Tonight's Awful Bedtime Movie: The Screaming Skull (1958)


How scary is this movie? So scary the producers open the film with a guarantee of free burial for anyone who dies of fight while watching it.

Thankfully for the producers they issued no such guarantee for those who die of boredom.

Long story short, transparently evil dude marries wealthy woman and moves her to his home after his previous wife dies at the home under mysterious circumstances.

New wife is haunted by ghosts and random skulls, which threaten to send her back to the insane asylum where evil dude found her, meaning he would inherit her fortune.

Movie actually expects you not to figure this out in the first 15 minutes, to the point where the futilely try to make you think the mentally handicapped groundskeeper did it.

But there is at least something of a twist at the end (evil dude gets his ghostly comeuppance.)

Not sure what makes this endearingly bad. The acting is fairly well done. The sets aren't cheap. The plot, while inane, is a pretty cool idea. Maybe it's the fact that, like all great bad movies, and especially American International Pictures productions, they just didn't try that hard.