You know what it’s like. Sometimes you feel like watching a really shitty movie. Something really low-budget that’s badly directed, badly written, badly acted and that has pretty crappy cinematography. Sometimes you don’t feel like watching a movie like this, but this is what you get.

Maybe I shouldn’t blame director of photography Robert E. Rogers for the lousy cinematography here, since the version of “Screams of a Winter Night” I saw was horrible: a jumpy and blurry old VHS release struck from a scratchy print with faded colors. I suppose the movie didn’t look this awful when it was released to theaters in 1979.

And I guess the acting isn’t that bad either. We’re not talking Oscar performances here, but the cast throws in your average 1970s B-horror performances, and they aren’t annoyingly bad.

But the screenplay by Richard H. Wadsack (his only filmed screenplay) is definitely lacking in most aspects. I suppose director James L. Wilson (this is his only credit as director) did what he could of it, but the script sucks -- and it isn’t helped by the non-existent budget that allowed for absolutely no production values.

“Screams of a Winter Night” (retitled "Howlings of a Winter's Night" in Australia) is an anthology movie, peole tell scary tales and the movie is made up of a handful of horror shorts. There are a few good anthology movies out there, like British production company Amicus’ adaptations of the old EC Comics classics; “Tales from the Crypt” and “The Vault of Horror”, but for some reason, most anthology movies are rather bad. Mainly because the stories told are weak and lack strong punch lines. Personally, I even think that George A. Romero’s popular “Creepshow”, scripted by Stephen King, is a failure -- the stories don’t deliver, their twists are too weak.

In “Screams of a Winter Night”, an vanload of youngsters are on their way to a cabin situated by a lake. But before we’re introduced to the main characters, we learn that something bad and evil once happened in that cabin. You see, while the opening titles play -- yellow titles against a black backdrop -- we hear the sound of a family getting killed. Or something like that. This goes on for several long minutes.