With "The House That Screamed", we have a '70s European horror flick about a killer stalking the residents of a girls' boarding school.
Now, having read the above, would you believe me if I said that this movie has NO NUDITY WHATSOEVER? And barely any violence? The plot description I just provided works for basically any movie sleaze maestro Jess Franco made in the same decade.
When you have a movie about a group of girls together under one roof, you know you're probably going to get one thing: shower scenes. And guess what? In "The House that Screamed", the girls shower fully clothed! I don't think I'd ever seen that in a movie before. I had to wonder if the filmmaker did it on purpose, just to trick the audience into thinking his movie was finally going to cough up some nudity, and then - nope!
The movie is quite well shot, and I liked the locations, and some of the performers. But the script was pretty dodgy. It loses your interest a lot of the time, and few of the characters make any impression. In a movie about a school where people are required to dress the same, you need to really make the personalities of the characters stand out. In this one, I couldn't tell one girl apart from another.
The ending is also pretty ridiculous. We've seen a couple of people killed, but mostly the movie seems to depict the school itself. Then suddenly it's an exposition dump that comes out of nowhere. Obviously you expect the killer's identity to be revealed. But here we also get a ridiculous modus operandi that was not foreshadowed at all.
Now, having read the above, would you believe me if I said that this movie has NO NUDITY WHATSOEVER? And barely any violence? The plot description I just provided works for basically any movie sleaze maestro Jess Franco made in the same decade.
When you have a movie about a group of girls together under one roof, you know you're probably going to get one thing: shower scenes. And guess what? In "The House that Screamed", the girls shower fully clothed! I don't think I'd ever seen that in a movie before. I had to wonder if the filmmaker did it on purpose, just to trick the audience into thinking his movie was finally going to cough up some nudity, and then - nope!
The movie is quite well shot, and I liked the locations, and some of the performers. But the script was pretty dodgy. It loses your interest a lot of the time, and few of the characters make any impression. In a movie about a school where people are required to dress the same, you need to really make the personalities of the characters stand out. In this one, I couldn't tell one girl apart from another.
The ending is also pretty ridiculous. We've seen a couple of people killed, but mostly the movie seems to depict the school itself. Then suddenly it's an exposition dump that comes out of nowhere. Obviously you expect the killer's identity to be revealed. But here we also get a ridiculous modus operandi that was not foreshadowed at all.