Excellent, a Must See

The film was still a fun one that will make you laugh and have you leaving the theater feeling like you just stole something valuable and got away with it.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

1795: Sir Charles Fengriffin (Ian Oglivy) brings his young bride Catherine (Stephanie Beacham) home to his estate and she falls victim to a curse upon his family. Some 50 years ago, Sir Charles's grandfather Sir Henry (Herbert Lom) raped woodcutter Silas's wife in front of his very eyes on their wedding night. When he resisted Sir Henry cut off his hand with an axe. Silas vowed that the next virgin bride who came to the Fengriffin estate would be violated just as his wife was and if anybody tried to prevent it they would die. In consequence, Catherine suffers from a series of gruesome apparitions including a severed hand appearing and disappearing at will (on one occasion punching its way through the canvas of a painting of Sir Henry) and a mouldering corpse with a bloodied severed hand. After the family solicitor Maitland (Guy Rolfe) and the housekeeper Mrs Luke (Rosalie Crutchley) die in horrible circumstances, Catherine falls pregnant and the child is born with a hand missing and an identical birth mark to that of Silas and his son (Geoffrey Whitehead) who lives on the estate and taunts the family . Sir Charles calls in the psychiatrist Dr Pope (Peter Cushing) to investigate the affair...A pretty standard haunted house ghost yarn that sometimes borders on the absurd - do they really expect us to believe that a woman can give birth to a child who was fathered by a ghost? No, I don't think so. Nevertheless, apart from that and the odd moments of crudity and unpleasantness, there is still much to watch here. Director Roy Ward Baker's direction is imaginative featuring some spectacular camerawork and some impressive special effects, which deliver some jumpy and well timed shocks. The film's attention to period detail is superb thanks to the subdued and atmospheric lighting of Denys Coop and Tony Curtis' art direction. It also depicts the brutality and corruption of the aristocracy of the period in which the story is set. For instance, Sir Henry Fengriffin's (played with a convincingly sinister edge by Herbert Lom) country estate and the debauched crowd he fills it with has connotations of the Hellfire Club and his treatment of his servant, the woodcutter Silas (Geoffrey Whitehead who offers the best performance in the movie as the ill-fated Silas and his vengeful son giving the part a genuinely frightening authenticity) shows how the wealthier and powerful classes could exploit the poor and the powerless with impunity. The film's most powerful scene is when Catherine's baby is born and Dr Pope lifts it out of its cot and gives it to her to hold and we are moved and kept on the edge of our seat wondering if she will reject him or accept him as her son. Oglivy and Beacham give only serviceable performances while Cushing offers the right amount of authority as the London doctor brought in to solve the mystery, but he has very little to do here and it certainly does not rank among his greatest performances.Overall, And Now The Screaming Starts is a very worthy genre piece from Amicus (Hammer's main rival throughout the 60's and 70's and best known for their portmanteau horror pictures) that may be routine in terms of its storyline, but a combination of some good performances, rich period detail and clever direction ensure that it is unmissable for fans of classic British horror films.

This little-seen film blends together a myriad of classic horror themes, such as ghosts, crawling hands, wrong doings and curses. It's a classic example of British horror, set in a standard haunted house (there's even a graveyard nearby). Early '70s fashions are sadly non-existent here, as it's a period piece and all the costumes are of the historical variety, although there's nothing wrong with that. While the plot for the film is a typical (and dare I say clichéd) one, it has plenty of incident to keep it moving and loads of different ingredients to make it enjoyable. However, the winning formula for this film is the cast.Ian Ogilvy (WITCHFINDER GENERAL), Stephanie Beacham (INSEMINOID), Patrick Magee (DEMENTIA 13), and Herbert Lom (ASYLUM) all act convincingly and enjoyably in their roles. Ogilvy doesn't get to do much but look haunted as the husband, but Beacham is on top form here, giving it her all as the screaming victim. Magee is fine as usual, while the fantastic Lom adds yet another cruel character to his resumé. As soon as Peter Cushing arrives, playing a doctor with a dodgy toupee, the fun really begins and things get even better. Cushing's performance is as usual, excellent, but all performances from a cast well familiar to the horror fan are varied and good.The sheer diversity of different ingredients in this film make it work, and I advise you to sit it through in order to witness a most amusing moment at the end, when Ian Ogilvy dashes Herbert Lom's skeleton apart against his tomb - serve him right, the nasty old man. You also get the classic "crawling hand" prop, which was reused by various studios throughout the 60's and 70's - spotting it is half the fun! AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS may not break any new boundaries in the horror genre but it's a good, solid, old-fashioned ghost story and it's very entertaining, with exactly the same quaint and brooding atmosphere as a quality Hammer horror piece.

