Scared Stiff

This movie just popped up on my radar recently and I was able to pick up the VHS fairly cheap online. It seemed fitting to throw on the blog. Scared Stiff is from 1987 and it is also known as The Masterson Curse.

Scared Stiff is tells the story of a family that gets more than they bargained for when they move into an old mansion in Charleston, South Carolina. Pop singer Kate Christopher (Mary Page Keller), her son Jason, and Psychiatrist David Young (Andrew Stevens) move in together after Kate met David under his care. Soon after moving in Kate begins to have visions/dreams about the slave master of the house. Soon strange things are happening to them and others surrounding the family and the mansion.

This damn movie felt like a chore to watch for the first hour. The acting is stiff, the characters are not well developed, and the story isn’t totally there. They deal more with the history of the house than they do any real character development of the main three characters of the movie. You are given little bits of pieces to put the story together and it never really gets explained fully. Most things are explained with the simple answer… CURSE.

Scared Stiff has an interesting, original premise and it does hold your attention to an extent.  I am going to attribute the good things in this movie to one of the three writers of the movie, Mark Frost. Frost was one of the creators and writers on Twin Peaks. This movie having three writers was probably the reason it had so many downfalls. Director Richard Friedman should have just let Frost have his way with the screenplay.

I digress. The last half hour was really fun. If there was anything worth watching this movie for, it was this. There are some really fun cheesy and at points gory effects thrown at you. Transformations into beasts, skin falling off, a dead body flying through the window, etc. All of that good stuff. That’s what I paid $4 to see!

Pigeons.