Journey Into Fear (1975)

          Featuring a random assortment of familiar faces, this Canadian production offers a pedestrian new adaptation of a 1940 spy novel previously adapted for the screen in 1943 by Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles. The 1975 version of Journey Into Fear is pleasant enough to watch, but because it’s almost all plot, those who don’t lock into the storyline early are likely to get bored during long exposition and/or suspense scenes featuring leading man Sam Waterston. Although he does credible work, the only fun sequences in Journey Into Fear are those with costars Donald Pleasence and Vincent Price. Pleasence combines his characteristic fidgety energy with a campy Turkish accent, while Price, taking a welcome break from playing cartoonish ghouls, lends sophistication to the role of a cold-blooded pragmatist.

          The murky plot involves geologist Graham (Waterston) visiting Turkey to explore oil resources, even as nefarious characters repeatedly try to kill him. Local cop Col. Haki (Joseph Wiseman) tells Graham he can’t leave Turkey until a criminal investigation related to one of the attempted murders is resolved, so before long Graham gets enmeshed with sketchy characters including the nervous Kuvelti (Pleasence) and the obsequious Kupelkin (Zero Mostel). Graham also begins a romance with French singer Josette (Yvette Mimieux) before finally meeting his main adversary, the suave Dervos (Price). That this brief synopsis excludes significant characters played by Ian McShane and Shelley Winters indicates both how overstuffed the storyline is and how many different types of acting are on display. Cohesion is not the order of the day.

          Appearing fairly early in his long screen career, Waterston performs with considerable authority, but because his role is so underwritten, Waterston often blends into the scenery. (One wishes Mimieux, chirping in a bad French accent, did the same.) While McShane is suitably menacing in a mostly wordless role, only Pleasence and Price bring real flair—the very quality that made the Welles/Cotten version enjoyable. It’s especially pleasurable to watch Price play someone closer to the sophisticate he was offscreen, though the villainous nature of his character keeps the role on-brand.

Journey Into Fear: FUNKY

Welcome to My Nightmare (1976)

          Years of merchandising and reunion tours have kept face-painted rockers Kiss in the public eye, but Gene Simmons and co. weren’t the only ’70s FM-radio favorites to weave elements of classic horror movies into their stage shows. Vincent Damon Furnier, better known by his stage name Alice Cooper, actually preceded Kiss in the practice of blending ballads with bloodshed. Like Kiss, Cooper eventually traded the fake gore for PG-rated thrills, the better to please the young children who became part of his fan base. By the time Cooper released the concert film Welcome to My Nightmare, his antics were about as threatening as the average episode of Scooby-Doo. Nonetheless, Welcome to My Nightmare is fun to watch because it captures Cooper at the apex of his popularity, and because the concert tour that’s documented in this movie was  so ambitious. Dancers! Monsters! Special effects! Vincent Price’s voice on a recording! Most of this stuff is pure camp, of course, but the tunes are fairly strong, and the overall presentation is entertaining.

          A little bit of context is necessary. In the early ’70s, Alice Cooper was the name of both Furnier’s stage persona and the tight rock band he fronted. Alice Cooper, the band, earned fame with attitudinal hits including “I’m Eighteen” and “School’s Out,” while their stage shows often climaxed with a fake head getting chopped off by a guillotine. In 1975, Cooper went solo and released Welcome to My Nightmare, which features the ballad “Only Women Bleed.” To promote the album, Cooper and choreographer/director David Winters created an elaborate stage show telling the story of the album from start to finish. (In the songs and the show, a young man named Steven becomes trapped in a phantasmagoria of demons, monsters, and spiders.) The team shot the show twice. First, they videotaped the performance on a soundstage, adding even more elaborate costumes and effects and sets, to create the Emmy-winning TV special Alice Cooper: The Nightmare. Then they shot part of the tour, complete with real audiences, to create this feature film. Overkill? Sure, but restraint wasn’t exactly the guiding principle of Cooper’s ’70s career.

          The separation of Cooper from his old backing band means that during many scenes, Cooper is alone onstage except for dancers, resulting in a high kitsch factor. The sequence of Cooper wearing a white tuxedo and a white top hat while high-kicking with dancers wearing skeleton costumes is silly. Yet the lengthy sequence during which two dancers dressed as spiders crawl up and down a giant web while Cooper’s guitarists engage in a shrieking six-string duel is a treat for the ears and the eyes. Cooper runs through the expected hits (“I’m Eighteen,” “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” “School’s Out”), as well as playing all of Welcome to My Nightmare. The material is uneven, and Cooper’s croak of a voice is unremarkable. However, there’s a lot to be said for an artist willing to work this hard in order to keep his audiences amused.

