Film Review
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...
© James Travers 2009
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Gerald Thomas film:
Carry on Cowboy (1966)
Film Synopsis
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...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.