The Gist: Dr. Phibes does his thing in the deserts of Egypt…very slowly this time.

Anyone Famous In It? Vincent Price returns to play Dr. Phibes. For some reason, Terry-Thomas is back but playing a different character for two minutes. Peter Cushing has a cameo as a ships captain. And Caroline Munro is still uncredited as Mrs. Phibes

How I Watched It: DVD

So, What Happened? To be honest, no fucking clue. I mean, it starts out ok enough. It’s three years later and the moon is over the dawning of the age of Aquarius or something so the tomb that Dr and Mrs. Phibes were in at the end of the first movie opens up and Dr. Phibes wakes up after all the embalming fluid is replaced with his blood again. I have to wonder if blood stores well? Like it’s just been sitting in a tomb for 3 years. Maybe it was AC controlled?

Phibes wakes up, immediately monologues about how he’s going to find the elixir of life to bring Victoria to life again and keep both of them alive for all of eternity. I feel like Phibes has that problem solved, he’s a walking skull with no vocal cords and has to eat in a hole in the back of his neck. I think you’re good, my guy.

Anyway, the map to this place that’ll give them this eternal life is in the safe upstairs. Problem is there is no more upstairs. The house that Phibes had in the first movie got demolished within the three years he was asleep. Oh and Vulnavia is back, despite melting to death in acid in the first movie. Phibes merely summons her and she just appears out of the shadow. I have no fucking clue nor is this explained.

Phibes does find the safe in the rubble but the safe has been busted open and the map to this eternal life thing is gone. Phibes immediately knows who took it! BIEDERBECK!!!!!!!! FUCKING BIEDERBECK!!!!!!

Wait…who’s Beiderbeck?

Apparently, Beiderbeck is Phibes #1 enemy, despite never being mentioned in the first movie. But whatever, we do see that Beiderbeck did indeed steal the map from Phibes’ safe and we see Beiderbeck’s swanky pad. Mrs. Beiderbeck shows up to tell her husband he’s late for a party and he puts a beefy butler in charge to watch the map.

But Phibes is a man with a plan! He has wacky contraptions up his sleeve! This one involves wind up snakes but one of the snakes is real! And it bites Beefy Butler. The Butler, wanting to call for a doctor, puts the phone to his head and Phibes presses a button and a spike comes out of the phone, going through his ears, instantly killing him.

Oh hell yeah!! This movie is going to be great!!!!

Is what I thought. Things come to a SCREECHING HALT when Phibes steals the map back and immediately gets on a ship, heading to Egypt, along with Vulnavia and Victoria’s body.  Also on this ship is Beiderbeck and a man named Ambrose, who is suppose to be an archeologist, but he looks more like The Queen’s Butler or something.

We do get one more kind of interesting death which made me laugh, when Phibes runs into Ambrose and he immediately stuffs him inside a comically large (empty) gin bottle. We don’t see how he stuffs the man inside the bottle but he does and the bottle gets tossed overboard.

Back in Scotland Yard, Detective Trout and his superior Waverley hear about the death of the butler and find the bottle with Ambrose stuffed in it. Terry-Thomas shows up as a man named Lombardo, who witnessed Phibes and Vulnavia get on the ship but not give very clear descriptions of them. This is suppose to be a comedic moment but I found it more annoying. And that is kind of a problem with this movie. The only comedic parts of this movies are the deaths Phibes does to various people. But anything NOT involving Phibes cleverly killing people is just kinda boring.

And the movie is confusing as fuck.

So Phibes gets to Egypt and I guess he had a summer house in Egypt, inside a pyramid, cause he shows up in a setting very similar to his house in England, complete with mechanical band and sets up his new home here. While digging around this pyramid, he finds a sarcophagus that’s empty, but if you pull a lever a different way, a secret compartment opens up. Phibes decides this is the best place to put Victoria until they find this secret eternal life place.

Well, Beiderbeck also finds this pyramid and he also finds the sarcophagus but he ends up taking it back to his camp! D’OH!! PHIBES!!! Why were you not watching the sarcophagus that contains the most precious things to you YOUR WIFE?!?!?!

So of course, Phibes has to go on a killing spree and by spree I mean two guys. One guy he clamps into a chair and pours scorpions on him, which eventually kill him. The other is a guy who’s suppose to guard the sarcophagus (Beiderbeck doesn’t know Victoria is stashed in there, he just wants to sell the thing eventually) so Phibes makes a giant vice and squishes the guy while laying on his cot.

Also along on this trip with Beiderbeck is Trout and Waverley, who discover that Phibes is chasing after Beiderbeck. But they LITERALLY DO NOTHING and don’t even GET REMOTELY CLOSE to capturing Phibes. They’re just there for lousy comedic effect.

And that’s honestly it for the wacky deaths. A big bulk of the movie is Phibes and Beiderbeck shaking their fists at each other, Phibes monologuing on how he loves Victoria and how he’s doing all this for her and Beiderbeck is a jerk. Beiderbeck bought his wife along on this trip but it’s not really clear why, except to be bait for Beiderbeck.

Oh I’m sorry. There is one more death but I have no idea what happened. After all these other guys are turning up dead, Beiderbeck makes a third guy on his team take Diana to the dock so she can go back home. The guy is distracted by a British marching band that ends up being a trap set by Phibes. Diana is taken and the guy, returning to his jeep, is suddenly pelted with brown rocks that apparently ate all of his flesh.

No fucking clue.

Beiderbeck, hearing that Phibes has Diana, rushes to the pyramid that Phibes is staying in and wouldn’t you know it, the eternal life thing was UNDERNEATH Phibes this entire time. Wow! Diane is knocked out and chained up to a gold raft. Phibes promises that she will be ok once he opens this gate that’ll let him, Victoria, and Vulnavia drift down a river to eternal life apparently.

The gate closes in Beiderbeck’s face, which makes him rapidly age until he’s nothing but a skeleton and this confusing movie comes to a end.

Final Thoughts: Holy crap this movie. Such a disappointment. Yeah the deaths, the few that happen in this movie, are wonderful. But if there ever was that feeling of “oh crap we need to make a sequel, uh…what do we do?!?” this was it. Vincent Price is honestly the best part of this film. Trout and Waverley was just here to connect things to the first movie. Bringing in Terry-Thomas is confusing, even if he’s playing a different character. Yeah, this bummed me out big time. At least they learned their lesson and didn’t make a third film. Thank god!

Rating: 1.5 out of 5.