25 Scream and Scream Again

[swo17]

Scream and Scream Again



A serial killer runs amok over London, draining his victims of their blood. A mad doctor performs experimental surgery on his victims, taking them apart limb by limb. A shady organisation from Eastern Europe is involved in some way while intelligence officer Fremont investigates. Bringing together the biggest horror stars of the era in Vincent Price (Witchfinder General), Christopher Lee (Dracula: Prince of Darkness) and Peter Cushing (Dr. Terror's House of Horrors) Amicus Productions pulled out all the stops to compete with rival studio Hammer. Directed by genre specialist Gordon Hessler (The Oblong Box) Scream and Scream Again is a diabolical sci-fi horror hybrid that counted Fritz Lang as an admirer. Dabbling with conspiracies, mad doctors and killers in the dying days of swinging London, this British horror classic makes its UK Blu-ray debut, and is presented in its British and American versions.

LIMITED EDITION BLU-RAY SPECIAL FEATURES

• High-Definition digital transfer of the British and American cuts of the film
• Uncompressed mono PCM audio
• 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 (2023)
• New interviews with actors Julian Holloway and Christopher Matthews, editor Peter Elliott, and propman Arthur Wicks (2023)
• Ramsey Campbell on Christopher Wicking and ‘Peter Saxon’ (2023)
• Gentleman Gothic: Gordon Hessler at American International Pictures - A documentary on the filmmaker's work for the studio featuring Hessler himself and critics Jeff Burr, David Del Valle, Steve Haberman and C. Courtney Joyner (2015, 23 mins)
• Uta Screams Again - An interview with actress Uta Levka (1999, 9 mins)
• Super 8 Version - a reconstruction of the cut-down version distributed as The Living Corpses of Dr. Mabuse
• Deleted scenes
• Mick Garris trailer commentary - the filmmaker provides a short overview of the film (2013, 2 mins)
• Trailer
• Gallery
• Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• Reversible sleeve featuring designs based on original posters
• Limited edition booklet featuring new writing by critic Anne Billson
• 3 character postcards of classic images from the film
• Limited edition of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings

[What A Disgrace]

I'd been wondering when Indicator would get around to this, a very obvious choice considering their milieu. But a Radiance release is probably even better. I've been wanting to see the movie for a while now.

[Dr Amicus]

Love it, as I’ve said many times before here. I recently bought the original novel - been looking for.a reasonably priced copy for years and finally got one. Although some would think £8 for a tatty old paperback is not reasonable…

[MichaelB]

I'd been wondering when Indicator would get around to this, a very obvious choice considering their milieu. But a Radiance release is probably even better. I've been wanting to see the movie for a while now.

I’m assuming it’s MGM, with whom Radiance has a deal but Indicator doesn’t.

[zedz]

Love it, as I’ve said many times before here. I recently bought the original novel - been looking for a reasonably priced copy for years and finally got one. Although some would think £8 for a tatty old paperback is not reasonable…

I was rushing here to post "Paging Dr. Amicus!"

This was the very first film I saw as a cinephile. When I was seven, for some reason my mother bought me two horror movie books by Alan G. Frank for Christmas.

I don't know what she was thinking (I'd never seen an actual horror movie, just Carry On Screaming on TV), but after getting them out of the bed-end pillowcase in the middle of the night I was freaked out enough by the back cover of one of them to stay awake for hours. I devoured the books and decided that if I had these books, I ought to become a horror movie fan, so I started watching every one that appeared on TV (sometimes deviously staying up late to do so). First up, in the regular 'Sunday Horrors' slot (a regular rotation of Hammer, AIP and Amicus fare, with only occasionally something older), was this film. I couldn't make much sense of the plot, but the two big shocks were enough to spur me on.

[Rayon Vert]

Nice mother. I have to put in a good word for mine, who, probably after a lot of pleading, allowed me to stay up for The Exorcist on network TV in '78 or 79 (censored but still terrifying) at age 10 (and, believe it or not, my 8 year-old brother when he went to sleep in his bed that nigh had his body spasming and "flying" up and down the bed like Regan, so I was told). Knowing her, she probably blocked that out of her mind afterwards.

[colinr0380]

My mother by contrast got really upset when my gandma let me stay up late one night to watch the premiere of the first Child's Play movie when I was about 12. She really had a bee in her bonnet about that one, and thank goodness she did not realise that I had also watched the Moviedrome screening of Alligator when staying overnight with good old granny!

(Plus from about 6-9 or so when both my parents were working nights they left me with a really lovely elderly next door neighbour lady, who proceeded to be absolutely fine with letting me stay up with her to watch things like The World According To Garp, Private Benjamin, She'll Be Wearing Pink Pyjamas, My Beautiful Laundrette, the Burt Reynolds version of The Man Who Loved Women and The Equalizer TV series (plus L.A. Law, but I guess that was not particularly harmful either way), so that probably explains the way I am today and suggests that I was probably already a lost cause before getting to Child's Play!)

[DeprongMori]

FWIW, Kino’s release of Scream and Scream Again (US and UK cuts, and Tim Lucas audio commentary) is now in their While Supplies Last list for $9.99.

[therewillbeblus]

I totally get why this has such low ratings. It's incredibly silly, nearly narratively incoherent, has a slapdash sense of economy that could be interpreted as careless, and hardly follows through on any of its ideas to cathartic ends... But, I kinda loved it for those reasons. This is a film that is entirely aware of how ridiculous it is - professionals like surgeons and cops nonchalantly dispense wildly socially inappropriate verbage next to killers' social skills and natural charm; the narrative hops around to try on clothes from nearly every kind of film the horror/thriller genres have dabbled in (including the portmanteau!) before pulling away and switching gears; running gags of gallows humor are pitched as hysterical by detaching their understood terror from any care for the character experiencing the ailment, because there's no real established 'characters' to care about (even big-name actors are sometimes disposed of within seconds, the limbs bit seems to be the inspiration for the only hilarious scene in Tusk for similar reasons, etc). I dunno, it's hard for me not to respect such an unapologetically imprudent film, because it slyly delivers full measures on its haywire schema of scattered designs, which challenges the false impression that it was not made with such fervent passion. Some bits seem drawn from a planned Hammer exercise, sloppily edited into arrhythmic atonality with uninhibited suspense sequences that try to pass for experimental guerrilla filmmaking, awkwardly in (subversive? Too much credit?) long shots. When one elongated, banal chase scene finally peters out five minutes too late, it does so brazenly with a winking Judex homage, only bent towards an absurd punchline with the acid - that would bar a diagnosis of evasion in any 'normal' fictitious genre entry!

This is not a safe blind-buy, even for those who liberally appreciate B-grade schlock (anybody who follows Glenn Kenny on LB knows he awards five stars to self-conscious trash like they're pre-K soccer participation trophies, and he hated this), but I had a blast swimming in its seesawing, uneven mess of a vision. When one accepts that the foundation isn't just a ruse but totally meaningless, it's easy to surrender to the frenzied ride - a series of trivial reveals posturing at kinds of horror (supernatural, vampire, body snatcher, mad scientist) and finally arrives at a left-field finale that works just as well as any of them, ambiguously committed to with a faint command of sublime farce, and cheekily dissipating the assumed value placed into a climactic twist with its anticlimax (but not before we get some meaty irreverent commentaries on recent atrocities: "A super-race" "Well, yes... but not an evil super-race").

I'd love to watch this with a group (and I recommend turning the subtitles on - once I did, I started catching mind-boggling, outrageous dialogue, so I restarted it and caught more). Low-stakes fun from start to finish