Scream for Help

For such an inept film, this British-made but New Rochelle-set horror movie is quite the crowd-pleaser. I'm not a fan of so-bad-its-good cinema, intentionally bad movies, or films that try to be campy, but I don't know if Scream For Help qualifies as any of those. It certainly has more than competent filmmakers at its helm. It was written by the great Tom Holland (Psycho II, Fright Night, Child's Play) and directed by the infamous Michael Winner (The Mechanic, Scorpio, the Death Wish movies). It features, at least what appear to be, actual young people playing the teenage protagonists. The first half plays like a sleazy, prurient Nancy Drew story, with the plucky and determined heroine madly peddling her single-speed bike to use a bulky Polaroid camera to catch the bad guy in the act. The second is more like a home invasion picture in which the killers make absurd decisions in order to keep to the all-important timetable of their half-baked plan (for which timing is not important at all). 

Rachael Kelly stars as Christie Cromwell, a teenage girl living in an extravagant mansion who discovers her stepfather (David Allen Brooks) is trying to murder her and her mother (Marie Masters) for their money. Of course, when she screams for help, no one will believe her. She's not very smart about the way she wields her accusations, and her plans to catch her stepdad plotting murder or cheating on her mom always backfire spectacularly. But she gets her act together by the film's last third, where she turns the tables in deeply satisfying ways. Winner has certainly directed some trash pictures, but they're almost always competently made, and some, like the first Death Wish, are damn good films for what they are. But this picture feels like it was made by an alien who not only hasn't made a film before but doesn't understand anything about how human beings work. The melodramatic, all-over-the-place score by Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones certainly adds to the film's tonally overwrought quality. But all of this is part of what makes Scream for Help a lot of fun.