The Adorable Doctor Phibes

 I am the same age as the film The Abominable Doctor Phibes. We were both born into the same world: not the sixties, but not quite the seventies either. The glamour and optimism of the swinging decade bleeding out into the tatty, flyblown seventies which, if it was swinging at all, was from a gibbet. 

My birthday was the date of the appalling nightmare of the Bangladesh Genocide. A week later, Phibes was released on the day the UK lifted all restrictions on gold ownership, so it was party time for the gold owning classes. That was what it was like: grim and glitzy, careworn and tatty, but still imbued with the fizz and pizzazz of the previous decade, the sixties still had momentum, though the world was growing greyer, grimier, more violent, and literally darker, as power cuts and the three day week loomed. 

In the 60's Vincent Price had made camp old nonsense like Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, sunny spoofs of the James Bond decade, where he would trot out a conniving bad guy like a party piece. That changed with his casting in Michael Reeves' brutal and nihilistic Witchfinder General, and the next few years would see him assay darker and darker roles in Scream and Scream Again, Cry of the Banshee, the incredible Theatre of Blood and Madhouse (though he also found time to portray Wicked Count Voxville in the Bee Gees movie Cucumber Castle).  

The Abominable Dr Phibes and its sequel Dr Phibes Rises Again, are like his Dr Goldfoot films through a prism of sadism and jet-black humour, and that's largely down to director Robert Fuest. The script had been written by James Whiton and William Goldstein as a straight horror film. In the original, Phibes tortures and eventually murders his companion Vulnavia, and escapes the police by sailing away over London rooftops in a hot air balloon. Fuest totally rewrote it, taking that straight horror and subjecting it to a series of kinks. Vulnavia becomes a silent enigma, Phibes a tortured romantic poet who, nevertheless, really wants to murder a whole bunch of guys. 

Fuest knew his camp. He'd been set designer on The Avengers, going on to direct seven episodes of the show (and a couple of The New Avengers). But he also knew how to do horror and suspense. His 1970 film, And Soon The Darkness, written by Avengers supremo Brian Clemens, is a quiet, edgy masterpiece of sun-dappled suspense, with Pamela Franklin and Michele Dotrice as bickering nurses on a cycling holiday in rural France. It is a quiet, creepy gem. The remake, sadly, is shit. 

He'd also go on to make The Final Programme, a deliriously, psychedelic take on Michael Moorcock's novel of the same name: all incest, needle-guns and Jon Finch and Jenny Runnacre turning into the world's sexiest monkey.  

Somewhere in the middle, we find Phibes, with his immaculate set-pieces and sketchy ideas about the Ten Plagues of Egypt. He lives in the greatest subterranean lair in cinematic history - Stromberg's stronghold reimagined by Biba - surrounded by giant clockwork musicians and a mute model in a fascinator, equally proficient with a white violin and a golden axe. The police think Phibes is dead for the majority of the film, despite the fact he drives around the city in a Rolls Royce with his profile sketched onto the windows. Phibes loves four things: the old testament, playing the organ, his wife, Victoria Regina, (played by Caroline Munro, the face of Lamb's Navy Rum, and uncredited, as she had signed a contract with Hammer for Dracula AD 72) and killing the surgical team that allowed his wife to die on the operating table. One of whom is a psychiatrist, for no reason I can discern beyond the pun of his ultimate fate.

What follows is delicious, knockabout fun, full of wit, vim and colour. Phibes is a bizarre creation: like an evil Mr Potato Head with a murderous bent, who cannot move his face and can only speak through the console of his Church Organ. This is Price's masterclass in "eye acting". He is asking you to love him with those pleading orbs. And you do! You're rooting for Phibes, even as he carves up a cottage hospital's worth of hapless medics. Only Trout of the yard (the masterful Peter Jeffrey) in dogged, always too late, pursuit, is as sympathetic. He's good. But we all know Phibes is better. 

It has the joyous quality of being much better than it should be. A lot of low budget films about mad serial killers exist. There's not many I'd stand in front of a crowd to lionise. But I would for this one. And the sequel. And Theatre of Blood, and all three of them have Vincent Price in them.  

He was a bloody marvel. 

 

(I'll be introducing The Abominable Doctor Phibes as the first Chambers Film at The Harrison Chambers of Distinction on Tuesday 29th July. Tickets are probably available and a free cocktail is included.)