the audience applauded

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Overrated and overhyped

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Deranged and sexually frustrated sniper Mike (a creepy and intense portrayal by the hunky Michael Stearns) picks off various libidinous swingers while they are in the middle of doing the deed in the Hollywood Hills area.Tightly written and directed by ace grindhouse cinema special Lee Frost (who also did the proficient cinematography), this exceptionally down'n'dirty marvel really pours on the scorching sleaze: The graphic semi-pornographic sex scenes, equally explicit and abundant nudity (even Stearns goes full monty!), unsparingly mean and sordid tone, choice footage of hot strippers bumping and grinding at the seedy dive bar The Classic Cat (special praise here for deliciously lissome blonde stunner Donna Young, who bares her yummy body with pleasing frequency and an admirable lack of inhibition), succinct 63-minute running time, startling moments of ugly violence, and a spot-on ironic ending all ensure that this raw'n'raunchy winner packs quite a savage and scuzzy punch.

Impotent wacko, Mike(Michael Stearns) with a high powered rifle, hunts down men sexing up women, in and around the Hollywood Hills, his sniper attacks striking terror in the community. His obsession becomes Susan, a stripper at the Cats Club, who invites him to her home where a party will be taking place. This is where his seed of lust begins to root, and once Susan is caught, after the party, taking it from behind by a plastics salesman(!), his rage takes shape and another sniper's bullet penetrates the face of an intended victim. Susan was, at the time, under Mike's blind sense of "innocence", pure as the whitest snow, and when his eyes are opened, he'll set his sights on potentially ravaging her. His impotence, however, will keep him from the desire of conquest, and in the midst of spying out another lovemaking couple with his scope, gets an unexpected surprise.Soft-core sex film with plenty of naked flesh..it seems Dawna Rae was merely hired to show her body for nearly the entire running time. That plastics salesman sure got his fill before the sniper's bullet sent him to meet his maker! He got not one, but two sex scenes with Rae and another female partygoer. There's an epic lesbian lovemaking sequence, seen in it's completion through the lens of Stearns' rifle scope. He spares them, funnily enough. Anyway, the film has strange sexual activity filmed underwater, including a dream sequence where Mike is visualizing a tryst with Susan in her pool. Sex shot underwater just looks odd. Rae has a fantastic body and seems uninhibited, frequently showing it off for our viewing pleasure. The film is rather dialogue-less, with some sparse exchanges here and there, but most of the sex scenes are drowned out by an ominous score, which echoes Dark Shadows or The Outer Limits.I don't know where Something Weird finds these flicks, but Zero in and Scream looks like it had been buried away in a basement or something. I can imagine the SW distributors feverishly salivating as a copy of this came into their possession. It really looks like it was put together by a small group of people for little money, and perhaps momentarily distributed to the sex market before slipping into obscurity.

(Some Spoilers) Basically a soft-core, sometimes crossing into hard-core, porno movie that uses some 80% of it's screen time in having a number of orgies in and out of the water of strippers and nude dancer Susan's swimming pool.The plot has to do with this very tanned and extremely good-looking, except when he looses control of his mental faculties, young man named Mike. Mike has this hang up about young and beautiful women whom he feels are being spoiled by having young men, like himself, have sex with them. This Mike feels takes away their innocence and beauty turning the women into dirty and unappealing hookers whom he hates, the women and men who have sex with them, with a passion.In between orgies we have Mike go out in the hills outside of L.A and gun down couples making out aiming only for the male not female as his victims. Mike also spends his time at this L.A strip joint where he strikes up a relationship with the places top stripper Susan. Invated to Susan's home for an orgy Mike is about as interested in the action going on all around him, with some half dozen couples jumping in and out of the swimming pool and on top of each other, as he would be interested in waiting to catch the 7:29 Long Island railroad train at the Jamaica Queens Station.Bored with all the sexual goings on at the orgy Mike takes off to a vantage point overlooking the place and zeros in on the young man making out with Susan in the pool. Taking aim, which takes Mike about ten minutes, Mike ends up blowing the man's brains out with Susan going into hysterics. In between the sniper killings, there's two in the movie, we also have a dream sequence with Mike and Susan really going at it underwater where there's nothing left to the viewers imagination of what their doing. This, Mike getting it on with Susan, is a bit strange if were lead to believe that Mike is against any kind of sexual relationships between a man and a woman which in the sequence Mike is a very willful and happy participant in.It's later that we see Mike again with his trusty snipers rifle zero in on Susan who's having a wild and hot time with her new sexual partner that he suddenly gets cold feet when he sees that Susan partner in the sack is in fact a woman. It seemed permissible in Mike's sick mind that woman on woman sex was quite all right with him but when it came to straight sex between a man and a woman it was the man who had to pay with his life.Later on when Mike opens up to Susan about his wired fantasies that he in fact breaks all the rules that he so stridently and almost religiously followed. Getting all hot under the collar, and in his pants, Mike loses control of his actions when he sees Susan stark naked laying right in front of him. Attacking and raping Susan Mike in an attempt to explain away his unnatural, to him, act blames Susan, the rape victim, for what he, the rapist, did to her!The movies very contrived ending has Mike loses it as well as the local police getting a bead on him as he tries to put away Susan for good with a bullet between the eyes. This is the first time that Mike as much as wanted to murder a woman in the film. It turns out that Mike ends up getting it off screen from Susan's new boyfriend, probably an undercover cop, who was paying as much attention to Mike, with his own snipers rifle, as Mike was paying attention to Susan."Zero in and Scream" is in some ways just your average run of the mill psycho killer on the loose movie but with, which makes the film more then worth watching, some of the hottest sex scenes outside of a triple X rated skin-flick. In fact the film has a decent plot that hold your attention, between the orgy and sex sequences, which practically no X rated flick has.

ZERO IN AND SCREAM ** (out of four) A lonely guy finds women to be very beautiful until he sees another man on top of them. When a woman isn't "pure" they are ugly so the guy goes around killing any man who would turn a woman ugly. The actual story of this film is rather interesting but sadly we've got around fifteen minutes of story and the rest of the running time is nothing more than strip scenes and a pool orgy. I love nudity but after a while this turns boring. The ending is a very nice tough however.Available on DVD through Something Weird Video. Also on the disc: THE SEX KILLER (1967) and THE ZODIAC KILLER (1971).