Friday, June 19, 2015

Scream... and Die! (1973)

First of all: nice Last House on the Left-kinda poster. Apart from that, this movie is a terrible English attempt to make a giallo. This movie can't have been watchable in the 70's and certainly isn't in 2015. Any form of pace is almost non-existent. After about 50 minutes you suddenly realise that you've mostly been watching main actress Andrea Allan, slowly strolling through her apartment. Believe me when I say I'm certainly not a fan of modern editing techniques with fast cuts etc. But this was just completely ridiculous.

A young model and her petty thief boyfriend find their way through the English fog to a backwoods manor in hopes of looting it. What they find instead is murder, and when the model attempts to find the house again, her efforts come to naught. 

The story itself is pretty ridiculous and the movie lacks any form of scarry build-up to deathscenes. The few deathscenes that this movie contains are poorly filmed and seem rushed. Instead director Jose Ramon Larraz focusses on useless scenes, stupid dialogue and boring characters. To keep things a little bit spicy he adds some naked female bodies. Every female actress that appears in this movie, including the beautiful Andrea Allan, gets fully naked at least once. Nice... But the director should know that a few tits here and there aren't going to change our hunger for horror scenes.

The dubbing is overly poor as well. The dialogue heard doesn't match with the movement of the actors' mouths, which is strange considering all actors spoke English on set. Not to mention that some dialogue isn't even dubbed, causing the viewer to see the actors' mouth move without hearing a single word of dialogue.

Wow, Scream and Die (A.K.A. The House That Vanished) turned out to be a disaster of a movie. I happen to find José Ramón Larraz an interesting director (I still want to see Edge of the Axe and Rest in Pieces), but with this movie he completely fails to entertain the viewer. The story sucks and the slow paced execution is even worse. The only good thing remaining is some female beauty, but that's about it.




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