House of Wax

1953 stereovision extravaganza

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Poor Henry Jarrod. He's worked hard to put together his wax museum, lovingly constructing historical characters for patrons to admire. But a mean guy sets fire to the museum, leaving Jarrod inside for dead. Wax figures apparently can't survive a fire, and all seems lost until Jarrod resurrects and reopens his business with a macabre twist.

I gave this the Vincent Price bonus and a separate bonus because I wasn't watching it with my 3D glasses and probably missed a lot of the brilliance. House of Wax is historically important as one of the first 3D films. I'm not sure the gimmick was used effectively. There's a scene with dancers' legs that I imagine would have looked like they were extending over theater-goers' heads, and a lot of pointless time spent with a top-hatted dude with three paddleballs. That's right--paddleballs. The scene with the burning wax museum looked a little odd, splotchy fires and wax sculptures melting like the bad guys at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and I wonder if maybe there was some 3D action going on there. Speaking of that scene--the makers of this film missed a golden opportunity to have a little dark humor in this. There was a wax Joan of Arc, and Vincent Price's partner didn't set fire to that one first? What were they thinking? The wax figures, especially the ones at the end of the movie, were cool, and I liked watching a shadowy Vincent Price Darkmanesquely lurking in dark alleys or stalking his victims. This was a remake of 1933's Mystery of the Wax Museum which I plan on watching eventually despite the lack of 3D effects.

Madhouse

1974 horror film

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Paul Toombes is a horror film actor, famous for playing Dr. Death. When his girlfriend is murdered, Toombes loses his mind and his career and is committed to a mental institution. He's lured to England to film a television series with his old character, and upon his arrival, people start dying. Oh, snap!

This is a really boring movie. There's nothing wrong with Vincent Price or really even his character or the fictional character his character plays. In fact, Dr. Death looks pretty cool, especially during one of the few good scenes in the movie--Dr. Death stalking one of his female victims through an elaborately landscaped yard. But a few good-looking scenes and a solid Price performance isn't enough to salvage this oft-incomprehensible borefest. It's either confusing (what the heck is with the weird spider woman?) or I got bored and lost focus. At first, I thought that some of the movies-within-the-movie were interesting, but I started to recognize them from other Vincent Price movies, and then it all just seemed cheap and lazy. Bonus points award for not only Vincent Price but Vincent Price singing, something that always makes movies a little better.

Witchfinder General (The Conqueror Worm)

1968 period drama

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Matthew Hopkins appoints himself "Witchfinder General," travelling the countryside with his thuggish assistant Stearnes to falsely accuse and and put to death people thought to be witches. Soldier Richard Marshall's girlfriend's dad, a priest, is accused, and Richard goes AWOL, risking treason to come to her aid.

Vincent Price said that this was his best horror movie performance. It's a more serious Vincent Price, menacing and ruthless. It's a solid performance, strange when juxtaposed with his campy run as Lionheart in Theater of Blood. This isn't a scary horror film at all, but it's got this creepy tone with a strange period details similar to movies like Blood on Satan's Claw or even The Wicker Man. The horror has more to do with what actual people--indeed, characters whose thinking is sadly inspired by actual historical thinking--are capable of than the more fantastical ideas we get in most horror films. The ending earns a big wow with its ability to shock and horrify. Oh, by the way: I don't know what the American title (The Conqueror Worm) has to do with anything or if it's really based on an Edgar Allan Poe story. I don't think it is, but there is something literary about the dialogue, and a lot of the dialogue between Hopkins and Stearnes drips with a dark irony. "Men have strange motives for what they do." "We're doing God's work." Price recites a poem at the beginning of the movie, and that might be one of Poe's. I could look it up if Angie wouldn't have stolen the "Complete Works of" book that I used to use as a doorstop. All I know is that this movie has a Vincent Price sex scene, and my life will never be the same again. Or did I just imagine that?

Theater of Blood

1973 Vincent Price movie mayhem

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Shakespearean actor Edward Lionheart doesn't handle criticism very well. In fact, after being overlooked for a critics award, he crashes their little party and leaps to his death in the Thames. Only he doesn't die, instead hooking up with the motley crew of homeless folk who pull his body from the river and getting his murderous revenge, offing the critics one at a time using methods inspired by some of The Bard's most violent deaths.

Released a couple of years after one of my faves--The Abominable Dr. Phibes--this Vincent Price horror/dark-comedy has more than a few similarities. But that's fine with me. Vincent Price is always Vincent Price, pound for pound one of the most entertaining actors ever, but this is the Vincent Price I really love, the one who walks into every single scene with two handfuls of rancid pork products and facial hair with a life of its own. Vincent's performance in this is all over the place in this one. He does Shakespeare, and plays an effeminate afro-headed hair stylist, a murderous chef, a demented surgeon, and in a completely surprising moment, a trampoline-bouncing fencer. Sure, he's always Vincent Price with that inimitable voice and overall presence, but he really shows quite the range here, and I think he's having a blast in this role as Lionheart. And watching him beat an egg, or more accurately, diabolically beating an egg? Nothing short of movie magic, and quite possibly the first scene I'd show people in an effort to prove that Vincent Price is one of the greatest of silverscreen geniuses. The murders are extremely gruesome. When a decapitation is only the third or fourth most disturbing death in a movie, you know you're in for some fun. But I guess that should be expected from a murderer who's inspired by the deaths in Shakespeare's work. What's not expected is that it will all be so funny. This is a creative pot of colorful insanity, fun and fastly-paced, with that amazing tour de force performance by one of the finest actors ever. Recommended for those of you with a sick sense of humor.

