This subtly titled epic's plot reminds me of the sweet tales of the Brothers Grimm. You know how it goes: Boy (Fred Holbert) kills father with some kind of farming vehicle. Boy loses hand. Boy spends years in an institution, but at least gets a nice hook. He comes back only to find his mother (Leigh Mitchell) freshly wedded to a guy wearing a pornoid mustache. Of course the boy Matthew doesn't like his new daddy and murders him with an axe. Accidentally, he kills his mother,too.
So he goes on the road, killing everyone who does anything remotely sexual, until he comes to a city where he meets the kind-hearted prostitute Vera (also played by Leigh Mitchell!). Surprisingly he kills only one of her costumers, while he has much better things for her in mind. He doesn't want his new friend to continue this icky job anymore, so he murders an old woman and her maid, moves into their house, kidnaps Vera and tries to rope (attention: bad pun!) her into being his passive and obedient new "mother". You see, it's exactly like a fairy tale.
Scream Bloody Murder is quite a successful semi-professional effort by all participants. Sure, it sometimes shows that nobody had a lot of experience, but one can feel an air of honest enthusiasm and energy throughout its running time. The actors may be amateurs, but they are doing their best, which mostly amounts to looking and sounding like real people.
Director Marc B. Ray has more than one nifty idea in his head and has no problem evading the classical static camera and boring composition of too many movies made for next to nothing.
The movie's psychology may be problematic, still small strikes of genius like Leigh Mitchell's double role or Matthew's weird ideas about friendship and love in the last act make most of the events plausible enough.
The only real problem I had was the terrible make-up used for the vision's Matthew has of his dead victims. It's so bad that it stretches my ability to suspend disbelief to the absolute breaking point and nearly ruins one or two scenes that should by all rights be absolute high points of the film.
Scream Bloody Murder's effect as a whole is typical of the Seventies films I like so much. It's at the same time darkly funny (sometimes even intentionally), harrowing and just plain nasty (people die for really nothing that's in anyone's control - you can call that honesty, of course), and I see no good reason for anyone not to at least try and watch it.
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