Director: Robert Fuest
Screenplay: Robert Fuest and Richard Blees
Starring: Vincent Price, Robert Quarry, Valli Kemp, Peter Jeffrey
Release Date: July 1972
I have absolutely nothing bad to say about DR. PHIBES RISES AGAIN. I had more fun with this flick than any other movie I’ve viewed for this blog, so much so that I will more than likely pop this disc back in and invite some friends over to watch it before the month is over. This film and it’s predecessor are two of the most bizarre, darkly comical, tacky and at times fiendishly unsettling horror movies I have ever witnessed.
The film begins with a frantic recap of THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES, which detailed the exploits of the vengeful Dr. Anton Phibes (Price) who, after learning of his wife’s death in surgery, supposedly died in a fiery car crash. It turns out he wasn’t dead after all, just horribly mutilated. Piecing together a mask to approximate his face, he is unable to speak through conventional methods, instead opting to plug an amplifier into a socket he has grafted into his neck. Blaming them for the death of his beloved Victoria (Caroline Munro), Phibes set out to enact bloody retribution on the nine surgeons in attendance that day, killing them off one by one in delightfully inventive scenarios that all involved the ten plagues of Egypt.
DR. PHIBES RISES AGAIN picks up three years after that film’s climax, with the mad doctor arisen from his cryogenic sleep by an alignment of the planets. After summoning his faithful mute servant, the voluptuous Vulnavia (Kemp), he sets off in search of an Egyptian scroll that holds the key to eternal life, stolen from his safe during his lengthy slumber. He quickly traces it to the home of Darrus Beiderbeck (Quarry), who is desperately searching for the River of Life so that he and his fiancé Diana (Fiona Lewis) can live forever. After efficiently dispatching a guard through an over-complicated scheme involving motorized wind-up snakes and a phone with a retractable spike (“In one ear and out the other, eh?”), Phibes and Vulnavia retrieve the papyrus and set off for the deserts of Egypt, carrying in tow his enormous organ, his robotic four-man band known as “The Alexandrian Quartet”, and the cryogenically preserved corpse of his beloved Victoria. Beiderbeck and company are of course in hot pursuit, as are Scotland Yard Inspector Trout (Jeffrey) and Superintendent Waverley (John Cater). Needless to say, Phibes picks them off one by one, each death a fiendishly clever twist on Egyptian lore.
The flick gets off to shaky start trying to bridge the gap between the two films, and it is never explained exactly how Phibes is able to track the papyrus to Beiderbeck’s home, but none of that really matters because once the story gets underway it is an absolute hoot from start to finish. The backbone of the film is the performance of Vincent Price, who has to deliver all of his dialogue without opening his mouth, and still manages to act circles around and chew more scenery than any of the other actors. The film is ripe with scene after scene of Phibes wailing away on his organ while soliloquizing melodramatically about his devotion to Victoria, all while Vulnavia stands by silently wearing a series of increasingly more stylish and confounding outfits. The relationship between Phibes and Vulnavia is strangely compelling. I thought she was a robot in the first movie, but here Phibes summons her out of thin air after reciting a bizarre incantation, indicating that she’s some sort of friendly spirit or ghost. It doesn’t matter, because Phibes seems to love her almost as much as he does his dead wife. Their interplay largely consists of Phibes waxing philosophical, and then cut to Vulnavia doing something completely out of left field and ridiculous, like when she is seen randomly holding the biggest goddamn tuba I have ever seen. Their quirkiness and mutual platonic love for one another makes the characters very endearing in spite of the atrocities they commit.
This tuba serves ABSOLUTELY no purpose in the film.
Most of the film’s thrills come from the elaborate, ridiculously complex and inventive death scenes. Phibes is obsessed with creating clockwork simulacrum of existing creatures, be they his traveling band or the mechanized snakes he uses to fool one victim into picking up a phone booby-trapped to plunge a spike through his skull. One unfortunate fellow opens the glove compartment in his jeep and has his face literally blasted off by sand. And most memorably, Vulvania lures a man into a secluded corner and gets him to sit in a gold scorpion-shaped chair, securing his wrists with a device that has a spiked interior, ensuring his arteries will be sliced if he attempts to get out of it. The key to the devise is placed inside of a small dog statue at the base of the chair which, when the man breaks it open with his foot, unleashes a swarm of scorpions that proceeds to attack his face and decimate his sensitive man-parts.
It’s obvious that the SAW series owes this film and it’s predecessor an enormous debt of gratitude for inspiring their formula of devising ingenious Rube Goldberg-ian death traps. But where those films are soul-crushing vacuums of despair, the PHIBES films view it all as a lark. Each murder sequence is punctuated by a wry one-liner from either Phibes himself or Inspector Trout, who dealt with Phibes’ reign of terror in the previous film. I’m also a big fan of the production design of the film, which looks like a cross between a Gothic horror film and AUSTIN POWERS, with Phibes’ underground lair sharing the same aesthetic as “The Price Is Right”. It almost seems like writer-director Robert Fuest set out to intentionally fuck with his audience, as every frame of the movie features some strange occurrence in the background or a random non-sequitur line reading from one of the supporting players, with all of it amped up to eleven by Price’s deviously devilish lead performance.
My Rating: 8.5/10
*The only recent exception I can think of is THE CABIN IN THE WOODS which, if you haven’t seen it, stop reading this and do so immediately!
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