Memorable, crazy movie

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Dreadfully Boring

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Previous reviewers said pretty much all about the scene, so I'd just add that this scene looks more like an insert or even a short film that had been shoot prior or during the main production and than edited into the film before its release. A guest in massage parlor, Mr. Heat was played by the well-known softcore actor from the early 1970's, Norman Fields. The question is who played the girl. Does anybody saw her in any other movie , either feature length or short one? If someone has some information about that actress or can get it somehow, please let me know via e-mail. Thanks in advanced. P.S The DVD is very likely edited down version. I found the French version with running time of 120 min and also one Swedish site mentions approx. 119 min.

Anytime John Tull is in a movie it is hard not to like it. Something Weird Video offers many Tull titles and each one has its own ridiculous charm. I love the line in the film where he is talking to his girlfriend on the bed and says something like, "Now, for those split beaver pants"! (His girlfriend was dressed for a 1950s costume party...) Lines like this make A Scream in the Streets and John Tull a "gem" of 70s sleaze cinema. It's not only Tull that captivates me, but how about that scene where the robber holds up the convenience store? I love the look of "horror" on the owner's face. (Actually, it looks like the guy has no idea what is going on...) I also love when the robber jumps out of the glass door in slow motion. Hey, they don't make movies like this anymore! A movie so horrible that I can't help but love it! The cross dressing killer somehow goes unnoticed (though it is so obvious that "she" is a man), the dialog is amusingly horrid, John Tull bares "Tull junior", and don't forget the flaccid member during one of the sex scenes in the massage parlor! God, I wish I lived in the 70s to experience this stuff first hand!

OK, this was a bit of a disappointment. I purchased the German version of this movie from eBay which appears to be an ancient rental copy. The cover is really nice, it pictures a man with an axe dismembering a screaming woman. The German title literally is The Slaughterer and has the following catch lines on the cover: Chopped alive, he hates all women, his only love is his axe.Unfortunately, the movie is quite different than what the advertising on the VHS cover suggests. Its 80 minutes long (PAL version) and not even ten minutes are devoted to the killer and his work. The lion share of celluloid is used for a number of rather steamy sex scenes, you get to see some genital parts indeed. The rest is second unit shots of the two cops driving their car doing their job.The only thing that makes the movie worth watching 8and that is only the first 40 minutes of it) is a long scene in a brothel where an old pervert is doing his thing on a masseuse. The dialog is really fun.The two or three scenes with the killer an his victims are mediocre at best. You don't get to see any stabbing, just the results.This movie is real turkey and can only be beared when intoxicated. This film should NOT be viewed by minors.

WARNING SPOILERS INCLUDED 'The World is Full of Freaks' remarks one cop to another in A Scream in the Streets and the film itself seems on a quest to prove his point. A detective thriller by way of a transvestite horror movie by way of the down and dirtiest kind of sexploitation feature. Scream takes no prisoners, even as the credits are rolling we're privy to a berserk man in drag roughing up a girl and tearing her clothes off. The film takes place over a hot week in LA as cop Ed Haskell, married and by the book has to act partner to Bob Streeker a hotheaded bachelor. In a threadbare Dragnet fashion they drive around LA acting as a link to the films gamut of criminal behaviour. At a downtown massage parlour the bearded owner rages at one of his girls who wants nothing to do with a customer nicknamed 'Fanny Freak'. Mr Fanny Freak is a rich, decrepit, skinny bald old man whose rough treatment has already sent one of the girls down to the hospital. Eventually the girl plays along, Fanny Freak gets to give her the massage and genially gets his dollars worth from her but this does little to cram the urge for his vice. Fanny Freak eventually goes into a tantrum smashing the owner over the face with a bottle and moving in on the girl- chasing her around the parlour with his belt. Deeper in suburbia a bloated voyeur who like a punch drunk boxer is mad at the world, peeps through a window at a swinger couple smoking dope. Dressed in a joke shop 50's nostalgia outfit the woman inexplicably resembles some gangster's moll who has fallen on hard times and has to appear in loops with the ugliest looking man imaginable. It all gets too much for Streeker who seems to be in one foul mood that gradually gets worse and worse as the week progresses. He works off his aggression by blowing holes in bank robbers or stomping suspects. All the while the threat of the transvestite sex killer looms in the background. Despite his fat legs, pink dresses and blonde wig, the transvestite is somehow undetected as he prowls around a park. Whenever he's near a woman he freaks-out, laughing hysterically while issuing twisted demands at knife-point before performing psycho surgery on the women when things get too hot. 'I hate you, I hate all women, you're rotten ohhhh' he says as he pummels an undercover policewoman. Too empathise what a fiend the transvestite is we're told he's picked off one of Haskell's teenage neighbours, a fact that jars Mrs Haskell who its revealed was the victim of a similar teenage assault. We last see the Peeping Tom trailing a woman home, in the process learning she's part of a bored housewives group who have made making out behind their husband's backs an afternoon pastime. A mock twister game provides the films lewdest sight gag as the girls manage to keep the peeper occupied while phoning the police at the same time. Scream was shot in 1972 the same year that would see Deep Throat and its ilk legitimatize triple X rated films. Seemingly anticipating the gradual change from softcore to hardcore, Scream takes 'soft X' as far as it would go... maybe further. Like in the late Carl Monson's most popular offering Please Don't Eat My Mother the appearance of well known sex actresses in the cast as well as an hitherto unheard of on screen frankness poses a good case for Scream being shot as hardcore and then cut down for a more general release. Scream is also a bigger Trojan horse in that like producer Harry Novak's 1970 film The Booby Trap its extreme nature was down-played in its publicity which favoured to sell it as a straight forward crime thriller. A Scream in the Streets is less a straightforward narrative than a group of sadistic outbursts that skips on few fetish. You sit transfixed, always anticipating the worst as its degenerate character actors get ready to explode like fireworks. Uncannily suited to their scummy parts you wonder if Monson didn't just spot these people on the streets of LA, roll down his window and holler 'hey creep wanna be in a movie? theres some really purrtey girls in it'. Rarely seen in its 86 minute entirety, cut versions bearing titles like Scream Street and Girls in the Street often lose quite a deal of footage with the fanny freak or the bored housewives club scenarios being the first to be snipped or lost. A Scream in the Streets waves its Hollywood Boulevard sleaze flag high, capturing a place at its most extreme and lawless which makes its on the street shootouts and grubby massage parlours all too believable. The weeklong madness ends in its final sucker punch. The transvestite works over another girl then kills Haskell in the confusion. Finally he gets his comeuppance when he learns that men in dresses should not call an armed cop a 'schmuck'. The ironic fade out brings full circle the films cycle of violent men who can't control themselves, but what really sticks in your mind is that Scream's violent events are probably all ready to be played out again the following week.