It’s probably normal to spend the majority of Scream and Scream Again wondering if
Gordon Hessler and his crew committed a botch-job of massive proportions or
made a conscious stab at abstract art. Hessler’s track record doesn’t make
figuring this out any easier since he directed his share of good pictures (The Golden Voyage of Sinbad) and exploitative trash heaps (Cry of the Banshee). Scream and Scream Again falls somewhere
in between those poles, and in this case, it’s probably wisest just to go with
the flow and take in its sundry oddities without thinking about any of it too
deeply. Half the picture is a political thriller in which a member of
some sort of Nazi-esque military organization keeps pinching people to death.
The other half finds a bloodsucking serial murderer/rapist terrorizing a London
nightspot called The Busted Pot. Why any swinging hippie would attend a joint
with a name like that is anyone’s guess. It’s like naming a brothel “The Crab
Trap.” Oops! Sorry. I promise not to think so much anymore.
The two disparate plots basically come together in the end,
but the film works best as a random scattering of weird bits and pieces. A
jogger collapses and wakes in hospital to discover his limbs keep disappearing
(in an impressive feat of esoteric referencing, “The X-Files” would parody this
bit decades later). The Amen Corner caterwaul the title tune as a bunch of
hipsters gyrate to the music (groovy fact: key sixties producer Shel Talmy is
credited as musical director of the movie!). There are references to
Frankenstein and vampire movies, and the three biggest horror stars of the day
all make appearances, though Vincent Price and Christopher Lee play important
yet fleeting roles and Peter Cushing barely puts in a cameo. Nevertheless, some
critics are uncomfortable classifying Scream
and Scream Again as a true horror movie, and it plays with sci-fi and
political thriller conventions too (maybe the spy-movie soundtrack music is the
filmmaker’s attempt to nudge us into taking the film as the latter). Really,
though, Scream and Scream Again is
really just one kind of movie: cuckoo.
Twilight Time’s new blu-ray edition of Scream and Scream Again is beset by
near constant scratches and speckles, but the extras are a nice bunch. There’s
a 23-minute featurette on Hessler’s films for AIP and it makes a pretty good case that the feature presentation is actually better than it seems (I'm not buying the praise for Cry of the Banshee, though. Blecch), a 9-minute interview with
Uta Levka, who plays a super nurse in the movie (she’s very forthright on her
feelings about Lee and Price), and a feature commentary with Tim Sullivan and
David Del Valle. Get the blu-ray on Twilight Time’s official site here.
