Dr. Phibes Rises Again

Dr. Phibes pops right back out of where he entombed himself at the end of the first film, with another scheme to revive his dead wife and get revenge on his enemies.

I have a real fondness for these silly films. Dr. Phibes is like a proto, corny, psychedelic version of Jigsaw from the Saw movies, what with his absurd death contraptions and penchant for speechifying. These are corny movies, but good corny movies, based more around the joys of gawking at the ridiculous sets and costumes, chuckling at the grotesque murders, and marveling at just how profoundly Vincent Price can ham it up.

Rating: B

The Masque of the Red Death

When a terrifying plague known as "the Red Death" sweeps the countryside, the sinister Prince Prospero (Vincent Price) holes up in his extravagant castle. There, he throws a decadent party for surviving royalty, where murder, torture and Satanism are the main attractions.

"The Masque of the Red Death" is easily one of my favorite Poe stories, but one of the reasons I love it is because of how it seems like it could only work as prose, and not in another medium. It is short, light on plot and characterizations, and is the closest I've ever come to reading a horror story that is 100% atmosphere. It's not one of Poe's clever mysteries or elegant revenge tales, it's closer to a canorous but unsettling tone poem. Suffice it to say I was highly skeptical how well it would translate to film.

I'm happy to report that this was not only my favorite movie I watched for Time to Pay the Price, but also one of Price's best films, not to mention hands down the best Roger Corman film I've seen. And hell, while I'm at it, quite possibly the best Poe adaptation I've seen, even if it's not a very faithful one.

It's not an accurate representation of the original story, but so what? It takes some serious inspiration from the original story and spins it out into its own thing. At first I was disappointed by this, as the film didn't seem to understand what was great about the story. In particular, the castle, though faithful to the original description, stuck me as too bright and joyful, lacking the the subterranean menace of the story. No bother, it uses some of Poe's ideas to make a film of rich suspense and baroque horror, one that's probably the strangest film I've seen by Corman (with the possible exception of X: The Man With The X-Ray Eyes).

As mentioned before, the Poe short story does not have enough plot for a feature film, so this tells the story of a demented Satanist who likes to play vicious games with his subjects in order to tests the limits of their morality. It also incorporates the excellent Poe story "Hop Frog" as a subplot. Price is heartless, but not a charlatan like in Witchfinder General, and this may be the first time I found him genuinely intimidating and scary. There are sequences of real suspense, such as a scene where Price forces two men to cut themselves with a series of knives selected at random, until one of them picks the blade that has been soaked with poison.

Best of all, though, is the lavish weirdness slathered all over the movie. Much of it is set at a strange and colorful masquerade. There are many unexpected sequences, such as a brutal murder by a bird of prey. And the physical incarnation of the Red Death, who periodically shows up, is a suitably ominous and mysterious figure. The final revelation of the nature of the Red Death and the bizarre dance of the dead that follows is the kind of delicious, satisfying absurdity that modern horror movies wouldn't even bother going for, for fear that people would find it corny. Nay, I say to that. This movie is awesome.

Grade:B +

The Last Man On Earth

Vincent Price stars as the titular character, last man standing now that a strange virus has left the entire world either dead or turned into weird vampire/zombie creatures. Price has to strive hard every day to stay alive, stay sane, and do what he can to kill as many of the monsters as possible.

Although not quite the classic its reputation had lead me to believe it would be, The Last Man On Earth is a reasonably entertaining horror flick that, if nothing else, is a lot more bleak than I was expecting, given the star and the era. The high points of the film for me were an extended flashback of how the world came to an end that captures an appropriately fatalistic tone, and the abrupt, violent, unexpected final scene.

The other real plus is that, against all odds, it makes Price into something of a badass. He's still a little feminine and mincing, but he gets to show his dark side, and also gets to kick a reasonable amount of ass (even getting to chuck a bunch of pipe bombs around during the finale).

The main problem with the film is that I was unimpressed with its direction. I wasn't taking notes or anything while watching it, so forgive me if I'm not sufficiently descriptive here, but the staging is often dull and ineffective. Price is constantly fighting off hoards of monsters, trying to keep them out of his house, and the filmmakers present it with all the enthusiasm of a sleepwalker. I've seen slap fights between preschoolers that were more exciting, desperate life-or-death struggles than the action scenes in this film. (Apparently I watch preschoolers a lot?)

I have not seen the Charlton Heston version of this story, The Omega Man, but I did see and greatly enjoy the Will Smith I Am Legend a few years back, and I'm going to say that it's the superior adaptation.

