[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop

SCREAM FOR HELP – Speaking of unlikely stories… what the f*ck was Michael Winner on when he made this?! I might have to rewatch it sober just to be certain, but from what I recall, ‘Scream For Help’s’ utter bizarreness seems beyond doubt. And it all sounds so basic… a girl in a small town is convinced her step-father is scheming to off her mother, so she goes detective to find out what’s going on. The conventional plot is a Trojan Horse whose strange interior is as hard to define as it is to fathom, but in the end the weirdness is about tone – ‘Scream For Help’ is shrill, disjointed, and has the same cloying unreality as a couch made of marshmallow in a lounge overstuffed with foul trinkets and strange statues… come to think of it, that might even have been a scene in the film. There is a sudden and decisive shift in atmosphere as we head into the film’s latter phase, and the fact that the last half hour is nothing other than a straight, tense and well-oiled home invasion sequence reveals the first hour as a deliberately contrived exercise in bad-taste baroque… but why? A hugely enigmatic movie, please someone else out there watch it and give an opinion to prove I’m not going mad.

Is this out on disc, Frankie? Sounds up my street being a British horror...and Winner makes at a winner.