Carry On Screaming (1966) - film review

Something sinister is afoot in Edwardian England.  One misty evening, a young couple, Albert and Doris, are disturbed whilst courting in Hocombe Woods.  As Albert goes to investigate, Doris is carried off by a huge lumbering monster.  Known to his friends as Oddbod, the creature leaves behind a clue, one of his hairy fingers.   When Albert reports Doris’s disappearance to the police, Detective Sergeant Bung and his mentally deficient assistant, Constable Slobotham, begin their investigation by exploring the area around the woods.  Doris is not the first young woman to go missing and Bung is determined to get to the bottom of the matter, despite his wife Emily’s constant henpecking.  Bung’s enquiries lead him to a sinister looking house, home to a deceased scientist, Dr Orlando Watt, and his vampishly seductive sister Valaria.  Despite having been happily dead for fifteen years, Dr Watt agrees to see Bung and assures him that nothing is amiss.  At the police station, the knowledgeable Dr Fettle identifies Oddbod’s stray finger as belonging to an extinct species of man, Homo Gargantuoso, and succeeds in generating another creature from the finger.  Having killed Fettle, Oddbod Junior makes his way to the Watts’ house and finds ready employment in their evil venture, which involves abducting attractive young women, coating them in wax and selling them as shop window dummies.   It’s a truly vile scheme which has probably been done before but it goes some way towards paying the Watts’ exorbitant electricity bills.  Sergeant Bung decides that the only way to solve the mystery of the disappearances is to lay a trap.  Constable Slobotham is none too pleased when he learns that he is to be the bait...

By the mid-1960s, the Carry On team had reached their creative peak and it was in this fruitful period that they turned out a series of inspired parodies of popular film genres.  Of these, the most enjoyable and best crafted is Carry On Screaming, a glorious send-up of the old Gothic horror films that had been made by Universal Pictures in the 1930s and ’40s and then, more recently, by Hammer Films.  The Carry On comedies and Hammer horror films had much in common – they were made in England on a ludicrously tight budget; they were highly popular with the cinema-going public; but they were almost universally despised by the critics.  It was inevitable that the two most distinctive and popular franchises in British cinema would collide, and the result is one of the cheekiest, most entertaining horror spoofs of all time.

With the 1953 film House of Wax providing the basic plot, the characters are clearly inspired by the familiar Gothic horror fiends, including Frankenstein’s monster, the Mummy, Mr Hyde and most of the original Addams Family.  In the hands of a lesser screenwriter, this wholesale smash-and-grab raid would be unpardonable, but Talbot Rothwell is so successful at melding all of the stolen ingredients together, marinating the ensemble in a deliciously rich comic sauce, that he literally gets away with murder.  Likewise, art director Bert Davey and cinematographer Alan Hume appear to have had great fun replicating the unmistakeable look of Hammer’s Gothic horror films, recreating the familiar fog-shrouded woods, creaky wood-panelled house and creepy cellar laboratory, equipped with bubbling vats and usual electrical paraphernalia for waking the dead.  This is plagiarism on an industrial scale but done so well that you can’t help wishing there was a special category at the BAFTAs, for Best Imitation of Someone Else’s Work.

Although many of the Carry On regulars are conspicuous by their absence, a heavily made-up Kenneth Williams makes up for the deficit with what is possibly the campest performance of his career.  "Frying tonight!" he cries maniacally as his victims get the hot wax treatment.   Meanwhile, Fenella Fielding establishes herself as the sexiest character in the entire Carry On series, the vamp with the vampire-look whose pastimes include turning her amorous admirers into wild beasts (not too difficult) and giving passive smoking a whole new meaning.  A last minute stand in for Sid James, Harry H. Corbett is magnificent in his one Carry On outing, clearly relishing his brief respite from the Steptoe and Son straitjacket.

Carry On Screaming was a significant film in the series since it was the last of the Carry Ons to be funded and distributed by Anglo-Amalgamated Films.  This latter company had aspirations of moving away from low budget comedy and were keen to end their association with what they increasingly felt was low brow entertainment with little future mileage.  Fortunately, producer Peter Rogers quickly found a replacement distributor, in the form of the Rank Organisation, although they insisted that any subsequent film did not include "Carry On" in the title - a mistake which was soon corrected after the next two films in the series (Don’t Lose Your Head and Follow That Camel) under-performed at the box office.

Carry On Screaming was one of three Carry On films (the other two being Sergeant and Cleo) to be depicted in a set of stamps issued by the Royal Mail in June 2008 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first Carry On film and the first Dracula film made by Hammer.

Far less reliant on the kind of low brow humour (cheap innuendo and pratfalls) that predominates in the other Carry Ons, Carry On Screaming stands out as one of the more sophisticated films in the series.  It may be a pastiche, but it is a pastiche made with exceptional style and flair, a wonderfully effective concoction of Gothic horror and 1960s British comedy that delivers chills and laughs by the bucket-load.  Now remember, if you go out into the woods tonight, take care not to run into Oddbod and his chums, or you could end up in Primark.  Now, that is something to make you scream...

© Chris Alderton 2009

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