Grade: B-

Tales of Terror

An anthology of 3 Poe stories directed by Roger Corman, each starring Vincent Price in a different role. Unlike many other horror anthologies, there's no wraparound story; the segments are preceded only by a brief narration by Price. In "Morella," a young woman returns to the home of her estranged father, and finds out about the very bizarre circumstances of her mother's death. In "The Black Cat" (by far the most adapted of Poe's stories, in this instance combined with "The Cask of Amontillado" plus a bunch of extra funny business thrown in), a drunken louse schemes the murders of his wife and rival. Finally, in "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" a man is hypnotized while on his deathbed, with distressing results.

After visiting the rinkydink Edgar Allen Poe museum in Richmond last year, I decided to refamiliarize myself with his work, which I hadn't read since I was in high school. Poe is amazing, he had a control of atmosphere and a depth of imagination that are basically unparalleled. If you've read any of his short stories, however, you've probably noticed that they don't seem like good fodder for adaptation to film. The stories can be very short (sometimes no more than a few pages) and are reliant less on plot and character development than on mood, concept, and description. A faithful adaptation of many of his stories would probably end up about 20 minutes in length and maybe even strike viewers as uneventful.

That is why so many Poe adaptations over the years combine stories together, or pluck the famous scene out of a story and plug it into a completely fabricated master plot. Even Tales of Terror, which reduces the stories to 30 minutes or less each, has to embellish, add, and amalgamate in order to reach a reasonable length. Still, by going for the anthology format, it allows Corman to mainly focus in on the famous sequences from the stories, or at least pay homage to the original concept. As self contained short stories, each segment is an effective piece of horror.

It helps that Corman gives each story a different tone to help distinguish them. "Morella" is the shortest, and mostly a mood piece. "The Black Cat" aims more for dark comedy and is probably the most plot heavy. And "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" takes the creepy idea from the original story (that through hypnosis, the body could die but the mind could live on), milks it for tension and builds a more typically structured story around it.

Grade: B

The Comedy of Terrors

A sleazy, alcoholic undertaker (Vincent Price) and his bumbling sidekick (Peter Lorre) decide to drum up some business for their fledgling enterprise by knocking off rich townsfolk and swooping in to offer their services to the family.

Part of what makes The Comedy of Terrors work so well is that they got a very skillful horror movie director to make it, rather than getting someone more known for comedies. Jacques Tourneur, who made a slew of top notch horror movies in the 40's and 50's, was a master of atmosphere, using a rich, detailed depth of field painted with starkly contrasted light and shadow. This has the aura of a real horror film, which makes all the absurdity even funnier.

What really pushes it over the top, though, is the cast. Especially Price. The movie can, at times, be a little too pratfall-y for my tastes, but Price is always there to save the day. His character speaks in a florid, showoffy series of faux-sophisticated bon mots, put downs and one liners ("Confound you too, sir! Will you kindly have the goodness to die?") that would leave Lost in Space's Dr. Smith tongue-tied, and chomp chomp chomp does Price savor every single word. He gets a plethora of laughs in the movie simply by the perfection of his reaction shots. There are also fun roles for Boris Karloff and Basil Rathbone. Joyce Jameson, who I was unfamiliar with, steals scenes as Price's nagging wife and verbal sparring partner. Lorre, unfortunately, would have been close to death around the time this was made and, if I'm not mistaken, plagued with a crippling morphine addiction. He has a few strong moments (and obviously can't help but bring his unmistakable Peter Lorre-ness), but often seems disengaged and worn out.

I know I saw this movie many years ago, as a child or early teen, and didn't like it. I don't know what was wrong with me. This movie is a hoot.

Grade: B

The Tomb of Ligeia

With Shenan out of town for the weekend, I carved out time on Saturday to do a Vincent Price horror movie marathon. I watched 5 of his films, 3 of which were also Poe adaptations directed by Roger Corman. In the spirit of The Price is Right and Two For the Price of One, I will name this marathon Time to Pay the Price.

The Tomb of Ligeia is a loose adaptation (as all three films were, to varying degrees) of the Poe story, about a man who becomes obsessed with his dead wife. He remarries, but soon becomes convinced that his wife holds power over him, and that she is perhaps somehow trying to return to life.