          Today, rock bands seeking to create spectacle have arsenals of digital technology at their command. Back in the day, folks like Alice Cooper and Kiss made their wonderments by hand. Especially since Kiss never made a proper concert movie in the ’70s (a shocking oversight by the entrepreneurial Mr. Simmons), Welcome to My Nightmare might be the best artifact we have from the original, low-tech “shock-rock” era.

Welcome to My Nightmare: FUNKY

Scream and Scream Again (1970)

          How badly do the makers of Scream and Scream Again contort themselves while trying to generate pulpy thrills? Consider this line, spoken by policeman Detective Sergeant Believer (Alfred Marks): “Well, either this is coincidence—some kinky freak burglary turned tragic—or we’ve got more than one supernormal maniac on our hands.” Like that cumbersome dialogue, Scream and Scream Again contains too many elements for its own good. Although the picture features iconic horror stars Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, and Vincent Price, it’s not a straight horror film. Rather, it’s more of a Twilight Zone-style head trip involving experimental surgery, a fictional Eastern European nation run by a Third Reich-esque government, quasi-invulnerable killers, and, to make sure Price has something to do, a mad scientist. There’s also a musical number.

          Made in Britain, with Price the only American star in the cast, the picture is confusing and jumbled. For the first 30 minutes or so, director Gordon Hessler bounces around between espionage-type scenes involving mysterious characters played by Lee and Marshall Jones, investigative bits featuring Marks and Price, and nightclub scenes during which arrogant young stud Keith (Michael Gothard) picks up ladies. Somewhere in the bewildering mix is Cushing’s brief appearance, which includes little more than one scene. Then, in the middle of the movie—once audiences and authorities have figured out that Keith is a serial killer—Scream and Scream Again stops dead for an interminable chase scene while cops pursue Keith through city streets, country roads, a quarry, and finally a secret laboratory. After the epic chase scene, the movie shifts into biological-horror mode, with lots of gruesome scenes during which unethical doctors and nurses steal body parts from victims. And finally, Scream and Scream Again reaches a long operating-theater scene dominated by Price’s character delivering a trite monologue about his grand scheme for genetic engineering.

          The overarching story of Scream and Scream Again, which was based on a novel by Peter Saxon, makes sense in a comic-book sort of way, but the Grand Guignol Lite conclusion raises as many questions as it answers. It’s hard to imagine whom this movie might satisfy, since horror fans will be disappointed that Cushing appears briefly, Lee plays a non-monstrous role, and Price delivers a terrible performance owing to the script’s overripe treatment of his character. Similarly, fans of conspiracy and/or sci-fi movies will probably find the chase scene painfully boring and the horror aspects silly. On the plus side, the title song—yes, there’s a title song—is actually a pretty happening ’60s blues-rock number, performed onscreen by the real-life Welsh band Amen Corner.

Scream and Scream Again: FUNKY

Cry of the Banshee (1970)

          After American International Pictures scored in the ’60s with several Edgar Allan Poe-derived movies starring Vincent Price, the company pushed its luck by occasionally slapping the Poe brand onto Price movies that weren’t derived from Poe stories. For instance, Cry of the Banshee opens with a poem falsely attributed to Poe, then tells an original story that riffs on the narrative of a previous Price film, Witchfinder General (1968), which AIP dubiously reititled The Conqueror Worm in order to force a Poe reference onto the material. Cry of the Banshee is crammed with so many horror-cinema signifiers that it’s a confusing hodgepodge. Although the film does not include a banshee, it does include corrupt inquisitors, grave robbers, rabid dogs, rapists, Satan worshippers, a werewolf (sort of), torturers, and witches. In the course of cramming all of these elements into 91 minutes, AIP skimped on character development and narrative coherence—Cry of the Banshee is all about lurid scenes featuring curses, the degradation of women, and pagan rituals, with Price’s signature style of aristocratic sadism providing a tenuous through line.

