The Gist: Take Darkman, add Seven, and put in a dash of Saw, set it in 1920’s London and viola!

Anyone Famous In It? Vincent Price plays the titular Dr. Phibes. Joseph Cotton plays Dr. Vesalius, one of Phibes victims. Terry-Thomas plays Dr. Longstreet, another one of Phibes’ victims. And a uncredited Caroline Munro as Mrs. Phibes.

How I Watched It: DVD

So, What Happened? Way back in 1921, Mrs. Phibes is getting surgery from a team of doctors (and a nurse) and something goes horribly wrong so she dies. Dr. Phibes, learning of his wife’s death, rushes back to London. But his car ends up sailing off a cliff and he is presumed dead. He actually didn’t die but his face is horribled mangled, with all the flesh burned off his skull. And he’s unable to speak. Pissed about, well, ALL of this, he decides to exact his revenge on the 8 doctors and 1 nurse!

And he’s going to make it fun!

One thing you should know going into this movie is honestly the fun deaths Dr. Phibes comes up with for every doctor. It’s not enough to just find them and kill them in boring manners, like stabbing or shooting or poisoning or putting their nuts in a bear trap. No, he goes TO THE EXTREME!!!!

The one off-camera death we learn about was a man being stung to death by bees….in his own room. The first murder we see at the start of the film involved Phibes and his really beautiful and mute assistant Vulnavia lowering a bird cage of bats into the room of a doctor, opening the birdcage, and the all the bats kinda scree scree scree around the room. Off-camera, they peck the man to death.

On the case is Inspector Trout. He’s definitely the Sherlock to Phibe’s Moriarty! At first, Trout finds the bee death and the bat death weird but unrelated. But then we get to Dr. Longstreet’s death. Oh, Dr. Longstreet. You perv you. He’s at home alone (he sent the housekeeper out to enjoy the evening) so he could crank it.

And by crank it, I mean hand crank a film projector that’s showing a film of a woman in a skimpy bikini dance around with a snake. For some reason, this is turning him on. When Vulnavia shows up, her hot body puts Longstreet in a trance, and she ties him to a chair. Phibes enters the room and starts draining the man of blood.

You may think I mean he only took enough blood out of him until Longstreet passed out and/or died. But no. I mean he COMPLETELY drained him of blood. If you’re curious, all the blood in the human body can fill up eight 16oz mason jars. When Trout comes across this scene, and finds this weird amulet on the floor, he then realizes all these murders are intentional.

The amulets are things Phibes puts on wax busts of all of his victims after he burns them with a torch to symbolize they are dead. By the way, Phibes little hideout is interesting. There’s a wind-up band that plays either marching band music or late-night orchestrations, depending on which way Phibes pulls the lever.

Also Phibes is a master at the organ. He recorded some albums and plays concerts all around the world! He’s like the Jimi Hendrix of organ music! He’s also got a doctorate in theology.

Wait…so the Doctor in his name is…

Eh, better not go down that route.

Anyway.

Trout finds the guy who made the amulet, and he tells him the symbol on the amulet is in Hebrew. So Trout finds a rabbi who tells him the symbol means blood, which is one of the 10 plagues of Egypt. The other 9 are bees, bats, frogs, hail, rats, beasts, locusts, death of the first-born son, and finally darkness. Mostly in that order.

The frog death is really silly. Phibes stalks his victim at a costume party, gives the doctor a giant headpiece of a frog and sets it so it automatically chokes him, making him cause a scene at the party, but not enough of a scene for anyone to help him and this doctor dies.

Trout does some digging and realize all these doctors worked under Vesalius at one time or another. Vesalius tells Trout that it’s not uncommon to get the help of 8 other doctors, depending on how bad things are with the patient. And it could be any number of patients he had over the year-oh wait he narrowed it down to one: Victoria Phibes.