This was probably my least favorite movie of the marathon, but that doesn't mean that I thought it was bad. It works itself to a nice climax (with a lot of cool shots of the characters with flames licking the bottom of the frame), but it's at times a bit of a slog getting there. Most disappointing is that Price doesn't really get to have much fun, as his character is morose and in mourning for much of the film. I think we can agree that the best Price performances are when he really sinks his teeth in and hams it up. In this film he has to underplay a bit. Uh, you know, relatively speaking.

I've seen a few other of Corman's Poe adaptations, and Ligeia has the goods but doesn't really distinguish itself. I don't recall the original short story well enough to know how much this differs/adds/changes/is combined with other stories, but based on his track record I'm guessing a lot. It has all of the Corman trademarks: costumes galore, opulent sets, spooky castle, revelation of a rotting corpse, trippy dream sequence. Worth seeing if you like this sort of thing, but we'll be getting to some better ones later.

Grade: B-

From a Whisper to a Scream

A reporter interviews an old librarian (played by the incomparable Vincent Price) about the recent execution of his niece, a serial killer. Price proceeds to tell the reporter four tales of the macabre, to illustrate the inherent evil of the town in which they live. The tales: a lonely old man harbors homicidal desires, culminating in some necrophilia with unintended consequences; an asshole on the run from thugs discovers a man in the backwoods that may have the secret to eternal life; a glass eater at freak show pisses off his voodoo-powered boss and suffers the consequences; and a group of lost Civil War soldiers stumble into in Children of the Corn-esque situation.

The obvious influence here is George Romero & Stephen King's classic Creepshow; this shares that film's stylized, grotesque, comic book vibe. I am always a sucker for a good horror anthology, and From a Whisper to a Scream sports some entertaining performances from Price and Clu Gulager, but the tales herein lack the wit and elegance of a good horror short story. They all build to fun, if typical, twist endings, but the getting-there can be a bit of a slog. The stories have a tendency to drag in the middle as the audience waits for the other shoe to drop. More tightening at the script stage could have seriously helped this one out.

The director, Jeff Burr, went on to direct Stepfather 2 and Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3. Both are probably better than they had any right to be, but are still basically pointless retreads. The same holds true for From a Whisper to a Scream.

Grade: C+

Witchfinder General

During the English Civil War, a man claiming to hold the nonexistent title of Witchfinder General (Vincent Price), goes around persecuting those he claims worship Satan, mainly as a pretext for accumulating power.

Witchfinder General sounded great to me on paper, but I wasn't so keen on the execution. I like Vincent Price, but he hams it up a little too much in what is essentially a serious minded horror film. I tend to prefer my Price films to be funny and over-soaked in atmosphere; this one attempts to be relatively more realistic and suffers for it. Too serious to be fun, and not well made enough to be taken seriously, Witchfinder General did not work for me.

Laura

Tuesday, April 29, 2008


We now move on to part 2 of the "Two for the Price of One" Vincent Price double feature, which I guess means this one was free. Or were they both half off? I'm not sure. I didn't really think this title out very well.


Moving on, it turns out that Price isn't one of the leads in Laura, although he does have a very significant supporting role that's practically a lead any way, so good for him. He was only in his early 30's here, and fairly handsome looking.


Laura is a sorta film-noir by Otto Preminger, whose Anatomy of a Murder I watched a while back for my K2K and totally gushed about it, and now find that it hasn't really stuck with me. How about that? I bet it would still be a great watch, but I guess maybe it's more like cinematic Chinese food.

Contrary to what I had heard, this wasn't a great movie, but I liked it. I love Preminger's visual style (deep focus, I believe you call it, and I especially dig the way long shots will turn into close-ups and vise versa), and there are a lot of interesting characters. The story and mystery elements, however, aren't very compelling, and this being a mystery/noir type of movie, it doesn't go over well. There's also a subplot involving the main character becoming obsessed with the murder victim he's investigating that feels half-assed. It's one of my favorite oft-used elements in detective stories, but it doesn't really go anywhere here and isn't developed enough. I'll stick with James Ellroy when I want detectives sporting wood for dead chicks.

The movie is helped by the quirky characters and some strange details. What really jumped out at me, although I suspect maybe it's just my imagination, was all the homosexual subtext. The three male leads are all in love with Laura, yet each one has a sort of gay vibe going on. Vincent Price, as I've already said, has mannerisms that suggest homosexuality. Clifton Webb plays a bitchy, catty author named Waldo Lydecker who seems almost like the proto-Capote. At one point, the main character sees Lydecker naked, coming out of his bathtub, and I swear they make a point of showing a slight smile cross his face. I have no idea what any of this means, or if it's even really there, but it added an unexpected layer to the movie.

