Scream Baby Scream (1969) (USA)

aka Nightmare House/House of Mutant Women

⭐️⭐️1/2

Florida oddity starts out strong with some jazzy opening credits and color-washed images throwing me off of solid ground. A man flees into the night but is run down by a passing motorist. We watch him loaded into an ambulance as an elderly woman shrieks about not knowing where he came from. The jazz music plays on. It’s fucking stellar… and I don’t even like jazz. It scares me. The man is given a sedative by his doctor because he won’t shut up about needing to “go back” and that “she’s still there”. That “she” is probably his super hot sixties chickadee Janet Wells and he is desperate to go back and get her. He lets the doctor know he’s an art student and two weeks ago things began to take a turn to the macabre. A famous artist works in the abstract and has a ghastly library of pieces clearly showing his preference. The problem is he’s mutilating the models he’s forcing to serve as the perfect inspiration for his art. This is all going down at his swanky house with the help of his psychotic, freaky henchmen. Janet goes missing and her derpy boyfriend goes looking for her… though they don’t seem to like each other all that much. Braindead dialogue fits our braindead heroes and adds to all the braindead charm you’d expect from a Florida genre film of the era. Our villain should definitely look into getting his stomach pumped because his scenery chewing has no restraints, coming off like a local Baptist minister channeling the tired spirit of Vincent Price. LSD is consumed, VD is most likely shared, way too much runtime is dedicated to the uninteresting antics of unlikable dopes, instead of horror we get an incredibly lame LSD trip, comedy that can not legally be called that, some horrible music and a hero who resembles a knockoff James Caan trying his best to be an unlikable knob. It’s like some idiot tried to spice up a look at the Miami college student psychedelia scene with bits of cheapjack horror… I really wish I liked it more but it really skimps on the basement terror vibes. Still watchable thanks to the last twenty minutes which finally focus on our villain (we even get an origin story!) and at least the ladies are easy on the eyes in that “she may have a low-grade fever but she’s still one hell of a stripper” way.