Screamtime is beloved among British members of the VHS generation. Other than nostalgia, I’m not sure why. Across the board, crucial factors such as wattage, imagination and payoff run low.
Linking three patched-together short films by UK sexploitation giant Stanley Long (London in the Raw) and House of the Long Shadows scribe Michael Armstrong, a rather daft wraparound conceit finds a couple of English hooligans watching tapes freshly shoplifted from a local video store: “I wanna see uh few mooovies.”
Arguably the most well-remembered segment comes first. It concerns Jack (Robin Bailey, the Dave Clark Five vehicle Having a Wild Weekend), a Punch and Judy-style street-theater puppeteer whose wife and stepson nag him over his beloved puppets to a point beyond humiliation and emasculation, and into annihilation. You know what’s bound to happen once he snaps, but it works in spite of its obviousness.
A meek spouse also figures in the midsection. This time, it’s the newlywed Susan (Dione Inman, 1985’s Pickwick Papers TV series), whose eyeglasses are the size of tea saucers. She wishes she could return one wedding present: the fixer-upper home gifted from her in-laws. Not only does it suffer electricity issues, but the bathtub fills with what looks like a menstrual cycle and a ghost boy rides his bike in circles on the front lawn. A hallway is the site of one effective jump scare; otherwise, this story is a bit of a cheat.
Finally, young motocross nut Gavin (UK pop singer David Van Day) needs more money than the schedule (aka “shed-ule”) at his menial menswear job allows. His out is to tend the lush garden of two biddies. They tell him it’s filled with gnomes and fairies, and you get one guess at whether such a cuckoo statement proves true once Gavin attempts a nighttime robbery of his elderly employers. —Rod Lott