Vincent Price Stars as Eccentric Killer in 1971 Cult Classic The Abominable Dr. Phibes

A hooded figure rises slowly from the floor of a cavernous art-deco space. It’s supposedly the hallway of his house, though it looks like a theater stage. He plays an organ mounted on a hydraulic platform, flanked by a sinister clockwork jazz band with papier-mâché heads. He sets the band in motion, and a beautiful young woman appears in a fantastical white gown. The two dance together in courtly fashion.

Then they murder a man. They lower a cage full of ravenous bats through a skylight into his bedroom, and the bats eat him alive. The woman and the hooded man go home, and he plays the organ again, sinking slowly into the floor.

Ten minutes into The Abominable Dr. Phibes, nobody has spoken a word. Robert Fuest’s 1971 horror film is a surreal, kitsch and intentionally funny murder museum of a movie. It’s also dreamlike and deeply strange, and the strangeness lingers after the credits.

The hooded figure turns out to be Vincent Price, the stately star of horror cinema’s most lurid and campy era. Unlike his friends and peers Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, Price never appeared in a production by Hammer, the legendary British horror studio. His career ran on a parallel American track in Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. By the late ’60s, though, Price was working in British productions that pushed Hammer’s technicolor horror style in weird new directions, like the brutally grim Witchfinder General.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes sits at the other end of that scale. It’s a fantasia and a black comedy, yet Price plays it dead straight, with mournful solemnity. He is Dr. Anton Phibes, a concert musician and theologian. In 1920s London, he resolves to murder every member of the medical team whose botched surgery killed his beloved wife.

Phibes was disfigured in a terrible car accident, and he wears an immovable prosthetic of his own head. Simple makeup and Price’s committed performance turn the actor’s familiar face into a ghastly death mask. Phibes rarely speaks, and when he does, it’s through a tube he runs between his neck and a gramophone contraption. Price never opens his mouth. He flexes his jaw while his inimitable voice emerges from the machine, scratchy and distant, as if from another time. It’s absurd and haunting at once.

Nothing explains this character. Why does he have a clockwork jazz band and an organ elevator? Who is Vulnavia, the woman who resembles his dead wife but never speaks with him? Her relationship to Phibes seems to be that of a deadly magician’s assistant. Why does he model his murders on the 10 Plagues of Egypt, which God leveled on the Pharaoh for keeping the Israelites in bondage? And why, after each killing, does he melt a wax effigy of the victim’s head with a blowtorch?

The film answers none of these questions, and it’s better for it. It plays out as a series of elaborate traps, like a Vaudevillian version of Seven or Saw. Phibes boils cabbages down into a green gloop and pours it through a hole in the ceiling onto one victim’s head, so locusts will devour him. (Things are always being lowered through ceilings and floors in this movie.) Somehow he gets from Hebrew scripture to impaling a man with a brass unicorn fired from a catapult.

Fuest relays all this silliness with visual panache but in a strangely flat, deadpan tone. The tone makes no distinction between Phibes’ macabre murders, his bizarre rituals and the bumbling attempts of an uninspired police detective, Inspector Harry Trout (Peter Jeffrey), to catch him. Citizen Kane‘s Joseph Cotten appears as one of the surgeons, and he and Jeffrey are the nominal heroes. But as in most Hammer-era films, the monster is the true protagonist.

Dr. Phibes is utterly bizarre, hilariously cruel and desperately sad. At the end, you find out what’s in the basement that his organ elevator leads to. Then the strange waxwork parade acquires a poignant pathos. It carries a sad, trapped feeling that, you realize, has been in Price’s eyes from the very start.

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Source: Polygon