by Jerry Roberts

May 5, 2002

Wuthering Heights it ain't!

A movie so shocking that it actually offers you a free coffin if you die while watching it? What they are really trying to say is that you are so likely to be bored to death while witnessing scene after scene of nothing, leading to nothing that they will promise you something, anything if you will only stay. That discomfort will come in the pit of your stomach when you realize that 12 minutes of plot have been stretched out to 68 minutes of movie.

Submitted for your dyspepsia, The Screaming Skull, a moribund 1958 William Castle wanna-be, wanna-be that doesn’t fly low because it never attains the energy to taxi onto the runway. The movie stars Peggy Webber (whose credits stretch from Lady MacBeth to the voice of Farmer Smurf) as Jenni, the new bride and second wife of Eric (John Hudson) who is such a slimeball that it wouldn’t be anymore obvious if he wore a T-shirt announcing “Hi! I’m a slimeball”.

These two are not exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer. Sample dialogue:

ERIC: “That’s the house where Mickey keeps his gardening tools”.

JENNI: “Who’s Mickey?”

ERIC: “He’s the gardener”.

Well, thank you very much!

Anyway, he moves his new bride into the house that he and his former wife occupied before she passed away in her sleep when her skull apparently bashed itself in. Intending to drive his new wife insane (Gaslight anyone?) he leaves skulls lying around the house for her to find (every skull by the way has it’s mandible intact and it is closed not matter how it is thrown around). But there’s something waiting that even Eric didn’t expect, the first wife continually wakes Jenni up by screaming from the grave. At least that’s what we are led to believe because to the audience the scream sounds more like someone running a bandsaw across a concrete driveway.

Even though it is obvious from the first instant that Eric is the one driving Jenni insane, we are thrown a herring, a goofy gardner named Mickey who is made goofy by his unkempt hair and tacky clothes. We are given this character to throw us off Eric’s trail. Its a cameo trick because Mickey, you see, is played by Alex Nicol, the film’s director (oh ho!).

The Screaming Skull is 68 minutes long and you wouldn’t think that a movie this short would have time for padding but somehow they manage. Propelled by Miss Webber’s lovely form we are not spared a single shot in which she runs around in her Morris Daecan mosquito net nightgown. At one point(less) she sheds said nightgown revealing a bra containing more hidden wire then the Nixon White House.

There are looooooong stretches where nothing happens, Webber remains motionless while an oboe underture creeps in and she moves very very veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery slowly toward the next “thrill”. The bulk of the movie consists of standing around, looking, reacting on cue and giving kids at the drive-in time for necking. Maybe that's it. Perhaps that’s the only good thing about this interminable mess. Perhaps those lulls gave young lovers a chance to get passionate at the drive-in might just be how half of the next generation got here in the first place. So, do we owe a debt and proper respect to a movie like this? Naaaaah!