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Scream and Scream Again (1970)

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39 comments in total

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11 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :-
Fab and groovy 60's horror, 6 March 2005

Author: TheatreX from Louisville, KY

This is one of my favorite horror movies of the 60's, it has cool jazzy music & even a band singing Scream and Scream Again, it has Vincent Price, it has Peter Cushing (as a honcho of some pseudo-Nazi type army), it has Christopher Lee, hard to tell if he's a good guy or a bad guy, actually, but overall it's just plain great entertainment. It's even got acid, no, not THAT kind, the kind that dissolves bodies. Yee-ha! People are mysteriously disappearing or being killed, it seems, and there's evil afoot, since Price is doing a few little experiments to make superhuman beings. Police are hot on the trail, along with a coroner's assistant, to catch the perpetrators, but they have no idea what they're up against. I particularly like when one of the superhuman dudes is captured and leaves behind a body part as he makes good his escape. If you're a fan of 60's horror then don't miss this one. 9 out of 10 stars.

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9 out of 9 people found the following comment useful :-
"That bloody chicken wasn't killed, it died of old age.", 5 February 2005

Author: bensonmum2 from Tennessee

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

What a bizarre movie! Scream and Scream Again is all over the place. It's a combination horror/sci-fi/mystery/espionage/thriller with sort of a James Bond twist. And it's a lot of fun.

To be honest, at the beginning of the film, I was lost. There are about four different plot lines that don't seem to have anything to do with each other. (1) There is a runner who collapses. Every time we see him after the collapse, he's in a hospital losing his limbs one at a time. (2) There is a vampire killer on the prowl in London. He attacks young women and drains them of their blood. (3) There are scenes of some fascist regime in some unknown country. The leaders of the regime are being killed one at a time. Also, people are being tortured for no apparent reason. (4) There are discussions going on in the uppermost levels of the British government that appear to have nothing to do with anything else. But, by the end of the film, most everything fits together quite nicely as a story about creating a master race.

Scream and Scream Again 'stars' Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, and Peter Cushing. I say 'stars' because Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing are barely in the movie. In fact, Cushing has all of about 5 minutes of screen time. Alfred Marks as Supt.Bellaver is actually the star. He's a no nonsense policeman investigating the string of murders in London. In the end though, Price takes over and is wonderful. His mad doctor routine is terrific to watch.

There are some excellent moments in the film worth mentioning. The chase scene is one of the longest I've ever seen, ending with the killer losing a hand after being handcuffed to the front of a car. Another is the fight scene at the end between Vincent Price and leader of the fascists. There are also moments of tension as when the young doctor is snooping around Vincent Price's house.

This is a movie that you have to be patient with. Trust me, it all makes sense in the end.

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7 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
Great atmosphere, great plot, fair otherwise, 24 December 2001

Author: silversprdave (davefranu@aol.com) from Washington DC suburb

'Scream and Scream Again' is one of my favorites, even though it is ratherly poorly put together. The director tried to make the movie mysterious -- and succeeded too well, making it nearly incomprehensible. However, if you have patience, the final explanation at the end will tie enough of the film together to make rewarding sense.

The main attraction for this movie is its subtle atmosphere of horror. The movie mainly consists of fragmented images that come to gether to paint a darker picture than just what the movie shows. A good example of the texture and flavor of the film is the scene which, to my disappointment, was removed from the version I rented (I originally saw the film in a college Halloween movie festival). A coroner while alone investigating the death of a lovely women begins to move forward as if to kiss the corpse but is interrupted by the inspector entering the room. The surprised coroner quickly straightens up and tries to look very official and busy, but obviously is upset at having almost been caught being amorous to the corpse. No further reference was made to the scene.

This is an example of the extremely dark and upsetting images that lie just beneath the surface of the film. It is unfortunate that the director's attempt to involve the audience by making them work hard to piece together fragments of action into something comprehensible was mostly unsuccessful. Still, I think the film is worth the patience. My rating: 8 of 10.

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6 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :-
Cast Of Horror Icons Make The Movie Fun To Watch, 18 October 2005

Author: Hal-900 from WA, USA

The film is a big mess of ideas. It tries to do too much. Part cop drama, part spy thriller, part vampire movie, part sci-fi mumbo-jumbo, this movie makes little sense until we get to see how all threads come together near the end of the film. I guess a great director could have turned this film into something really special, but as it is, the movie is never boring, if a tad overcomplicated. Biggest disappointment was to find out that despite their prominent billing, Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing have glorified cameos. Plus they do not share any screen time, which is not a wise idea when you are dealing with iconic figures of the horror genre. Regardless of my complaints, this is an entertaining movie, very interesting in terms of its unusual plot structure. The very 1960s psychedelic music score is terrible, though. Definitely Hessler's best movie of his erratic movie career.