          The movie takes place in 16th-century England, where Lord Edward Whitman (Price) is a vicious judge who abuses suspected witches for sport. After a long and ultimately pointless sequence of Edward overseeing the public whipping of a young woman, the movie introduces its proper plot when Edward causes the murders of two siblings from a coven overseen by a witch named Oona (Elisabeth Bergner). The incensed Oona puts a curse on Edward’s family, so a member of Edward’s household, the mysterious Roderick (Patrick Mower), periodically transforms into some sort of hairy monster and kills Edward’s relatives. Between deaths, Edward leads frantic searches for the identity of the killer and the location of Oona’s secret hideout.

          Cry of the Banshee suffers from needlessly obtuse storytelling that can be attributed to aimless scripting and messy editing. The movie’s also quite ugly in its treatment of women, since it seems as if some accused witch and/or innocent serving wench is having her clothes ripped open every 10 minutes. Women are also hung over hot coals, put in stocks, stabbed, violated, and whipped. Nonetheless, Price contributes his usual robust work, the production design is acceptably immersive, and it’s novel to see an animated title sequence created by Terry Gilliam outside of the usual Monty Python context. All in all, Cry of the Banshee is nasty stuff—but that’s probably the point.

Cry of the Banshee: FUNKY

Scavenger Hunt (1979)

          Producers have spent years trying to mimic It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), the all-star comedy epic about an international treasure hunt. Lesser attempts, such as Scavenger Hunt, succumb to predictable problems including bloated running times and underwritten characters. Trying to adequately service roles for a dozen or more principal actors seems to vex even the most well-meaning filmmakers. Additionally, trying to maintain the desired level of hellzapoppin excitement for an entire feature film usually drives the people behind pictures like Scavenger Hunt to rely on chases, screaming, and slapstick—all of which get tiresome. Inevitably, the initial sugar rush leads to a crash. Although Scavenger Hunt is largely a disappointment, especially considering the incredible array of gifted comic actors appearing in the film, it has some meritorious elements. Cowriter/producer Steven Vail and his team (mostly) avoid taking cheap shots at ethnic stereotypes, and they play a clean game by opting for family-friendly jokes instead of lurid ones. It’s not difficult to see the frothy confection the filmmakers had in mind.

          The premise, naturally, is simple. When multimillionaire board-game titan Milton Parker (Vincent Price) dies, his would-be heirs are forced to compete in a scavenger hunt that will determine who inherits the Parker fortune. On one team is Parker’s greedy sister (Cloris Leachman), along with her idiot son (Richard Masur) and her slimy lawyer (Richard Benjamin). Another team includes Parker’s son-in-law (Tony Randall) and the son-in-law’s kids. Next up is a duo comprising two of Parker’s nephews (played by Willie Aames and Dirk Benedict). Still another team features Parker’s household help—the butler (Roddy McDowall), the chauffeur (Cleavon Little), the chef (James Coco), and the maid (Stephanie Faracy). The wild-card contender is a dimwitted taxi driver (Richard Mulligan), whom Parker included because the cab driver accidentally killed Parker’s business partner, making Parker rich.

          You can figure out where this goes—as the teams pursue items on their lists, the evil people bicker and steal while the virtuous people help each other. Some scenes that presumably were meant to be comic highlights fall flat, including a lengthy bit of McDowall supervising his team’s theft of a toilet from a hotel bathroom. Cameos from random actors (Ruth Gordon, Meat Loaf, Arnold Schwarzenegger) add little, and the gags are uninspired. Nonetheless, director Michael Schultz keeps everyone upbeat and moving fast, so several sequences generate mild amusement, especially the anything-goes finale. Additionally, while none of the performances truly stand out (excepting perhaps Benjamin’s vigorous turn as a long-suffering schmuck), the vibe is consistently and pleasantly silly.

Scavenger Hunt: FUNKY

The Butterfly Ball (1977)

          The symbiotic relationship between movies and rock music generated some oddities during the ’70s, and this obscure hybrid of concert footage, live-action scenes, and a single animated vignette is nothing if not odd. A musical extravaganza intended for children but featuring several hard-rock singers, the piece was put together by Roger Glover, the longtime bassist of UK band Deep Purple, but the process involved a few fits and starts. In 1973, an illustrated children’s book titled The Butterfly’s Ball, and the Grasshopper’s Feast was released. It was based on William Roscoe’s 1802 poem of the same name. As the title suggests, the story is a fanciful lark about a party for woodland critters. A short cartoon was made from one section of the book, and Glover wrote the accompanying music. This generated a minor UK hit single titled “Love Is All,” with vocals by heavy-metal howler Ronnie James Dio, and plans were made for a full-length animated feature. Yet by the time Glover finished writing songs for the proposed movie, production was cancelled.