Armed with the list of the other doctors who were responsible for Mrs. Phibes death, they get to work trying to round them up and keep them safe. One doctor takes this opportunity to go for a nice airplane ride, which gives Phibes a chance to fill the cockpit with rats that claw at the doctor’s face, causing his plane to crash.

I dare say, sir, I have had ENOUGH of these God Forsaken Rodents on this Queen-loving Plane!! My word!!

The one that everyone was wondering how he was going to pull off was the death of beasts. Like…was a heard of wildebeests gonna stampede through this guys house or something? Oh no, my friends. It’s much more magnificent than that. The police find this doctor in a hotel and decide to put him into a safehouse until they find Phibes. As they open the doors to the hotel, a giant brass unicorn comes sailing across the street and punges its horn into the heart of the guy. Complete with catapult sound effect. It’s probably the best death in the movie, hands down.

The movies dances between these deaths, Trout and other police getting yelled at by the commissioner of Scotland Yard, and Phibes hanging around his hideout either playing the organ or talking to a picture of his dead wife. Now, Vincent Price is known for his voice. It’s iconic. And he’s great in this role, obviously. BUT a downside to this film is he doesn’t talk on screen. Since Phibes lost his voice box, he figured out how to make a device and using acoustics, can talk through this device. And honestly, he goes through all this trouble for no reason, because the only time he talks, until the last act of the film, is when he’s talking to the picture of his dead wife. And he easily could monologue this in his head. But whatever, we had to show he can make devices I suppose.

So we have locusts, death of first born, and darkness left and only Vesalius and the nurse that was on duty that fateful night left. They super guard both nurse and doctor at the hospital and keep it airtight so no one can sneak in or out.

Except Phibes totally sneaks in and eventually sneaks out. The death of the nurse was probably the strangest. He turned all these vegetables into a juice, snuck into the hospital, went one floor above the nurse, and pulled out this sheet of plastic film with a drawing of a cartoon naked woman on it. He puts the film of the drawing on the floor and uses this to drill a hole in the floor until revealing the nurses room below. He then pours the veggie juice all over the nurse before dumping the locusts down through a tube (with Phibes happily watching this happen).

For some reason, Trout never thought “death of first-born son” to mean Phibes was going to go after Vesalius son until it’s too late. By the time they get to Vesalius’ house, the son is missing. When they check on the nurse, they find her entire face has been eaten by the locusts. Man, locusts work fucking fast, yo!!

Phibes calls Vesalius and tells him to come on over for a “Come Save Your Son’s Life Party” and after Trout tries to interfere, Vesalius knocks him out and rushes over. Now, I’ve described this movie up above as Darkman meets Seven. Here’s where the Saw part comes in. And there’s no way in hell the filmmakers of Saw DID NOT see this movie and felt inspired.

Phibes locked the unconscious boy’s table into place with a lock and chain. He put the key inside the ribcage of the boy and sewn him back up. Now Vesalius has six minutes to open up the boy and get the key out before Phibes dumps acid all over the boy’s face. Phibes taunts the doctor while he’s trying to work, blaming him for killing his wife over and over again. Then when he hears the police getting closer, he takes his leave.

Vesalius manages to cut the key out and unlocks the table pushing it out of the way before the acid fell. But Vulnavia manages to get in the way of the acid and melts off camera. The cops show up, can’t find Phibes anywhere and manage to find his secret passageway to the basement. Before the cops find the basement, Phibes gets into a sarcophagus with his dead wife, exchanges his blood with embalming fluid, and is lowered into the ground before the cops find him. Wondering what the last plague, darkness, means, they wander off, leaving a cackling Phibes underground.

Final Thoughts: This movie is fucking wacky. Honestly, it’s all the death scenes. And the comedy between Trout, the other cops, and their superior who’s just about had it with Trout. Vincent Price, naturally, does a great job and they did a good job making his face look like prosthetics. There is a sequel to this, and look at that, I own it! Guess what I’m gonna be reviewing next week…

Rating: 4 out of 5.