Review of A Taste of Evil

Writer Jimmy Sangster revised his own "Scream of Fear" from 1961, but the results this time are ludicrous when they're not incoherent. A young woman returns to her family's home in San Francisco after spending several years in a Swiss institution; seems she was attacked by an unknown man when she was a child, and the familiar surroundings quickly begin playing tricks with her mind--or is someone trying to drive her insane? Lumbering TV-yarn at first features Barbara Parkins running around the opulent woodland grounds in a terrified state, then exchanges Parkins' screams for those of Barbara Stanwyck's, playing Parkins' mother. Both actresses are at the mercy of a teleplay so contrived, the plot twists are not so much surprising as they are confounding. There's no attention to detail (at least, not logical detail) in Sangster's scenario, and the story becomes so muddled that the final revelations are practically irrelevant. Parkins keeps shooing Stanwyck off to the store or away to the airport, while Arthur O'Connell shuffles around as a simpleton groundskeeper and William Windom pops up intermittently as a drunken stepfather (always with the same pained expression on his face). Dreadful!