The Abominable Dr. Phibes is a remarkable film.

 

Hello. I am Vincent Price and I like to play the organ in my shiny rain poncho.

I always put on my face before I go out.

This is my beautiful and silent assistant Vulnavia. In the background you can see the wax busts I've made of my intended victims.

She wears a vast array of deco costumes and helps me kill people.

 

For instance, this bird cage is filled with murderous bats.

This man is being exsanguinated.

And this gentleman has been brought down by a booby-trapped frog mask at a fancy dress ball.

The police are stymied.

Oh, I see. Vincent Price is following his own version of the ten plagues of Egypt, as he kills off all the members of the surgical team who failed to save his wife four years ago. Thank you, rebbe.

This movie also stars Joseph Cotten. Hello, Joseph Cotten!

It turns out that while everyone thought Dr. Phibes had died in a terrible car accident while rushing to the side of his dying wife, he was merely horribly disfigured. He'd also been rendered mute, but he's used his great acoustical expertise to rig up a way to attach an amplifier to a hole in his neck (through which he also drinks martinis) and connect it to a phonograph. This allows Vincent Price a number of excellent scenes in which he stares balefully and inflates his throat like a toad while a recording of his voice plays from elsewhere. 

I think my favorite murder is death by locusts. First, Dr. Phibes brews up some highly concentrated essence of brussels sprouts, as you do:

Then he drizzles it all over the head and neck of his sleeping victim through a hole in the ceiling and sends in the locusts.

They naturally chew all the flesh from her bones, because of the well known irresistible allure that brussels sprouts hold for all grasshoppers. Vulnavia dances a celebratory dance (not pictured).

One thing leads to another, as it will. Joseph Cotten is forced to surgically remove a key from the torso of his young son, an elaborate acid-dispensing device hanging like the sword of Damocles over his head. Dr. Phibes takes his leave.

 

That's his dead wife there next to him. Dr. Phibes will be joining her in the afterlife, or so it seems, via an infusion of embalming fluid. Then the floor closes over them, and the police are left, once again, at a complete loss.

Best of all, there's a sequel!

Comments

[Ray Davis]

Even more remarkably, the sequel is not up to the original's standard.

But! If you have not yet seen Theatre of Blood, I recommend it. Shakespeare > Old Testament; Diana Rigg > Joseph Cotten; critic victims > surgeon victims.

[redfox]

Are you insinuating that the standard of the original is lacking in some way?

[Lemmycaution]

When my family was camping when I was a kid we met another family whose kids told the dr phibes story to us in great detail. We went camping with them a couple more times. Later, we saw in the newspaper that one of the kids got some sort of traffic violation and was going to be kicked off the track team. His brilliant plan was to try to kill the police officer so that he couldn't show up for the traffic violation trial. Luckly the plan did not work. We never saw the family again.