Thinking about The Omega Man reminded me that I went through a horror-film/scifi film craze in my early teens. I remember gory scenes with lots of ghouls and zombies, but the films themselves were unmemorable and justly I cannot remember their titles. There were however three exceptions. The Omega Man was one. The 1970 film Scream and Scream Again (starring Christopher Lee, Vincent Price and Peter Cushing!) was the second. And the 1973 Soylent Green (again starring Charlton Heston) was the third. They had complicated plots with plenty of ironies and paradoxes and twists in their tales. And, in their own sweet way, they raised big moral and social and philosophical issues. The Omega Man I dealt with in the previous post. Scream and Scream Again, borrowing from Frankenstein’s Monster, imagines in a yucky way what happens when man-machines get out of hand (cf. 2001 A Space Odyssey and I, Robot, for example). Soylent Green, set in a dystopian Malthussian future of massive overpopulation and food scarcity, depicts a combination of institutionalised euthanasia and secret recycling of human protein. Now I have remembered them, I’ll be looking for the DVDs for, unless my memory is playing tricks, they were all well worthwhile watching. Scream and Scream Again, incidentally, has a dreadful joke discotheque title. Remember, this was 1970, in the UK, when dope-smoking was rife and the police were forever raiding pubs and clubs. The title of the discotheque? The Busted Pot. Groan!
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