Highly entertaining as a blackly comic riff on the revenge motif and an eye-catching exemplar of a strand of what might be called pop-art horror from the late ‘60s and early ’70s, The Abominable Dr Phibes also draws inspiration from the craze for Jazz-age flavour sparked by films like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and Bonnie and Clyde. Director Robert Fuest had handled several episodes of The Avengers in that show’s halcyon days, and he brings that playful, retro-cool flavour to a story that evokes the mechanical plots of Edgar Wallace, the lair-plotting of The Phantom of the Opera, and quotes the elaborate techno-sadism of Fu Manchu.
The story, revolving around scarred, grief-stricken genius Anton Phibes’ (Vincent Price) programme of vengeance against the eight doctors and one nurse whom he blames for failing to save his wife’s life on the operating table, is chiefly an excuse for elaborate invention in Phibes’ multiple homicides based on the ten plagues Moses brought down on Egypt. Phibes’ killings are usually self-conscious in their ridiculousness, like a plague of locusts that eat off a victim’s face or a catapulted brass unicorn head, and the tone veers towards camp, garishly amusing comedy, particularly when the victim of the latter device has to be literally unscrewed from the wall.
Fuest archly celebrates Phibes’ status as new-age anti-heroic rebel against the modern religion of medical science, preferring his own cabalistic style of extremist moral surgery. His murders are rendered like varieties of gruesome, critical performance art. Particularly in the finale, in which Phibes contrives an elaborate exercise in race-against-time surgery, the narrative anticipates the affectations of the Saw films, and with a not-dissimilar keynote of gruelling exacted punishment for the sloppiness inherent in everyday lives, here explicitly related to an Old Testament moral code, and a general air of gimmicky anticipation. Dr Phibes is however far more likeable and visually appealing than that glum and tacky series.
In spite of the jokes, and sometimes in accord with them, Fuest offers a weirdly beautiful vision of 1925 as reconceived by
Carnaby Street
, full of resplendent art-deco sets and curious anachronistic flourishes, which possess an occasionally otherworldly, liebestod-inflected perversity. Fuest offers a morbidly romantic zest, like in the first scene, in which Phibes bangs away with delirious rapture on his organ, and then sets a mechanical jazz-band to play, conducting the mannequins with enthusiasm, before greeting the arrival of his mysterious, silent, seemingly spectral assistant Vulnavia (incarnated with cool stature by Virginia North) in a blaze of light and spinning with her about the floor his ballroom-cum-hideout.
Vulnavia swans through the proceedings bedecked in clothes that often suggest a flapper pagan priestess, sawing away on a white fiddle whilst Phibes’ foul deeds are done. Particularly funny is her and Phibes’ miniature concert as they watch one of his victim’s plane fall from the sky (he’s being gnawn on by rats, understandably distracting him from his piloting duties), and off-hand moments as when Vulnavia settles for a thoughtful cigarette amidst Phibes’ fantastically odd home decor. North’s and Price’s scenes together anticipate the way Orson Welles would use himself and muse Oja Kodar a couple of years later in the even more waggish riff, F for Fake.
Because the film is driven by affection for its villain and delight in the malicious splendour of his killings, the good doctor’s victims are barely characterised, except through varieties of smugness, or perversion, in the case of blue movie-loving Dr Longstreet. Terry-Thomas, in a droll cameo, plays Longstreet, who receives a midnight visitation from Vulnavia whilst he’s indulging his habit: the doctor is immediately lost in lustful delight as he beholds the gorgeous creature who’s just invaded his rooms, his hand still swinging the crank handle of his projector even though it’s broken off, a neat image of auto-erotic frenzy. She ties him to a chair, Longstreet unable and unwilling to resist the promise of a bit of dominatrix action, only to spend the night having his blood drained out into bottles by Phibes.
The one exception to the ludicrousness of the victims is Dr Vesalius (Joseph Cotten, a late fill-in for Peter Cushing), chief surgeon at the operation that failed to save the life of Victoria Regina Phibes, a conscientious and whip-smart man who has to save his son from the ninth plague, the curse of the death of the first-born, so of course he is the only one to retain any real chance of fending off Phibes’ machinations. What’s left of the potential for genuine horror is leavened by plentiful comic relief by a particularly entertaining Peter Jeffrey, as the canny but considerably outmatched Inspector Trout, and his various underlings and overlords at Scotland Yard, trying to keep up with Phibes’ relentless, fearless invention.
Dr Phibes was however chiefly designed as a paean to the legend of Price, with the film publicised as his one-hundredth feature, sporting numerous references to some of his famous works, especially House of Wax, the tinkering mod-mad scientist of the Dr Goldfoot films, and even, in his wife’s name, to the play he made his Broadway debut in. The curiosity here is that Price’s most distinctive and effective device as an actor, his voice, is only heard in raspy, disconnected snatches, for Phibes can only speak through an electric device, and then mostly only in interpolated, repetitive invocations to the shrine he keeps to his wife. However, this helps affirm Price’s definite skill as a physical mime, communicating with great deftness his alternations of eagerness, contempt, judiciousness and joy in the process of gaining his revenge, particularly in the malevolent, unfaded hate he displays in burning the faces from representative mannequins of his victims: his lack of words to express himself with somehow only focuses the lethal emotions which are Phibes’ only true provenance.
Fuest was making his fourth feature here after Just Like a Woman (1967), Wuthering Heights, and And Soon the Darkness (both 1970). Whereas his work on And Soon the Darkness in particular was singular for its canny spaciousness and disorientating use of the big screen for claustrophobic ends, here Fuest inverts that achievement by finding constant opportunities for turning limited spaces into baroquely packed vortexes of detail. His background in art direction for television, where the possibilities for suggesting style are far more limited, is also very apparent: like more imaginative TV directors, Fuest crowds the edges of frames and foregrounds with looming objects, décor and design, whilst action occurs in a central or slightly displaced, deep-focus zone. The results are occasionally immobilising, but nonetheless accumulate into an ebullient universe of period paraphernalia and stylised historicism, a haute couture fantasia of the Jazz Age viewed through a lens of post-modern genre detritus. If production company AIP’s take on horror had been best defined by Roger Corman, who often experimented with introducing textures inspired by other visual art forms in his ’60s work, from psychedelia to pop art to abstract expressionism to Cubism, Fuest offered here possibilities to extend and enlarge that approach, in conceiving his labours in B-movie land as a place to indulge a laissez faire take on cinema style. Whilst Fuest’s career individuality dissipated quickly, like too many intriguing talents to emerge in just as the British film industry entered crisis, his run of films in the early ’70s are entirely justified cult objects. Dr Phibes satirises and debunks the Gothic horror and stylised thriller traditions of genre cinema and literature from the first half of the 20th century, just before their last vestiges would be swept away by the splatter movie, and yet it also celebrates them with the most delicious brand of eye candy.
