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Originally Posted by RCRochester
It was also posted on Facebook that SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN has been permanently reduced in price to $9.95 for anyone still looking to pick that one up (perfect time of year for it!).
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It's an oddbod for sure, but at that price it's worth a flutter - just don't expect a Price, Lee or Cushing teamup:
“Fastest transition in the world – human being to corpse. It doesn’t do to get the two confused or you’ll never be successful.”
Taking its cue from the title of its source material, The Disoriented Man, a pseudonymously published novel that appears to have been written by a tag team of writers,
Scream and Scream Again certainly goes out of its way to disorient its audience, quickly moving from a jogger collapsing and waking in hospital to find himself minus one leg (and that’s not the worst of it) to an East European dictatorship where Marshall Jones murders his superior Peter Sallis with a Vulcan death grip, to Alfred Marks investigating a brutal rape and murder in England to a grotty basement nightclub where The Amen Corner sing the badly recorded title song (it sounds like a bootleg of a live performance in a room with poor acoustics) as Michael Gothard’s ‘supernormal’ serial killer wows the chicks with his cool moves. Then there’s Christopher Lee’s British intelligence chief, Peter Cushing’s military dictator, medical researcher Vincent Price’s vat of acid in his barn, a downed British pilot who could turn into an international incident, synthetic human tissue (Dr. X would certainly approve) and not one but two severed hands (no Christopher Wicking horror film screenplay should be without one, or in this case two). That’s not forgetting a 15-minute chase scene, the killer nurse or Yutte Stensgaard having her fingers cut off (that Christopher Wicking and his hand fetish…).
Small wonder that Price often lamented that he never understood what was going on in the film and many audiences never knew quite what to make of it, especially since it turns out to be more science fiction than horror despite its blood-drinking superhuman killer. Yet it’s equally small wonder that Fritz Lang loved it, and clearly wasn’t the only one to see similarities with his own early films – in Germany it was sold as a Dr. Mabuse film. It’s a film with a lot of ideas that it doesn’t always find a very fluid way of expressing, with a strong subtext of political disenchantment – both Cushing and Price think of themselves as benign dictators despite pursuing a policy that regards the young and healthy as merely essential spare parts while both democratic and dictatorial governments are more interested in covering up the truth than stopping the carnage.
The film’s reputation has certainly suffered from the fact that the three headliners are barely in the film, Lee getting a couple of inconsequential scenes, Cushing only one and Price barely utilised in the most substantial (the term being strictly relative) role of the three and giving one of his weakest performances as he runs off most of the exposition to Christopher Matthews purely because his character wants someone to talk to about his work with only the odd proclamation like “Man is God now. As a matter of fact, he always was” to really get his teeth into. But while they’re clearly only there because American International wanted to exploit their names on the marquee while employing them for as little time and money as possible, few of the other characters have a great deal of screen time either as the film passes its initially disconnected story from character to character, some of whom we only meet briefly before they’re discarded like Stensgaard’s would-be escapee. (Somewhat bizarrely, David Lodge is listed in the cast list despite not being in the film while several others like Julian Holloway and Stensgaard aren’t despite being listed in the opening credits.) Of the cast, Marks is the standout, whether barking orders or investigating the contents of an indecipherable sandwich, though Jones’ choice of disguise when undercover in Trafalgar Square – a black deerstalker bobble hat – certainly makes an impression.
You certainly can’t make the case for it being a great film or a total success, but it’s certainly a fascinating one in its ambition and its almost determinedly oblique freeform approach to narrative – a genuine cult movie if ever there was one.
MGM/UA have obviously provided Twilight Time with an old master of a film that doesn’t look like it was especially well shot to begin with for their limited edition Region-free Blu-ray release, with some print damage and little detail in the shadows in some scenes, but it’s the uncut version with the original soundtrack rather than the rescored (by Kendall Schmidt) VHS version and unlike the previous DVD issues it’s got a very decent extras package: a chatty but informative audio commentary by David Del Valle and Tim Sullivan that draws on their encounters with Gordon Hessler, a new featurette about Hessler’s frustrating time at American International, archive interview with Uta Levka (loved Price but like so many never took to Lee), isolated original score, radio spot, original trailer – which plays Price’s final shot in reverse and plays Cushing’s credit over a shot of Jones! - and booklet.
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Now everyone prices it as though it's some super sought-after OOP title and I can't justify the expense.
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