Screamer (1974) (TV)

... aka: Thriller: Screamer

Directed by:

Shaun O'Riordan

Most horror fans are probably pretty well-acquainted with British actress Pamela Franklin. After all, with a dozen genre films / TV appearances on her resume over a fifteen year period, she was certainly one of the more ubiquitous females in 60s and 70s horror. For awhile, she even managed to avoid the same fate as fellow child actress Linda Blair, whose attempt at a mainstream career pretty much went straight in the toilet soon after The Exorcist had made her famous. Franklin was able to follow her initial success - the superb Henry James adaptation The Innocents (1961) - with a number of other quality projects like Hammer's The Nanny (1965) with Bette Davis, the TV movie Eagle in a Cage (1965), which netted the young star an Emmy nomination, the very interesting (and unfortunately overlooked) Our Mother's House (1967) and the crime-thriller The Night of the Following Day (1969) alongside Marlon Brandon. All that before even turning 20.

The young actresses career then hit a high mark at the end of the decade when she gave an acclaimed turn as Maggie Smith's precocious student in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969). However, while Smith dominated the awards circuit that year, Franklin's equally-deserving contributions were given a cold shoulder from the Golden Globes and Oscars. While I personally don't put much stock in those awards as their histories are riddled with unjust snubs and ridiculous nominations, there's no denying what they can do for a career. Seeing how Goldie Hawn won the Supporting Actress award that year for the long-forgotten comedy Cactus Flower and they had room to nominate Sylvia Miles for a glorified cameo in Midnight Cowboy, the oversight of Franklin certainly qualifies as a huge injustice. Even Blair, a fun though far less talented actress than Franklin, was able to sustain a long B-movie career from her initial Oscar notoriety. All that makes me wonder what kind of boost Franklin's career would have seen had she been nominated herself.

Alas, Franklin's big screen career started to fizzle out just a few years after Brodie. While she was in a few decent theatrical releases early on in the decade, like AND SOON THE DARKNESS (1970) and The Legend of Hell House (1973), by the end of the 70s she was doing nothing but guest spots on TV fluff like Fantasy Island, Love Boat and Vega$. Even worse, the final nail in her big screen coffin ended up being Bert I. Gordon's giant animal schlock-fest THE FOOD OF THE GODS (1976). Not that her previous Gordon starring vehicle - NECROMANCY (1972) - had been much better, but it was still a depressing way for the promising actress to go out. In between, she did land some genre TV work that many remember, like appearances on Circle of Fear and Night Gallery, plus two feature-length entries in the Thriller series: Won't Write Home Mom - I'm Dead (aka Terror from Within), and this one...

Pamela portrays Nicola Stevens, an American living in England working as a stenographer at the U. S. Embassy. She decides to take a late night British Railways train to visit a couple of friends - Jeff (Donal McCann) and Virna (Frances White) - out in the country. A rather sinister old woman (Ambrosine Phillpotts) sharing a cabin with her warns that three young women have all been sexually assaulted and beaten in just three months along the same route. One was almost killed. As her friends have already agreed to meet her at the station, Nicola thinks she has nothing to worry about. As for the old lady, she makes a joking aside: "I suppose if it happened to me at my age I could take it as a complement" before exiting. The next person to enter her cabin isn't quite as humorous. Instead, he's a creepy, leering, silent man (Jim Norton) who seems strangely familiar. That's because the old woman had just been reading the rapist's description to her from a newspaper and this guy fits that description to a T!

The uncomfortable, wordless train ride that follows finds the man staring at Nicola's legs and lighting up his pipe and throwing a match on the floor despite the no smoking sign. Subtly threatening gestures follow, like him reaching toward Nicola numerous times then pulling back to do something else, such as grabbing the newspaper she's just been reading that happens to have a front page article about him, and then peering over the top as if to tell her that he knows she knows who he is. Nicola makes it to her stop shaken but unharmed, but gets some bad news from the stationmaster upon arrival. Her friends still haven't arrived back in town yet due to car problems and won't be home until tomorrow. She's to walk to their home a quarter of a mile away and let herself in using a key hidden under the doormat. While she makes it, she forgets the key in the door and the rapist, who's followed her there, manages to get inside. When her friends arrive home the next morning, they find their home a wreck, blood smeared on the walls, a missing hatchet and a bruised and battered Nicola.

Nicola is rushed off to the hospital in a state of shock. At first, any man who enters her room, whether that be her attending physician (Michael Hall) or the police inspector (Derek Smith) investigating her case, she envisions is her rapist and hysterically screams them right out of the room. She's then sent to a mental home run by Dr. Ward (Peter Howell) for six months, where Nicola improves somewhat but still recoils from any man's touch and continues to have nightmares about her assaulter. Still, progress is progress and she's allowed to return to live with the (amazingly kind and patient) Jeff and Virna, who feel guilty about what happened and want to help her fully recover. However, that proves to be difficult when Nicola starts seeing fleeting glimpses of attacker around town...

The opening fifteen minute set-piece is tense, suspenseful and really quite excellent; perhaps the best spot of filmmaking I've seen on the series thus far. All of the performances are good and, though this has its slow spots afterward, the plot eventually introduces enough twists and turns to keep your interest and keep you guessing. The eventual resolution itself, however, is the most obvious of the possibilities when all is said and done and perhaps doesn't hold quite the same impact that something a little less obvious would have.

