Screamtime (1983)

Screamtime (1983) is an anthology horror film composed of three pre-existing short films packaged together with a framing story.  While the three episodes are obviously UK productions, the framing story is set and filmed in New York with American actors, presumably to make the direct-to-video release more appealing to the US market.  The framing story is somewhat perfunctory, in comparison to the often elaborate frameworks that Amicus, for instance, wove around the episodes in their anthology films.  Here, we simply have a couple of bone headed New Yorkers who steal three videos and go to a girlfriend's apartment to watch them.  (The sole purpose of the girlfriend's presence seems to be to provide some gratuitous nudity: she's in the shower when we first meet her).  The three videos they watch, of course, are the three episodes of the anthology.  All three of these films, produced by Stanley Long, written by Michael Armstrong and variously directed by them, had previously been released in support of feature films, (the middle episode, for instance, had most recently served as support for the UK cinematic release of Evil Dead (1982)), and were all edited somewhat in order for the whole package to fit an approximate ninety minute run time.

The three stories themselves are of varying quality.  The first, featuring a Punch and Judy man driven to madness by his wife's threats to leave him and a hostile step son, both of whom perpetually denigrate his profession as a puppeteer, is actually not bad at all.  While it springs no surprises in its story of the Mr Punch doll apparently coming to life and beating people to death, while following the traditional Punch and Judy storyline, it is well executed.  The actors all play it with conviction - Robin Bailey as the Punch and Judy man is suitably worn down and frayed around the edges, his apparently infinite patience concealing a true, deep-seated, passion for his work.  Jonathon Morris, an actor usually seen around this time in sympathetic roles in sitcoms is also very effective, cast against type as the thoroughly nasty step son.  Overall, episode has a suitably down beat atmosphere, the gloomily shot beach where Baily performs, for instance, full of foreboding and barely suppressed menace.  If you've ever wanted to see noted character actor Robin Bailey go bonkers and chase a young woman around in the persona of Mr Punch, then 'That's The Way to Do It' is for you.

The second episode, 'Dreamtime', is undoubtedly the best of the three stories, featuring an apparently haunted house in which a young wife who has just moved in suffers a series of disturbing, (not to mention increasingly gory) dreams and visions.  Of course, there is no record of anything approximating her visions having ever taken place at the property and even a local medium fails to detect any kind of psychic presence there.  Is the wife simply mad?  The episode concludes with a twist ending which, sort of, makes sense.  While unable to muster even familiar TV faces like Bailey and Morris in the first episode, 'Dreamtime' nonetheless boasts some good performances from its cast who, once again, play it all with absolute sincerity.  The visions themselves are generally well executed, their shock value increased by the way in which they often come out of nowhere, as the wife is performing some mundane task, then finds herself witnessing some horrendous and bloody violence.  Perhaps the most disturbing of the visions is the simplest - looking out of the window she frequently sees a young boy on a bike cycling around the lawn, who, when she looks back, has vanished.  As befits its title, 'Dreamtime' succeeds in creating the feel of an unsettling dream and alone is well worth watching the whole anthology for.  

The final episode, 'Garden of Evil', is undoubtedly the weakest of the three, it is clearly intended to be the 'lighter', more 'comedic' episode, of a kind often found in anthology films, such the Golfing episode of Dead of Night (1945), for instance.  Whereas these were usually inserted part way through the film in order to break up somewhat the grimness of the more conventionally horrific episodes and lure the audience into a false sense of security before even grimmer episodes unfolded, the decision to place 'Garden of Evil' third and last in Screamtime succeeds only in dissipating the atmosphere and momentum built up by the previous stories.  While the audience might have been expecting 'That's The Way To Do It' and 'Dreamtime' to be leading up to an even more  horrifying and disturbing climax, they instead get this tale of would be robbers finding the house they are targeting is guarded by fairies, gnomes and spirits.  Unfortunately, garden gnomes (even when they transform into a man in a gnome suit to attack a burglar) simply aren't scary.  Despite being well shot  and reasonably well scripted, this episode simply fails to deliver the same sort of menacing atmosphere conjured up by the previous two entries.  It probably doesn't help that the main character is played by David Van Day of 'Dollar' infamy, in his 'acting' debut.  He delivers an unsurprisingly flat performance, that even the presence of Dora Bryan and Jean Anderson as the two apparently dotty old ladies who employ him as a gardener and handyman, can't compensate for.  The episode's ending leads into the concluding part of the framing story, which delivers its own 'twist' ending.

It has to be said that while Screamtime doesn't at first seem a promising prospect, with its rather rough looking New York opening and framing story, it is worth persevering with.  Clearly, both that framing story and the episodes themselves were shot on miniscule budgets - everything is shot on actual locations, with no studio work and production values are pretty basic, but in the first two episodes especially, this is used to advantage.  The very ordinariness of the suburban British locations in those stories adds to their effectiveness, as their extraordinary events unfold in this mundane milieu.  The third episode is far less successful in establishing its location - the old ladies' cottage, where most of the events take place, never feels just ordinary, leaving the various supernatural happenings seeming somehow unsurprising.  Directors Armstrong and Long ,jointly credited as 'Al Beresford',  both have a solid body of work in low budget exploitation films, for which I have a lot of time.  Their films are more often than not intelligently scripted and imaginatively directed and two thirds of Screamtime, at least, reflect this.  As a final thought, it is interesting to observes that, with slightly bigger budgets, studio shooting and better productions values, all of the three stories contained in Screamtime could easily have fitted into a seventies Amicus anthology film.