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8 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :-
You will scream again and again!, 21 December 2001
Author: the lioness from United States

This has got to be the wildest Price film ever. I saw this film for the first time recently and I was just blown.

This film tells the intricate story of an organization that's trying to take over the world by way of a superhuman race of people that are literally created. Think "Frankenstein". If I could rename this film, I'd call it "Frankenstein Meets James Bond". As a matter fact, that's the best way to describe the plot.

When you see this film, don't turn away from it because you will find yourself missing a lot. There are several plots going on simultaneously (I kid you not!). You have the crazed serial killer will a thirst for blood, the runner who keeps losing limbs and the secret organization that's afoot.

For those of you that are looking for action & horror in a fast-pace setting, you got it!

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5 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
Hawaii-Five-OOOOOOHHHHHHHH, 4 February 2002

Author: Peter Antoniades from Birmingham, UK

From the director of Hawaii-Five-0, Gordon Hessler directs this very underrated Thriller. With a star cast of Cushing, Lee and Price, and some rather wooden acting from Alfred Marks as the non-emotional Supt. Bellaver, this film runs as fast as Hawaii-Five-0, with some excellent car chases around England. However Hessler's use of tension is not used to full effect, and the German Nazi sub-plot (with hilarious logo) seems both distant and pointless, and used only as a dig at dictatorship regimes.

Also the music at times seems farcical, with Jazzy-sixty bands playing when the serial killer is attacking his victim. With the serial killers actions of out-running and powering the police, reactions of "he's quite strong" and "Oh he's torn his hand off" seem like tongue-in-cheek, or if not a terrible script.

All in all, this movie is a cross between Hawaii-Five-0, Frankenstein, and Hitchcock's Frenzy, and although it's well worth a watch, the styles don't combine well to give a scary thriller. The viewer is left a little lost with all the scene changing and Christopher Lee's role could have been expanded upon. The viewer should Scream and Scream Again and again and again at the poor direction the movie takes, nice try, but he should have tried and tried again to make it at least scary!!

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5 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
Lee, Cushing, and Price, Oh My!!, 22 July 2000

Author: Jerry-93 from Milwaukee, WI

This film was released before I was born, so I don't know anything about its ad campaign, but I imagine it went something like, "Lee, Cushing, and Price: Together at Last!!" This is true: they all are in this movie, but what we have here is a movie about a bunch of pseudo-Nazis (complete with knockoff uniforms) trying to create the master race by assembling people from assorted "perfect" body parts. Price has a substantial supporting role, but Cushing and Lee have basically cameos, and none of them share any meaningful screen time. So, basically, they are together in the credits only.

Now for the movie. Yes, it has a solid plot, but the movie doesn't follow it. It mostly has to do with the police tracking one of "composite" superhumans as he goes on a rape and murder spree. This does make for two of the best moments of the movie : when the killer, handcuffed to a car bumper, tears of not only his hand to escape, but a third of his forearm. The other is when a killer falls off a mountain and barely gets a scratch.

The real highlight is the final 20 minutes, when Price explains, in classic Bad Guy fashion, the entire master race thing to the hero. Price is a great actor, but he's a terrible doctor, because 1) he puts on his own surgical gloves, and 2) contaminates them 10 seconds later. A fight ensues between Price and the head of the fake Gestapo, and that's it. I don't know if I can recommend this movie to anyone, because fans of the three horror institutions in this film will be disappointed, as will genre fans. Watch it if you're bored, or for the goofy dialogue.

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6 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN (Gordon Hessler, 1969) ***, 10 October 2004
Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@onvol.net) from Naxxar, Malta

I had missed a viewing of SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN (the title itself is fairly ludicrous, I must say) when I was a kid, shown on Italian TV as part of a one-night Vincent Price marathon. Having now watched the four AIP films made by director Gordon Hessler, I think that this is probably his best work.

