Somewhere between a live action Disney movie from the 1970s (Candleshoe? I’ve never seen it) and Last House On The Left. Douglas Sirkian suburban New England with big houses and fall leaves, tainted with a strain of scuzziness. Disreputable pig Michael Winner has always been to my knowledge a god amongst hacks who employed his success as a director with Death Wish in diminishing returns for Cannon Movies, and yet Scream For Help (1984) might be his best or at least most entertaining movie since Death Wish III.
With a script by Tom Holland (writer of Psycho II, future director of Fright Night and Child’s Play), the story kicks into gear from the first scene: teenager Christie (Rachael Kelly) is convinced her step-father is plotting to kill her mother. Scream For Help is best experienced without any further details, but a lot of its pleasures come through the bizarre conflation of tones. Of a Nancy Drew teenage investigator riding a bike around to the sleaziness and violence of a junk-Eighties slasher. Winner as a director always seems to know when to add a shot or a moment that is just lurid and unseemly. “They wouldn’t make this today!” etc.
Rachael Kelly in the lead role has a righteous earnestness that keeps it all cooking. There’s a bland sitcom-level blank evil to David Allen Brooks as the stepfather, Lola Lesheim as a trashy vamp and Rocco Sisto is imposing as a psycho criminal (Sopranos fans will know him as the future Uncle Junior in the TV show’s flashbacks).
A movie that has the sordid but compelling aura of a tattered VC Andrews paperback with obscene pen-graffiti in the margins. There’s an uncut copy floating around on YouTube.
VHS Tracking 