Verdict
Summary
Correctly billed as a sleaze fest, A Scream in the Streets only gets sleazier and more explicit as it goes along, and while that might appeal to a niche demographic, anyone looking for a straight-ahead cop thriller will only get a small dose of that with its police procedural elements.
Plot:
A serial rapist and murderer is terrorizing the streets of Los Angeles, and two LAPD cops are on his trail.
Review:
A cross-dressing serial rapist and murderer of women (mostly perpetrated in an open park area) is terrorizing the streets of Los Angeles, and two newly paired-up cops are hunting him over the course of a few difficult days that has them sidelined with emergency calls to massage parlors where the clients are beating and humiliating the young staff, answering panicked calls at residences where a peeping tom is scaring couples in the middle of intercourse, and the odd call where they have to quell liquor store robberies. There’s a wild and unhinged killer on the loose (he looks like a Golden Girl with his old lady wig and skirt), and he preys on single women in the park, but no one seems to realize he’s a dude, despite all the signs pointing to the obvious. The cops on the case have lots of sex with their partners, and there are plenty of erotic interludes between other peripheral characters as well.
Correctly billed as a sleaze fest, A Scream in the Streets only gets sleazier and more explicit as it goes along, and while that might appeal to a niche demographic, anyone looking for a straight-ahead cop thriller will only get a small dose of that with its police procedural elements. The two cop characters get to stop drug deals, beat up scumbags, and have a reading-of-the-Miranda-rights scene at the end that will raise some eyebrows, but the movie is far more concerned with its close-to hardcore porn scenes that go on and on for no good reason other than to brand itself as a certain kind of movie for a certain kind of audience. The girls in the film are incredibly attractive (Sharon Kelly as the police dispatcher, for example), but all the sex takes away from the killer-on-the-loose story. There are some laugh-out-loud moments concerning the killer, and so the movie does have its entertaining aspects, but I would hesitate to call this a straight-ahead thriller, and instead define it as a scuzzy exploitationer that likely played in porno houses on 42nd street back in the day. If that’s your jam, then this will fill your jellyroll. From producer Harry Novak and director Carl Monson.
Severin has just released a crisp looking Blu-ray of A Scream in the Streets that certainly looks and sounds better than the previous DVD release from Something Strange, and it comes with several sexy short films that were expanded from scenes from the film, as well as some trailers.
