Carry on Screaming! (1966)

Henpecked and sexually frustrated DC Sidney Bung (Harry H. Corbett) stumbles upon the work of – dead yet occasionally revived – Dr Orlando Watt (Kenneth Williams) and his flirtatious sister Valeria (Fenella Fielding). Apart from trying to revive a mummy and creating the delightful monster Oddbod (Tom Clegg) – whose Frankenstein’s monster plus werewolf thing truly is odd – the good doctor occupies his time with turning young women into mannikins, which apparently also earns him a pretty penny. Will Bung manage to not have his two braincells be distracted by the highly distracting Valeria for a second or two so he can solve the case?

It had to happen sometime. I blame Edgar Wright’s appearance on a recent episode of the Pure Cinema Podcast for finally pushing me into watching one of the many, many Carry On! movies. I even enjoyed this October outing into the world of formerly super popular British comedy, so more of this stuff might be in the future of this blog, for better or worse.

As you know, Jim, the Carry On! movies were the British idea of their time about what sex comedies were supposed to be. Not the sort of thing featuring copious nudity and jokes about crabs, but films you’d probably describe with adjectives like “naughty”, or “a bit raunchy”. Apparently, it’s the sort of humour used on naughty postcards, but I’m from Northern Germany, so couldn’t possibly comment. This is the sort of comedy where perpetually horny men’s desires are often frustrated, usually by their own inefficacy, where double entendres tend to the absurd – or to the utterly bizarre – and where the potential unpleasantness of the humour is counteracted by its very pleasant weirdness.

And there’s weirdness aplenty in Gerald Thomas’s (who was the series main director) parody of Hammer Horror (with nods towards Universal, The Munsters and the Addams Family), as well as puns so horrifying the film often threatens to turn into a proper horror film by virtue of them. It’s the sort of absurdist affair where Valeria takes a break in her hair-raising seduction of Bung by asking if he’d mind if she smoked. Bung acceding, her body indeed very literally starts smoking. If you find this funny when delivered with perfect comical line readings and timing, you’ll have about as much fun with Carry on Screaming! as I did. If not, carrying on running away from the series screaming seems perfectly appropriate.

Even though all of this is of course grandfather’s idea of naughty humour, there’s a wildly imaginative and anarchic bend to proceedings, with ideas that would land on the mental cutting room floor of lesser comical minds mined for all they are worth, bizarre asides that suggest a deep and abiding strangeness at the core of a perfectly mainstream (of its time) series, a subversive quality to the silliness.

There’s also, at least here, a clear, visual understanding of what the film is parodying. The colours and the sets look just right, and even the monster design, ridiculous as it is, demonstrates insight into what makes the original versions sent up here tick.

That’s rather more than I would have expected from a naughty comedy of fifty-five years ago.