Film Review: Carry On Screaming! (1966)

Until very recently, if you were to ask me which British franchise held the record for having the most films, without hesitation and with utmost certainty, I would have answered, “James Bond.” And I would have been dead wrong. To date, Eon Productions (the British company that makes the Bond films) has released twenty-five 007 movies, falling six short of England’s grand franchise champion, the Carry On films.

Between 1958 and 1992, producer Peter Rogers and director Gerald Thomas made 31 comedy spoofs in their Carry On series, of which I have now officially seen exactly one: the Hammer and Universal horror parody Carry On Screaming! from 1966. It would be unfair to judge the other thirty films (not to mention four Christmas specials, a television series, and a handful of stage productions) from this one outing, but if I were to do so, I’d say that Rogers and Thomas are one bawdy duo indeed.

Full of risqué innuendo and mustache-twirling villainy, Carry On Screaming! features a plot so ridiculous and convoluted that it almost bears admiration. Things kick off as a randy fellow and his gal (Jim Dale and Angela Douglas) paw each other in a dimly lit and secluded grove. Before long, they are assaulted by a lumbering, hairy beastman named Oddbod (Tom Clegg), who kidnaps the girl but inexplicably leaves one of his own severed fingers behind.

From here, the investigation into the poor woman’s disappearance is on — one that takes our beau and a pair of bumbling detectives (Harry H. Corbett and Peter Butterworth) first to a pervy men’s lavatory and then to a creepy old mansion full of overacting Vincent Price worshippers and Lily Munster knock-offs (Kenneth Williams and Fenella Fielding).

And then things get weird. 

I’m dying to tell you the motive behind the kidnapping, but it’s so laughably absurd that I’m not sure I should spoil it. Oh, what the hell. The villains are stealing women so they can turn them into mannequins to be sold to department stores. There you have it. To me, it seems there might be an easier way to produce and sell mannequins, but I’ve never considered myself much of an expert on the subject, so I’ll refrain from judgment for now. There’s also a subplot about a mummy thrown in, but, much like every other element of the film, it doesn’t have much bearing on anything at all and seems to only exist because the studio happened to have a prop sarcophagus laying around. 

Carry On Screaming! is a mess, but it’s not without its charms. The racy and suggestive undertones can be clever at times, even if they’re delivered with all the subtlety of a freight train. More often than not, though, they come off as the outdated, sexist jokes they are, which, at the time, I’m sure was a selling point, but now just seems cheap and silly. And while I can’t bring myself to recommend this odd bit of 1960s filmdom to discerning fans of quality cinema, I have no problem doing so for fans of dry British humor sprinkled with bits of innocent enough Benny Hill-styled raunch. Cue “Yakety Sax.”