SCHLOCK CORRIDOR: Screamtime
What exactly is Screamtime? It claims to be an anthology film released in the early 1980's directed by somebody named Al Beresford, but something about the way it was presented just kept bugging me throughout. The actual stories in the film take place in England, with English actors in English locations, and while clearly a series of low-budget productions, they all manage to tell their stories with a dash of style, which is successful to varying degrees. But the wrap-around story is a completely different animal, amateurishly shot in the U.S.A., on the mean streets of New York City, featuring an obscenely schlubby duo that mumbles through all of their sparse-yet-horrid dialogue and a token female that exists only to expose her breasts to the camera.
The conceit: these two mouth-breathers steal a trio of movies from a local video store and visit their lady friend, who isn't bathing so much as just hanging out naked in the shower when the two stooges come a-knocking. She lets them in and they eat all her chicken and drink all her beer while they watch their purloined pictures on her bulky wood-paneled television. The first of three macabre tales follows the middle-aged proprietor of a Punch & Judy show at some dreary seaside park. If you don't know what a Punch & Judy show is, I don't have time to get into it, so just read up on it here, and add a little more useless information to your repertoire. His wife is a harpy who doesn't believe in his work, and his step-son Damien (really?) is a wannabe droog who just wants to burn the old man's puppets and punch him in the face a lot for no good reason.
But he soldiers on as the sole breadwinner in the family, keeping them in a reasonably-sized house with electricity and running water and a kitchen full of food, despite his wife's insistence that he makes no money and they need to move to Canada because her friend or her sister or something owns a hardware store and needs somebody to sharpen the handsaws and make keys for customers while they wait. This poor guy's family just wants him to throw his life's work in the garbage and move to fucking Canada like it's not a big deal at all, because they have no perspective and seem to take pleasure in trampling on his fragile dreams.
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One day, the old man's worthless step-son shows up at the park and sets fire to his equipment with what appears to be an electric lamp, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense, then he hangs out near the beach, throwing rocks at a stray dog for shits and giggles, because the audience needed another reason to hate this little shit stain. Suddenly, an unseen assailant creeps up from behind and beats Damien to death with a plank of wood, and I guess nobody ever discovers the body because his shrew of a mother never learns of his untimely death, believing him to be out on the town, drinking suspicious milk and committing various atrocities while listening to the works of Ludwig van Beethoven.
Speaking of the shrew, when the old man gets home from a long day of watching his entire life turn to ash before his eyes, she actually blames him for the incident, because as far as she's concerned the very fact that he continued to earn money to take care of his family by entertaining children every day was a despicable act that drove her cherubic son to arson as a last resort. Then an unseen assailant beats her to death in bed with a plank of wood, the old man finds her body and calls a man I must assume is a doctor, who gives him a sedative and attempts to phone the police. Before he can dial the last 9 in 999, the old man's Punch puppet pops up, spends five minutes leaping around the foyer like Yoda in Star Wars, Episode II: Attack Of The Clones, beating him to death with a plank of wood, while wheezing the phrase "that's the way to do it" with a voice that sounds like a man swallowed a kazoo.
The next day, one of Damien's pals shows up at the house and is attacked by the puppet, who disappointingly isn't actually a sentient inanimate object bent on revenge against the people that wronged his master, but rather the old man himself, now quite insane, who has been beating people to death with a wood plank-wielding puppet on his hand. He chases her for a while, then confusingly falls off the roof of a building, into a garbage truck, going out like Master Shredder in the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.
Our second tale of terror details the disturbing visions that plague a recently married young woman after she moves into a mysterious new house. Day after day, night after night, she is assaulted with images of violence and death that linger in almost every room of the house, and her husband notes the deterioration of her mental state with frustration, unable to do anything to help the woman he loves. He's already had the police come by and search the house from top to bottom, installed new and sturdier locks on every door, and even invited a spiritual medium out to the house to reassure his frazzled spouse that it isn't really haunted.
One fateful night, the visions of brutality and murder become inescapable, seemingly following her throughout the entire house and growing in their intensity as she tries to run away from the horrors unfolding before her eyes. Her mind finally snaps, and she is admitted to a mental hospital in a catatonic state, her senses now closed off to the outside world. The final moments of the story follow the husband as he welcomes the new owners of the house he once shared with his wife. And with one final shocking moment of violence, the audience realizes that our protagonist wasn't crazy, and she wasn't seeing ghosts; she was seeing the future.
Our final story is all about a dead-eyed blonde asshole who races his piece of shit dirt bike on the weekends and likes to take advantage of nice old women when he needs quick cash. His brother turns him on to an employment opportunity at an old house inhabited by two old ladies who really like garden gnomes and believe their house is infested with vengeful fairies. They offer him a fair wage to rake the leaves and mow the grass and he accepts, but as soon as he sees a chance to rob the two biddies blind, he jumps at it, recruiting his dimbulb brother and some random fat guy with a moustache to assist him in his nefarious scheme.
After they break in, the dickhead's brother is almost immediately murdered by a
Some time later, the two old broads are speaking with a new young man interested in cutting their grass, and they tell him about how his predecessor disappeared under mysterious circumstances, which shouldn't worry the unsuspecting dude at all. Then one of them turns to the camera and asks the viewer if they believe in fairies, and the fat asshole watching this madness unfold at his not-girlfriend's house, now sitting with his nose pressed against the television set and shoving an entire Cornish game hen into his gaping mouth like a python, claims that he does not and is immediately strangled by an albino's beefy hand as it crashes through the TV. His pal, who previously excused himself to have dirty 1980's sex with the woman of the house, is basking in the afterglow in her soiled bed when a Punch puppet appears out of thin air to beat him to death with a plank of wood while his bathrobe-clad sexual partner screams in very confused terror.