          Undaunted, Glover staged a live concert in at London’s famed Royal Albert Hall, recruiting several celebrities to perform his song suite, which bears the abbreviated title The Butterfly Ball. Footage of the 1975 concert comprises most of this movie. The picture also features the “Love Is All” short, as well as weird interstitial bits of performers in animal costumes strolling through London. The film climaxes with a live-action version of the ball, at which the various animal characters sit around a table in a scene straight out of Alice in Wonderland. Despite Glover’s obvious passion for the project, The Butterfly Ball is inherently half-assed—it’s like watching the recording session of the soundtrack for an unmade movie, with glimpses of test footage suggesting what the movie might have been like. That said, the concert has appealing moments.

          Vincent Price, eschewing his normal horror-movie style, participated in the concert as narrator, sitting in a chair above the stage and reading the illustrated book’s whimsical lines. Each song has a different singer, so the film presents an eclectic range of vocal styles. Hard-rockers including David Coverdale put muscle into their numbers, while twee songbirds including model/actress Twiggy offer more ethereal sounds. John Lawton provides one of the loveliest vocals, for the gospel-tinged ballad “Little Chalk Blue,” and he also subs for Dio on the movie’s epic-length rendition of “Love Is All.” Alas, most of the tunes come across as weak imitations of the Lennon-McCartney songbook, with fanciful numbers such as “Sir Maximus Mouse” bearing their Sgt. Pepper’s/White Album influences far too obviously.

The Butterfly Ball: FUNKY

The Devil’s Triangle (1974) & The Bermuda Triangle (1979)

          The Bermuda Triangle, that mysterious section of the Atlantic Ocean into which a vast number of boats and planes have inexplicably disappeared, enjoyed pop-culture prominence in the ’70s, when all things paranormal were grist for the infotainment mill. For instance, two feature-length documentaries were made about the Triangle. The first of the documentaries was a terrible hack job called The Devil’s Triangle, which would have been unwatchable had the filmmakers not hired horror-cinema legend Vincent Price to narrate. Featuring dull interview clips, utilitarian stock footage, and silly artistic renderings that look like courtroom sketches, The Devil’s Triangle offers nothing more than bland descriptions of mysterious events. (And if the promise of a score by prog-rock titans King Crimson gets your blood pumping, lower your expectations because the music is unmemorable.) Price, who does not appear on camera, does his best to infuse the florid script with creepy-crawly energy, but by the zillionth time he ends a sentence with “in the Devil’s Triangle,” the novelty has eroded. Additionally, director/co-writer Richard Winer doesn’t even bother to propose possible explanations for the Triangle phenomenon, instead forcing Price to croak cryptic crap: “What is this wrath-flinging, horrifying curse that prevails in the Devil’s Triangle? An affliction so incredible that even the United States Coast Guard is reluctant to make an observation on the matter?”

          For entertainingly outrageous answers to such questions, one must shift attention to a later film, The Bermuda Triangle, which was unleashed by the titans of fact-deficient “documentaries,” Sunn Classic Pictures. Hosted by bearish-looking Brad Crandall, who lent his melodious speaking voice and professorial visage to several Sunn Classic joints, The Bermuda Triangle is a smorgasbord of pseudoscience. In between vignettes of Crandall speaking while he walks around locations related to the Triangle mystery, like a now-closed U.S. airbase in Fort Lauderdale, the picture features re-enactments of Triangle incidents that are staged like scenes from low-budget horror movies. Flyers freak out when the sky turns green around their planes; sailors reel when ghost ships appear from strange mists; seadogs crumble when inexplicable forces cause them to shift in and out of tangible reality.

          Nearly every sensational theory about the Triangle that’s ever been put forth is depicted with the same degree of ominousness. Abandoned WWII mines destroying ships! Giant waterspouts rising from the ocean to engulf aircraft! Undersea earthquakes causing massive tidal waves! Viewers are even treated to the theory that the Triangle is related to the mythical lost kingdom of Atlantis—apparently, ancient Atlanteans created a “magnetic force crystal that harnessed the awesome power of the stars,” but the crystal’s energy activated volcanoes that consumed Atlantis; now, centuries later, the crystal rests at the bottom of the ocean, blasting laser beams that explode passing vessels. But wait—we haven’t even gotten to the part about UFOs traveling through the triangle via transdimensional gateways! Boasting better production values than most Sunn Classic cheapies (even though the special effects are laughably bad), The Bermuda Triangle is highly enjoyable by dint of sheer ridiculousness.

