Scream and Scream Again (1970) - film review

As he investigates the gruesome murders of two young women, Superintendent Bellaver becomes convinced that a psychopath is at large.  A man wakes up in a hospital and finds, to his horror, that his legs have been amputated.  Somewhere in Europe, a Fascist government with a very silly logo is preparing to take over the world.  A mad scientist is attempting to create a race of super-humans by inserting human brains into synthetic bodies.  Is it possible that these bizarre happenings are in some way connected?

Scream and Scream Again can be summarised in four words: premise good; realisation bad.  The plot, taken from a novel by Peter Saxon, has some mileage (even if it is slightly barking), but unfortunately screenwriter Christopher Wicking and director Gordon Hessler took the decision to jumble it up and make it as incomprehensible as possible.  After five or six viewings, the film starts to make some kind of sense, but by that stage you are just about ready to throw yourself into a vat of acid, just like the film’s principal villains.

The film’s lack of narrative coherence is not its biggest sin however.   The publicity for Scream and Scream Again boldly claimed to offer us three masters of horror – Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.  What it doesn’t tell us is that Cushing is only on screen for about three minutes, Lee for only marginally longer and Price only comes into his own in the last ten minutes.  It doesn’t quite contravene the Trades Description Act, but it is a bit of a let down for anyone expecting to see the three horror kings together.  No doubt if the film were re-released today, the distributors would make a big thing of the fact that Peter Sallis of Wallace and Gromit fame is in the film (for a good ninety seconds).

Although the film has its failings, it occasionally impresses with a few inspired directorial flourishes and, to be fair, it does offer one or two spine-tingling thrills of the kind you would expect of a good low-budget British horror film.  The only thing that cannot, under any circumstances, be forgiven is the awful soundtrack.  Who could possibly think that late 1960s British disco jazz would make an appropriate accompaniment to a horror film?  Someone in the production office clearly lost the plot.  And they weren’t alone.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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