Dr Phibes is a camp masterpiece of sublime elegance – what other film could offer up a scene where a man’s blood is drained to the accompaniment of a woman in furs standing outside playing a melancholic violin solo. There’s such a droll sense of humour at work here – like the moment Vincent Price’s deformed title doctor pours a glass of champagne and tips it up to his neck to drink, or puts a finger dipped in the vegetable juice to his neck to taste the flavour. There is the joyously droll moment where Maurice Kaufman is impaled against the wall on the horn of a unicorn head fired from a cannon, with the bumbling police then having to unscrew the body from the wall, while arguing over which way the horn’s screw-thread runs.
Vincent Price gives the best performance of his life as a madman, seemingly trapped inside his own face, all the time delivering hilariously flowery eulogies to his dead wife via speaker-phone. And there’s that marvellously wicked little chuckle he gives, sitting sniffing a daisy as he watches one victim go down in a plane. He’s perfect. The scenes in the house as he and the lovely never-speaking Virginia North sweep across the ballroom floor, amid painted art-deco cycloramas and a clockwork orchestra have a beautiful, elegant sophistication. There is also a superb score.
Director Robert Fuest came here via the camp antics of tv’s The Avengers (1962-9) – in fact Dr Phibes would have made a perfect foil for Steed and Mrs Peel. Fuest had previously made the fine little-seen psycho film And Soon the Darkness. Certainly many of the fans of the series hold Dr Phibes Rises Again as being up there alongside if not better than the original. But it appears caught between the two camps that all sequels do in trying to maintain the same elements that made the original a success while heading off in its own directions. The
results appear more haphazard and ultimately lacks the surefooted sense of droll humour
that characterized the original. The original and its revenge motif was perfectly self-
contained as a story, this feels much more strained trying to copy it. The set-up this time
– Vincent Price employing his novelty deaths to kill the members of a rival
archaeological expedition – is contrived. It’s not exactly a realist film but the
improbability of some of the set-ups – that Vincent Price has carted an entire clockwork
army, concertina beds and the wherewithal to rig somebody’s car into a deathtrap with
him into the desert – does seem ever so slightly incredible.
first film – Hugh Griffith, Terry-Thomas – in different roles, as well as a small cameo from Peter Cushing as the captain of the ship. The film also gives Dr Phibes a nemesis in
Biederbeck, played by Robert Quarry who had become a hot genre name following his
success as the title character in Count Yorga, Vampire.
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