Review:Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)/Brian Kurtz

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Burn victim Anton Phibes rises from the dead to avenge the death of his wife, whose life was cut short, when a team of British physicians failed to save her. Phibes' vengeance takes its form in the guise of the 10 great plagues of ancient Egypt.

Synopsis

The movie opens with an elaborate looking ballroom accented by an artificial bandstand called the Clockwork Wizards. At the face of the room sits a caped pianist with a dark hood and concealed face, thumping away at an elaborate pipe organ. A chick with weird clothing walks in and the two begin waltzing as the clockwork band plays on. But everything is not all fun and games. After a tango or two, our hooded villain, Doctor Anton Phibes (Vincent Price) and his lovely assistant Vulnavia leave the stately lair and embark upon a journey in a rather fanciful looking Rolls Royce.

Phibes creeps along a roof to the home of Doctor Dunwoody in the middle of the night. While the good doctor is sleeping, Phibes lowers a birdcage containing a flock of vampire bats into the room. He releases the bats, which then begin to rake and claw at Dunwoody's face until he is dead. Dunwoody's butler finds his body and calls the police. Enter: Inspector Trout. Trout and his sidekick Sgt. Schenley have no idea how to pursue such a bizarre murder.

The following evening, Phibes attends a masked costume party. One of the guests is another physician known as Doctor Hargreaves. Without revealing his own face, Phibes gives Hargreaves a large plaster frog's head that he is required to wear for the duration of the evening. But the frog head has this weird winch attached to the back of it that slowly tightens until it crushes Hargreaves' skull in. Even while the poor bastard is suffering, the other guests seem not to notice. Or maybe they simply didn't give a shit. It was a pretty ridiculous looking mask after all. Soon after this, we get a look at the face of Doctor Phibes. He looks kinda like Vincent Price, except for the fact that his face is real rubbery looking as if he had been burned very badly. He also has the shittiest haircut that I have ever seen.

Phibes' third murder is even weirder than the first two. Vulnavia and he go to the home of yet another quack, Doctor Longstreet. Longstreet is in his den watching weird old snake charmer pornos on a movie screen. The two dastardly villains sneak into the room and Vulnavia ties Longstreet down to his chair. He must be at least slightly smitten by her, because he offers no resistance, despite the fact that he has no clue who this freaky bitch is. But that's the inherent beauty of the Phibes-Vulnavia partnership. She lulls the victims into a false sense of security while Phibes watches from behind some hidden curtain jerking off. When he's done, he "comes" out and finds some maniacal way to dispose of his victim. Phibes hooks Longstreet up to a catheter and begins draining his blood into eight pint-sized glass jars while Vulnavia watches the affair while playing the violin. He then delicately arranges the eight jars on the mantelpiece and the two leave. Longstreet's housekeeper (and part-time fuck-slut) finds his body. But Phibes got a little careless with this one and left a clue behind. Eventually the fuck-slut informs Inspector Trout who arrives to examine the stiffie. He finds that the killer had left behind a strange medallion with Hebrew symbols etched upon it.

Inspector Trout takes the medallion to a jewelry maker who explains that it is but one of a set of ten that he was commissioned to fashion. The symbol carved upon the medallion is the Hebrew word for blood. Leaving the flighty little lapidary, Trout then takes the medallion to a Rabbi. The Rabbi tells him of the ten plagues of ancient Egypt (To anyone who has seen The Mummy – you ought to know what the ten plagues are. And if you don't know what they are, then I suggest you pick up a Bible and read the book of Exodus you Godless heathens!).

Trout links the medallion to the three established murders as well as an initial murder that took place off-screen prior to the movie (a Professor Thornton had been stung to death by bees – but this is mentioned only and never shown). So the killer is obviously designing his murders to be imitative of the ten plagues of Egypt. Ancient Egypt was devastated with waves of various critters and geological phenomenon because the Pharaoh made the mistake of pissing off Moses. Here's a quick comparative rundown of the ten plagues (for the purpose of this movie, gnats and flies have been replaced by rats and bats).

1. Blood
2. Frogs
3. Gnats
4. Flies
5. Livestock
6. Boils
7. Hailstorm
8. Locusts
9. Darkness
10. Death of the first-born son.

Another physician is introduced, and this bizarre plot begins to flesh itself out a bit. Inspector Trout visits the home of Doctor Vesalius. Now, there is one thing that is linking all of the deceased together. All of the physicians, including Vesalius, operated on a woman named Victoria Phibes who had been dying from an undisclosed illness. While the team had been operating, Victoria's husband Anton Phibes had been returning from a concert in Switzerland. On his way to the hospital, his car flipped over and exploded. Phibes was burned to death and there was nothing but ashes left (or so the story goes).

Trout suspects that Phibes may have faked his death and has vowed to kill all of the doctors who failed to save his wife. Meanwhile, Phibes is back at his place playing his organ and vowing to kill all of the doctors who failed to save his wife. Convenient eh?

Phibes' next victim is a goofball named Doctor Hedgepath. Hedgepath is a dipshit because he falls for the oldest trick in the book. As his car is chugging down the road, he sees a Rolls parked off to the side with the voluptuous Vulnavia standing next to it shaking her ass. He stops to offer her some assistance, but truthfully, I think he was just hoping to score some tail. But that damned Doctor Phibes pops up again. Hedgepath is locked inside the cab of his limo, and Phibes hooks up some bizarre device that pumps snow into the limo, ultimately freezing Doctor Hedgepath to death.

Inspector Trout and Doctor Vesalius decide to work together and track down Anton Phibes. They go to the Phibes family crypt and crack open his coffin. Inside is a container supposedly holding his ashes. But Vesalius theorizes that they could just as easily be the ashes of Phibes’=' driver, who was likewise burned in the crash. They open the tomb of Victoria Phibes to find it empty.

The next asswipe to have his clock cleaned is Doctor Kitaj. Kitaj is on vacation and decides to take a trip in his personal single-engine airplane. But Phibes and the violin playing hootchie, Ms. Vulnavia, sneak onto the airfield and fill Kitaj's plane with a bunch of rats. Of course, Kitaj and his pilot don't realize that a dozen of the fuckers are inside of the plane until they are several miles up in the sky. The darlings tear into the pilot something fierce forcing the plane to crash into the ground killing both of them. Willard would be proud.

By now, Inspector Trout is racing around town trying to find the surviving doctors who once worked on Victoria Phibes. He tries to protect a guy named Doctor Whitcombe at a local mall. But Whitcombe dies when a big-ass brass unicorn is launched from a catapult, spearing him in the chest and nailing him to a door. Failing to save Whitcombe, Trout decides that he must protect one Victoria Phibes' attending nurses, named Allen. The police try to secure her a room in the hospital, while the rest of the team stalks out the building looking for Phibes. But Doctor Phibes is a sneaky old fuck and he manages to get past their checkpoints. He breaks into the room directly above the one Nurse Allen is sleeping in. He drills a hole through the floor and then drips this weird green syrupy cocktail made out of Brussels sprouts on top of her. Nurse Allen is asleep mind you, so obviously she is unaware that twelve pounds of this nasty shit is being dumped on her. Because...you know, she's like... asleep and all. On top of that, Phibes begins pumping in swarms of locusts into her room. The locusts are attracted to the Brussels sprout juice like flies on shit and they eat at Nurse Allen until there is nothing left but her skull. Fortunately for nurse Allen, she was asleep during the entire affair. I'd hate to think what her reaction would be if she had actually woken up while the locusts were busy eating her face.

So now Inspector Trout and Doctor Vesalius try to figure out who the next victim might be. Trout realizes that Vesalius is the only physician who has any children. He suspects that Phibes may try to enact the death of the first-born son upon Vesalius' boy, Lem. Racing back to Vesalius' home, they discover that Lem is missing. Doctor Phibes telephones Vesalius and tells him that he must meet him at his place, if he wishes to save his son. Trout doesn't want Vesalius to go, as it is obviously a trap, but Vesalius brains him with a statue and takes off to save his boy.

Arriving at Phibes' badass crib, he finds that Phibes has strapped Lem down to an operating table. Implanted inside his chest, just below his heart is a key. The key unlocks a halter, which has been strapped to Lem's neck keeping his body from moving off of the table. Above him is a spiral-shaped tube from which acid will be dripping down onto his face unless Pop can operate on him, free the key, unlock the halter and push him out of the way within six minutes. Now, I ask you: Is this an elaborate fucking plan or what? This is the kind of goofy shit you would find on Fear Factor! As Vesalius is desperately trying to operate to save his boy, Phibes looks onward mockingly informing him that the six-minute window he is granting him is equal to the amount of time that the doctors had to work on his wife. Vesalius keeps cutting, and Phibes keeps heckling. To further unnerve him, he even reveals his true face. Pulling off a bunch of rubber prosthetics and that shitty-ass wig, we find that Phibes' face had been burned so badly by the accident, that it is little more than a flesh-colored skull. Phibes tells Vulnavia that this is their final mission and that she should go and destroy the rest of the house. Phibes leaves Vesalius and his boy to their fates.

