"Scream and Scream Again" is a British movie release in 1970, though the genre for this one is hard. It starts off like some sort of Gothic Horror Crime Drama, but ends up taking another direction, then makes a right turn, then a left, and overall, leaves the viewer confused.
There are 3 main ideas in this movie, and they are barely tied together by the end of the movie. First, is a so called "vampire killer", where a man was targeting women, killing them, and seen sucking their blood (at least with one woman). Second, is a military initiative that very clearly resembles the Nazis. While it doesn't show any swastikas, the outfits and color schemes are the same. Why this was there, and what they were hoping to achieve, is never really explained. Some sort of "master race", but not in the Hitler way. Even still, why the movie was trying to emulate this, was never explained.
The third plot point to the movie was a strange experiment of sorts, where a man who was seen running at the beginning of the movie, would be periodically shown with less and less limbs.
The movie advertised big names such as Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, and Peter Cushing...though the three are never in a scene altogether. Peter Cushing is seen the least, literally only in one scene, where is killed off. Christopher Lee gets a little more screen time, and Price gets the most, but even he isn't seen that much. I don't consider this to be a Vincent Price movie, just one that he happened to be in. Halfway through the movie, I realized they probably couldn't afford to have all three in the movie, which is likely why they were barely in it at all.
The movie runs too long, and should have definitely been cut in multiple areas. One of the biggest scenes is this police car chase, where the vampire murderer dude is wanted by the police. It's so time consuming, and acts like it's building up to his arrest, only to take a turn and have him get away. While it was interesting to see how the chase ended, with the unusual death, it was still very anti-climatic. The movie as a whole acts like it's building up to something, yet there is never really a pay off.
The end of the movie is the most interesting, where of course, Vincent Price is revealed to be a bad guy. There is this Frankenstein element to his character, where he was having people murdered and brought to his lab to be experimented on. He was creating special human creatures that were constructed out of other peoples' elements, like the brain and limbs. Price and Lee's characters are revealed to also be of this created human type, though it's revealed only at the end. Price is killed off by being submerged in the same bath of acid (acid bath?) that the others were put in.
One of the other characters asks Christopher Lee if it was finally over, and he, so cliched, says "No, it's just beginning.". Then the movie ends. It was like as if they might have made a sequel, but thankfully, this never happened.
Overall, the movie was very hard to follow, and rather boring. Lee and Price's acting was great, which is such a shame for how bad the movie is. It's cheesy, hard to follow, and pretty dorky. It's not scary or Gothic at all. The chase scene could have been 5 minutes, tops. The evil regime didn't need to be there at all. There was just too much going on, and by the end of it all, I asked myself, "What just happened?".
The movie could have been good if they focused more on the science fiction element. If they looked more at the human experiments going on, and maybe had more scenes of people being used for them, I would have found the movie more interesting. But it's hard to be taken seriously at all.
Looking at some of the lore online, it appears that even Vincent Price was confused by the script. Very little of the writing makes sense at all. This is one of those movies were bad writing really broke the film.
I'm not sure if I would rewatch this movie. It's not horrible, but boring. It's not creepy, or gothic, or scary...it's just sort of there.
I could not find any reviews for the movie when I looked for it on the newspaper archives.
2/5 slimes