While this debuted as part of the Thriller series in the UK (the first episode of the 4th season), it premiered on TV here in America as a standalone movie on ABC and had a new opening credit scene added that's not in the later DVD versions. The 1986 VHS release from ThrillerVideo, which claims to run 71 minutes on the box (the original British version runs just shy of 67 minutes) appears to be this new U. S. cut.

★★1/2

Witching, The (1983)

... aka: Magia negra (Black Magic)
... aka: Noituus (Witchcraft)
... aka: Rosemary's Disciples
... aka: Witching

Directed by:
Bert I. Gordon

When it came time to bring his 1972 film NECROMANCY to VHS, Gordon decided it wouldn't quite be up to snuff for the exploitation-hungry home viewing audience who'd likely be renting it. After all, the original film was quite slow and bland, didn't have much violence and, even though it had a few flashes of nudity, you can never have too much nudity, amiright? So Mr. Gordon was kind enough to cut out some of the duller parts of the original, reinstate some of the nudity cut from the original PG-rated theatrical print and film brand new scenes of a more sleazy nature to splice into the works. I won't be rehashing the plot of the first film here in detail as I've already reviewed it so here I will be detailing the differences between this and the original film, starting with the fact this version runs 77 minutes, which is seven minutes shorter than Necromancy. Right off the bat you'll notice we have new credits, which just feature the original stars plus the new title (the closing credits include the newer cast and crew members). Also noticeable right away is that the original Fred Karger score has been replaced with a new synthesizer-heavy one by Rob Walsh.

We begin with five minutes of the new footage. A blonde high priestess (Anna Berglund) in a white robe is first seen making a voodoo doll with Pamela Franklin's head on it before she joins the rest of her cult of devil worshipers for a black mass. The leader, decked out in a fluffy white sheep's head, gives out orders in a deep echo voice as new initiate Jennie (Barbara Peckinpaugh) prepares to join "the family of witchcraft." She's placed in a circle containing a pentagram drawn on the floor, has her shirt opened, her breasts fondled and then rubbed with oil and is then given the voodoo doll and ordered to stab it by the high priest (Stephen Knight - The Black Room). Doing so will make Pamela's character Lori lose her baby.

As all of that's going on, male and female black sabbath members strip completely naked and do circles around the room. When Jennie refuses to stab the doll ("No! That's murder!"), another topless female cult member is given the dagger and gladly does it for her. As an added note, the character "Jennie" is mentioned in the 1972 film but all we get to see is her arm sticking out of a flaming car after it crashes and explodes.

After we briefly meet Lori and her husband Frank (Michael Ontkean), some more new footage is superimposed over Lori sleeping. In this bit, a spirit (Anne Gaybis) informs her that "you have the power!" in regards to her ESP abilities. The conversations between Lori and Frank have been greatly shortened to where it now looks like all they do is argue. Once they arrive to the small town of Lilith, the spirit is superimposed over their new house to warn Lori that Mr. Cato (Orson Welles) is "a vile slime of spit." The spirit will return several more times in scenes that are pointless as the ghost merely reiterates what we've already seen or shouts out "Beware!" like she's in some Ed Wood movie.

The next big change occurs when Lori and Frank go to the party at Jay (Harvey Shane) and Nancy's (Sue Bernard) place. Originally we see a bunch of female witches garbed in white robes sitting there staring at them while Jay tries to coerce the couple into joining their cult. The shots of the witches have mostly been replaced here by a room full of male and female partiers. Future Scream Queen extraordinaire "Berinka" / Brinke Stevens can be spotted sitting on the edge of a couch with a martini in one hand hugging a guy. Another woman whose face is obscured but tits aren't gets several close-ups. A double for Frank is then seen from behind following another topless woman into another room. There, things get a little kinkier. The white goat demon leader guy smokes a hookah while topless women dance and another woman in leather whips a bare-assed guy sprawled out over a fireplace mantle (!)

There are no other major new scenes included after the party, just more of the spirit talking and some additional fx added to the finale to make it look like it's taking place during a thunderstorm. However, some scenes from the original have been shuffled around or removed entirely to create a slightly different narrative. A dream sequence in the original where Lori accidentally stabs her husband as he's hidden under the goat mask at the time, has been moved to the ending and presented as "real." A fire effect superimposed over a scene in the original has also been removed and the original's (awful) ending is thankfully scrapped and replaced with a more grim finale. There are also a few bits from the original 1972 shoot that didn't make that final cut that are included here, including more footage of a topless Franklin burning at the stake and lying in bed. Some of these alterations are actually for the better, which at least justifies this, even if the movie as a whole isn't great.

The Magnum reissue of this title (under the new moniker Rosemary's Disciples) is the same "new" version of the film and includes the names of new cast members Knight and Peckinpaugh on the VHS box. The Finnish VHS release, which uses the title Noituus / "Witchcraft," the Argentinian VHS titled Magia negra / "Black Magic" and the Japanese VHS from Showa, which also uses the Witching title, were also this new spiced up version. The latter really plays up the nudity on both the front and back covers, so you can see exactly why they added this stuff.

★★