Horror Movie Review - Scream And Scream Again

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1970 - Spoiler alerts A rather confused Hammer horror movie with great casting, some strong ideas but not just one incoherent plot but three, which hardly link together. A European Fascist state tortures people horribly in one plot. In the second strand, a jogger collapses, and wakes up in a hospital where one by one his arms and legs are amputated in the night by medics who offer no explanation. A vampire-like killer abducts women from night clubs in London and drains their blood. They do not return from the dead. The police hunt for the maniac responsible. There is a long, spectacular car chase through London and into a quarry as Alfred Marks pursues the villain, who seems to be super-human. Cornered, the villain destroys himself with concentrated acid. The investigation leads to a surgeon played by Vincent Price, but the police are told to avoid investigating further by a mysterious government agent, played by Christopher Lee. He goes to Price and orders him to stop creating his supermen from human body parts, and kills him. We learn therefore that Price is creating a whole bunch of sophisticated Frankenstein monsters which Lee has been marketing to the right wing foreign power. The strands link so tenuously that audiences are left wondering what is going on. Also, though Lee, Price and briefly, Peter Cushing, all appear in the film, only two of them even briefly meet. The pop group Amen Corner provide the theme tune which they are briefly seen performing in a club where the vampiric villain stalks his prey. The story is based on a novel in which the conspirators are actually aliens, but this idea was dropped from the movie. Another highlight movie of the 2015 Festival Of Fantastic Films. Arthur Chappell