NEWS:
TWILIGHT TIME RELEASES SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN ON BLU RAY IN U.S :
Amicus' only film to feature Peter Cushing, Vincent Price and
Christopher Lee gets a Pre-order date of Wednesday, September 30th at 4
pm EST. Release Date: October 13th, 2015. REGION FREE.
Some
very nice Special Features include: Isolated Score Track / Audio
Commentary with Film Historians David Del Valle and Tim Sullivan /
Gentleman Gothic: Gordon Hessler at AIP / An Interview with Uta Levka /
Still Gallery / Radio Spot / Original Theatrical Trailer.
SYNOPSIS
AND QUICK CRITIQUE: A killer is stalking women in London nightclubs and
drinking their blood; a jogger wakes up in a hospital bed to find his
limbs amputated one by one; and a ruthless psychopath seizes power in a
totalitarian Eastern European state. Bewildering and exhilarating by
turns, Hessler's adaptation of Peter Saxon's novel The Disorientated Man
is an ambitious attempt to drag classic
horror stars (Price, Lee, Cushing) and themes (Frankenstein, vampires)
into a modern Swinging London of grooving dolly-birds, mauve silk shirts
and political paranoia.
It's
not entirely successful: the film's obsession with human partition,
seen in the limb-lopped jogger, the vampiric Keith's torn-off hand and a
freezer full of body parts, has its parallels in a narrative that is so
fragmented as to be a near-incoherent patchwork of scenes that fail to
make the most of their horror stars (Cushing's role is a cameo, and Lee
and Price only meet for a brief confrontation at the climax) or the
collision of styles ranging from generation-gap movie through mad
science to '60s super-sleuth - as though John le Carré, his mind buzzing
with topical events (Gary Powers's spy plane) and ambient fears (organ
transplants, cyborg technology), had rewritten Frankenstein as a tribute
to Bava's Diabolik (1968).
Our Full review and Full COLOUR STILLS Gallery : HERE
But,
as Hessler avoids static camera set-ups in favour of hand-held cameras
and rapid edits, even if the film is finally little more than a
collection of dissociated set pieces, they're so bizarre and
Adrenalin-charged that Scream remains enormously entertaining, trading
on such extraordinary sequences as cyborg vampire Keith (Michael Gothard
in a wonderful Austin Powers turn - "lovely mover", one of the habitués
of the Busted Pot observes as Gothard shimmies to the sound of the Amen
Corner) being chased around south London by police and tearing off his
hand to escape, all fueled by a jazz score that kicks into high gear at
the slightest provocation.
Part Two of our The Amicus Films Of Peter Cushing
features an in depth look at SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN
