Scream and Scream Again

Plot

The movie's structure is fragmented, as it alternates between three distinguishable plot threads.

A man jogging through suburban London grabs his heart, and collapses. He wakes up in a hospital bed. The nurse tending him gives him water. She leaves. He pulls down the bed covers to discover that his lower right leg has been amputated. He screams.

Elsewhere, intelligence operative Konartz (Marshall Jones) returns to his home country, an unidentified Eastern European totalitarian state. Upon being debriefed by a superior officer, Konartz steps around the table and places a hand on the other man's shoulder, paralyzing and thereby killing him.

Back in London, MPS Detective Superintendent Bellaver (Alfred Marks) investigates the deaths of several young women in the city. The women, picked up at nightclubs by Keith (Michael Gothard), have apparently been killed by the same individual, and some of the bodies have been drained of blood.

The centerpiece of the movie is a nearly fifteen minutes long police - murder suspect car-chase/foot-chase sequence through suburban London.

Vincent Price plays Dr Browning, whose clinic specializes in limb and organ transplantation.

Christopher Lee plays Fremont, the head of Britain's (unnamed) intelligence services.

Peter Cushing - third-billed- plays Major Heinrich Benedek, an official in the Eastern European country; a very brief cameo role.

The three plot lines converge in a chilling - and unexpected- climax.

Cast

Production

The movie is based on Peter Saxon's science fiction novel "The Disoriented Man". For the most part, the movie follows the novel quite closely.

In the novel, the antagonists turned out to be aliens. According to an interview with Christopher Lee, the characters were indeed going to be revealed as aliens in the movie's climax, but all connections to that fact were cut out of the movie before it was released, leaving the enigmatic villains backgrounds unexplained.

Rights to the novel were bought by Milton Subotsky of Amicus Productions who got financing from Louis Heyward head of European operations for AIP.

There was a script by Subotsky but it was regarded as unplayable. Gordon Hessler says he got Chris Wickling to heavily rewrite it:

That was really a pulp book, a throwaway book that you read on a train. There was nothing in it, just empty pieces of action. But it was Chris who gave it a whole new level by using it as a political process of what might happen in the future. That is what made the picture, he's the one that came up with all those ideas, yet he still managed to keep the nuances of the sort of pulp fiction novel.

The epnonymous theme song for the film was by Amen Corner, who appeared in the film singing it. This was one of their last appearances before Andy Fairweather Low departed for a solo career after a brief career as Fair Weather.

This marked the first time Peter Cushing, Vincent Price and Christopher Lee appeared in the same film. The three actors however, do not share screen space. Cushing does not appear with either Lee or Price - only appearing in a cameo. Lee and Price share a brief scene towards the film's climax.

The opening credits list the copyright as 1969, and Judy Huxtable is billed as a "guest star".

An episode of The X-Files, Kill Switch, depicts Agent Fox Mulder in a virtual reality experience during which, like this film's victim, nurses periodically amputate his limbs while he sleeps.