The Devil’s Triangle: LAME

The Bermuda Triangle: GROOVY

Madhouse (1974)

Built around a premise that’s too gimmicky to take seriously, Madhouse marked the end of Vincent Price’s run as a leading star of horror movies—after this picture, he mostly drifted into cameos and voice performances that winked at his glory (gory?) days. Considering how many fine shockers Price made, it’s a shame he didn’t bid adieu to the genre with a better movie, although one can imagine that Madhouse might have worked had a wittier director been in charge. Price plays Paul Toombes, a faded movie star known for playing big-screen killer Dr. Death. Following a tragedy, Toombes gets tossed into a mental hospital, thus marking him among potential employers damaged goods. Later, bereft of better options, Toombes accepts a humiliating offer to reprise his Dr. Death character for a tacky TV show. Once the show debuts, someone dressed as Dr. Death starts killing people related to the program. Is Toombes the killer? Or must Toombes unmask a murderer who’s trying to frame him? If you watch Madhouse, you’ll be amazed how little you care about the answers to these questions. Director Jim Clark, a top-notch film editor who briefly left the cutting room to helm a string of undistinguished projects, relies on such obnoxious tropes as fisheye lenses and in-your-face camera moves. Seeing as how the story is innately florid, juicing the action with adrenalized camerawork was not the wisest move, because Madhouse starts to feel grating and loud very early in its running time. It doesn’t help that Price looks bored, or that the actor had just made a very similar film, Theatre of Blood (1973), which was superior in both conception and execution. It’s a measure of Madhouse’s mediocrity, in fact, that even supporting players Peter Cushing and Robert Quarry—both of whom were as prone to onscreen flamboyance as Price—fail to make memorable impressions. Madhouse gets the job done, more or less, by providing bloody kills and perfunctory thrills. Plus, of course, Price is a unique presence even in the worst circumstances. But Madhouse is plagued by a been-there/done-that malaise from start to finish. No wonder Clark gave up on directing and returned to editing—a wise move, seeing as how, a decade later, he won an Oscar a for cutting The Killing Fields (1985).

Madhouse: FUNKY

Theatre of Blood (1973)

          The enjoyably nasty Theatre of Blood is one of Vincent Price’s best shockers, not only because of the droll storyline—an actor murders his critics—but because Price gets to demonstrate so many colors in his dramatic spectrum. Although once again consigned to incarnating a homicidal madman, the horror-cinema legend also “plays” several key characters from the Shakespearean canon, because each of his crimes is themed to a particular work by the Bard. Thus, rather than merely speechifying about how he’s been wronged by the world—the usual mode for Price’s villains—the character of Edward Lionheart performs snippets from Hamlet (“To be or not to be”), Julius Caesar (“Friends, Romans, Countrymen”), and so on. It’s apparent that Price is having a blast, and his good cheer makes up for the overall gruesomeness of the movie.

         Plus, while director Douglas Hickock can’t match the high style of other ’70s filmmakers who worked with Price (notably Robert Fuest, who made the gonzo Dr. Phibes movies, to which the storyline of Theatre of Blood owes a considerable debt), Hickock benefits from an exemplary supporting cast. Diana Rigg plays Lionheart’s daughter/accomplice, and actors portraying Lionheart’s “guest victims” (as they’re billed in the trailer) include such venerable Brits as Harry Andrews, Jack Hawkins, Michael Hordern, and Robert Morley.

          The story begins with Lionheart suffering the final humiliation of an unsatisfying career: Critics deny him the award he longed to win for his farewell season. Lionheart tries to kill himself but survives, then finds a hiding place and schemes, along with various murderous helpers, to kill each of his detractors in spectacular fashion. The bloody deaths involve cannibalism, decapitation, dismemberment, and other such horrors; as a result, Theatre of Blood lives up to its title with a fair amount of stomach-churning gore. Thankfully, the grimy stuff is complemented with a measure of wit. However, the storyline is quite episodic, so depending on one’s taste for bloodshed or Shakespeare (or both), the pattern of outlandish murders might seem repetitious after a while.