Meanwhile, Inspector Trout revives at Vesalius' place and races down to Phibes' house to save the good doctor. He runs afoul of Vulnavia and the two square off in the makeshift ER just as Vesalius succeeds in freeing his son from the operating table. Trout forces Vulnavia to back up, placing her directly under the ceiling mounted glass tube just as the acid comes down. She screams wildly as the acid melts away her face and finally dies.

Trout, Vesalius and Lem race around trying to find Doctor Phibes. Phibes has retreated to a secret room where the preserved remains of his wife Victoria are kept. He gets inside a custom made sarcophagus and slices open his wrist. Hooking up a catheter, he exchanges his own blood for embalming fluid and allows himself to die next to his wife (thus fulfilling the plague of darkness).

Of course we all know that Phibes doesn't REALLY die, as he springs back up a year later in the appropriately named Dr. Phibes Rises Again.

Note: As an added bonus, I'm going to list the ten plagues again and how they correspond to Doctor Phibes' victims.

1. Blood – Dr. Longstreet (Sanguination)
2. Frogs – Dr. Hargreaves (Frog mask)
3. Gnats –Dr. Dunwoody (Bats instead of gnats)
4. Flies – Dr. Kitaj (Rats instead of flies)
5. Livestock – Dr. Whitcombe (Unicorn in place of cattle)
6. Boils – Professor Thornton (Bee stings equating to boils)
7. Hailstorm –Dr. Hedgepath (Snow blower in car)
8. Locusts – Nurse Anne (Locusts and green shit)
9. Darkness – Dr. Phibes (Dying in his coffin)
10. Death of the first-born son. (Lem Vesalius – failed murder)

Review

Acting / Dialogue

Vincent Price plays the honorable but slightly kookie Anton Phibes. Now Price delivers on all counts as he usually does, but there is a strange difference between the Phibes roll and the characters he usually plays. You see, Phibes was fucked up ass-over-elbows in that car crash, losing his ability to speak. So instead, he's got this weird stethoscope thing hooked up to the side of his neck that transmits the vibrations of his useless voice box into a mechanical transmitter (kind of like Ned from South Park). So while it is Vincent Price's voice being recorded on the box, it is slowed down to sound more mechanical, thus losing a great deal of the edge that Price usually infuses into his roles. But Price still works his ass off in this part, as he has to match his facial expressions to a pre-recorded voice; a challenging feat I'm sure. So even though I love the Phibes character, I think the movie would have worked better had they ditched the whole trache-box thingie. But don't let that get you down... this is still the "V" man we're talking about and he kicks plenty of ass!

Gore

The most impressive feature was seeing Nurse Allen's skull smeared with locusts and green shit. That was bad ass I've gotta admit. Doctor Dunwoody's bat bite wounds are pretty cool too. The best scene though is when we see the face of the real Doctor Phibes. It's refreshing to know that the initial face he used was intended to look shitty, as it was merely a prosthetic that he had designed himself. The final face disfigurement is much more impressive than Price's visage as seen in The House of Wax. He kind of reminds me of Liam Neeson's character in Sam Raimi's Darkman.

Guilty Pleasures

This is the sort of a film that only a true horror fan would ever admit to liking. Not that it's a bad film... but its not one that offers bragging rights to anyone's DVD collection. The Abominable Dr. Phibes is filled with absurdities and campy imaginative bits of humor.

The most sidesplitting scene in the entire movie involves the death of Doctor Whitcombe. It's made even funnier by the fact that Inspector Trout is trying to convince Whitcombe to seek his protection. But from out of nowhere, a big fucking unicorn comes shooting past us, impaling the good doctor. We later learn that this thing was thrown via a catapult. A CATAPULT! Where the fuck did Doctor Phibes get a catapult? Furthermore, how was he able to rig this thing in a public setting without anyone noticing? To make the scene even funnier, we see Trout and Sgt. Schenley facing the difficult job of removing Whitcombe's corpse from the door it had been thrust into. They can't simply pull it out, since the unicorns' horn is corkscrewed into him, so they begin spinning his body counter-clockwise in an effort to UNSCREW him from the door. These are the golden moments of Horror cinema that you will cherish always.

