Directed by Alex Nicol
Starring John Hudson, Peggy Webber and Russ Conway
Pre-MPAA horror movies. They're a real mixed bag, I tell ya. Sometimes, they're a mixed bag within the SAME DAMN FILM, and this is what we get with The Screaming Skull, a classic in all the wrong ways no matter how occasionally tedious it might be.
DVD collection masturbation time: I own a few insanely cheap "50-movie-in-a-pack" type horror movie bundles. For something like ten bucks, you get 50 movies on roughly ten discs. The movies are, almost without fail, absolutely awful, as they're public domain stuff that anybody can release. One of the drawbacks of having an insanely large movie collection is that there is no way that you'll ever watch every single thing you own, and I don't know if there's enough wild oats in this world to make me watch ALL of these flicks in rapid-fire succession. Of the ones I HAVE seen, though, The Screaming Skull is one that I actually don't particularly mind. It definitely fits into the "so bad it's good" category for yours truly despite virtually every film critic disagreeing vehemently. You've also got to hand it to any movie that had the balls back in the day to make its ad campaign that it was so horrifying that it could literally KILL you. That is some grade-A chutzpah right there.
There's two things that this movie has going for it: it's really simple, and really short, clocking in at just a hair over an hour. If every movie were this length, Jon Lickness would be a very happy man. That simple plot, in a nutshell: newlyweds Jenni (Peggy Webber, who also starred in another "so bad it's good" classic The Space Children) and Eric (John Hudson) are moving into a really, really big countryside home. Weird stuff starts going down. Shocking climax. One of the joys of movies like this is the unapologetic basic-ness that we see played out in front of us, and this flick fits the bill in spades. Both characters are distinguishable enough, I guess, although I've got to hand it to Peggy Noonan for taking on this movie with way more energy than she could have. And for being super hot in the "1958 mom" kind of way.
For a movie that seemingly zips by at light speed, it's amazingly all about that build, that build, with treble. That horrible joke gets unleashed because the music in this film is the kind of dreadful, dreary funeral dirge that is clearly meant to drive right into your gut and make you feel all sorts of painful fear. Instead, it's just kind of blah. We get clued in to some of the stuff that led up to the events of this film, as this is actually Eric's second marriage. His first wife Marion died after slipping and cracking her head open on the ground (not making that up, it's said in pretty much as many words in the movie's Oscar-winning screenplay). The movie is planting those seeds of doubt in your head about what is going on, as Jenni begins having all kinds of weird happenings involving skulls.
Yup, skulls. The movie is called The Screaming Skull after all. And now, ladies and gentlemen, for everyone's favorite read-by-8-subscribers segment of Lick Ness Monster's Horror Movie Mayhem: the Boring Life and Times of Jon Lickness. As a kid, I absolutely loved reading about ghosts, UFOs, bigfoot, all of that stuff. I checked out every book at the local library (remember those?) on this very subject, and many of them had stories involving a haunted screaming skull in some long-forgotten English palatial estate. The story terrified me to my very soul, and I always wondered why someone hadn't made a movie pretty much depicting this real-life case to the letter. Well, somebody had! Only...we got this.
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
The movie takes the mystery angle, but alas, it's not much of a mystery. It's actually kind of hilarious, as Jenni thinks that the ghost of Marion is haunting her. She hears a scream. She sees a skull. Rinse, lather, repeat, and that's the middle section of this movie. We also get our single red herring here in the form of the groundskeeper Mickey, played by the director himself. So we've got a new bride with a background of mental health problems, a mentally challenged groundskeeper, and a husband who may or may not be murdering his wives for their money. Spoiler alert. Which of these threats is the correct one? Is there truly a ghost, or is it all in Jenni's mind? And if it IS a ghost, who is it trying to torment? Do you care? The answer is...not really. Except for that scene where Peggy Noonan strips down to her underwear. That scene is absolutely captivating.
What IS pretty good is the movie's climax, which the first couple minutes of this movie brag might just put you in a casket (exact quote). Now, it's not THAT good. But it does provide a pretty satisfying payoff, complete with a chase involving the movie's vengeful ghost (spoiler alert #2) chasing around both Jenni and Eric at different points. There's plenty of creepy visuals here and a soundtrack that does a good job evoking the sense of dread that had been sorely lacking up until this point. I can't say that the movie left me feeling unsatisfied. And a dude throwing a chair at a walking skeleton is hilarious.
As you can tell, this movie is definitely not good. It was shot on the ultra-cheap, and it shows. The acting is pretty bad with the exception of Webber, but that's probably just me perving on a woman born in 1925 (because I'm such a winner). And the mystery and twists are all telegraphed from a mile away. Still, I can't give this movie the BAD label, because I remember it when it's over. For that, I award The Screaming Skull ** 1/2 out of ****. It's definitely worth a watch for some solid entertainment to fall asleep to. As long as you don't start with the final ten minutes or so.
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