Washington Post, DC
Jan 26 2007
Making Their Voices Heard
Friday, January 26, 2007; Page WE34
Rife with rotting corpses, severed heads and massacred children,
"Screamers" is one of the most horrifying movies I’ve ever seen.
Sadly, it’s a documentary, not a slasher flick. A strident reckoning
on a century of genocide, the film exhumes a Turkish campaign to
exterminate Armenians in 1915, then casts a baleful eye on
preventable slaughters up to the current ethnic cleansing in Darfur.
But sadly, too, its call to action is somewhat undermined by unsubtle
artistry.
"Screamers" isn’t easy to watch, and not entirely because of its
content. There is much ear-hammering heavy metal music and
full-throated screaming, courtesy of the band System of a Down, whose
members are Armenian American. The film is mainly their story — part
history lesson, part political broadside, part concert travelogue —
with unwieldy results. Oral accounts from now-frail Armenian
survivors and witnesses don’t quite mix with strobe lights,
headbanging fans and tour-bus antics.
Teamed with filmmaker Carla Garapedian (also Armenian American), the
band is out to make the Turkish government own up to a "wild orgy of
blood" (as one witness wrote to President Woodrow Wilson) after
decades of denial. Most engaging in its second half, the documentary
also indicts U.S. and British political leadership for failing to
officially use the word "genocide" in connection with the deaths of
as many as 1.5 million Armenians. Persistent vows of "never again"
ring shamefully hollow in the abattoirs of Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.
The film paraphrases a quote from Hitler before he invaded Poland in
1939 (a quote still in hot dispute): "Who still speaks nowadays of
the extermination of the Armenians?"
This documentary does. Whatever its flaws, that alone makes it worth
seeing.
— Richard Leiby
Screamers R, 91 minutes Contains graphic gore, disturbing images and
profanity. At AMC Hoffman Center.