Video Oddities #12: Scream for Help, page 2

VIDEO ODDITIES

page 2

Not only is he an incompetent murderer, he's a complete asshole!

At this point in the film I was kind of hoping it would turn out Christie's Deneuve-like fascination/repulsion really had driven her nuts and that Paul Fox was totally innocent, but a deliciously elaborate conspiracy is soon unveiled. Not only is Paul Fox liberating Brenda Bohle from her leather pants at regular intervals (three times Christie catches them at it - three times! These two are like bloodthirsty bunny rabbits with no sense of discretion), he's recruited Brenda and her scuzzy "brother" Lacey to help engineer the unfortunate accidents that will take his current wife and stepdaughter out of the picture. In exchange, Brenda will presumedly become the new Mrs. Paul Fox and share in his lucrative inheritance. But hold the phone - turns out Lacey is in fact Brenda's bitter, abusive husband whom she's persuaded to reluctantly go along with this brother-sister show until after they get the money, at which point Paul Fox will almost certainly become the victim of his own little misfortune, a scheme-within-a-scheme! I love a good needlessly complicated subplot involving deception and murder over an inheritance, and this one is just another example of the movie running off and doing its own thing. A lot of that has to do with loose cannon Lacey Bohle, shown seething with jealousy as Paul Fox bones his wife in the next room. Finding Christie's polaroid which documents this backdoor rendezvous, he blows up and nearly beats Brenda to death as Paul Fox scrambles around trying to locate a hiding Christie. Then, when this obvious psycho manages to grab Christie himself, instead of horribly murdering her on the spot Lacey hands her the incriminating polaroid! There's just no predicting this movie!

So the polaroid is presented to mom, Paul Fox is duly cast out of the house and we're brought back to the beginning of the film as a relieved Christie concludes her narration via diary entry. Everything appears to have been resolved...until three dark figures make their way towards the house! (To show Christie is still attuned to Paul Fox's frequency, she looks up from her journal almost instinctively and walks over to the window where she sees the determined trio approaching.) Most of the remainder of the film is dedicated to a home invasion scenario reminiscent of James Foley's Fear (or Straw Dogs, a 70's knock-off of James Foley's Fear) in which Paul Fox, Brenda and Lacey let themselves inside and capture Christie and her mother. "So what's the plan here, jackasses?" flashed through my mind until I realized: this is actually how real crimes play out. The perpetrators get impatient and make rash decisions, any kind of plan that was even slightly premeditated gets thrown out the window and they figure it's okay to improvise, truly believing they can predict and avoid leaving any possible evidence based on the complicated criminal tricks they've picked up watching television. A fake burglarly and double murder, Paul Fox is the only survivor and sole benefactor of his wife's estate - flawless! The culprits play their parts perfectly - Paul Fox is nervous; Brenda Bohle seems bored and doesn't really care how things turn out; Lacey is irrational and overeager to commit violence. And the victims are just as dumb: the police weren't immediately called after Paul Fox was kicked out, his various attempts at murder and clear involvement in the death of Janey seemingly ignored so mom can climb into a glass of brandy. Christie, so desperate for vindication, holds off notifying Josh Dealey or the cops until after she's done transcribing the transformative entire incident down in her diary. Is it important that she vindicate herself first? Is it enough to have convinced her mom and gotten Paul Fox tossed out of the house, the same way he manipulated mom to kick Christie's dad to the curb?

Whatever her reasoning, the narrative obviously demands a drawn-out climax during which Christie finally takes control and exerts her newfound power over the increasingly waning dominance of Paul Fox. Up to now, there's been a heavy emphasis on action/reaction in Scream for Help: Christie sees Paul Fox messing around by the basement door, in the next scene we learn the gas man's been electrocuted. We see Janey and Josh Dealey fucking, later it's revealed Janey is pregnant (possibly the sudden entrance of Christie is what prevented him from a timely pull-out a'la Oskar Matzerath jumping on his dad's back mid-coitus in The Tin Drum). But none of the female characters instigate any of the action - Christine's multiple attempts to warn her mother and enlist the help of the cops all hit the wall, and it's only after Lacey offers her the dropped polaroid in what should have been a "game over" outcome that she's able to prove Paul Fox is a dastardly cad. Even Brenda Bohle isn't the mastermind of her own scheme, it's been devised by Lacey who not only has to threaten her to get her to act, but puts the final assault in motion by placing the evidence of Paul Fox's infidelity into Christie's hands (Brenda continues her minimal involvement after they take over the house, slumped on the couch laughing at some late night rerun while Lacey is trying to get this whole fake burglary-double murder going). The one event Christie initiated - her interrupted tryst with Josh Dealey - is mocked by Paul Fox as he shuts Christie and her mom in the basement, and it's her defense of said act ("Josh loves me! It's not like you and Brenda... What we did wasn't wrong, we care about each other!") that finally awakens Christie's own confidence and aggression, inspiring her to "snap to!" as her mother commanded earlier in the movie.

