THE CAPTIVE FEMALE aka SCREAM BLOODY MURDER [1973] [HCF REWIND]

Scream Bloody Murder (1973)
Directed by: Mark B. Ray
Written by: Larry Alexander, Mark B. Ray
Starring: Fred Holbert, Leigh Mitchell, Robert Knox, Ron Bastone

HCF REWIND NO.103. THE CAPTIVE FEMALE AKA SCREAM BLOODY MURDER, CLAW OF TERROR

AVAILABLE ON DVD

RUNNING TIME: 85 min

REVIEWED BY: Dr Lenera, Official HCF Critic

A young boy named Matthew runs over his father with a tractor, killing him, though he loses an arm in the process. He’s taken to a mental hospital where he’s outfitted with a hook to replace his lost hand. When he is 18, he is released from the asylum and returns home, but finds that his mother has got married again, to one of the farmhands who helped her run the place after her husband’s death. Insanely jealous and overly protective of his mother, he kills the husband, then accidently slaughters Ma too. Going on the run, he sets off on a killing spree….

Sometimes one can be mistaken as to what one ends up with. I’m a sucker for trawling my local Poundland for DVDs. Quite often, the range is pretty decent, from films many will have heard of to obscurities that quite often deserve to remain obscure but occasionally could be unsung gems. Not long ago I picked up a disc with two films on it; the 2001 slasher pic Ripper, and another film called Scream Bloody Murder. I assumed this was the slasher movie from 2000 of the time title, but the brief synopsis on the back of the case suggested otherwise. Actually the film I started watching turned out to be rather different from what the synopsis stated, so someone at Boulevard Entertainment made a mistake that no one bothered to check. A bit of research told me that what I was watching was actually a 1973 movie called The Captive Female and that the synopsis was of another film, but also called Scream Bloody Murder, from 1972! Confused? Yeah, so was I for a while, but I do love checking out films I know nothing about!

Now I must say right away; the picture quality on the Boulevard Entertainment DVD is awful, so blurry [you can’t even make out the credits at the end] that it took me back to watching dodgy pirate video copies of banned and uncut horror films back in the late 80’s when I was a crazy horror nut but was frustrated by the fact that many of the movies I wanted to see were either not legally available or hacked to bits by the censors. It seems that the film looks the same on other releases, and add to that it was censored on release by five minutes, which sounds like a lot so perhaps some dialogue was lost too, while the uncut version seems to be lost. Its director and co-writer Mark B. Ray only made one other film and his writing credits are mainly minor TV work though he did have a hand in the screenplay for the middling Stepfather 3.

Of course what you really want to know is, is the film good? I would love to tell you that it’s a lost gem that should be far better known and deserves a decent release. Sadly I can’t. The film is certainly not devoid of interest, especially when is full of that grimy, sleazy feel that many 70’s horrors had and is rarely attempted these days, and at times it does verge on being quite good, but most of the time it is sunk by some truly abysmal acting, especially from Fred Holbert as the psychotic Matthew who only seems to have one expression throughout. Small wonder that The Captive Female is his only credit. There is also a lot of really shoddy dialogue that is often laughable and really inconsistent direction that veers from the extremely bland to rather stylised, such as a murder where, as the victim falls, the camera assumes her point of view and goes all over the place. The cameraman was Stephen H. Burum, who would go on to do great things with the likes of Brian De Palma and Francis Ford Coppola. The first few minutes of the film really are bad, with the tractor death lousily staged, especially when the murderous kid somehow gets his arm ran over in the process. Fast forward ten or so years, and the kid is now supposed to be 18, but looks twice that.

After this, the film becomes a kind of early slasher movie but from the point of view of the killer. The killings are many and varied, with methods including an axe, dagger, strangulation and a rock. It’s glaringly obvious where trims have been made in most of these scenes as the editing often jars and I just knew that we were intended to see more than we do. There’s plenty of blood on display though, and even a blackly comic kill where Matthew has considerable trouble with a cane-wielding old lady. All this makes for quite a fast paced experience for the film’s first half as various folk from housemaids to sailors get murdered, but it then grinds to a halt when mad Matt sets up house with a happy hooker [who also paints] called Vera, in his own strange way. By this I mean giving her plenty of things like food and wine, but also keeping her constantly tied up in a big house he has taken over. Interestingly he isn’t sexually interested in her, not even wanting to look at her when she’s in the shower. Matthew clearly has Oedipal issues, but just seems to want a replacement mother rather than to become one. He’s an interesting psycho, but is never as interesting as he should be because of the terrible acting and the fact that the writers chicken out of making him a bit sympathetic. It’s the same with Vera, where it seems like the two scriptwriters started to write an intriguing character but after a while gave up.

The scenes between Matthew and Vera are sometimes rather amusing, which may have been intended, and though the movie gets a little dull, Vera’s escape attempts are quite suspenseful, even after she has freed herself from being tied up so badly to a chair she is just able to slide underneath the string. Matthew also appears to teleport in one scene, though he wouldn’t be the only killer to have this ability when the slasher boom happened in the early 80’s. Then again, it’s pretty impressive that he can drive with a hook replacing one of the hands, and then there’s an odd scene with a delivery boy who talks for around a minute as he stands outside the house even though there is no answer from inside. The film does do well by its distorted visions of Matthew’s mother, and it has a really weird climax in a church that seems to borrow from both Carnival Of Souls and The Roaring Twenties [honest] and may have also inspired the finale of Maniac. This movie also seems to have inspired Don’t Go Into The House.  

The score by Rockwell sometimes irritates, often sounding like slightly messed-up TV music, and not being helped by being very badly recorded, but there are a few interesting experimental cues reminiscent of Ennio Morricone at his weirdest. In the 80’s, a version of this movie came out in Italy with the original score replaced by Fabio Frizzi’s music from The Beyond and House By The Cemetery. I’d like to see it. In the meantime, The Captive Female is not really very good, but can still be recommended for fans of the obscure and folk who are tired of the samey nature of many of the horror films and thrillers today. It’s certainly worth the 50p I paid to get it, even with that awful picture quality! And look out for Phantasm’s Angus Scrimm in a small role!

Rating: