The Abominable Dr. Phibes is horror-comedy starring the inimitable Vincent Price, Virginia North, Joseph Cotten, Peter Jeffrey, Derek Godfrey, and a collection of white men (and one white woman!) making up the good doctor's victims.
The movie is kind of a revenge flick; the victims here (the aforementioned collection of white dudes) are the doctors who worked on the wife of one Dr. Anton Phibes (Price), a professor with doctorates in music and theology. She died, and Phibes was supposedly killed in a car wreck as he raced to the hospital, but now he's back! And killing these doctors in methods inspired by the Ten Plagues of Egypt (or some version of them; I don't remember a "Plague of Beasts," but he's the theologian, not me).
We split our time in the movie more or less evenly between watching Phibes' weird, ritualistic behavior - he kills while wearing different necklaces with Hebrew letters, then burns a bust of the person he's just killed, then hangs out and plays music with his animatronic band while his mute assistant Vulnavia (North) looks on or dances. Meanwhile, we also follow the investigation of Inspector Trout (Jeffrey) as he tries vainly to save these men's lives, but ultimately settles for trying to protect the last one, Dr. Vesalius (Cotten). He (and everyone else involved) somehow miss that Vesalius is the only one of these people with a teenage son (you know, the plague involving killing firstborn sons?), so of course his son Lem (Sean Bury) gets kidnapped and put in a Saw trap (seriously - Dr. Vesalius has six minutes, the same amount of time Phibes' wife was on the operating table, to extract a key from Lem's body and use it to free him from a harness or else he gets doused in acid).
This movie...very interesting. First of all, Price's physical presence and his voiceover work (Phibes can't actually speak because his face was burned away, so Phibes used his mastery of acoustics to let him speak through a cord that attaches to his neck) is amazing and he manages to make Phibes both cold and scary, and pretty sympathetic. The supporting cast is fine, though the only ones that really get much to do are Cotten and Jeffrey (although Susan Travers as Phibes' only female victim gets a few good scenes before she gets doused in brussel sprout extract and devoured by locusts). My comparison to Saw wasn't remotely facetious; there is no way Leigh Whannel never saw this movie.
But what I find weird are the campy humor elements to it. One of the doctors (Maurice Kaufmann) is impaled by a brass unicorn horn fired by catapult, which unfortunately we don't see. But what we do see is the man's feet moving up a wall as the police "unscrew" the horn from the wall. Likewise, as Dr. Phibes is making the brussel sprout syrup, he carefully chooses which sprouts to put in and then tastes the mixture. That's kind of absurd on its own, but as his face is a mask, he "tastes" by dipping his finger in and then putting it to the back of his neck (he takes a sip of wine the same way earlier in the film). All of this is played completely straight, with the result that the humor works.
This isn't a movie I'd ever heard of, but I kind of want to see the sequel.
My Grade: B+
Rewatch Value: Medium
Next up: Black Bag
No comments:
Post a Comment