Scream and Scream Again

Scream and Scream Again (1970)

Dir. Gordon Hessler

Written by Christopher Wicking, based on The Disoriented Man by Peter Saxon

Starring Alfred Marks, Michael Gothard, Vincent Price, Christopher Matthews, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing (cameo)

SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN would be more accurately called SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN AND THEN SCREAM A THIRD TIME, because it’s all about threes. First, its three producers: Max Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky of the venerable also-ran British horror house Amicus studios being joined in this case by the equally venerable Louis Heyward of American exploitation house AIP. Second, its three “stars” – Amicus regulars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, along with AIP go-to Vincent Price, probably the three biggest marquee names in horror at the time, together for the first time, no less! And finally, its three plots, because it begins by introducing us to three seemingly unrelated storylines. In the first, a jogger who runs with an unimpressively floppy form (prolific British bit player Nigel Lambert) has a heart attack, only to wake up in a mysterious, sinister hospital where they slowly amputate his limbs. In a second, a sadistic military officer (Marshall Jones, CRY OF THE BANSHEE, MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE) steadily rises through the ranks in an unnamed European dictatorship. And in the third, a no-nonsense police superintendent (Alfred Marks, THE FRIGHTENED CITY, VALENTINO) and, I guess, an assistant coroner (Christopher Matthews, SCARS OF DRACULA), who sort of gradually turns into the protagonist through a process of attrition and the need for this sort of movie to have some blandly handsome British youngsters, seek a mystery killer in a series of apparently vampiric rape-murders. How on Earth could this all fit together?

Indeed, how could three sets of such unusual triplets fit together? Well, the answer is that they don’t entirely, because the movie’s a weird mess. But I confess to rather enjoying the messy, confounding, winding journey it takes. I’ll be damned if I know what to do with it, but give SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN credit for this, at least: it’s probably not what you’re expecting. First of all, it’s really more of a science-fiction thriller than a horror movie, despite the presence of Price, Lee, and Cushing (and they’re not much of a presence at that; Price eventually gets a bit to do, but Lee is a minor character and Cushing has just one throwaway scene). But second and most importantly, it’s a pretty wild --practically deranged!— ride, but for all the insane convolutions it takes, it turns out there really was a discrete destination in mind the whole time. It’s going somewhere. I’m not saying it makes sense, exactly, but somehow the movie does sort of tie everything together at the very end. But I do mean the very end; for the vast majority of its none-too-hurried 95 minutes, it seems like we’re watching a bunch of utterly unrelated lunacy, three paranoid, surreal plotlines playing out completely parallel to each other with no obvious connection of any kind.  

Like many movies of the period, it feels a bit dawdling when it would probably benefit from a breakneck pace, and also like many movies of the period, it gets painfully bogged down in groovy pandering to the swinging youth (two lengthy club scenes prominently featuring a trendy British-invasion rock group --in this case Welsh soul outfit Amen Corner). But unlike many movies of the period, it also features the credit “police chase arranged and executed by Joe Wadham,” and for a 1970 British B-movie, this thing’s a real doozy. It involves a diabolical vampire date-rapist (Michael Gothard, THE DEVILS, LIFEFORCE[!!], FOR YOUR EYES ONLY) in a red convertible sportscar (apparently a 1955 Austin-Healey 100/4) tearing around London and the surrounding Surrey countryside with dozens of expendable police cruisers in hot pursuit, and ends up blossoming into a lengthy --in fact, almost comically extended-- foot chase capped with several bouts of superpowered fisticuffs. It isn’t exactly jam-packed with jaw-dropping stunts or eye-popping spectacle, but clocking in at close to 15 minutes of screentime (pointedly beating BULLITT’s 10 minutes, a point of reference clearly on its mind), it ends up building momentum out of sheer moxie. Normally this sort of action spectacle is death for a horror movie, which thrives on tension rather than excitement. But a few touches of grotesque weirdness --the killer rips off his hand to escape a handcuff, and can crack a human skull with his punches— help resolve the disconnect here. It’s classic action cinema, but with a touch of the genuinely weird, both exciting and a little disconcerting. It honestly makes me wonder if these two genres aren’t as mutually incompatible as I’d always assumed.

