can be restored to its original uncut and pristine picture as it played in theaters in 1983