And the real shock here is Price, doing something I've never seen before: playing a normal guy in a reasonably normal movie. And you know what? Compared to everything else I've seen him in, he's subdued and natural and lacking in his overt theatricality. He plays a regular, kinda good looking guy, and never once stands out as some weirdo, iconic camp figure. So there you go, Vincent Price can act.

The Baron of Arizona

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Vincent Price has an interesting screen presence. It's hard to call him a good actor, but he's an incredibly memorable one. I guess we tend to think of him as a campy over-actor. Certainly, he's a theatrical one. He comes off as possibly homosexual, although he was not, and that adds some campiness. By the time I was watching cartoons, The 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo was on TV, and Price's persona or iconography was already familiar to me, despite not having even seen any of his movies. I've wondered for a while now, though, if Price was really a bad/campy actor, or if it's just the campy movies he showed up in.

So last night I did a double feature of non-horror movies starring Vincent Price, that I'm going to go ahead and right now name the "Two for the Price of One Double Feature." And yes, this is my second VP double feature in only 4 months. Before you know it, I'll have double-featured my way through his entire filmography.

Two Price movies, both dramatic roles, as a test to see if he is a better actor given different material. No haunted houses, no murders-by-pendulum, and certainly no killing yappy dogs, baking them into a pie and feeding them to their master.

Two things I learned about "the Veep" (as I call him) last night:

1) He is very tall. I mean, I think I knew he was tall, but goddamn, I didn't realize he was some towering gigantor with long monkey-arms. Maybe it was the monkey-arms that I hadn't noticed before.

2) When he was young and beardless, he was actually a decently attractive guy.

So first on the list was The Baron of Arizona, which is Sam Fuller's 2nd movie (I think), and the 3rd I've watched in the past few weeks, so this was really like a perfect storm for me. It's a shitload better than I Shot Jesse James, although it still has some serious flaws that keep it from realizing its full potential. I would say the worst part is that the movie has a useless wraparound story where some older rich dude is telling the story of the Baron of Arizona to a bunch of other guys. So for a while we get this really annoying, cheesy, obvious narration going on over the (far more interesting) story of the Baron, every now and then cutting back to the rich guys sipping scotch in their study or oppressing minorities or whatever it is the upper crust does. Oddly, by the end, the movie has slowly abandoned the narration, and the whole wraparound never comes back. Like they completely forgot it.

The story itself is pretty cool though, about an audacious con man in the late 1800's who sets up a complicated plot to try and claim all of Arizona for himself. He forges all sorts of documents and adopts a little girl for whom he invents a new identity as a Spanish Baroness with rightful claim to the land. When she grows up, he marries her, making himself the Baron.

OK, here it is. I'm going to come out in defense of Vincent Price. Because he's pretty good in this movie. He's still got that weird voice, that sexual ambiguity and some serious theatricality, but it works for the character. I mean, this guy is one ballsy con artist, creating a fictional royal position and persona for himself. It fits. It doesn't come off as hammy... in fact, in a movie that does have some accidentally hammy moments, V.P. comes off as the least corny, most nuanced character.

I'm not gonna give him a posthumous Oscar or nothing, but his demeanor and style of acting don't come off as overly campy in a non-campy movie. So, I'm thinking this means that his style lends well to camp, but that it more has to do with the movie he's in rather than his being a shitty actor. Good job, Vincent, you proved to me that you actually could act.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Doing some follow up on our Price is Right Double Feature from back in December, Andy and I watched another movie where Vincent Price kills off a group of people one-by-one in very strange ways. This movie looks great, with a lot of flashy colors and weird, ornate sets. And it contains a lot of weird details, like the fact that Price is some sort of zombie-man can only speak through a microphone attached to a hole in his throat. And he has this weird wind-up jazz band that play songs for him. And he kills people in odd, animal-themed ways. There's also a nice sense of goofy dark humor, and Joseph Cotton plays a major role. Not a great horror movie, but an enjoyable strange one.

Theatre of Blood

Sunday, December 30, 2007

Part 2 of the Price is Right Double Feature (and 4th movie of the day) was a little picture called Theatre of Blood... and goddamn.

I said before that Madhouse was my favorite of the 2 Price movies, and that's true, as I think it was better shot and a more consistantly entertaining. But there's something about this Theatre of Blood. It's just so fucking nuts... I mean, completely coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs. Let me explain.

