"Scream Bloody Murder" gets right down to business. A young boy runs over his father with a tractor before accidentally running over his own arm, and that's before the opening titles have rolled.
From there, the film becomes reminiscent of the John Fowles novel and subsequent movie "The Collector." After being released from an institution, the boy quickly does away with his mother's new husband and then the mother herself, meets a perky prostitute with whom he falls into a chaste kind of love, and keeps her captive in a mansion he's broken into so that no one else can have her. As I've written it here, the plot seems to make plenty of sense, but it doesn't necessarily cohere in the actual movie. The movie only does a half-assed job of addressing the psychological mother issues that motivate our main character, but that's probably for the best, since an attempt to be more ambitious would likely have strained the intellect of the people who made this movie and would certainly have strained the acting talents of the people in it.
In any objective sense, "Scream Bloody Murder" isn't a very good movie. But it managed to disturb me quite a bit despite that. It is creepy, and bad acting aside, there are some moments that chilled me to the bone, especially in the movie's last half when we're subjected to the prostitute's mental and then physical torture. During a dinner scene when the boy is forcing her to eat the steak he prepared for her and she refuses to eat more, he tells her he will cut out her tongue if she doesn't comply, and I know I for one certainly believed him.
Grade: C
From there, the film becomes reminiscent of the John Fowles novel and subsequent movie "The Collector." After being released from an institution, the boy quickly does away with his mother's new husband and then the mother herself, meets a perky prostitute with whom he falls into a chaste kind of love, and keeps her captive in a mansion he's broken into so that no one else can have her. As I've written it here, the plot seems to make plenty of sense, but it doesn't necessarily cohere in the actual movie. The movie only does a half-assed job of addressing the psychological mother issues that motivate our main character, but that's probably for the best, since an attempt to be more ambitious would likely have strained the intellect of the people who made this movie and would certainly have strained the acting talents of the people in it.
In any objective sense, "Scream Bloody Murder" isn't a very good movie. But it managed to disturb me quite a bit despite that. It is creepy, and bad acting aside, there are some moments that chilled me to the bone, especially in the movie's last half when we're subjected to the prostitute's mental and then physical torture. During a dinner scene when the boy is forcing her to eat the steak he prepared for her and she refuses to eat more, he tells her he will cut out her tongue if she doesn't comply, and I know I for one certainly believed him.
Grade: C