It has a rather audacious non-linear narrative for a 'mainstream' horror film, though it all comes together neatly in the end. It is also the only one of the four films to take place in 'our' times –despite the old-fashioned trappings of the plot (taking in espionage in the form of dictatorial regimes with their Nazi-like villains, as well as the obligatory mad scientist and his vampiric 'creations'), the modern-day setting is indeed very appropriate and John Coquillon's typically elegant cinematography captures its essence quite well.

SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN is virtually a black comedy which, mercifully, does not descend into camp: it is quite convoluted, relatively protracted (maybe this was because I watched it back to back with THE OBLONG BOX!), but wholly likable for all that. David Whitaker's 'unusual' pop score is another major asset.

Like the earlier film, SCREAM does not take advantage of having three great horror stars together for the first time. Peter Cushing, graceful as always, does not share any scenes with Vincent Price or Christopher Lee, and indeed appears all too briefly. Price is effective as the mad scientist, even if the material itself didn't seem to inspire him all that much (he later admitted to not 'getting' it!). Lee, perhaps the most progressive-thinking horror star (let's not forget he appeared in Jess Franco's EUGENIE…THE STORY OF HER JOURNEY INTO PERVERSION that same year!), is perfectly authoritative as the true villain of the piece.

We also get an exciting if over-extended chase sequence in which Michael Gothard finds new (and highly impractical!) means of eluding the Police - in the shape of sarcastic Superintendent Bellaver who, as played with a rather heavy British accent by Alfred Marks, manages any number of amusing scenes (designed, perhaps, to relieve the audience's frustration at the many - and apparently disjointed - strands of plot going on all at once)!

The end result is patchy overall – certainly not everything in this pot-pourri of ideas works to our general satisfaction (particularly Marshall Jones' overbearing characterization of Konratz) - but the film is often ingenious and weird enough to keep one's interest at all times. In retrospect, the great Fritz Lang's (reported) appreciation of SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN is actually not very hard to understand, as the material is indeed well up his street!

Reading about the film on the Net, I came across a rather disconcerting post over at Mobius where it was stated that the print utilized for the DVD was cut. Here is the relevant quote in full:

'On SCREAM I am convinced there was extra footage in the UK theatrical release (which I saw) that has now vanished and was not restored in the MGM DVD. This consists of (a) Alfred Marks bringing down Michael Gothard in the quarry by throwing a stone that hits him on the head, which is the reason he falls down (b) at the climax, there was originally more footage and some more dialogue between Lee and Price - there is a fairly obvious music track change on the DVD where this should be.'

Is anybody here able to confirm this, or at least shed some more light on the matter?

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3 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
An enjoyable but disorientating pulp cocktail, 2 May 2003
Author: heathblair from London, England

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

POSSIBLE SPOILERS

A British government sponsored scientific clinic run by Vincent Price is secretly producing a race of superhuman cyborgs assembled from stolen human body-parts. The cyborgs are taking over key positions of power throughout the world with a view to total domination. The superhumans' plans are threatened with exposure when one of their number flees Price's clinic and goes on a psychopathic killing spree. More mayhem ensues when a cyborg hitman is dispatched from a fascistic eastern European country to eliminate all witnesses, including his former co-conspirator, Price.

If writer Chris Wicking had just stuck to the basic storyline above, Scream And Scream Again might be regarded today as a lean, mean minor classic. Instead, the film's reputation has suffered because of a failure to resolve the screenplay's many intriguing subplots; spy-planes, government cover-ups, police investigations, car chases, swinging London, transplant surgery, eugenics, and vampirism. Wicking obviously wanted to portray the intangibility and inter-connectedness of evil, but ninety minutes is not enough time to tie all of these ambitious elements together and accommodate character development. It was a good try though.

Christopher Matthews plays the young, inquisitive police pathologist and is the movie's nominal hero. But his character exists only to bear witness to the very small piece of the puzzle that he is a part of. He is what film critics used to call a cipher. Indeed, all of the characters are ciphers. They don't really exist as properly motivated people in themselves, but rather as conduits disseminating Wicking's fertile ideas. To be fair, it's possible to make an interesting movie in this way, but Scream And Scream Again is first and foremost a schlock exploitation film. It says "American International" on the tin, so you aren't going to get Antonioni here.

So, high art and intellectualism apart, is Scream And Scream Again any good as schlock entertainment? Sure it is. It possesses a fair dollop of pulp-trash energy, and its very willingness to flit recklessly between locations, time-frames, and plot-points lends it a certain charm.

