The Carry On Legacy - Carry On Screaming 1966

The Hammer horror films have much in common with the Carry On comedies. Both were made on small budgets by a regular production team and both employed a repertory of actors, making their films instantly recognisable. Among the most popular series of homegrown films shown in British cinemas throughout the 1950s and 1960s, both series were dismissed by the critical establishment for many years. When the Carry On team decided to parody the horror genre, it was perhaps inevitable that they would do it in the commercially successful mould of the Hammer films.

Carry On Screaming (d. Gerald Thomas, 1966) opens with a catchy, if particularly daft, song (Because when you're screaming / I know that you're dreaming of me / Come closer / For you bring out the monster in me), then immediately sets the mood with a shot of a creature walking through a misty wood at night. The night-time sequences are inevitably filled with fog, a cliché mocked in a scene in which Fenella Fielding is enveloped in a huge cloud after asking if the Sergeant (Harry H. Corbett, in a role clearly planned for Sidney James) minds if she smokes. The film ably captures the lurid Eastmancolor look of the Hammer films, especially with the laboratory set, which is permanently bathed in an unhealthy yellow light, in which Kenneth Williams memorably cries "Frying tonight!" as victims are plunged into a vat of bubbling wax.

The film draws on many classic chillers, including the 1930s Universalhorror films starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, but they are clearly also indebted to their later titles like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man(US, d. Roy William Neil, 1943), which combined a number of Universal's monsters into single films. It also recalls the company's spoofs starringAbbott and Costello, especially an early scene between Corbett,Butterworth and Williams which apes the celebrated "Who's on first?" comedy routine of the American duo.

THE

MONTHLY FILM BULLETIN

Published by

THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE

Volume 33, No.392, September 1966, page 141

CARRY ON SCREAMING! (1966)

When his girl-friend Doris disappears in mysterious circumstances from the forest clearing in which they have been dallying, Albert Potter reports the matter to Detective Sergeant Bung and his assistant, Slobotham. Investigating several similar disappearances, Bung and Slobotham find a house near the clearing, but are unsuspicious of its very suspect owners, Dr. Watt and his vampirish sister, Valeria. Dr. Watt, a corpse who revivifies himself with electrical charges, has a pet monster called Odbodd who goes out collecting girls; Watt and Valeria then vitrify them and sell them profitably as window-dummies. Bung is given a lead by Dan, a lavatory attendant, who is promptly drowned by Odbodd in one of his own toilets; investigating the lead, Bung is sidetracked into a hectic affair with Valeria. Eventually, using Slobotham in female disguise as a decoy, Bung precipitates a showdown; but not before his own shrewish wife, Emily, has been vitrified. Albert, under the accidental influence of a potion, destroys Odbodd and another monster who has been inadvertently created from Odbodd's severed finger; Watt is attacked by a mummy he has revivified, and both of them fall into the vitrifying vat; and Doris, de-vitrified, is reunited with Albert. Bung, preferring to leave his wife in her vitrified state, takes her home along with Valeria, who will minister to his needs.

Apart from an engaging performance by Jim Dale (and some appealing squeaks from monster Odbodd Junior, alias Billy Cornelius), this is glum stuff even by Carry On standards. The regulars, Kenneth Williams in particular, seem too bored to care; Harry H. Corbett overdoes every line; and the horror clichés are rather less amusing than the straight routines in some of Hammer's early epics.

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The Monthly Film Bulletin was published by the British Film Institute between 1934 and 1991. Initially aimed at distributors and exhibitors as well as filmgoers, it carried reviews and details of all UK film releases. In 1991, the Bulletin was absorbed by Sight and Sound magazine.