I hesitate to call the 1973 exploitation flick Scream Bloody Murder a gem, but surely it qualifies as at least gem-adjacent. After all, this is a movie in which a young boy runs over and kills his father with a piece of farm equipment, only to promptly fall and lose his hand after being run over by the very same farm equipment...all in the first minute of the movie, before the title pops up.
Okay, yeah, by the end of this post I might just be calling Scream Bloody Murder a straight-up gem.
The young boy in question, Matthew, is promptly sent to an institution run by strict-looking nuns of the Silent Night, Deadly Night variety (as opposed to the fun-having nuns of the Sister Act variety, or the hot nuns of the Whichever Annabelle Movie That Was That Had the Nun In It variety). They replace his missing hand with a hook and eventually send him back home. Everyone in the movie continues to call Matthew a "boy," and he certainly speaks like a boy, but actor Fred Holbert was 28 at the time and looks every year of it. So who's to say what's going on with Matthew? Maybe it's none of my business.
One thing you can say about Matthew with total certainty, however, is that he was and continues to be a stone-cold hater. He hates that while he was away in the institution, his mother met an married a nice man and they sometimes touch each other in their private no-no parts, so he promptly kills his new stepfather and then accidentally kills his mother...all in the first ten minutes of the movie.
Matthew goes on the lam and is picked up by some kind newlyweds. They all stop to frolic in a stream (as you do) and when the newlyweds hug...well, you might figure out where this is going. That's right, Matthew is not just any hater, he is a sex hater who has tasked himself with "saving" women from the gross advances of men, whether the women enjoy said advances or not. He kills the men and he's plagued by weird visions of his dead mother Daisy, so then he kills the women, too. A Hater and a Killer: The Matthew Story.
Matthew goes on the lam 2.0 and ends up in Venice, where he meets a cool artist-prostitute named Vera, and well, you might figure out where this is going.
Vera is super chill, meeting johns in her house to pay the bills so she can spend the rest of her time painting. Matthew immediately becomes attached, and Vera is okay with being friends with him, but she's not interested in being saved: "You stay a nice little boy and I'll stay Vera who throws it down for a couple of bucks."
Again I say: "little boy"? Whatever you say, Scream Bloody Murder!
Matthew isn't happy taking "I'm happy" for an answer, however. He's concocted a wild tale, that he's from a wealthy family and lives near a mansion nearby, where Vera--whom he now calls 'Daisy' after his mother--can live out her artistic dreams without having to do all that gross sex stuff. He murders one of her johns and then sets out to make his wild tale a reality.
There is nobody Matthew won't kill to make this happen: innocents, old women, dogs...anyone that stands in the way of this dream will end up dead. After he clears the house of its rightful owner, Matthew brings Vera over for a visit, one he demands will be permanent. Vera, of course, says no thank you, so as you might expect, Matthew kidnaps her.
She continues to be ungrateful, even when Matthew points out the lengths he goes to to make her happy: "See what I do for you? I get groceries and clothes and art stuff and kill people."
This is the point when Scream Bloody Murder peters out a bit. Vera's tied up, and we get all the standard someone's being held captive sequences: the foiled escape attempts, the missed phone call, the missed visiting neighbor, and so on. One of these sequences features a pre-Tall Man Angus Scrimm, but I'll have to take imdb's word on that one because I didn't recognize him at all.
Then again, I also didn't recognize that the same actress plays Vera and Daisy! In my defense, the print for this film is terrible and at times, faces (and end credits) aren't much more than a smear.
It all picks up again during the climax, which finds Matthew on the lam 3.0, literally running from his demons. It's got a somewhat bonkers end that sorta predicts the end of the 1980 Maniac, though Scream Bloody Murder's finale features 100% more cackling and a score that can only be called "church organ madness."
Like Maniac, Scream Bloody Murder is not as exploitative as you might anticipate. More often than not it's having fun with its premise, which is remarkable because in a parallel universe this movie about a man who murders sex-enjoyers and takes a sex worker captive could be an uncomfortable watch to say the least. Instead, it's got some truly humorous sequences (a montage of one of Matthew's crime sprees is a delight) and Vera is really the rad hero of the hour-and-a-half.
Like I said from the very start, Scream Bloody Murder is a straight-up gem!
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