Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie''s plot.
Of all the Decrepit Crypt movies, this is one of the few I’ve been looking forward to seeing. But only because it’s from 1971 (released in 1973), so my hope was that, if it’s got to be bad, it would at least be fun bad, you know? And it was. Dumb, dumb movie with some really over the top acting and pathetic effects, but it was still fun, and if you can’t get enough of 1970s film stock, this is the place to be. Plus it’s got a very young and dapper-looking Angus Scrimm, so how can you go wrong?
Before we get into it, however, a note of caution. Like I said, this movie was made in 1971 and released in 1973, but it appears there was another SCREAM BLOODY MURDER released in 1972 with an entirely different plot, cast, and crew. It’s this SBM, the 1972 version, which is listed here in the Epinions database, only the PLOT listed is for the 1971-1973 version. So it’s really anyone’s guess which movie is supposed to be listed here. However, since this one has that 71-73 gap, and since the plot matches this movie, I’m splitting the difference and calling it good. Now onto the review:
Matthew is a young boy on his family farm watching his father work on a bulldozer one day when Matthew gets it into his head that jumping up in the driver’s seat and playing with the gears would be a really boss idea. Unfortunately, he didn’t mention this to pop and the bulldozer mows down the old man. Freaked out, Matthew jumps from the tractor and somehow lands ahead of it so that the treads run over his left hand. He’s committed to a hospital for the next decade or so, where he’s given a hook to replace his missing hand, and eventually released. But when Matthew returns home, he finds his mother has remarried. This doesn’t go over well and Matthew chops up the new husband with an ax before accidentally killing his mother as well.
Before he can be found out, Matthew hits the road in 70s style, catching a ride with a newlywed couple on the way out of town. Of course he has to kill them, too, because the hallucinations tell him it’s his mother and step-father returned to torment him. Eventually, Matthew winds up down the coast on a beach where he meets Vera. Vera is an amateur at painting, but a professional in other areas. If you can dig it. Matthew gets it into his head that Vera can replace his dear old mother (probably because, according to IMDb, they were played by the same actress, Leigh Mitchell, although I never would have guessed that), so he starts trying to convince her she doesn’t have to see these other men, she doesn’t have to let them touch her-Matthew’s got obvious mommy issues on top of his intimacy issues-but Vera’s a strong, independent women, a free spirit, and the master of her own destiny and no one can tell her what to do.
So Matthew does what anyone would do in a situation like that, if they were delusional and homicidal. He’s told Vera his father is rich and that he lives in a mansion, so Matthew finds a suitable mansion in a nice neighborhood, kills the old woman who lives there alone, and kidnaps Vera so he can keep her there forever and ever. And she’ll never have to let those filthy men touch her again.
SCREAM BLOODY MURDER--retitled MATTHEW for the Decrepit Crypt set--is full-on 70s glory. The clothes, the haircuts, it’s all there. Larry Alexander and Marc B. Ray mean well with their screenplay, but it seemed as if they got so wrapped up in their idea, they forgot to work out the logic of it. There’s no follow-up on the killing of Matthew’s mother and step-father, nor is there any further mention of Matthew’s mugging spree one afternoon when he needs to get money to buy Vera lots of pretty things. And they seem to be holed up in old lady Anatole’s house for a few days, Matthew tooling around town in her nice car, but no one ever notices. In that neighborhood? I just didn’t buy that the screenwriters had worked out all the holes--hell, ANY of the holes--before going into production. But since Ray acted as director, too, maybe he thought he could just breeze over those points with his brilliant directing skills and no one would notice. It was the last movie he directed, although he went on to write a few more, including the third installment in the original STEPFATHER series.
The script, also, is way overdone. The dialogue is too simple and naïve, even though I understand Matthew is supposed to be a disturbed character with a stunted emotional and mental development, but there’s a point where enough’s enough and you have to stop writing down to the audience. And it doesn’t help that Fred Holbert takes playing Matthew a little too seriously. He gives it his all, I’ll grant him that, but sometimes less is more, you know?
You won't recognize the cast from their later work, because there wasn't any; it appears everyone except Angus Scrimm made this movie, then went back to real life and got jobs or something. Or maybe MATTHEW was such a hit, none of them ever needed to work again. hahahahahahahahahahaahahaha, I kid.
I think there were definitely a number of missed opportunities in this movie, especially concerning Matthew’s obvious Oedipus Complex, but it's only because we've already been exposed to similar stories so many times over the years. It wouldn't have hurt Alexander and Ray to go a little deeper into the character, for our sake if nothing else. Hell, we don’t even know why he killed his father, whether intentional or not. The Oedipus Complex is all there laid out for us, but never fully addressed.
MATTHEW was a lazy movie, was probably shot very quickly with a pretty small budget, by people who knew what they wanted to say, just failed miserably at saying it. It happens, you know. You get a great story idea but something gets lost in translation from conception to execution. I can’t fault them for trying, but at the very least they could have made their flawed movie a little less goofy and laughable. “It was the 70s” only goes so far, sometimes a bad movie is a bad movie, period.
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