The machinations of these men have left Christie helpless, locked in her own basement with her wheelchair-bound mom, who's already been given the Mildred Dunnock treatment twice. So she figures if she's not going to be allowed to change anything through her own actions, she'll borrow the ones unsuccessfully utilized by Paul Fox, rigging the power box in the basement to blow the lights so that she can stealthily booby trap other parts of the house. Taking control of the situation, she ironically she tells her mother NOT to scream for help and feigns having to use the bathroom. Smartly claiming she can't "go in the corner" because the cops will find traces of urine in the basement and call foul play, she convinces Brenda to lead her upstairs, an unintentional act of female support on Brenda's part, where she sets her plan in motion the second the lights go out. In a series of stops and starts, she manages to wound her captors several times (including the ol' reliable "impaling bad guy's hand to staircase banner with knife" gag), throw them off by divulging Lacey and Brenda's true relationship to Paul Fox* and secretly warn Josh Dealey when he unsuspectingly drops by to check on her by claiming she merely used him for sex, that she was so desperate she would have "lost my cherry to anyone, even the garbageman!" Harsh words, but it clues Josh Dealey to what's going on and he's able to convince his dad that murder is afoot (of course, this is yet another instance of a male character almost effortlessly putting things in motion, but at least Christie planted the seed).

Before the police can intervene, Christie has already dispatched two of the intruders - Brenda steps in a strategically-situated puddle of water and gets fried by the basement power box while Paul Fox blows up in the bathroom. A cut and bruised Lacey beats a hasty retreat, only to turn up again as Christie is convalescing in Josh Dealey's bed the next day. In a beautiful parallel to their first romp, Josh Dealey has just mounted Christie when trickles of blood stain the wholesome white sheets. But Christie's no longer a virgin, and doesn't let herself get intimidated by this reminder of her first off-putting sexual experience or its sanguinary source - a wounded and vengeful Lacey Bohle! Having only indirectly killed Brenda and Paul Fox using his own traps, Christie doesn't miss the opportunity to demonstrate the physical dominion she's wrested from her male oppressors and, in the movie's sexiest moment, punctuates the point by seizing Lacey's knife and giving it back to him, deep inside his gut. Emboldened by the conquest of her would-be butcher, she calmly picks up the phone and asks Josh Dealey's patronizing dad, "Do you believe me NOW?" Total dominance has been achieved. My only complaint about this cathartic climax is that for some reason Lacey becomes the final threat rather than Paul Fox, the film's most crucial antagonist and motivation for all of Christie's actions from the first line of dialogue. Christie taking power away from Paul Fox has been the entire focus of the movie, and while an epic explosion is hardly an unceremonious send-off, he really should have been the one Christie gutted just before the credits roll on, not exactly an eponymous theme song, but a soft rock ode to "Christie":

Magic, just the way you look at me/But you don't see/Shadows, closing in/On love's memory/Sunset, just as the Sun goes down/The moon has met/You only have to turn your head/Talking to my Christie

But again, this movie doesn't recognize "rules." For one thing, it picks up these little pieces of minutae that seem important but never pay off. When a bicycled Christie comes to a stop at one of the various corners from which she picks up her pursuit of Paul Fox, there's a poster for some politican's mayor campaign placed prominently in the foreground in no less than three shots. Is he some bigwig Paul Fox is somehow involved with? Will he later be introduced as an unlikely ally in the war against the three scheming crooks? Or at least some inconsequential cipher of a powerful male to further contrast Christie's helplessness? No, he never turns up. Later on, when the mother asks a housemaid to close the curtains in the scene right before the nocturnal assault, the camera lingers on the curtains as they close and holds on them a moment, Ooh, will the villains be somehow thwarted by either the drapes being closed when they should be open, or will Christie somehow rig up some kind of drape-based trap to ensnare Paul Fox? Absolutely not - never see 'em again.

