I grew up in the era of Freddy Kruger and Friday the Thirteenth and other slasher films. Yet watching the part where the nurse gets slimed and then eaten by locusts it freaked me out, I highly recommend this film for anyone who wants something original.
This is one of my all time favorite films and kind of stands out on that list amongst a slew of much more serious and "artsy" fare. It's entertaining in the way a funhouse of horrors is entertaining, with the trappings of grand guignol but the focus on macabre fun. It's also got a genuinely creepy atmosphere, a wonderfully campy art-deco production design, a fantastic supporting cast and enough quirky touches for a dozen run-of-the-mill cult films. Sadly the sequel is at best merely tolerable. The original screenwriters wrote a second installment but director Robert Fuest, in a fit of ego apparently, scrapped what was by all accounts an excellent follow-up so that he could write the sequel himself. It lacks all of the most intriguing elements and copies only the most superficial trappings of the original. One of the things that gets glossed over in all the discussion of this film's general oddness is Vincent Price's absolutely masterful and surprisingly subtle performance. For the entire first half he doesn't speak at all and because his face is (as we discover later) only a mask, he must convey his emotions through his eyes and the movements of his body. Despite these limitations Price created a menacing, eerie and strangely sympathetic human being. If you have never seen it go right now and fill in that vital gap in your cinematic experience!
+Bradley Lyndon Hollowniczky (Igmu Até) One of the things that gets glossed over in all the discussion of this film's general oddness is Vincent Price's absolutely masterful and surprisingly subtle performance. For the entire first half he doesn't speak at all and because his face is (as we discover later) only a mask, he must convey his emotions through his eyes and the movements of his body. " I completely agree. It was a truly wonderful piece of acting, and one many people don't really notice.
I've only seen the sequel once... and it's absolutely MADDENNING. It appears as times as if the story is intended to explain more about Phibes, who he is, how he got that way, why he acts and thinks the way he does. But after a series of murders or people who are getting in the way of ressurecting his wife, the film ends ON A CLIFFHANGER. So, apparently, any real revelations were going to come (if they ever did) in the 3rd film. But it was NEVER made! I'm reminded a bit of HALLOWEEN 5, a total piece of crap that throws away the ending of H4, pointlessly kills its heroine, rambles for 90 minutes, then ends in such a way as to say they only made this movie to explain it all in the next movie. Except it took 6 years to do H6 because H5 bombed so badly, and the screenplay for H6 was "assembled" from the "cheapest parts" of multiple CONFLICTING stories. If you don't get the writing RIGHT, first, there's no point in even making the movie.
