Scream and Scream Again

• The three horror icons, Price, Lee, and Cushing, share almost no screen space. Price and Lee get one brief confrontation scene near the climax; Cushing, playing totalitarian-state official Major Heinrich Benedek, appears alone in a single scene and never crosses paths with either of them. Combined, all three actors' screen time adds up to roughly a fifth of the runtime.
• The film is credited to Peter Saxon's 1967 novel 'The Disorientated Man' (also published as 'The Disoriented Man'), not 'The Disintegrated Man.' The book already mixed a Cold War political-conspiracy thread into its alien-vampire plot, so screenwriter Christopher Wicking didn't invent the Eastern Bloc subplot from scratch, though his script otherwise diverges heavily from the novel's specifics.
• It was a joint production between Milton Subotsky's Amicus Productions, which bought the novel's rights, and American International Pictures, financed through AIP's European operations head Louis Heyward.
• The US and UK prints differ in more than runtime. The American cut trims a couple of minor character beats (a peeping drunk, a slapstick rock-throwing gag) and drops a brief Price/Lee exchange ('But what of the dream?' / 'There is only nightmare'), and it closes over a black screen with the theme song instead of the UK cut's lingering shot of Browning's lab.
• The jogger who keeps waking up missing limbs, Ken Sparten (Nigel Lambert), is never shown mid-amputation. Each scene just reveals the aftermath as he wakes in bed, all the way down to the final reveal that all that's left of him is a brain in a jar.
• Released in the UK in January 1970 and the US the following month, the film pulled in roughly $1.2 million against a $350,000 budget, going from a mostly overlooked release to a minor cult favorite cited as one of the better British sci-fi horror films of its era.

The Eastern Bloc coup subplot isn't a digression. The composite beings are the real super-soldier program, and the political revolution is simply the application phase. Dr. Browning's experiments aren't mad science for its own sake, they are state-sponsored R&D, and the film's real villain is the military-industrial apparatus that builds composite men out of people like Sparten.

The film's notorious three-plot structure is deliberate fragmentation mirroring the composite creatures themselves. The viewer assembles the narrative the same way the surgeon assembles a creature, from disconnected pieces. The film refuses coherence because its subject is something built from parts that don't belong together.

Sparten's track-star identity is the real horror. He begins as a whole, autonomous person and is incrementally reduced to a collection of components. The vampire killings are misdirection, the true threat is a medical system that sees human beings as inventory.

A serial killer stalks London, draining victims of their blood through surgical incisions. Meanwhile, a fascist coup unfolds in an unnamed Eastern Bloc state, and a track star keeps waking up minus body parts. Three plotlines that have no business colliding do exactly that, converging on a secret compound where a mad surgeon stitches together superhuman composite beings from harvested limbs. Vincent Price is barely in it. Christopher Lee is barely in it. Peter Cushing is barely in it. The film is a conspiracy thriller wearing a monster's skin, and the monster is the British medical establishment.