B movie legend Fred Olen Ray’s mean-spirited and often surreal slasher is preserved in a well-recommended Blu-ray from 88 Films.

It’d be lazy and ignorant to bemoan 88 Films’ transfer of SCALPS. Mirroring the McGuffin of Fred Olen Ray’s charismatic slasher, 88’s 2K scan – provided by the cult auteur’s own Retromedia – is a remarkable feat of excavation. As the schlock supremo explains in his wonderfully candid commentary, Scalps‘ astonishing censorship history has resulted in a preservation as piecemeal as the film’s shot-on-weekends creation; this as it stands definitive version taken from the 16mm production’s maddeningly censored 35mm blow-up negative, with its gore scenes – including the vicious, titular money shot – restored from various tape sources. It’d be a real pig by any conventional standard, but it’s a vital, achingly bittersweet experience for those well-versed in Ray lore; Scalps‘ original elements long believed lost at the hands of its conniving US distributor, 21st Century. And with the director’s decade plus of searching leading nowhere, the harsh truth is Scalps will probably never, ever look as good as it does here.

Strangely, though, its scratchy, washed out and fuzzy appearance lends itself to the film’s grim fabric and unsettling, nightmare-soaked ambiance. Indeed, with his name more synonymous with such amiable cheese as Cyclone and Evil Toons, Ray’s mean-spirited body counter is something of an anomaly; the B movie legend himself saying as much in the disc’s cool, twenty-two minute retrospective, Remembering Scalps (which also features stars Richard Hench and Frank McDonald, and Ray’s filmmaking son, Christopher). Abrasive and often surreal, the mood is set with a splendid opening sequence; a crude but alarmingly nasty decapitation by the film’s gurning, craggy-faced antagonist (an evil Native American spirit called Black Claw) segueing into an unnerving and evocative collection of images, before an archaeologist slashes his own throat out in the Californian desert.

But as even a cursory dip into either of 88’s aforementioned extras (both of which can be found on Retromedia’s limited edition Stateside counterpart) reveal, interference from the money men are as much to credit as Ray. Reworking fragments of Scalps‘ structure before its eventual theatrical run, 21st Century’s editorial noodling only enhances Ray’s surprisingly accomplished sense of eerie sparseness; an accidental but indelible power to their union. While extremely rough around the edges (its poor sound and lame day-for-night photography could be a headache inducer for the unprepared), Scalps is at least a technical leap and bound above the helmer’s earlier, made-for-buttons regional shocker, the woefully inept Alien Dead. Echoing Wes Craven’s classic The Hills Have Eyes with its open air claustrophobia, Ray evokes the late, great fright maestro’s other 70s shock essential, The Last House on the Left, with his similarly intrusive and documentary-like camerawork; comparisons that favourably extend to the thought provoking meat of Scalps‘ otherwise rudimentary narrative.

Built around a paltry $15,000 dollar budget, Ray’s admittedly laboured teens and tent set up is simplicity personified; a sextet of archaeology students unearthing a bloodthirsty spectre after disturbing an Indian burial ground. It’s a cliche as hoary as the stalk n’ slash that bookends it, but, as genre critic J.A. Kerswell offers in his to-camera appraisal (a nifty ten minute featurette exclusive to 88’s package), there’s a pleasing shade of Poltergeist to the whole thing; Tobe Hooper’s robust frightener, of course, scaring up big business the year before Scalps‘ release. But whereas the defiling of sacred land there took a fairly broad swing at the encroaching greed of the Reagan-era, Scalps subtlety suggests something a little more personable; the supernatural here a cypher for Ray’s excellent, pacey third act, a Craven-flavoured focus on man’s capacity for hideous, primal violence.

A welcome upgrade of Retromedia’s old 20th Anniversary Edition DVD (although, annoyingly, Ray and producer T.L. Lankford’s vintage yatter track isn’t ported over), 88 Films’ Blu-ray marks the first time the generally under the radar Scalps has been available on UK shores since a predictably cut sell through VHS release from Ariel back in the late 80s. Bargain priced at less than a tenner if you look in the right places, the Leicester-based boutique label’s latest instalment in their Slasher Classics Collection is well worth picking up and thankfully continues the upward projection of their recent Evilspeak disc after several months of questionable behaviour. The brief stall of their lax Children of the Corn box notwithstanding, here’s hoping 88’s forthcoming Blus of the terrific Sleepaway Camp II and III are as easy to recommend…

SCALPS is released on Region B locked, UK Blu-ray on 4th April, via 88 Films

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