THE SCREAMING SKULL (1958)

Eric brings his new wife Jenni to his family estate which has been shut up for a couple of years, though it has been kept up by the gardener, Mickey, a mentally handicapped young man. The newlyweds have both gone through rough times: Eric's first wife Marion died during a storm by slipping on a wet leaf, hitting her head and drowning in a pond on the estate; Jenni was a witness to both her parents drowning in a boating accident and she had a breakdown, winding up in an asylum for a time. Eric fears she's still a little fragile and enlists the help of his friend and neighbor the Reverend Snow and his wife to help keep an eye on her. A couple of complicating bits of backstory: Eric's first wife Marion was wealthy—the estate belonged to her—and Jenni also comes from money; Mickey the gardener was particularly close to Marion and has never really accepted that she's dead. Despite the best efforts of Eric and the Snows, Jenni starts freaking out pretty quickly: 1) she's certain that she hears Marion's ghost wandering the house at night; 2) she's disturbed by a huge portrait of Marion that still hangs in the house; 3) the unearthly cries of the peacocks who live on the estate startle her. Then a creepy skull, that others don't seem to see, starts cropping up in weird places.

This B-thriller will remind you at various times of movies like REBECCA (the possibly sinister influence of the first wife) and GASLIGHT (is Mickey, resentful of the new mistress of the house, trying to drive Jenny back to the asylum?). Though there is promise in the plot, the low budget, sloppy writing, and variable acting work against it. The big house has almost no furniture—it's all supposedly still in storage—which makes me think the producers just found a big empty house to use, but actually the sparse settings wind up working well. The character of Mickey (played by the film's director Alex Nicol) is poorly conceived and not terribly well acted. John Hudson (as Eric), Russ Conway (Rev. Snow) and Toni Johnson (Mrs. Snow; the actor's name is misspelled in the credits) are pretty good, but Peggy Webber as Jenni gives a disappointing two-note performance—she's either on the verge of going crazy or she's blandly passive. The title skull is not very scary. We expect there to be rational explanations for the haunting, and there are, but at the climax things take an odd turn toward the supernatural, which in a better written script might have worked well. This American International release opens with a William Castle-like gimmick, offering to pay for the coffin of any who dies of shock during the movie. Not gonna happen. Pictured are Hudson and Webber. [DVD]