Death by Dialogue (1988)

Cary and his friends head out to stay at his Uncle Ive’s farm.  His uncle is in a wheelchair and his caretaker Mrs. Camden is overbearing and a bit dismissive, considering Cary is his nephew.

Uncle tells Cary he and his friends can stay on the movie set nearby. While in the uncle’s basement, Kelly finds a script called Victim 67 and brings it with her.  After reading it for awhile, she put it down. But later she swears previously blank pages now have writing and the number in the title has changed.  

When several of their friends disappear, Kelly tells the Sheriff she thinks the script seems to be mirroring what is happening. What she doesn’t know is the script is evil.

Uncle and Mrs. Camden are alarmed when they discover she has the script. It was supposed to be hidden in a trunk so no one would find it.  The story behind it is a tribe killed a journalist after his insistence on taking photos, which they believed was the cause of bad luck. They put his remains in an urn, which uncle brought back to the states.  Later when Mrs. Camden was cleaning the urn, she accidentally released the spirit and it went into the script, whose number updates with the death of each victim. So… yeah that’s pretty weird.

So we’ve got an inanimate object which holds a spirit who murders and paralyses people. I’m not sure why they don’t burn it or stuff it back in the urn. At the beginning of the movie, worker Thorn steals the script, god knows why, and Mrs. Camden catches him in the basement.  As he wanders through the movie set, a woman in a long flowing robe surrounded by fog and lights comes towards him. Even though she is half the age of Mrs. Camden and dressed totally differently, he believes it’s the modestly dressed spinster.  Sigh.

Ridiculous dialogue

Kelly: What’s in this display, Mr. Jefferson?

Uncle: They’re pre-war Colombian artifacts, Kelly.

Kelly: Well where did they come from?

The script is killing everybody!

How can a script kill someone?

My paralysis is the result of our last attempt to contain it.

He looks like the Greatest American Hero

Music montage playing soccer and flying a kite
in the ghost town movie set

Mrs. Camden seems a bit extreme

Out of nowhere, there’s a metal band

Practical effects for an exploding head

Oh no. this just won’t do