By 1966, the Gothic horrors of Hammer Films had become sufficiently huge to warrant the Carry On treatment and dutifully, along came the the twelfth in the long-running comedy series, Carry on Screaming!, released in London first, at the New Victoria cinema, followed by a general release across the country on 9 September. Two of the series’ stalwarts may have been absent (both Kenneth Connor and Sid James were still appearing as robbers in Babes in the Wood at the London Palladium alongside Arthur Askey, Frank Ifield and Roy Kinnear when the film went into production on 6 January 1966) but they were more than capably replaced by Harry H. Corbett and Jim Dale

The former gets the leading role, playing Sidney Bung, a bungling London cop, burdened with an even more inept sidekick Slobotham (Peter Butterworth) and the series’ standard issue sharp-tongued wife Emily (Joan Sims). None of which helps his latest investigation into the disappearance of Doris Mann (Angela Douglas) from Hocombe Woods while canoodling with boyfriend Albert Potter (Dale). Despite their sheer incompetence (which gives us the immortal “whereabouts” “hereabouts” “thereabouts” “layabouts” exchange), the duo make some progress, tracing the kidnapping to an artificially created man, Oddbod (Tom Clegg, voiced, if that’s the right words for his child-like gibberings, by an uncredited Thomas), built in the laboratory of the flamboyant Dr Orlando Watt (nephew of a “Doctor Who”), played with typical manic gusto by Kenneth Williams. Fenella Fielding is on hand as Watt’s vampish sister Valeria, series regular Charles Hawtrey is great value as ever as the ill-fated Dan Dann the lavatory man, Jon Pertwee tries out his doddery old duffer routine as the police scientist who accidentally creates a second creature, and Sims and Williams meet sticky ends in a vat of wax (”frying tonight!”).

Directed, as the Carry Ons invariably were, by Gerald Thomas and written by regular Talbot Rothwell, Carry on Screaming! does an outstanding job in recreating something of the look and feel of those mid-60s Hammer Gothics. Watt’s laboratory is full of the not-sure-what-they-do-but-the-look-great gadgets and gizmos beloved of all self-respecting mad scientists and the brutish Oddbod and his cloned offspring Oddbod Junior are Frankenstein’s monsters in all but name. Doctor Watt’s name gives Williams, Butterworth and Corbett the opportunity to run through a short variation on Abbott and Costello’s famous “Who’s on first” routine, there’s a daft theme tune (sung not by Dale as is often supposed but by session man Ray Pilgrim, with “Boz” Burrell, later of King Crimson and Bad Company taking over vocal duties for the subsequent UK single release) and terrific work from cinematographer Alan Hume and designer Bert Davey who made good use of the film’s tiny £179,537 budget goes a long way to achieving that near-perfect recreation of the Hammer Gothic style.

All the usual terrible puns abound (”Oh, never mind. Ear today, gone tomorrow!”), there’s a soupcon of slapstick silliness and if it’s not quite as genuinely witty as something like Carry on Cleo (1964), Rothwell’s script has the good grace to leave very few genre clichés unsubverted. There are hints here and there of older horror traditions, particularly the 1930s Universal horrors (that routine confusing Watt’s name reminds us that Abbott and Costello were doing this sort of things years before) and the plot owes more than a little to The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), and indeed to more recent phenomena like the hit TV series The Addams Family (1964-1966) but Hammer were the main target here and the film hits the spot more often than it misses.

Some might bemoan the lack of some of the series regulars, but you can’t fault Corbett as Bung and indeed it’s hard to imagine that even James could have improved on his performance – indeed, his trademark roguish screen persona might actually have counted against the film. The rest of the cast are all having a ball and if the performances are as broad as you’d expect, they’re all a lot of fun, though Dale perhaps isn’t as good here as he was in Cleo. Initially, Charles Hawtrey had been left out of the production as it was originally felt that there was no suitable role for him, prompting CHB Williamson of the influential trade journal Today’s Cinema to pen a piece complaining about Hawtrey’s absence. Stuart Levy, who was still distributing the Carry Ons at this time through his company Anglo Amalgamated (he died in June 1966), had badgered producer Peter Rogers, worrying that his absence would adversely affect the film’s success. Eventually Rogers relented and poor Sydney Bromley, who had been cast as Dan Dann was elbowed out of the way and Hawtrey took over the role though his contribution amounts to little more than a single scene.

Despite a lukewarm reception from the critics, The Times strangely dismissing it as “one of the dullest and least spirited of them all,” Carry on Screaming! was another roaring success for Rogers and co, Nat Cohen of distributors Anglo Amalgamated announcing in the trade press that it “grossed to date at the box office the biggest take in the history of Anglo Amalgamated.” By now both Hammer and the Carry Ons – both series produced on the tightest of budgets re-using the same cast and crew – were box office juggernauts and even at their least impressive were still packing them in at cinemas the length and breadth of the land. Screaming! doesn’t quite scale the heights of Cleo or the subsequent Carry On Up the Khyber (1968) but it’s certainly no slouch, delivering the right number of silly gags and a spot-on send-up of the Hammer style. Thomas seemed to have been particularly inspired, Screaming! featuring some of his best and most inventive work in the series.