Carry on Screaming !

R1 DVD

Various Editions

Carry On Screaming! is the twelfth "Carry On" film and was released in 1966. It featured Kenneth Williams, Joan Sims, Jim Dale, Charles Hawtrey, Bernard Bresslaw and Peter Butterworth. It guest stars included Harry H. Corbett and Fenella Fielding and appearances by Jon Pertwee, Frank Thornton and Angela Douglas. The appearance of Frank Thornton as a very staid store owner with a camp offsider (Charles Hawtrey) predates Are You Being Served? by about 8 years yet they have quite a lot of common. Perhaps they saw Thornton in this episode and his role in Are You Being Served? developed from here.

Carry on Screaming is really a spoof of the look and feel of the B Grade Hammer horror films of the period with a plot which has elements of Frankenstein and the 1953 House of Wax.

The film is set in Edwardian London but clearly made to look like the artificial sets of the Hammer horror films, not difficult on the budgets of the Carry On Films. Albert Potter and Doris Mann are innocently making out when Doris becomes convinced someone is watching them. When Albert goes to investigate she is abducted by a Frankenstein like creature who leaves a large hairy finger behind.

Albert goes to the police who, of course, provide a lot of the comedy value. There is Constable Slobotham who is a bungling fool and Sergeant Sidney Bung who is constantly henpecked by his wife.

As Potter leads Slobotham and Bung to where Doris went missing, they find a strange old mansion called Bide-A-Wee Rest Home in the middle of the forest. Here we are introduced to the gothic “Hammer Horror” like characters with a Lurch like butler, an Elvira type character and Kenneth Williams as a camp Dr.Frankenstein.

Of course the tale gets more and more ridiculous as we get stories of re-animated bodies, Frankenstein zombies, girls turned into mannequins for profit and lots more. The humour is very tongue-in-cheek mixing as many innuendoes as possible into every scene with a basic horror spoof. There is also some also good physical humour ranging from re-animation via power points to the dopy Oddbod creatures !

There is even a “Mr.Jekyll and Dr.Hyde” sub plot and a re-animated Mummy, they have really gone all out to spoof all sorts of horror stories within one plot.

This certainly isn’t the best Carry On film but it does offer a fun horror comedy combination which is amusing to watch.

While out of production, the dual Anchor Bay Carry On Cowboy and Carry on Screaming DVD (R1) is a good value and can be found easily at second hand sites.

This review will appear in Volume 2 No.4 (2009) of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.

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