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Re: 70's horrors
Ive come to love and admire the work of Vincent Price in recent years. The films he made over here after his Roger Corman, Edgar Allen Poe years in hollywood are some unsung classics and worthy of greater appreciation. I'm thinking of films like The Abominable Doctor Phibes, Theatre of Blood and Madhouse to name a few. He was often unfairly criticised for being too tongue in cheek and "camping" up the roles, but I think he managed to balance the humour, tragedy and horror to perfection.
All too often these days it seems to be one gore shocker after another with no thought of character or development. For me the little humorous asides and charcterizations somehow make the horror sequences all the more intense and chilling when they come.
As an example....In theatre of blood, Price plays a washed up Shakesperean actor who returns from the dead to bump off all his worst critics in a series of chillingly apt Shakesperean vignettes. In one scene mirroring Cymbeline, he dispatches a critic, played by Arthur Lowe (Dad's Army), by drugging him and surgically beheading him as he sleeps next to his also drugged wife. Price does this to the music of Doctor Kildare, assisted by his Daughter in the nurse role, who dutifully passes him the surgical tools to perform the grim operation. Inevitably in the morning the wife awakes from her induced slumber, tries to wake her hubby and on shaking him, faints from abject terror as his severed head rolls off onto the floor like some grotesque football. You dont know whether to laugh or be sickened or both. Take a look you wont regret it. I promise you. Just dont blame me for the rather surreal nightmares that result. Sweet dreams....lol
Ive come to love and admire the work of Vincent Price in recent years. The films he made over here after his Roger Corman, Edgar Allen Poe years in hollywood are some unsung classics and worthy of greater appreciation. I'm thinking of films like The Abominable Doctor Phibes, Theatre of Blood and Madhouse to name a few. He was often unfairly criticised for being too tongue in cheek and "camping" up the roles, but I think he managed to balance the humour, tragedy and horror to perfection.
All too often these days it seems to be one gore shocker after another with no thought of character or development. For me the little humorous asides and charcterizations somehow make the horror sequences all the more intense and chilling when they come.
As an example....In theatre of blood, Price plays a washed up Shakesperean actor who returns from the dead to bump off all his worst critics in a series of chillingly apt Shakesperean vignettes. In one scene mirroring Cymbeline, he dispatches a critic, played by Arthur Lowe (Dad's Army), by drugging him and surgically beheading him as he sleeps next to his also drugged wife. Price does this to the music of Doctor Kildare, assisted by his Daughter in the nurse role, who dutifully passes him the surgical tools to perform the grim operation. Inevitably in the morning the wife awakes from her induced slumber, tries to wake her hubby and on shaking him, faints from abject terror as his severed head rolls off onto the floor like some grotesque football. You dont know whether to laugh or be sickened or both. Take a look you wont regret it. I promise you. Just dont blame me for the rather surreal nightmares that result. Sweet dreams....lol
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