Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.
I’d love to tell you that Scream and Scream Again was a ton of fun for me to watch, but that would be a lie. It’s not, despite featuring a cast that includes Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, and Peter Cushing. In fact, it’s an incomprehensible mess. While this was based on a novel and apparently sticks pretty close to the source material, it also seems like virtually every horror and science fiction trope from vampirism and golem creation to random vats of acid lying around have been cobbled together with something akin to a narrative to hang all the scenes together. It feels like a film that wants to hit every touchstone of the genre in the hopes that there will be something there to please any fan. And, as normally happens when someone tries to tick off all the boxes, it ends up a poorly-conceived mess.
And that’s kind of the problem for me. This is a film that is almost impossible to summarize in any way that is remotely coherent. There are murders that involve people being drained of their blood and people having limbs amputated, and there’s a whole weird subplot that happens in something like a communist country with a strange symbol. There’s also Vincent Price as an eccentric doctor who literally has a vat of acid on his property. Our evil killer jumps into it at one point, after escaping from the police by more or less snapping his hand off to escape his handcuffs.