Besides thematic nudity (something that film writers really don't bring up enough, in my opinion), the use of names also says a lot about our favorite Scream for Help characters. The two with the most sexual confidence, Paul Fox** and Josh Dealey, are almost always referred to by their full names: "Fuck you, Josh Dealey." "I'm tell the truth, Josh Dealey!" "What's that got to do with Paul Fox?" Christie is always referred to by her first name, or "Cromwell" as Janey calls her, and the film's opening line of narration in which she introduces herself using her own full name turns out to be a flash-forward to after she's finally convinced her mother that Paul Fox is a scheming scumbag and had him kicked out of the house. Lacey is the most sexually frustrated - we know his last name is the same as his "sister," but nobody ever says "Lacey Bohle." Not only that, he's got a girl's name: no wonder he over-compensates during the climatic attack. Janey is the only major character whose last name (Ralston) is never mentioned on screen; if she'd lived and ended up marrying Josh, it would have been Janey Dealey.

Sadly old Janey doesn't make it that to the altar or even the social service office: Her revelation of her pregnancy and optimism about her future plans with Josh Dealey turn out to be her "two days til retirement" statement, as she's then instantly killed by a hit and run in what must have been the most brutal sideswipe of a female character until the remake of Edge of Darkness. Her sticky demise seems to suggest that domestication in this film brings about an instant or imminent death. Of course Christie's mom, happily remarried and living in a big house within which she's been enshrined via a portrait over the mantle, is under threat throughout the movie. Lacey and Brenda, living in a squalid home under a fictional family framework, look forward to backstabbing Paul Fox and living the rest of their days as a comfortably wealthy married couple, but their dream turns into a backfiring nightmare. Maybe realizing that there's lots of middleground between "chaste" and "debauched" will stop Christie from falling into the material trap that fatally entices those around her: long as she's got enough for muff-themed apparel I'm sure she'll be happy.

A spiritual sister film to Scream for Help is Gary Sherman's Lisa from 1990, in which the titular 14-year-old rebels against her single mother's insistence that she hold off on dating until she turns 16 by keeping a fantasy journal filled with photos of dreamy hunks she's followed around on the streets like a sex-starved puppy. She becomes obsessed with a dapper stud who just happens to be the Candlelight Killer, a serial murderer fond of stalking young women prior to raping and murdering them. Once again we've got a modelesque murderer whose effect on a fatherless, adolescent girl (who also utilizes a polaroid camera in her covert activities) warps her already repressed view of sexuality. However Sherman's movie, while enjoyable, couldn't be more straightforward - it doesn't quite tap into the craziness of Winner's. The only one that comes close that immediately pops to mind is Geoffrey Wright's Cherry Falls, although focus is ultimately misdirected from that movie and it putters out in a fairly standard and responsible climax (I'm not speaking for the director's cut, which according to no less an authority than Lloud Kaufman is a "masterpiece").

appendix, or what i learned later

The crazy score is courtesy of none other than John Paul Jones; the Atlantic Records release (including tracks with titles like "Spaghetti Junction" and "Chilli Sauce") was his first in the wake of Led Zeppelin's post-Bonham break-up. Winner had previously enlisted the pick of Jimmy Page to score Death Wish II and Death Wish 3 - had asked Page to score Scream but his Berkshire neighbor was busy and suggested Jones. I guess Winner never convinced Robert Plant to do music for him, but Scream and the two Death Wish sequels make up 3 out of only 4 film composer credits for Page and J.P.J. so I guess he had some pull with the 'zeps (or just with huge British bands in general, since he had Genesis keyboardist Tony Banks score The Wicked Lady). Jon Anderson, lead singer for Yes, is the one "talking to my Christie" in the Jones-composed end credits song.

The screenplay was written by Todd Holland, who would return to the "nobody believes threatened puberty-plagued everyteen" theme with his next script and directorial debut Fright Night. He had previously written two films for Richard Franklin: Psycho II, in which nobody believes Norman Bates when he claims his dead mother is calling him on the phone, and Cloak & Dagger, in which nobody believes Henry Thomas when he says evil spies want to kill him. Following Scream, Holland would co-write and direct Child's Play, which is about a kid who nobody believes when he says his doll is alive and wants to kill him. Holland must have been working out some issues in the 80's.

