by Marcey Papandrea, MoreHorror.com

I am not overly familiar with After Dark films, and after watching the Scream Of The Banshee I can see why.

This film is terrible, plain and simple. After the first six minutes, I had to force myself to keep watching because all I wanted to do was switch it off. It begins with a poorly executed prologue, which is meant to establish the Banshee and the means of stopping it. We then cut to present day with Archaeology Professor Isis Whelan (Lauren Holly), who comes across an artifact (the one from the prologue) and of course it gets opened and unleashes terror.

Oh dear is this ever bad, Lauren Holly who is a decent actress in her own right was just awful. There was not a single moment of credible acting to be had in her performance, and with material like this it isn't hard to see why. Her line delivery with some scenes are so bad, that I wasn't even able to chuckle at it, it was just sad to see. The supporting cast are even worse, and calling them actors would be an insult to actors. They'd probably do a lot better at blog hosting.

The material is not at all serious, yet these people treat it as such and in turn it is so uneven and it does not work. You need to play it with how it is, and the only person who seemed to know this was the great Lance Henriksen. He really was the only decent thing in this film, his scenes are very few but at least he was some what entertaining and he knew what type of film he was making.

The gore and special effects (if you could call them that) were really poorly done, the blood looked like red honey, I have never seen blood look like that. Perhaps the team behind this needed to actually go out and like see what real blood looks like? The Banshee itself looked like it was a person in a rubber costume, the Goblins in Troll 2 were far more convincing. The kills were handled poorly, and it either looked stupid or it happened off screen, both did not work.

The film fails as entertainment, it fails as a horror film, I have to question whether the writer Anthony C. Ferrante and director Steven C. Miller have ever seen an actual good horror or creature film. There is no suspense, no real build up to anything and when something does happen it relies on a cheap scare which doesn't work. There is more to horror then just showing something disgusting, and this film isn't aware of this fact.

There really isn't any redeeming features with this film, and I have no idea who the target audience is meant to be. It isn't scary, it isn't well made, it isn't smart, and your pet dog will likely vomit over how terrible it is. Pick up your game After Dark and SyFy, making this shlock is just not going to cut it. Maybe it would have worked if they intended this to be 'so bad its good', I had hoped it would have been. But it really is not, it seemed that they wanted this to be good and that just made the experience worse because it failed. I honestly think that a group of six year old children could have made a better film.

Scream Of The Banshee suffers from terrible acting, directing and editing, not helped by the poor script and special effects. Hitting ones head against the wall for 90 minutes would probably be a much better experience than watching this film.