Scream and Scream Again hangs in there as a genre curiosity, and I must admit I come back to re-check it every few years. This year the added benefit is a sharp new Blu-ray from Twilight Time.
About thirteen years ago, MGM began releasing its Orion / American-International holdings on DVD, and their first branded-line Midnite Movies double bill was this title paired with The Oblong Box, itself newly available on Blu-ray. Scream and Scream Again is a 1969 sci-fi / horror thriller directed by Gordon Hessler, a prolific German-born director who got his start on the television show Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Joining A.I.P. when the company expanded filming in England and Europe, room the late ‘60s Hessler worked constantly in both film and television.
Scream and Scream Again is always interesting, even if it’s not very good. What reads as a unique blend of crossed genres, plays more like a sprawling story chopped down to fit a television budget. We’re told that it went through more than one writer on the way to the screen, but the movie we see follows Peter Saxon’s original book “The Disorientated Man” fairly closely. In the book, the mysterious foreign dictatorship is meant to be East Germany. Scream invents a vague new totalitarian state. We assume it is Fascist, because they all wear Nazi-like armbands with a symbol that looks like a demonic pitchfork.
Several plots dovetail in a story of intrigue that jumps between Great Britain and the other European dictatorship. Konratz (Marshall Jones), a military spy who can kill with one hand, is consolidating personal power. When his secret police torture citizens like Erika (Yutte Stensgaard), he avoids official censure by murdering government ministers, including the ethical Benedek (Peter Cushing). Konratz has an unclear relationship with top Brit security minister Fremont (Christopher Lee), and other agents are watching both of them. To obtain new military technology, Konratz’s people have shot down a British spy plane and captured the pilot. Meanwhile, an ordinary police case becomes extraordinary. Superintendant Bellaver (Alfred Marks) and his detectives close the net on a brutal serial killer, Keith (Michael Gothard), who both rapes his victims and drinks their blood. Assistant pathologist David Sorel (Christopher Matthews) and policewoman Sylvia (Judy Huxtable) aid in the capture of Keith, who turns out to be a cyborg-like ‘composite’ human of great strength and agility. Finally, a jogger who collapses on a morning run wakes up in hospital to find that he’s been made the victim of appalling surgery. The loose threads lead to the quiet country medical clinic of Dr. Browning (Vincent Price). Alarming experiments are being conducted, with the failures consigned to an acid bath…
As the synopsis tries to indicate, Scream and Scream Again is a complicated web of spies, police procedural, and Frankenstein-like medical experiments. Part of its notoriety comes from rave coverage in the late Phil Hardy’s film encyclopedias, where it rates write-ups in both the Horror and Science Fiction volumes. Many writers defend the film by citing the enthusiastic approval of Fritz Lang, presumably for its similarities to Lang’s superb paranoid ‘Empire of Crime’ movies about the diabolical Dr. Mabuse character. Although I’m not claiming that the quotes are bogus, Lang’s reported endorsement of this movie, Kubrick’s 2001, a Space Odyssey, and Jesús Franco’s Succubus (Necronomicon) have always seemed suspect. I met Fritz Lang when he visited a UCLA screening in 1973 or so, when he was functionally blind. He told us that in 1968 his eyesight was so poor that he only heard the soundtrack of 2001, and enjoyed it through the description of a fully sighted person. Scream and Scream Again does have elements in common with Lang’s groundbreaking Mabuse and spy films, mainly its seemingly unrelated mysteries that eventually dovetail into a single menace. But that’s where the resemblance ends — the show is a style-challenged potpourri of disconnected scenes.
Horror fan expectations are immediately foiled when Scream limits its three major stars, each given prominent billing, to a few short minutes of screen time as relatively minor players. They have almost no scenes together. Peter Cushing’s role should have been billed as a cameo. Christopher Lee’s is so devoid of context, even his formidable presence makes little impression. We see Lee only three or four times, and in each brief appearance he could almost be a different character. Vincent Price has somewhat more to do, but he’s an obvious mad doctor from the start, which drains all the suspense (and frankly, any freshness) from the medical horror subplot.
The film’s actual primary characters are played by relative unknowns. Chief among the villains is Marshall Jones’ Ruritanian spy Konratz, who has the most screen time of anybody yet projects little personality. Although Jones could be Patrick MacNee’s unpleasant brother, we tend to forget what Konratz looks like when he is off-screen. Konratz is central to every sidebar event in the movie, but actor Jones rates only fifteenth billing in the confused main titles, buried down in the third or fourth block of actor’s names. To make matters worse, although his name in the credits and the book is Konratz, everybody in the film calls him Konrad. (No, they’re not calling him comrade.) Even A.I.P. was confused, for they mis-identify actor Jones in the trailer as Peter Cushing. The book may be “The Disorientated Man” but this entire production could be described as “The Disorganizized Movie.”
