A man jogging through urban London grabs his heart and collapses. He wakes up in a hospital to find that his right leg has been amputated. Later, all his limbs will be cut off. Meanwhile, Intelligence Agent Konratz (Marshall Jones) returns to his home country in Eastern Europe. After debriefing by Captain Schweitz (Peter Sallis), he paralyzes and kills the captain. He is reprimanded by Major Benedek (Peter Cushing) for torturing an escapee named Erika (Yutte Stensgaard) and he kills Major Benedek too.
In London, Detective Superintendent Bellaver (Alfred Marks) investigates the rape and murder of a young woman named Eileen Stevens (Olga Linden). He goes with Forensic Pathologist Doctor David Sorel (Christopher Matthews) to see her boss Doctor Browning (Vincent Price) but gets no information. Another young woman named Sylvia (Judy Huxtable) is picked up by a sinister character named Keith (Michael Gothard), who kills her. Later, her body is found drained of blood.
It appears the two women have been raped and murdered by the same man. Several young policewomen are sent out to trap the killer. Officer Helen Bradford (Judy Bloom) is picked up at the same club as the others and driven away by Keith. The police arrive as he is drinking her blood. He fights off the police with superhuman strength. After a long chase, they cuff him and he tears off his artificial arm to escape. Finally, he throws himself into a vat of acid, in a building owned by Doctor Browning. Policewoman Helen Bradford wakes up in the same hospital bed with the same nurse as the dismembered jogger.
The police put the artificial arm in lockup, but the nurse comes in and steals it. A senior government official named Fremont (Christopher Lee) meets Konratz in Trafalgar Square and agrees to turn over evidence in exchange for a captured pilot. In the laboratory, Doctor Sorel penetrates Doctor Browning’s lab, filled with composite body parts. He discovers Doctor Browning about to dismember Helen Bradford in a plot to replace humans with composite beings. In a struggle, Browning reveals himself as one of those beings.
Konratz appears, angry that Doctor Browning has interfered with his plot. Browning and Konratz struggle and the good guys escape. Konratz is pushed into a vat of acid. Sorel and Bradford get out of the building safely and are told by Fremont to wait for him. He too is a composite being. It appears to me that the cyborg-like alien forces are now subservient to the Terran military dictatorship. Fremont subdues Doctor Browning and pushes him into the acid as well. (Christopher Lee gets to kill Vincent Price in this one.) Fremont leaves with Sorel and Helen Bradford. Sorel asks if it’s over and Fremont says that it’s only beginning.
This strange science-fiction/spy film was directed by Gordon Hassler and written by Christopher Wicking. Scream and Scream Again is more SF than a horror film, though it is full of horrifying ideas, based on The Disorientated Man novel (1967) listed as written by Peter Saxon, though that is a pseudonym for several authors. Vincent Price, Peter Cushing, and Christopher Lee are in it but are secondary characters in the complex story and hardly ever interact. It reminds me a bit of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but the aliens are also communist spies. It was not terribly successful but is now a respected cult film. In the fractured novel, the bad guys are quite obviously aliens, but in the film they act like cold warrior dictators.
The complex film was put together in one month. It doesn’t make a lot of sense until the last ten minutes, frankly. Reviews were mixed. Some critics were impressed and others were offended. It has 64% positive on Rotten Tomatoes. Vincent Price said he never did understand the script. It seems the novel was written by three different men and one wonders if they actually talked to each other a lot. Vincent Price refused a stunt double for a scene in which he was submerged in what is supposed to be acid and he had sinus problems for years afterwards.