The casting is astute. The late Michael Gothard makes a good, eerie cyborg psychopath as he prowls groovy London discotheques in search of party-girls whom just assume he's a good-looking guy with a fast car and an Austin Powers shirt. Of course, the reality is more gruesome, and he is soon savagely murdering them and sucking their blood - although exactly why he has vampiric tendencies is, typically, never explained. With his turns in that other super-trash magnum opus, Lifeforce, and Ken Russell's brilliant The Devils, I'm surprised Gothard doesn't have more of a cult following.

Elsewhere, Alfred Marks pretty much steals the show as the curmudgeonly cop in charge of the murder investigation. He has some nice throwaway lines that he delivers with mordent relish. Think of a British version of Walther Matthau in The Taking Of Pelham 123. Marks was a well known light-comedy actor in Britain, and appears here in one of his few film roles.

Judy Huxtable plays one of Gothard's victims in a brief and suitably unpleasant scene. At the time, Huxtable's was famous for being Peter Cook's second wife.

The movie's big selling point is the casting of Price, Cushing and Lee. All but Price have little more than extended cameos, but it's always good to see them. Some people have praised Price's "serious" performance, but, to me, he is his usual, quite wonderful camp self.

My personal favourite piece of characterization is that of Konratz, the sadistic cyborg hitman/superfascist, portrayed by Marshall Jones. I don't know what became of Jones, but his stint here is impressively charismatic and convincingly evil. His preferred method of murder is noteworthy; a lethal version of Leonard Nimoy's vulcan neck pinch, which, in this case, seems to induce a rather unfortunate cerebral hemorrhage. In one bravura sequence, Konratz calmly waltzes into a busy police station, kills one of the major characters in a startling and gory close-up, steals some files and waltzes out again without missing a beat. A very scary fellow.

The movie's technical credits are sound enough. Gordon Hessler directs with workmanlike efficiency, and although a couple of his set-ups are inspired (the nightmarish image of a bed-ridden, screaming man progressively losing his limbs comes to mind), it's mostly a case of point-and-shoot. John Coquillon's camerwork takes a similar path. He was to do much more interesting work on Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs a year or two later.

David Whittaker's brash, riotously jazzy score seems at first to be outrageously inappropriate, then, as the narrative silliness progresses, you realise it is COMPLETELY appropriate. It's that kind of a movie. When it was re-released on video in the mid 80s, Scream And Scream Again had a completely new electronic score written for it (probably to avoid the Musicians Union re-use fees) composed by Kendall Schmidt. While I'm fond of Schmidt's electro-score, I prefer Whittaker's original music. The score actually becomes legitimately serious towards the denouement when Whittaker underscores the true horror of Price's laboratory with an an eerie saxophone mysteriouso.

Finally, with its wild fusion of elements, Scream And Scream Again is an enjoyable but disorientating gallop through late sixties paranoia. If nothing else, it highlights that era's creeping fear of medical progress. This was a time when the latest advances in transplant surgery were making global news. The latent horror of these techniques, with their echoes of Frankenstein, were to inspire other films and shows such as O Lucky Man, Coma, and Gerry Anderson's UFO series with its organ stealing alien invaders. But at least Scream And Scream Again got there first.

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4 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
Weird, uneven, bizarre, but never boring, 9 October 2003
Author: squeezebox from United States

Gordon Hessler was not all that great a director. He wasn't particularly good at setting up interesting shots or getting good performances out of his actors, but occasionally he managed by default to create a movie that was so completely off-the-wall and bizarre that those shortcomings could be forgotten.

SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN is a good example of that. It is by no means a good movie; in fact, it's really pretty bad. But you literally have no idea where it's headed, and by the time you get there, even though it's a tad underwhelming, it's still just oddball enough to keep you hooked.

Basically, it's the story of a serial killer who preys on bar-hopping women, and who, incidentally, seems to have superpowers of some sort. Or, maybe it's the story of a military conspiracy of some sort? Or is it the story of some kind of body parts black market? Believe it or not, all these seemingly unrelated plotlines eventually come together, and it's a wacky ride all the way.

The biggest disappointment for me, is the scarce screen time of headliners Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. They literally have less than twenty minutes of screen time combined, and only Lee and Price even appear together, in one very brief scene. The main characters seem to be a disgruntled Scotland Yard detective, and a younger, less cynical police officer.

I recommend this movie to any fan of AIP or any of the three horror stars, but most people will not have the patience to sit through it. Fans will enjoy it, if only for it's sheer weirdness.

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