As a fifteen-minute chase scene tangent might suggest, the three plotlines are all a little shaggy, which makes a little more sense when you learn that the credited author of the novel which became the basis for SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN (originally titled, appropriately, The Disoriented Man), one “Peter Saxon,” is actually a pen named most frequently used by Irish journalist, pulp author, and editor W. Howard Baker, but, the novel itself was apparently written primarily by fellow pulp author Stephen Frances, with additional possible input from Martin Thomas. All three men were veterans of the Sexton Blake detective stories which are said to number over 4,000[!] entries, and it’s unclear which of the three, if any, was the dominant creative force here. Several websites –all unattributed, I’m afraid—suggest the novel was the result of a “round robin” type writing exercise, which would obviously do much to explain its otherwise befuddlingly unconnected trio of storylines. But whatever the explanation, each tangent affords at least a few oddball pleasures. There’s not exactly a surplus of whammy (the gore is infrequent, though impressively gnarly and clearly shot when it does happen), so with Price, Lee, and Cushing only rarely on-screen, the movie must primarily rely on its pervasive strangeness to keep engaging. Fortunately, it is indeed very, very strange, so that works out.

How strange, you ask? Strange enough to feel completely comfortable removing the novel’s explanation –BOOK SPOILERS it turns out the villains are aliens! END BOOK SPOILERS —and replacing it with… nothing. No explanation at all. It’d be pretty weird to just throw extraterrestrial conspiracies into the mix of a movie which already contains a vampiric car chase, but it’s even weirder to just leave it unexplained, and that’s the kinda shit we’re rolling with here. SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN doesn’t give a fuck about your pathetic need for explanation. It’s just gonna let its freak flag fly, and you’re gonna have to deal with it. Some may find this intolerable; me, I was kinda disappointed to hear there ever was an explanation. I prefer the film’s satisfaction with the vague, uneasy ambiguity of it. So the movie is definitely weird, but obviously I’m on its wavelength.

Well, mostly, anyway. One weird thing which is less effective is the jazzy, sunny score by David Whitaker (VAMPIRE CIRCUS) which is, one can’t help but notice, monstrously inappropriate for such a bizarre, unsettling thriller, and does a great deal to undermine whatever tension director Gordon Hessler (MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE) might be building up. Not that the movie strikes one as being impeccably planned by a master craftsman or anything, but there’s weird which is productive, and weird which is counterproductive, and the groovy Bond music knockoff soundtrack is probably the latter. I might be more inclined to tolerate this kind of tomfoolery in an Italian flick, but it’s an ungainly and awkward look for the British. Italian genre films are the cinema of pure sensation, content to luxuriate in any sufficiently evocative artistic element; British films, especially from the 70’s, have a stiffer and more calculated feel, making an inappropriately funky soundtrack feel less like an indulgence in extravagant overstimulation and more like a misjudged attempt to feel hip. But no matter, few 70’s horror flicks, and especially British ones, feel as wildly out-of-control and unpredictable as SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN manages, and if that blurs its focus, it rarely blunts its impact. And that’s enough to recommend it all by itself.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	TRIPLE DISTILLED HORROR... as powerful as a vat of boiling ACID! I should probably mention that yes, there is a vat of acid in the movie.
TITLE ACCURACY	Completely meaningless, but that just add to its weirdo vibe.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Yes, from the pulp novel The Disoriented Man by “Peter Saxon” (actually some combination of W. Howard Baker, Stephen Frances, and Martin Thomas).
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	UK/USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Boy, um, gosh. Vampire, I guess? Sci-Fi Horror?
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, though none are especially prominent and Cushing in particular only has one throwaway scene.
NUDITY?	My teenage self would never have believed it, but I swear I don’t even notice anymore. Those creeps on IMDB do include “Frontal female nudity” in their keywords, so I’ll bow to their superior collective horniness.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Yes
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None.
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	Gosh, um. I dunno, man, “don’t go jogging because you’ll look like a dork and then have your limbs cut off” is about the best I can do for you. Otherwise…