Sunday, May 13, 2018

275. Scream Bloody Murder

275. Scream Bloody Murder (1973)
Director: Marc B. Ray
Writers: Larry Alexander and Marc B. Ray
From: Chilling
Watch: archive.org

A young man comes home from an asylum to find his mother remarried. He murders the couple and then starts hitchhiking, murdering couples who offend his sexual morality.

We open on young Matthew using a tractor to run over and murder his father. No prelude; this is where the movie begins. Matthew loses control, though, and, after jumping off, has his hand run over by the tractor. Matthew gets a hook as a replacement and is sent to live in an institution. Years later, he leaves (escapes, is released?) and comes home the day his mother has remarried. Matthew objects to the marriage and murders his new step-father. When mom finds out, Matthew tells her the man won’t come between them anymore and she won’t have to let him touch her. She tells him she wanted him to touch her and Matthew throws her to the ground. She hits her head on a rock and dies.

From here, Matthew meets couples, hallucinates the ghosts of his parents, and murders the couple whenever something sexual starts happening. I expected the movie to keep doing this for ninety minutes, but he quickly meets Vera, a sex worker who he becomes infatuated with.

I had little doubt of how things would go from there, only the movie switched it up some.

Matthew tells her he’s rich and picks out a mansion to claim is his. He social engineers his way into the house and murders the maid, the old woman who lives there, and her dog. Then he takes Vera over and holds her captive. The rest of the movie is Vera trying to escape.

Various attempts are made only to be thwarted at the last minute. Vera finally realizes Matthew has some weird sex hangup and uses that to her advantage. She stabs him a few times with a towel hook she’s stolen from the bathroom and runs to the front door only to find Matthew has somehow magicked himself there before her. He kills her, starts seeing the ghosts again, and runs across town into a church. The ghosts of everyone he’s killed surround him, he stabs himself in the stomach with his hook hand, and dies on the altar. THE END.

Bit of an odd duck in that it feels like two partial movies stitched into an incomplete whole. Like I said, I initially thought it was going to be a repetition of Matthew getting picked up by nameless characters only for him to murder them—the violent drifter story but told from the drifter’s point of view. Instead, the movie turns its focus onto Vera and how she’s going to survive. In fact, the movie kind of contorts itself to have her escape attempts be thwarted by Matthew. She’s pretty competent. That she dies the way she does is really unsatisfying.

As for Matthew, he’s a real Nice Guy™/Incel type, very Ross Douthat in his disgust with female sexuality and demands that he be loved on his terms because he’s doing the right things (regardless of what the woman says she wants). On that level, the movie’s kind of interesting. I’m sure it wasn’t thinking in terms of toxic masculinity, but it gives a pretty solid representation of it. Matthew is enraged by women controlling their own sexuality, even within the context of marriage. Once he starts seeing them in a sexual context, he sees them replaced with the mocking ghost of his mother. The visual effects during those scenes are kind of interesting as well. The effects aren’t complicated, but there’s an effort made to make the situation strange and discomfiting.

Which is maybe the key thing to note about this movie—an effort was made. So many of these flicks feel lazy and perfunctory, and, yes, this is another exploitation proto-slasher, but the people involved are putting that little extra in to make it more particular. It’s not great, but it’s alright, and I’d recommend it on that level. It drags a little, but if you have friend with you, there’s a lot of riffing fun to be had. Plus, it’s in the public domain. There’s a copy on archive.org here.

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