This time, VP plays Edward Lionheart (good name), a Shakesperian theatre actor who is killing off all the critics who wrote bad reviews about him and humiliated him by not giving him an acting award that (he felt) he deserved. And he kills them in ways taken from (or more often loosely inspired by) Shakespeare plays. OK, so far it sounds pretty similar to Madhouse. Only this time, "the Veep" (as I call him) is straight fuckin' looney tunes; there's no mystery about who the killer is, it's him. We just follow him along on his murder spree, aided by his (get this) loyal band of muderous, hippie hobos. Also in tow is his sexy daughter, who disguises herself by wearing a fake beard and 'fro and pretends to be a man. She tends to help lure in the critics with some sort of ruse. I guess I can maybe accept that the critics couldn't tell she was a woman, but didn't, say, that one critic think it was at all odd that some hippie looking dude with a weird voice was hosting a wine tasting with a bunch of smelly homeless people dressed up in ill-fitting suits?

These critics kind of have it coming, is what I mean.

See, then what makes this flick even more bizzare is the fucked up ways they kill everybody. They don't just snuff them out, some of this shit is gross and protracted. They cut a pound of flesh off of one fellow, in a re-writing of The Merchant of Venice. Actually, they take off too much flesh, so Lionheart cuts off a piece and re-weighs it. (No word on if they put the extra flesh back). Another dude, Lionheart bakes his beloved pet poodles into a meat pie and force feeds it to him until he chokes to death.

Even worse is when Lionheart and Co. sneak into one guys house, dressed as surgeons, drug him and his sleeping wife, and then slowly cut the head off his still living body. And since Lionheart is an actor, he stays in character the whole time and pretends to be a surgeon, with an assistant that wipes his forehead and everything. His only audience being his buddies and, I guess, us. Oh and there's some really inappropriate, rather pretty music playing on the soundtrack, which makes the scene both funnier and more disturbing.

Then, each time he kills someone, he recites an appropriate quote from a Shakespeare play.

This movie has problems. The cinematography seemed a little bland, and the editing a little choppy at times. Some of this may be an issue with the DVD (the audio was also a little too quiet at times), but it still isn't always a well crafted movie. It's a little sloppy. Some of the humor (it's more of a dark comedy than anything else) is a little corny at times, too.

Damn, though. It's maybe not a well-made film always, but it's fascinating. It's just so oddball, veering from broad comedy, to really dark comedy, to full-on horror. It gets my thumbs up. You just don't see shit like this every day.

Madhouse

Sunday, December 30, 2007

The next step in our adventure was what we called The Price is Right Double Feature. It was back-to-back Vincent Price movies, both with a similar plot. (Or so we assumed).

Madhouse was my favorite of the two. In it, Price plays... well, sort of himself. He's an aging horror movie actor attempting to make a comeback. Only, in a twist that I assume is not based on his real life, people on the set of his new movie keep getting killed by a mysterious masked madman. And the killer is killing them in the exact same ways that characters were killed by him in his old movies. Could Price be the killer? Or is someone setting him up?

This is a pretty entertaining horror/mystery type flick, good-looking, with a typically enjoyable performance by Price. It's not a particularly graphic film, but it was more violent than I was expecting. (That's a pleasant surprise). Also, as an added bonus, Peter Cushing is along for the ride, too. And they make good use of actual clips from some of Price's older movies.

It also had a really weird ending that I'm not sure I understood. I was scratching my head a bit. But in a good way, if you feel me.

The Pit and the Pendulum

Thursday, December 13, 2007

I tivoed this one back in October when TCM was showing a bunch of old horror movies, and just got around to watching it. I still have a few others to catch up on as well.

As a horror movie fan, I've been working to expand my knowledge of older genre entries. This here is a Vincent Price movie from the early 60's loosely based on the Poe story.

I saw a few Vincent Price movies when I was a kid, and I always liked Price, but never liked the movies. He is a pretty hammy actor, I suppose, but in a really good, really entertaining way. He's corny, but he's got a lot of presence, you know? I am making an effort to see some more of his films.

I'm happy to report that The Pit and the Pendulum is the first Vincent Price movie that I liked. The rest of the cast besides Price suck, and it's a little too talky, but it's entertaining. It's colorful and visually over-the-top, has a pretty good story, and some really good scenes. The last 10 minutes-ish, when we finally get to the titular pit and pendulum, are pretty awesome.

Next up, I think I will give Price's Theatre of Blood a chance. He plays a Shakespearian actor who kills off the critics that don't like his work. That sounds pretty awesome.