Carry On Screaming!

Young women start disappearing at the edge of a wood. The police take it up. The officer in charge is Bung and his assistant is Slobotham; both are incompetent and miss the first traces. The trail leads to the large house nearby. Dr Watt lives there; the man died some time ago and was revived by electricity. His sister Valeria is there too. The two put the abducted women through a process, turn them into mannequins and sell them to shops. Bung goes to the house and notices nothing. Gerald Thomas directs. Harry H. Corbett, Kenneth Williams, Fenella Fielding, Jim Dale and Charles Hawtrey are in the cast. It is a British production. The film is the twelfth link in the Carry On series, which ran to more than thirty and holds a place of its own in British comedy. The narrative satirises the horror films being made in Britain at the time; the large house, the laboratory and the revival scenes are direct references. The character Kenneth Williams plays is among the most cited roles in the series. The woman Fenella Fielding plays exaggerates the shape of the genre and her lines became known separately. The production values are above the average of the series; the sets and lighting were prepared to the measure of a horror film. The humour rests on wordplay and innuendo; it is bound to English and most of it is lost in translation. Its limit is accessibility; the jokes belong to their period and their language. Who it is for: viewers who like British comedy and genre parody. Who it is not for: the humour is dated, the plot thin, and the references hang loose if unknown.