Scream for help if someone forces you to watch "Scream and Scream Again"

Scream and Scream Again (1970)
Starring: Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Marshall Jones, Peter Cushing and Christopher Matthews
Director: Gordon Hessler
Rating: Two of Ten Stars

One day, during the Swingin' Sixties, three clerks collided in the hall of American International Productions. Each and been carrying a film script--one was a supernatural/political thriller set within a fictitious East bloc country, the other was a modern-day psycho-vampire flick set in London, and the third was a mad doctor/Frankenstein flick--and the pages went everywhere. They tried their best to sort them out properly, but in the end the three scripts were hopelessly jumbled together. In the hopes of covering their sloppiness, they simply put the three mish-mash "scripts" in for review. One ended up being green-lighted by an indifferent executive. A shooting script was then approved by a drunk producer. Stoned and tripping directors then went about finding actors, and soon principle photography on "Scream and Scream Again" was underway.


I don't know if that story accurately describes how "Scream and Scream Again" came to be produced, but it's a more generous explanation than one that assumes this incoherent and disjointed movie was intended to be this way.

For more than 3/4ths of the picture there is barely a connection between the various plots, except for a single actor who crosses over between the two. And when they do come together, it's only barely and it's not in any way that seems terribly well thought out. (A sign of the complete confusion that reins in this film is even evident in the theatrical preview where the actor who is identified as Peter Cushing is actually Marshall Jones.)

The story, such as it is, starts with a series of "vampire murders" in London. It turns out that these are being perpetrated by the creation of a mad scientist (Vincent Price) who is working as part of a global secret scientific society to create a superior human race through surgery. When the police refuse to investigate due to political pressure a young coroner (Christopher Matthews) starts doing his own investigation. He is soon in over his head and that's when things get really stupid.

Although Cushing, Lee, and Price get top billing, Cushing is only in one scene (and it's a pointless one at that) and Lee's presence isn't much more than Cushing's. Price's role is larger and very important to the story, but his screen time is still very limited and he doesn't have much to do. His presence is almost as big a waste as that of Cushing and Lee.

And the score, the easy-listening rock/jazz fusion score, is almost too painful for words!

All in all, this film should go on the "must-miss" list, except for those who might be looking for the worst "day-for-night" shots since Ed Wood stopped making Z-grade thrillers and turned to Z-grade pornos. It makes the worst of the Hammer Film efforts look like the work of Orson Wells. What's even more embarrassing for this film is that it looks like it probably had a bigger budget than several Hammer Films combined, based on the number of locations and aerial shots featured.

There ain't much Irish in this Banshee

According to the original Irish legends, the banshee is a spirit that followed five powerful Irish clans and her mournful howls would fill the darkness of the eve before one of their numbers were to come to a dark end. Recent tales have expanded the nature of the banshee to a more general nature... although one has to wonder if the creators of this film even bothered looking up the word "banshee" in a dictionary.

In honor of St. Patrick's Day, I present a review of a movie featuring the Banshee... kinda. And while the Banshee may be an Irish spirit, it admittedly has about as much to do with St. Patrick as this movie has to do with the Banshee. (This is an expanded version of a review that appears in Movies You Should (Die Before You) See.)


Cry of the Banshee (1970)
Starring: Vincent Price, Hilary Dwyer, Patrick Mower, and Elizabeth Bergner
Director: Gordon Hessler
Rating: Three of Ten Stars

When the ruthless, psychopathic Lord Edward Whitman (Price) has a coven of witches massacred, the leader (Bergner) escapes and calls forth a Banshee that will visit death and destruction upon the entire Whitman line, until it exists no more.

Every so often, a movie comes along where every character in it is so unlikeable or so one-dimensional and flat that the viewer really doesn't care what happens to them, and has no one in particular to root for or identify with. "Cry of the Banshee" is one of those films.

The writing here is so bad that not even Vincent Price, who usually manages to bring a fresh feel to even the corniest villian, and some degree of twisted charm to even the worst psychopathic murderer, can tease anything from the character of Edward Whitman other than "this is a bloodthirsty upperclass twit in Elizabethan England who gets off on killing buxom peasant wenches suspected of performing pagan rituals in the woods."

The opposite side of the story--the coven leader Oona--is a performance that stands as a tribute to the questionable gift of overacting. Then there's the story problem that her "revenge" is as broad and uncalled for as the atrocities of Lord Edward's random witch-hunts.

The most glaring example of how bad this movie is the complete illiteracy of anyone involved with the production side. A simple consultation of a dictionary to find the defintion of "banshee" would have gone a long way to making this movie a little less dumb.

The film almost redeems itself at the end with a nicely executed twist (even if the sudden shift in Price's character was a little odd) and there's some honest-to-god horror to be found there, as opposed to simple sadism and brutality, but it's too little and too late. By then, "Cry of the Banshee" is firmly in the Bad category. (There are worse--and director Hessler is responsible for some them, such as "Scream and Scream Again"--but there are also far, far better.)






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Trivia: The opening titles sequence was by Terry Gilliam of "Monte Python" and "Time Bandits" fame. It's pretty nifty and more creative than "Cry of the Banshee" deserves.