          What keeps the movie watchable, therefore, is Price’s giddy flamboyance. Masterfully employing his singular voice and rearranging his elastic features into masks of artistic anguish or sadistic glee, as the scene demands, Price plays for the cheap seats in every scene, somehow managing to simultaneously deliver a credible performance and spoof his reputation for hammy showboating. Although Theatre of Blood never quite rises above its fright-cinema constraints, the way the Dr. Phibes movies did with their perverse campiness, the movie is a treat for fans of offbeat horror films and, of course, for devotees of Price’s unique screen persona.

Theatre of Blood: GROOVY

The Abonimable Dr. Phibes (1971) & Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972)

          One of the most stylish horror movies of the ’70s, The Abominable Dr. Phibes combines an outlandish storyline with divine art direction and a wickedly funny star turn. Vincent Price, perfectly threading the needle between camp and fright, plays Dr. Anton Phibes, a ghoulish genius preying upon 1920s London. Some years ago, his wife died on the operating table during emergency surgery, and Phibes himself was severely injured in a car accident while racing to her side. Presumed dead and hiding in an underground lair, Phibes methodically murders members of his wife’s medical team, basing his killings on plagues from the Old Testament. For example, the victim of the “plague of frogs” is tricked into donning an ornate frog mask for a costume party, unaware that the mask is designed to tighten until the wearer’s skull is crushed.

          Much of the action surrounds the last man on Phibes’ kill list, chief surgeon Dr. Vesalius (Joseph Cotten), and the bumbling English cops assigned to protect him. However, the real fun is watching Phibes float through his surreal existence. Accompanied only by a mute assistant, the opulently costumed beauty Vulnavia (Virginia North), Phibes occupies a fortress that’s a cross between a theater and a throne room. His figure swathed in long robes, Phibes plays classical music and silly Tin Pan Alley tunes on a giant pipe organ, accompanied by a group of animatronic musicians identified as “Dr. Phibes’ Clockwork Wizards.” Left speechless by his injuries, Phibes communicates through a tube extending from his neck to a speaker, so Price gets to pull faces while his unmistakable voice reverberates on the soundtrack.

          Surrounding this eccentric protagonist is resplendent imagery created by director Robert Fuest. Whether he’s forming arch compositions with a masked Phibes in profile—or meticulously depicting how Phibes kills victims with bats, locusts, rats, and the like—Fuest treats every shot like an art project, giving the piece a rarified air that amusingly contrasts the lowbrow narrative. Brisk, funny, and completely strange, The Abominable Dr. Phibes is truly one of a kind.

          The rushed sequel, Dr. Phibes Rises Again, benefits from the return of key players Fuest and Price, but it’s less compelling than its predecessor. Without spoiling the wonderful ending of the first film, suffice to say that bringing Phibes back requires some fancy narrative footwork. Unfortunately, neither the method of Phibes’ revival nor the reason for his return is persuasive.

          Furthermore, the storyline of Dr. Phibes Rises Again is confusing and convoluted. Phibes and a mysterious explorer named Biederbeck (Robert Quarry) travel to Egypt in search of a mythical river supposedly capable of bringing the dead back to life. Phibes resumes committing elaborate murders, though his motivation is rather thin—a group of people snatched a scroll from the good doctor’s safe. Meanwhile, the inept policemen from the first movie join the hunt when they realize Phibes is back. Although Fuest’s imagery is just as kicky the second time around, the slipshod storyline disappointingly transforms Price’s character from a heartbroken romantic to a bloodthirsty bogeyman.

          Still, the sequel has wry flourishes, like the bit in which Phibes feeds a forkful of fish into his neck, “chokes,” and then retrieves a piece of bone. It seems Price had fun playing the character, and his enjoyment is contagious. Costar Quarry, known for the Count Yorga movies, unwisely plays the material straight, though he summons pathos in the climax. Horror icon Peter Cushing is wasted in a minor role, while starlets Fiona Lewis (as Biderbeck’s lover) and Valli Kemp (taking over the silent role of Vulnavia) provide attractive decoration. FYI, actors Hugh Griffith and Terry-Thomas appear in both Phibes movies, but they play different characters, adding to the murky quality of the sequel.

The Abonimable Dr. Phibes: GROOVY

Dr. Phibes Rises Again: FUNKY