Search - The Oblong Box / Scream and Scream Again on DVD

One good, one bad movie

mrliteral | 10/04/2002

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Just as Karloff, Lugosi and Chaney were the horror actors of the 1930s and 1940s, the 1960s belonged to the trinity of Vincent Price, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. While Lee and Cushing worked together often, collaborations with Price were much less frequent. This DVD offers two such rare collaborations. Scream and Scream Again is definitely the better of the two movies. It has its flaws: the plot is overly complicated and certain plot lines don't tie together for a long time, if truly ever. The story has something to do with a mad scientist (Price) who is performing mysterious experiments and a serial killer who frequents discos and is seemingly unkillable. Add to all this some intrigue with a East German-country, and you have a mess, but somehow a fun one. Although billed as starring all three actors, this is misleading. Cushing is in the movie for all of five minutes, Lee not much longer. Only Price has a significant role, and even he's got a relatively small part. On the other hand, both Lee and Price have significant roles in the Oblong Box. Unfortunately, this movie is pretty weak. Price plays a wealthy gentleman who has just returned from his African plantation, where his brother was hideously deformed as part of a native ritual. The brother, confined to Price's house, fakes his death and is buried alive, only to wind up in the custody of some grave robbers, who sell him to Lee, a doctor who hides him. The brother's quest for revenge occupies the rest of the movie.
The Oblong Box is pretty slow-moving and suspenseless, and even the big payoff, seeing the deformed brother's face at long last, is a disappointment: he's hardly scary or even grotesque. At best, these are minor horror movies; for big fans of the genre, especially from the 1960s and 1970s, it may be worth watching. Others should find their thrills elsewhere"

A Bit More Than Meets the Eye

tg_browning | Salem, OR United States | 08/24/2003

(4 out of 5 stars)

"There are serveral good reviews of this DVD and I'll not go over ground that's been extensively covered. However, there are a couple of things not mentioned that should be. First, Scream and Scream Again, when it appeared in theaters, was spooky as hell. At least I thought so as a 13 year old. Second, the thread mentioned by several reviews of the runner who wakes up missing parts actually is not a separate thread at all, but background to the main story. You see, Price is making people out of spare parts and well . . . you have to get them from somewhere, don't you? Third, the movie is an adaptation of a book by the same title, written by Peter Saxon--a well respected English writer of gothic horror and mysteries. The book's better, by the way. The Oblong Box is sloooooooow. Not terribly interesting and the end of the film is telegraphed well in advance. Price isn't at his best and I had the feeling this was one film he wasn't terribly interested in, himself. If you like Price, though, it's worth watching. Closed Captioning on the DVD is available, though the CC'ing on The Oblong Box is slightly late some of the time. You find yourself looking at someone talking, get about 2 seconds of CC'ing and then the scene will shift to another view, often of someone else and you're still reading the CC'ing. Annoying."

Late '60s Vincent

Jerry McDaniel | 03/15/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"this DVD combines two of Vincent's under-rated horror films from this era. "Scream and Scream Again" is a great movie...but the people at AIP ruined the film's legacy by giving Vincent top billing. the reason? Vincent is only in maybe 20 minutes of the movie...and this isn't an uninterrupted 20 minutes either. his big scene is in the lab at the end of the film as he kills one of his own robots that have gone corrupt, only to be confronted by Christopher Lee's character in an eerie scene. Peter Cushing's role is two scenes, and he's killed by the main robot or "composite" as Vincent calls them. However, these three horror legends have no scenes together and each one has nearly a minute or two of on-screen time sandwiched between other scenes with the London police and the scientist/coroner on the case. this is a good movie...but beware that the three horror legends that get top billing ARE NOT the stars of the film! the other film, "The Oblong Box", IS a Vincent Price starring film. He plays the brother of a man who was mutated in Africa by a bunch of witch-doctors for a crime he didn't do. Price's character {Julian Markham} had killed a child {the victim of a horse trampling} but the natives grabbed the brother by mistake! forced to wear a crimson mask because of his scars, the brother {named Edward Markham} plots revenge on everybody. Christopher Lee plays a doctor named Neuhart who can't help the brother but nevertheless the brother demands satisfaction. later, when the insecure Edward {played by Alister Williamson} feels that the doctor is double-crossing him, a swift slice of the neck with a blade does the trick and Lee meets his demise midway through the film. Lee is wearing a grey wig for some reason!? it's rather funny seeing him in it and deliver his lines in that voice we all know and love! "The Oblong Box" is a mixture of voo-doo, cult, and African cultures very different from typical Price horror movies of the previous years by Roger Corman and William Castle. "Scream and Scream Again" is a good movie for what it deals with {1970, release} and "The Oblong Box" is also good {1969, release}."

Price Hessler & Wicking Double Bill

J. L. Probert | 09/10/2002

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Another excellent release from the Midnight Movie series of double features gives us the first and second collaborations of director Gordon Hessler & screenwriter Christopher Wicking. The first is `The Oblong Box'. Replacing the tragic Michael Reeves as director and getting Wicking to rewrite Laurence Huntingdon's script, Hessler's first AIP horror film isn't by any means a bad effort, beautifully shot and with some nice performances by Price and AIP's then-current scream queen Hilary Dwyer.
Of course, it's the second film, `Scream & Scream Again', that we have all been waiting for. Subject of one of Tim Lucas' very first Video Watchdog columns before he made it into a magazine, this has until now only been available on home video with a different music score composed by Kendall Schmidt, replacing the original music composed by David Whitaker. Well, the Whitaker score is now back, and its interesting to watch the film having got so used to Schmidt's electronic doodlings, which it turns out actually weren't that bad. In fact sometimes his score is better than Whitaker's own jazz-inspired music, which in places is quite inappropriate to the action taking place on screen.
Some of the reviews on this site have criticized the plotting. Certainly Hessler & Wicking have always maintained that the fragmentary disjointed nature of the story was always intentional. Anyone who has read the original novel `The Disorientated Man' by "Peter Saxon" (a pseudonym for any number of writers working at that particular publishing house at that time) will know that the novel is constructed like that anyway, possibly because multiple writers may have contributed to it. `We took out the blobs from space' said Wicking in an interview, but to be honest they don't seem to have done much else. On the other hand, the original screenplay was written by Milton Subotsky who put everything into logical order, so maybe Hessler and Wicking deserve praise simply for going with a different kind of narrative style. Certainly `Scream & Scream Again' has often been beloved of `art-house horror' critics who have praised its paranoid conspiracy plotline. At least now we get to see it in 1:1.85 and with the original music as intended"