Scream and Scream Again (1970) The Most Peculiar Portmanteau from Amicus (Review)

This week, the excellent Radiance Films continues its commitment to the classic and the cult by raiding the crypt of Amicus to deliver unto us one of the strangest portmanteau horrors Hammer’s biggest rival ever produced – 1970’s Scream and Scream Again.

The title may sound like the catchphrase of a young Bonnie Langford, but it is in fact a film based on the 1967 pulp novel, The Disorientated Man by Peter Saxon. Who is Peter Saxon, I hear you ask? Well, we’ll be here all day trying to get to the bottom of that particular one. Suffice it to say that Peter Saxon was originally the pen name of Irish comic book writer W Howard Baker, who wrote many of the Sexton Blake stories for Amalgamated Press’ the Sexton Blake Library, using both his real name and the in-house pseudonym of, yup, you’ve guessed it, Peter Saxon. This alias was used by a number of writers on the comic and magazine circuit, including Martin Thomas and Stephen Frances, and it is said that The Disorientated Man was actually a collaborative effort between these three men. If true, this would certainly explain the fragmentary nature of the novel, which pursues three separate plot threads for much of its duration – the mysterious gradual amputation of a stricken athlete’s limbs, a police manhunt for a serial killer of young women in London and the political machinations of life beyond the Iron Curtain – only coming together in the final chapters were it is revealed that the whole plot actually concerns alien colonisation of Earth and its plans for a new super race.

Following the success of 1965’s Dr Terror’s House of Horrors and 1967’s Torture Garden, Amicus producer Milton Subotsky felt assured that success for the studio lay not only in modern-day, contemporary horror but also in the anthology or portmanteau format they became famous for. Both of these styles were unique to Amicus and afforded audiences something distinctive and different from their nearest competitor, Hammer, who were still delivering rehashes of traditional horror featuring characters such as Dracula and Frankenstein.

A story, presented in three separate strands, concerning an alien invasion, was definitely something different from Hammer and Subotsky set about adapting the novel himself, with a script entitled The Screamer. Finance was secured by AIP, but it came with a proviso; they didn’t want Subotsky’s script. Their recent success with The Oblong Box (1969) saw them want to repeat the winning formula, and they instructed Amicus to hire its director, Gordon Hessler, screenwriter, Christopher Wicking, and its stars, Christopher Lee and Vincent Price.

With Subotsky’s nose out of joint, Hessler and Wicking began to thrash out an adaptation. Both hated the novel and Subotsky’s screenplay. They found the alien invasion storyline detracted from the sobering realism of the rapes, murders and political violence that otherwise populated much of the book’s narrative. They decided to excise the aliens and focus instead on the nature of genetic experimentation for political gain and, in doing so, they took their inspiration from Hollywood director Don Siegel; specifically the political allegory and sci-fi horror of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the contemporary police thriller Coogan’s Bluff. There’s a strong sense of the influence of the former, but the latter is a little harder to see, beyond an impressive car chase between Michael Gothard’s serial killer in a red 1955 Austin-Healey 100/4, and the police headed up by Alfred Marks in a 1965 Jaguar S-Types and a 1965 Austin 1800 MkI respectively.

In reality, Scream and Scream Again bears comparison to a number of British horror films that were to follow; Hammer’s eventual foray into Swinging London, Dracula AD 1972 and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (Christopher Neame’s dangerous hipster Johnny Alucard is kin to Gothard’s antagonist here, whilst the political espionage of the sequel is reminiscent of this film’s quasi-Nazi/Communist state and its infiltration of England), and 1972’s Death Line, which sees Donald Pleasance’s cynical Scotland Yarder on the hunt for a serial killer in the London Underground. Scream and Scream Again‘s sardonic Chief Superintendent Bellaver (Alfred Marks) is clearly a forerunner to the Pleasance’s character, whilst both films feature Christopher Lee as a shadowy government official who, sits like a spider, at the centre of the web of intrigue. There’s also the deeply ’60s, counter-cultural and anti-authoritarian influence of Michael Reeves, specifically his 1966 movie The Sorcerers, that can be felt in the DNA of Scream and Scream Again, and indeed those films that followed.

Scream and Scream Again ranks as one of the loosest, strangest portmanteau horrors. This is because, unlike the traditional Amicus portmaneau, there is no introductory framework to hold each strand together. As a result, what you are essentially watching is an initially confusing cinematic experience made up of disparate sequences set in various locations and with a raft of actors that only start to come together in the final reel. Each individual story strand is very watchable; there’s the unnerving, clammy claustrophobic horror of Nigel Lambert’s athlete, awakening from a coma to find the silent ministrations of Uta Levka’s attractive, yet blank-faced nurse are gradually robbing him of his limbs. As a story, it’s the slightest of the movie, and is revisited in short, horrorfic bursts. it requires nothing from Lambert but screams of terror and even less from the mute Levka. It feels like a Tales of the Unexpected, stripped to the bone. The sequence behind the Iron Curtain (specifically East Germany in the novel, but an abstract melding of fascism and communism under Hessler, with three strident pronged arrows linked by a gate made of a kind of horizontal X replacing the authoritarian iconography of the swastika or hammer and sickle) are very effectively done, recalling to mind the ’60s British TV and film industry’s winning formula during the craze for spy mania with productions like the James Bond films on the big screen and The Avengers on the small screen.