I've found conflicting information on where the film was actually shot: some sources claim it was shot in England, standing in for New Rochelle, while others claim it was filmed on location. I didn't notice a statue of Jacob Leisler, so it's hard to say - the wheels are on the correct side of cars and there's nary a hovercraft sporting a giant Union Jack in sight so it's not obviously England like in Someone Behind the Door. The neighborhoods and stores look American enough, so if Scream was shot overseas Winner was at least more competent than Kubrick in passing it off as New York. (That's right everybody, Michael Winner did a better job than Stanley Kubrick.)

Years after Scream's dismal performance at the box office, Winner told Fangoria:

"I actually think it was a very well-made, out-and-out horror film. Now, I had always worked with big stars, always. The producers wanted cheap, cheap cheap - although the film was not that cheap, really. I like the film very much, but I was annoyed that too much control had gone to other people, and that wasn't how I worked...But I do like the movie. It wasn't a big success at the box office, which annoyed me. Horror films are famous for hiring well-known actors who are on the skids a bit but are still big names, and if we had brought in someone like, I don't know, Jack Palance..."

I could see Jack Palance in this movie! That menacing sexuality on display in Shane - even at 65, I'll bet it was still in evidence. He was a servicable villain to Bronson in Winner's Chato's Land. He had been killing off members of his own family as recently as 1980's Hawk the Slayer...no seriously Michael Winner, Jack Palance?? According to Michael Winner expert Edgar Wright, one of Winner's quirks was his excessive name-dropping, so maybe Scream for Help would have been one of his proudest achievements if he'd gotten Palance as Paul Fox, Trini Alvarado as Christie, Marina Sirtis as Brenda and Dean Stockwell as Lacey.

Of the actual cast, Scream for Help is the only theatrically-released movie listed on the imdb page of Rachael Kelly (Christie Cromwell), Sandra Clark (Janey Ralston) and the enticingly-shaped and excellently-named Lolita Lorre (Brenda Bohle). Lorre's onscreen "brother" Rocco Sisto has fared better, popping up in bit parts in movies like After Hours and Carlito's Way, in a supporting role in Donnie Brasco and as a recurring character on The Sopranos (most recently he was in Todd Haynes' mini-series Mildred Pierce). David Allen Brooks, the incorrigible Paul Fox, played the father of the murdered family in Manhunter, the lead in The Kindred, and continued to appear in feature films up to 2000 when he appeared in both Robert Zemeckis' Cast Away and Michael Cooney's Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman, both of which take place on an island. Marie Masters, who plays the condemned Karen Cromwell Fox, turned up in the atrocious Parker book adaptation Slayground. Tony Sibbald (Josh Delaney's creepy dad) was in the classic Doctor Who serial Terror of the Zygons and played the guy who pretends to be the president but kneels too quickly after Terrence Stamp's General Zod takes over the White House in Superman II. He also played a red in Reds.

Corey Parker, who could not have a more 80's name even if it were "Rob Nintendo," followed up his role as Josh Delaney with turns as the beleaguered Epstein in Biloxi Blues and Marlon Browne in Pinnland Empire favorite How I Got Into College.

A perfect second bill in a Scream for Help double feature would be the Gordon Hessler-Shô Kosugi actioneer Pray for Death, released the year after Winner's film. I'd definitely slam on the brakes and pull into a drive-in with a marquee advertising Scream for Help...Pray for Death!

COMING SOON...

THE SEDUCERS, aka DEATH GAME!

* A small missed opportunity here: if the Bohles' brother-sister plot had been made up by Christie to fool Paul Fox it would have been a nice parallel to earlier when she told the truth and no one believed her; he believes her when she's lying. Oh well. Amusingly, once Lacey has turned on Paul Fox, it's Paul Fox who seeks to regain his co-conspirator's approval, even though the Bohles need him a hell of a lot more than he needs them if they want to get their mitts on mama's money.

** "Paul" is an interesting choice for the villain's name considering it's also the name of Michael Winner's most famous "hero" (although Death Wish changed the protagonist's last name from Benjamin to Kersey, he was still "Paul").

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