That's Screamtime, and it's a strange beast. The short films that make up the bulk of the film seem like they were made by a completely different crew from the wrap-around segments that pathetically attempt to link them together. And as it turns out, I believe that to be the case. After a little research, I discovered that the so-called director "Al Beresford" doesn't exist, and is in fact a pseudonym for two people: Michael Armstrong & Stanley A. Long. These guys seemed to have collaborated on a series of British nudie cuties in the 1970's, including 1974's The Sex Thief, a stilted and boring softcore "romp" which served as the directorial debut of Martin Campbell, who you may know as the guy who directed such films as The Mask Of Zorro, Casino Royale & Green Lantern.
Now, I can't find any evidence to specifically back up my claim, but I don't believe these two gentlemen are completely responsible for the movie known as Screamtime. I don't dispute that they created the three short films that make up the majority of the final product, but I'm not convinced they had anything to do with the flimsy U.S.-based framing device. It feels like it was made by completely different people, and doesn't even bother to connect itself to the goings-on in the short films until literally the final minute of the narrative.
You've seen a few anthologies in your time, I'm sure. And what do they all have in common? The short stories tend to relate to the meta-plot in some way. The Tales From The Crypt movie, the Tales From The Crypt HBO series, Creepshow, Creepshow 2, Tales From The Darkside: The Movie, Trick R' Treat, The Theatre Bizarre, VHS, VHS 2... I could go on, but I don't need to. Each one of these films offers something interesting and entertaining in the segments that occur in between the short stories. They're never literally just scenes of a pair of slightly overweight dudes sitting on a sofa watching the stories on video tapes, eating chicken wings and drinking beer while a woman dries her hair off screen.
Then the TV strangles one guy while a puppet bludgeons his friend to death, because whoever directed this shit apparently realized that he needed to find some clever way to link his filmed shenanigans to the bizarre goings-on in the short films he acquired the rights to in a back-alley poker game the night before, so that he can package it all together as a "professional movie" called Screamtime and sell it to people who don't know any better. Like I said, I have no evidence to prove any of this, but there's just no way this rubbish wrap-around story was made by the same people.
Not to say the three short films are high art, by the way. The first short, about the "killer puppet", and the third short, about the killer garden gnomes, aren't terribly good. The first one works a little better than the first, mostly due to the lead actor's portrayal of a broken-down old man whose dreams have been systematically crushed by his ungrateful family over the years. As a viewer, I genuinely felt bad for this man and wanted him to break away from the people who treated him like dirt. Then he fell into a garbage truck and got crushed, just like his dreams! That's poetry, man. None of the other actors in this segment are terribly exciting, but the guy who plays the not-antichrist Damien really knows how to play a douchebag, I'll give him that much. It's also goofy and more than a little cruel, which I enjoyed.
The young actors we spend most of our time with in the third segment can't seem to really emote, just kind of staring at each other with blank, placid expressions whenever they're onscreen. Even when the lead is being magic-murdered by the crazy-eyed fairy queen, he can't seem to muster an expression of surprise, pain, or fear. He just looks constipated, but maybe that's his idea of terrifying. I don't know and I don't care. Overall, it's not the worst thing I've ever seen, but the moment I saw a
The middle chapter, however, is something else. Something, dare I say... special? The story of a woman being driven insane by the grisly visions that permeate her new home, only for the visions to be revealed as echoes of horrific future events was well written, directed, and acted, and I have no real complaints to raise. It's stylish, unsettling, and effective, and I was very surprised and impressed. And at around 25 minutes in length, it was short enough to not overstay its welcome. The female lead does occasionally don a pair of truly horrifying massive 1980's-era prescription glasses, but I didn't let it bother me.
But while watching this short film unfold, I couldn't help but feel like I was being haunted myself, as a serious sense of déjà vu crept into my awareness. After the movie ended, I sat in in front of the computer, trying to figure out exactly what about this story was bothering me so much. Then I suddenly remembered a movie I saw a few years ago on cable and looked it up on IMDB. The film was called Psychosis, and it starred Charisma Carpenter as a married woman living in a newly-bought house, being plagued by visions of murder and brutality who slowly loses her mind, and these visions are eventually revealed to be echoes of horrific future events.
This film is identified as a remake of the "Dream House" sequence of Screamtime, and Michael Armstrong is listed in the cast & crew with a "story by" credit, which just means that Reg Traviss, the writer/director of Psychosis, took Armstrong's existing screenplay and added a whole bunch of garbage to craft a feature-length screenplay. Seriously, this movie is terrible, and even though I remembered thinking the twist ending was a little clever, the rest of the film left almost no impression on me. It wasn't terribly well made, feeling more like a product than a labor of love. It fails in almost every way the short film upon which it is based succeeds. More than anything, Psychosis stands as proof that some stories are better suited for the short subject format, because as a feature-length narrative, the plot simply can't sustain itself.
So that's the story of Screamtime, at least as much as I could learn. It's a strange patchwork anthology film that works more than it doesn't, with one segment that stands head and shoulders above the others in terms of quality. But I find the story behind the film, both what I've learned and what I can only speculate about, to be perhaps more interesting that anything that was actually in the film itself. Go figure.
TOMORROW: The Frankenstein Theory
I saw this movie when I was a teenager and I just thought it was boring. I fell asleep a few times and still felt like I didn't miss anything.
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