I just picked up The Vincent Price Collection from Shout Factory on Blu-Ray and had a chance to watch The Abominable Dr. Phibes for the first time, a movie that’s now just shy of a half a century old.
It’s less a straight horror film that a black comedy Grand Guignol take on a Jacobean revenge drama, in which organist/inventor/theologian Phibes (Vincent Price, wearing disguises to hide his horrible disfigurement and speaking through mechanical aids) and (never explained) beautiful female assistant Vulnavia (Virginia North) venture from their elaborate Art Deco lair (complete with a raising and lowering organ for Phibes to play, along with an animatronic jazz band) to carry out a series of revenge murders based on Biblical plagues on a team of doctors lead by Dr. Vesalius (old pro Joseph Cotton), who Phibe feels botched his late wife’s surgery. Victims are dispatched by bats (who actually look quite adorable), rats, a particularly nasty mechanical frog mask, and (in the case of British comic actor legend Terry Thomas) having their blood drained.
Police, as usual, are always one step behind the fiendishly clever Phibes.
The film it most reminds me of is near-contemporary Suspiria, in that both are completely nutso, color-drenched horror films of hallucinatory intensity. The art direction by Bernard Reeves is so striking, and so integral to the success of the film, that it’s quite surprising he never did another full-length film.
I actually tracked Reeves down and asked why that was:
Thank you for your enquiry, yes I am the same Bernard Reeves that Art Directed the film Abominable Dr. Phibes.
I did very few films in my life, basically due to the fact I was Production Designer for TV commercials and travelled abroad a lot.
These days he’s best know for his motorsports art.
Phibe’s lair is so vivid that it does a great job of making you forget the usual American International Pictures cheapness in the rest of the film. Another fascinating aspect is that while it’s set in 1925, the design of both Phibe’s lair and of Dr. Vesalius’ house is less straight Art Deco than a version re-imagined through the prism of mod London, with bright colors, wall mirrors and anachronistic red plexiglass panels on Phibe’s organ.
And you can easily imagine Diana Rigg modeling some of Vulnavia’s very sexy fashions in The Avengers.
Speaking of which, Director Robert Fuest (who directed several post-Rigg episodes of same) keeps things moving along at a steady clip, so it never drags over its 94 minutes. It’s not really scary, but it does hold your attention throughout. It’s not as good as Suspiria, manly because nothing matches the crazy intensity of latter film’s first murder, and because we root for Jessica Harper’s protagonist in a way we can’t for Price’s twisted antihero.
Some have talked about The Abominable Dr. Phibes as an example of camp, and while aspects lend themselves to that, distance and the sheer vivid weirdness of the film has given it the feel of an intense fever dream.
Still worth a look.
