STOP ME… opens just after a car accident, the credits play out over shots of the wreckage and passengers. The driver’s head is through the windshield, his unconscious body motionless. His female passenger writhes briefly in her seat and passes out. From there we jump to the head injury patient’s release from hospital, we learn the man was a race car driver and the woman his wife and they were on their honeymoon. They plan to resume the honeymoon, while the husband continues to convalesce. Trouble emerges right away though, as the couple begins to make love, the husband is possessed by an uncontrollable urge to strangle his partner. This leads them to seek psychiatric care which results in a rather unorthodox doctor / patient relationship, where the doctor seems to been more interested in his patient’s wife, than his possibly psychotic patient’s well being.
This 1960 Hammer Film (released under the Falcon banner) is one of the lesser psycho thrillers in their catalog, and the genre would not hit for them until a year later with SCREAM OF FEAR. As with THE SNORKEL, Columbia cut the film down for release in the US,although in this case it was surely not as damaging. Val Guest had a hand in the screenplay and directs, & while the cast is decent, the only familiar face here is Ronald Lewis, who would fare better in 1961’s SCREAM OF FEAR. The movie suffers primarily due to a long, drawn out script that hinges on a rather silly plot hook, the entire affair comes off overblown. The film slowly turns to the climax, where things pick up briefly (while retaining the same lack of credibility).
Nearly impossible to see today, the movie once was released to TV through Screen Gems ( the TV arm of Columbia ). The film ran 120 min in the UK, and was cut to 90 min for it’s US run. The TV print I watched clocked in at 108 min, somewhere in the middle, but felt overlong. The finale was clearly softened for TV, as a rather obvious cut transpires at a key moment. The original Megascope image is present only briefly and squeezed during one set of opening credits, the rest of the film plays out in full screen, but sans panning. Nor is it a dead center transfer, instead, it is more akin to what I will hence forth christen skip and scan, as the framing does shift to the left and right throughout, but does so abruptly, jumping back and forth across the wide Megascope terrain as needed to keep the bulk of the desired image on screen. Film lovers have great disdain for pan and scan transfers, skip and scan takes it to a more intrusive, disruptive level.