Tricky Quickie

Scream of Fear (Hammer; Columbia). "You must be dead." the stepmother (Ann Todd) murmurs with sinister sympathy as the wan little crippled girl (Susan Strasberg) turns her wheelchair wearily toward bed. Poor child, she hasn't had an easy life: a divorce in the family, a fall from a horse, nine years of physical limitation and nervous debility. Then suddenly her mother's death, and now an anxious new beginning in her father's house. Odd, come to think of it, that her father isn't there to meet her, but then of course business is business, and no doubt he will be back tomorrow. In any case, his wife seems nice. She really seems to mean it when she says, "You don't know how glad I am to have you here."

She means it, all right. And just how she means it becomes gruesomely apparent before the corpsy-turvy plot of this tricky quickie has finished its first harrowing half-hour. A wind springs up in the middle of the night, and in the cripple's bedroom the door that leads to the terrace begins to bang. The girl wakes, wheels across the room to close it, sees a queer light flickering in the summerhouse, wheels across the terrace, opens the summerhouse door, looks in, sees her father sitting in an armchair--dead.

The poor child is terrified--apparently she didn't see Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, which included the same scene. She screams and wheels hysterically away. Her stepmother comes running. They go back to the summerhouse. The body is gone. "You poor dear," her stepmother says, "you've had a hallucination." And next morning the stepmother's doctor, a personable bachelor who comes to dinner almost every day, goes even further. "Your mind," he says gravely to the girl, "has suffered a blow which could affect it permanently."

As he gums this ancient hairball, the doctor does everything but twirl his mustachios and snicker up his sleeve, so it's obvious there's a will and this is the stepmother's naughty way of contesting it. But watch out. A couple of nasty surprises have been stirred into the routine ingredients of this unsavory little chiller con carne.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.