The Invisible Man Returns

1940 sequel

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Geoffrey Radcliffe, a guy with a name that makes you want to sucker punch him, is scheduled to hang after being convicted of killing his own brother. But he didn't do it! Oh, snap! His fiance weeps as the day approaches. A scientist with a concoction to make people invisible, just like his brother in the first movie, shows up to help Radcliffe out. He sucker punches him and apologizes immediately. "I'm sorry," he said, "but your name is Geoffrey Radcliffe." Once invisible, Radcliffe runs off to find the real killer. It's a race against time, however, because the invisibility formula will gradually make him lose his mind. This is loosely based on the life of O.J. Simpson.

How do you make a sequel to a classic movie, one that isn't all that different when you boil it down, without offending audiences and making it totally suck? Add Vincent Price! This is his first horror film although there's really nothing horrifying about it. His character is an invisible man for whom you can root since he's been wrongly accused of a crime. To compensate for the inability to use facial expressions, Vincent really hams it up, and I don't know about viewers in 1940, but I was pleased to know that his character goes commando. The mystery isn't all that mysterious; like a Scooby Doo cartoon, you'll know who the real murderer is before you're supposed to. Also, in the intervening nine years, the details of the first invisible man have apparently become exaggerated as one character claims that "hundreds of lives" were lost. This offers nothing new with the special effects despite the nine years. They're fine, but it's more of the same. I did really like one scene with invisible Geoffrey messing with a character named Mr. Spars. Some quick camera movements and some nifty effects really brought Spars' fear and confusion to life. This is a fine sequel, somewhere in between the Abbott and Costello comedy and the original The Invisible Man and definitely required viewing for Vincent Price fans.

The Last Man on Earth

To celebrate the two year anniversary of when I last saw The Last Man on Earth, I decided to watch it again.

Long before the impressive "man" streak, long before my beard was longer than it is now but shorter than it was before, long before my wife threatened to take my life because of this blog, and long before I was ready to admit that Vincent Price is the greatest actor of all time, I sat down and watched this, the first adaptation of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. It was June 23, 2008. I sat down with my action pants (a pair of tights with a jock strap worn over them), a muscle shirt, and a bowl containing approximately eight servings of tapioca pudding, and I watched The Last Man on Earth. Halfway through, I realized (and I've never told anybody about this before, but this is the kind of thing you share on two year anniversaries) that the ghost of Vincent Price, sans pants (action or otherwise), had sat beside me, leaning forward slightly and fondling the coffee table like it was a woman. We watched the rest of the movie together. I laughed twice, and he shot me a look like you see on the poster there. I yawned once; he shot me the same look. One year and two days later, while I was celebrating the one year anniversary of when I watched The Last Man on Earth, I was playing Michael Jackson's Thriller, and the song "Thriller" came on. I had attached jumper cables to my nipples in anticipation of the part of the song where Vincent Price laughs, and at that precise moment, my telephone rang and a man named Lucas who I had briefly, at a gas station in Nebraska, conversed with about how many different kinds of soda pops there were now compared to when he was a kid and then never seen again informed me that the King of Pop had died. "I thought you'd like to hear it from me first," he said. "I'm drinking something called a Grape Crush. Where the hell do they come up with this stuff?" That night, I was visited once again by the ghost of Vincent Price, sans shirt this time, and we wept together while he quoted a line from "Thriller": "Now is the time for you and I to cuddle close together. Yeah." It was one of five life-changing experiences I had that week, but I don't remember the other four.

You can find my other write-up on June 23, 2008. My feelings haven't really changed. I think Price is excellent as usual. This movie really starts strong, sags in the middle with a really long flashback, and then has an unsatisfying conclusion. There are some great opening shots--empty gray buildings and streets, a gray sunrise, haunting gray corpses curled up on sidewalks or across stone steps, abandoned gray automobiles, a church sign with the ominous message "The end has come." And this has such a great opening line (Price's narration): "Another day to live through; better get started." The zombies really remind me of Romero's in Night of the Living Dead, but that could just be that I haven't seen a black and white zombie movie in a long time. I'd still rather them be mute though. When the zombies are first shown in motion, it's right after Vincent Price's character has thrown on a jazz record, and it looks for a moment like they're dancing. Something else I noticed this time around: There's a scene where Price is watching film, and he starts laughing at a scene with monkeys. It reminded me of the scene in Ghostrider where Nicolas Cage is laughing at televised monkeys, a scene that, if you haven't had to pleasure of watching Ghostrider yet, is very nearly a religious experience.

This is, for those of you keeping score, 50% better than The Omega Man and over 100% better than the terrible I Am Legend. And before you accuse me otherwise, that has nothing to do with my opinion on rights to own firearms or my racism.