The main focus here is Marshall Jones’ political assassin, Konratz, dispatching targets such as Peter Sallis and Peter Cushing with a somewhat risible kind of Vulcan neck pinch. Much is made of Scream and Scream Again‘s ‘avengers assemble’ casting of Christopher Lee, Vincent Price and Peter Cushing and indeed it was the first movie to unite the celebrated titans of horror, but it’s important to note that Cushing’s role is just a cameo restricted to one small scene, and he shares none of it with Price or Lee. The final strand in the film’s plotline is arguably the most represented, most involving and the best. It concerns Michael Gothard as a dangerously handsome, high-cheek-boned psychosexual slasher called Keith (no, seriously), who picks up young women like the quintessential elfin blonde dollybird of the 60s, star of The Touchables and Die Screaming Marianne and the second Mrs Peter Cook, Judy Huxtable, at a club where the movie’s musical guest stars, Welsh rockers Amen Corner play (a better signing than Stoneground, who?, who appeared in Hammer’s Dracula AD 1972 after The Faces pulled out), and takes them for a spin in his red sports car before before killing them and drinking their blood from their wrists. As Chief Superintendent Bellaver’s dragnet tightens around Gothard, we discover he is capable of superhuman strength, ripping off his hand at his handcuffed wrist to continue to evade capture. It’s a compelling breakout performance from Gothard who, until then, had played minor roles in films such as Peter Collinson’s Up the Junction. Indeed, big things were predicted for the striking young actor, with executive producer Louis M. Heyward stating “I felt that Michael Gothard was going to be the biggest thing that ever happened. He had that insane look and that drive, and he was wonderful. Here is a kid who really threw himself into the picture wholeheartedly”.

Whilst Gothard did get some incredible opportunities after this movie, mostly as villains. He played Father Barre for Ken Russell in The Devils, portrayed the assassin John Felton in Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers and its sequel, The Four Musketeers, and played a bespectacled baddie opposite Roger Moore’s Bond in For Your Eyes Only. It is probably fair to say that the doldrums that British film industry found itself in in the 1970s did little to raise Gothard’s career to the heights it perhaps should have been elevated to, and the actor’s own battles with mental health, culminating in his suicide in 1992 at the age of 53, may have also impacted negatively on his potential.

Viewed seperately, each plot thread is reminiscent of a peculiar nightmare. Half-remembered in daylight, you’re left trying to find their meaning. The meaning in the film begins to knit together in the last half hour as Lee’s urbane man from the ministry meets with Konratz and agrees to hand over the details of the police investigation relating to Keith’s killing spree. All roads subsequently lead to Vincent Price’s Dr Browning, a pioneering medic in the field of cancer research. It’s a restrained performance from Price, and he gets some of the movie’s best lines; “Man is God now”, he explains to Christopher Matthews’ Dr Sorel, “As a matter of fact, he always was”.

On its release in 1970, Scream and Scream Again was a success, earning such plaudits as “One of the best science fiction films ever written” from David Pirie and finding a fan in no less a cinematic icon than the great auteur Fritz Lang who, according to Price, personally sought out Christopher Wicking to tell him that his screenplay was “suspensefully developed”. Less of a fan however was Milton Subotsky. It may have been a case of sour grapes given that his own screenplay was snubbed by AIP, but he made it clear that he neither understood nor cared for Scream and Scream Again. It remains a unique hybrid in the canon of Amicus, a portmanteau that probably isn’t really a portmanteau, and certainly the weirdest and goriest the studio had to offer. It probably comes as no surprise that, when they returned to the anthology format with The House that Dripped Blood the subsequent year, it was in a style more in keeping with Subotsky’s own original Dr Terror’s House of Horrors than Wicking’s wilfully strange offering.

In recent years, Scream and Scream Again has become forgotten, its stock reduced, so it’s perfect timing for Radiance to release it and have it find new audience. As per usual with Radiance, they have delivered an attractive package, laden with extras including an audio commentary with Kevin Lyons, author of The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film and Television and Jonathan Rigby, author of English Gothic: Classic Horror Cinema 1897-2015, new interviews with actors Julian Holloway and Christopher Matthews, editor Peter Elliott, and propman Arthur Wicks, a 1999 interview with Uta Levka, Ramsey Campbell on Christopher Wicking, a documentary on Gordon Hessler and his work for AIP, the Super 8 version of the film, trailers and galleries. Unavailable to this reviewer is the usual accompanying illustrated booklet with new writing, in this case from the critic Anne Bilson and character postcards.

Mark’s Archive: Scream and Scream Again