Catherine (Stephanie Beacham) the new blushing bride of Charles Fengriffen (Ian Ogilvy) comes to live at his old family estate. On their first night together a family curse rears it's ugly head when a ghost rapes and impregnates her. Dr. Pope (Peter Cushing) is brought into the mix to figure the mess and solve the riddle of the curse.'…And Now The Screaming Starts' is a solid tale from the Amicus Studios. The acting is on par with this type of film, slightly over the top and hammy but that's to be expected for this fare. While the production value is close to the grand productions of Hammer Studios (Amicus' chief competitor) the film lacks the lovely atmosphere of the Gothic Hammer films.

I remember being underwhelmed when I first watched this (a pan & scan airing on TV some years ago), but re-acquainting myself with it via Anchor Bay UK's exemplary DVD edition has proved surprisingly enjoyable - despite its utter lack of originality! Being Amicus' sole foray into full-blown Gothic horror, this film perhaps draws the most comparisons with the 'rival' Hammer films, and as such manages to keep its own in their company by virtue of its polished (if not expensive) production values - Denys Coop's intricate camera-work, Douglas Gamley's atmospheric score and Tony Curtis' handsome sets - and its top cast, comprised of any number of renowned genre stars.Stephanie Beacham (who screams and faints like the best of them!) actually manages to keep the audience involved in her plight, which is no easy feat seeing that precious little of the plot is revealed during its first half; Ian Ogilvy is an adequately brooding master-of-the house; Geoffrey Whitehead is a mysterious and vaguely sinister woodsmen who lives on the property (actually doubling as his own grandfather in the flashback sequence towards the end); Guy Rolfe and Rosalie Crutchley have small but fairly important roles in support. However, the film belongs to three thespians and it seems that the producers knew this as well, given they were top-billed: Peter Cushing, whose belated arrival does not disguise the fact that he's the true star of the show (nothing new for him here, really, but he's always worth watching); Herbert Lom as a particularly nasty descendant of Ogilvy's and whose misdemeanors have put a terrible curse over the entire house; Patrick Magee as the compassionate but eventually weak-willed town medic (who's regrettably thrown to the sidelines and eventually dispatched once Cushing, who's of a more analytical approach, arrives on the scene).The film features a number of effective moments: the hand bursting out of the painting; the many scenes involving the crawling hand (though a rather tired motif by now, especially since it was not a part of the original novel!); likewise, the many appearances of Whitehead's disfigured and spooky ancestor; the all-important flashback involving Lom's character (basically lifted outright from Conan Doyle's "The Hound Of The Baskervilles") which, apart from brutal (if not too graphic) rape and symbolic mutilation, also features some brief nudity - unless I'm mistaken, a first for Amicus (in contrast, Beacham's violation by the 'ghost' is presented in a lot subtler way which, by the end, only led to confusion for some viewers as to what had really happened to her!); the finale is quite interesting for this type of film (though, again, hardly ground-breaking in the broader scheme of things): Ogilvy going mad a' la WITCHFINDER GENERAL (1968) and literally digging up his grandfather's corpse while Beacham, equally unhinged by this time, is perplexed by the presence of her new-born child who may or may not be 'possessed' (echoes of ROSEMARY'S BABY [1968]) - the sight of Cushing presiding over this scene and realizing that all his 'enlightened' advise has brought only misery upon the couple lends the whole a rare (and probably unwitting) poignancy.With respect to the video/audio department, Anchor Bay UK handles this area of the disc satisfactorily. The Audio Commentaries are the icing on the cake for this release - two excellent tracks that take in everything one would possibly want to know about the production, including the fact that all seemingly agree on the singularly unbecoming retitling of the film by producer Max J. Rosenberg, and then some (Ogilvy comes off as a very pleasant chap who looks back at his days in horror cinema with great fondness, though he continually underestimates his own memory of them!; Stephanie Beacham and Roy Ward Baker seem very glad to be once again in each other's company while also evidently very proud of their respective work here; moderators Darren Gross and Marcus Hearn, respectively, come up with relevant questions and general factoids so that both tracks remain, ahem, on track for the most part. Finally, there are film notes, bios, a trailer, some TV spots and a poster/stills gallery which, as with the other discs in this Collection, add up to a very nice extra touch.