A college professor and her students discover an ornate box in the basement of their university. When they open the artifact, a bloodcurdling scream is unleashed. According to Irish lore, those who hear a banshee scream will die – which is what begins to happen as the creature comes for each of them.
This movie runs 90 minutes and stars Lauren Holly, Lance Henriksen, Marcelle Baer, Leanne Cochran, Todd Haberkorn and Lucy Hale.
Scream of the Banshee is an After Dark Original which means it is your typical B-movie horror/slasher movie.
For the most part the acting is okay except for Lance Henriksen. He portrays an former college professor and for most of the movie we only see him on old video and audio recordings mumbling on camera. You have to listen closely but what he is rambling about is important because he is the one who relays important information about the banshee lore. But he mumbles so badly that it wasn’t until I was watching this for the second time that I understood that he did have an important role but it was so badly acted that it was overlooked. In fact Mr. Henriksen mumbled so much I had to turn on the subtitles just I could understand what he was saying – by reading it.
After our group hears the banshee scream, they start having hallucinations. At least that’s what
I’m calling them. In these hallucinations, they see a old hag (they don’t know it’s a banshee yet) who is terrorizing them. It took me a while to understand why the hallucinations were happening. Apparently the banshee stalks its victim and causes them to have horrific hallucinations that when the banshee strikes they will scream in terror. If you scream, you die. Of course it would have been nice if the movie told me this instead of me piecing it together myself. But even this revolution isn’t consistent.
One of the first kills by the banshee is a security officer. He was in the building the night the group discovered and opened the box releasing the banshee and hearing the banshee scream. Yet when the banshee goes after the security officer, he doesn’t scream. Later Janie is terrorized by banshee to the point that she screams and it seems that she kills herself by gouging out her eyes, yet when Otto races to her dorm room, the campus security is outside the building covering up her body, so I’m really confused how Janie died. Did she gouge out her eyes and then jump out the window or did she really just jump out the window. There are some many hallucinations intertwined into reality that it makes it hard to tell what’s real and what’s not.
Then we come to the climax where all of sudden our group of victims have turned into gun wielding vigilantes goes after the old professor (Lance Henriksen). I’m not sure why they have resorted to wielding guns and the thing I can guess is that the director wanted an action packed ending. There are some many plot holes that all reason be left at the door to watch Scream of the 
Banshee.
Bottom line – Scream of the Banshee is definitely a B-movie that has glaring plot holes and leaves all logical and reason out of the picture. So the question becomes, was this film entertaining? I can’t answer this question with a simple yes or no. It was so bad that I turned it off but it wouldn’t be one that I ran out and recommended to friends. This would be a good one to watch on a cold winter’s day when your stuck in your cabin 20 miles from town and the roads are too dangerous to drive on and this is the only movie you brought.
