Can anyone stop the alien foreheads as they rampage through Longhead Bay, sucking the souls of the innocent and turning them into zombies? Following up his hilarious The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, director Larry Blamire returns to further explore his own razor-sharp brand of cult cinema parody with this priceless gem. Featuring cameo appearances from veteran genre actors such as James Karen, Betty Garrett, Dick Miller and the iconic Kevin McCarthy (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), a hypnotic theme song by The Manhattan Transfer and special effects courtesy of stop-motion animation experts The Chiodo Brothers (Team America: World Police), Trail of the Screaming Forehead sees Blamire reworking classic 1950s monster movie The Blob in his own inimitable style.

His eye for side-splitting detail is clear. Visually reminiscent of Warren Beatty’s 1990 film version of Dick Tracy, this colourful pastiche glows with a warm familiarity that could only be achieved through the love of a subject, whilst thriving on a rich vein of well observed humour similar to that exploited by Jim Abrahams and the Zucker Brothers in the Airplane! films.

Having fine-tuned the style they employed so successfully in his first film, Blamire’s regular company of actors return to inhabit another clutch of his brilliant caricatures. From Brian Howe’s burly ship’s captain Big Dan Frater to Jennifer Blaine’s alluring gangster’s moll Droxy Chapelle, their satirically heightened performances are uniformly excellent, easily occupying Blamire’s acutely realised world of fractured B-movie stereotypes, and providing a crucial contribution to the film’s comic success.

The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra (which will return in his next project, The Lost Skeleton Returns Again) was a hard act to follow, but with Trail of the Screaming Forehead, Blamire outdoes himself and ensures not only that the audience he snared with his assured debut will be delighted once again, but that his fanbase will swell.