Next to Konratz the most developed character is the dedicated police detective Bellaver (Alfred Marks), a stock harassed cop granted a modicum of dignity. We like Bellaver even when his foolish police repeatedly underestimate a foe that’s an unpredictable near-superman. Most every main character in Scream and Scream Again is violently eliminated, which leaves us nobody to care about when the narrative fails to cohere. Each big big story surprise Is a reveal that the last two or three scenes we’ve been seeing — innocents tortured, ministers murdered — are irrelevant to the big picture. No compensating sense of humor, or self-awareness steps in to offset the awkwardness of all this.
Often, a reviewer will slam a complicated movie as incoherent simply because he didn’t care enough to pay attention to the details. We see that sometimes with American reviews of English genre movies. The Variety reviewer thought Quatermass 2 was ‘murky and muddled,’ when it is one of the most brilliantly paced fantasy thrillers ever, and a worthy successor to Fritz Lang’s espionage stories. But this is not the case with Scream and Scream Again. What may have begun as a great concept remains a confused mess, even after multiple viewings.
What we’ve got here is indeed a poorly structured script, with characters that do not develop and connections that don’t connect. The choice of what to show on screen is the opposite of ellipsis: key narrative material is missing, while we wait out car chases and dancing action in a discotheque — predictable filler that could have been skipped. All we see of Konratz’s mysterious foreign country is a frontier gate in a divided city, a green field, and several confined offices. Time is wasted with the capture and torture of the sexy refugee Stensgaard; Konratz’s sketchy activities don’t explain if he’s killing state officials as part of a personal power grab, or if he’s an impostor seizing the government from the outside.
The best thing on view is actor Michael Gothard, a cult figure who decorates movies as disparate as Don Levy’s Herostratus, Ken Russell’s The Devils, Barbet Schroeder’s The Valley… Obscured by Clouds and Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce. Gothard’s ‘vampire killer’ Keith is at least interesting, but our patience is taxed to the breaking point. Keith has killed or seriously maimed several policemen. They’ve seen him rip out a policewoman’s throat. They’ve watched him climb the side of a steep mountain with superhuman ease. He seems capable of anything, yet the cops merely handcuff his wrist to a car grille and turn their backs to him.
Vincent Price’s Dr. Browning practically hangs signs outside his clinic reading ‘Mad Maniac M.D. On Call, No Waiting.’ Logic incriminates the good doctor from the very beginning but Superintendent Bellaver accepts whatever flaky excuse he offers. We’ve observed the connection between Browning’s nurse Jane (Uta Levka) and various evildoings with body parts, so we’ve known the answer before it is officially revealed in Dr. Browning’s freezer. Frankly, we were hoping Scream and Scream Again would be a little more interesting.
The gruesome ‘running gag’ of the jogger would have more potential if the show showed a sense of humor or any kind of flair. It’s almost a ‘crazy ward’ Burlesque skit (“Nurse! Nurse!”). Successive returns to the jogger’s bedside fail to carry any surprise. Director Lindsay Anderson seemingly borrowed this idea for his bizarre ‘pilgrim’s progress’ satire O Lucky Man, and hit a precise balance of Theater of the Absurd humor and jolting horror. Anderson’s mad science episode is truly appalling-hilarious, and one of his film’s best scenes.
Fritz Lang’s characterizations are often simplistic, yet his films always have strong identification figures. The only happens here when the pathologist Sorel and the lady cop Sylvia go sleuthing on their own. We are happy to at last find a couple in which to invest our concern. But she becomes a standard damsel in distress, and he serves as little more than a listening board for Dr. Browning’s complex but pointless conspiracy. Browning spouts the same goofy-speak of our favorite old crackpot Doctor Vornoff: ( “I will perfect my own race of people! A race of atomic supermen which will conquer the world!”) When Konratz and then Fremont arrive to wrap things up, it’s as if they’ve come from a different movie. The finish is more predictable mad-doctor fighting in the mad lab.
So we’ve got a mediocre police hunt for a mad killer, intercut with a mostly irrelevant spy story. They both dovetail into a cartoonish mad-doctor plot that wandered in from The Frozen Dead, with crazy-quilt Frankenstein monsters. The styles don’t mesh. The parts not only don’t add up to something bigger, they don’t even fit together.
At the finish we still have a million unanswered questions. Are Sorel and Sylvia to be eliminated for knowing too much? Is this medical conspiracy separate from the government or part of it? Is Konratz the ‘foreign’ agent for the conspiracy, or just a renegade composite gone wild in a different way than serial killer Keith? What does the conspiracy want, anyway? A master race? Political control via the substitution of synthetic people for politicians? Did Keith break loose, or did Browning just set him free? Why is Keith a killer? Why is he a vampire? Is Konratz a vampire as well? How can Fremont back Browning into the acid bath just by staring at him? Is Fremont a composite too?
We know less at the finish than when we started. More people turn out to be patchwork composites, yet they don’t seem to recognize each other. There’s no big reveal moment where one of them finally says, “Hey, we’re ALL Bozos on this bus!”