Then there's Nurse Allen. I've already poked fun at the lack of conventional wisdom as it is applied to this scene, but it bears repeating. THE BITCH NEVER WOKE UP! Come on now, get real! If my dog took a shit on the floor next to the bed, I'd be up like a bullet. But this dummy is having a bucket full of liquefied Brussels sprouts poured onto her and she doesn't even twitch! Speaking of which, I really don't get the Brussels sprout angle at all. Earlier in the movie, we see Phibes dumping a bunch of these things into a vat, which he then grinds into a gelatinous paste. He then sticks a tube into his neck and begins drinking the shit intravenously! What the fuck was that about? Was he testing it to make sure that it was the perfect desired consistency by which to lure the locusts? And exactly when did he discover that locusts were partial to squashed Brussels sprouts? Come to think of it... is anyone truly partial to Brussels sprouts? I hate those shits! Nasty, bitter little mutant cabbage heads. They're almost as disgusting as lima beans – which as we all know – is the Devil's fruit. The scene serves to accentuate Doctor Phibes' more villainous tendencies. Chopping a person's head off is one thing, but dumping Brussels sprouts onto them? That's just cruelty beyond measure.

The Good

I love this squirrelly-ass goofball shit. Seriously. I eat this shit up with a dirty plastic spoon. Maybe it's because I spent so much of my childhood watching Creature Double-Feature on Saturday afternoons. While other kids were outside playing softball and wondering what that strange feeling in their groin was all about, I was at home munching on Cocoa Puffs watching Vincent Price movies. Says a lot about me, doesn't it? What makes these flicks so damn cool is the way that directors can overlap dark gothic undertones with bright vibrant characters and imagery. They teeter on the brink of being quasi-serious, but are likewise peppered with a campy and yet unsettling atmosphere. These movies are so stylized that they damn near become a genre in and of themselves.

But The Abominable Dr. Phibes is more than just your typical Vincent Price movie. The directing style and set production appears to be eight parts Terence Fisher, one part Stanley Kubrick and one part David Lynch. The opening scenes with the clockwork bandstand and the masked tango dancing reminded me a great deal of that freaky house from Eyes Wide Shut (unfortunately, it didn't have the same amount of titty bitches running around). The weird moments where Vulnavia is playing a violin while Doctor Phibes emasculates some geriatric fuck could have been lifted straight out of the Club Silencio scenes from David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. Now, this is not to suggest that ADP is nearly as esoteric as either of the above films, but it does convey an eerie quality that makes it at least memorable if not "good".

And then of course, there's the doctor himself. What makes Doctor Phibes a true Hollywood badass is the fact that he's just so damn creative. He's not the type to settle for a machete to the throat or an axe up the nut crack, no sir. He agonizes over creating these elaborate machines and detailed torture devices. Never before have I seen a Horror movie baddie this dementedly imaginative. This is a guy who truly does love his work, and for that, he deserves our respect and admiration.

The Bad

These sort of flicks aren't for everyone. Horror fans come in all shapes and sizes and invariably there are going to be complete swatches of genre films that simply aren't going to appeal aesthetically to some audiences. Take my wife for example. She digs horror movies, but her allegiance to the genre is squarely confined to modern big-budget affairs; Freddy Versus Jason, Van Helsing, Blade, Gothica etc. Me on the other hand – I love ALL that shit! Truth be known, I sometimes prefer some of the more obscure and less cultured movies to that of the A-list celebrity cast soirees like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer.

The point is, a movie like The Abominable Dr. Phibes, while pleasant is not going to impress fans who prefer their Horror to be a bit more rugged and draconian in its intent. The bulk of negative things I could say about this movie are covered in the Guilty Pleasures section above. Again... I personally don't feel as if these are black marks against the movie, as I think they actually accentuate what would simply be another tritely rehashed revenge story. But I don't claim to be the spokesperson for all of Horror fandom (not yet anyway).

Regardless of anything else, you should still go and check out The Abominable Dr. Phibes, solely because it stars Vincent Price, and Vinnie is simply the coolest of the fucking cool. Even Arthur Fonzarelli wasn't this fucking cool.

Great Lines

"Nine killed her; nine shall die! Eight have died, soon to be nine. Nine eternities in doom!"

―Doctor Phibes talking to himself

"Where can we find two better hemispheres, without sharp north, without declining west? My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears, and true plain hearts do in thee faces rest. Within twenty-four hours, my work will be finished, and then, my precious jewel, I will join you in your setting. We shall be reunited forever in a secluded corner of the great elysian field of the beautiful beyond!"

―Doctor Phibes talking to the body of his deceased wife Victoria.

"A brass unicorn has been catapulted across a London street and impaled an eminent surgeon. Words fail me, gentlemen."

―Inspector Waverly

"Love means never having to say you're ugly."

―Doctor Phibes

Reviewer Notes

This review was originally published at Headhunter's Horror House Reviews. Some changes have been made from the original review in terms of spelling and grammar, but otherwise is largely preserved in its original form.