Former AVENGERS director Robert Fuest (The Devil's Rain, The Final Programme) perfected the horror/comedy in these two endearing and extraordinarily visually stylish movies, now available inexpensively on one disc. This was the role of Vincent Price’s career, maximizing the effect of his beautiful voice while restraining his hammy manner. You see, the hideously injured Doctor Phibes cannot move his face and communicates only by plugging a speaker into his neck, producing an unforgettable villain’s voice.Before a car crash took away his beautiful bride Dr. Phibes was a musical impressario and maker of clockwork. (He’s a doctor the way Professor Longhair is a professor.) Now he sits at the organ in his gorgeous over-the-top art deco shuttered palace of music plotting revenge against those who failed to save his wife. Finding inspiration in the biblical plagues of Exodus Phibes uses his mechanical ingenuity to dispatch his victims with frogs, locusts, hail, etc.. Each crime is delightful! Some scary, other funny. (Terry Thomas is one of the victims.) Inspector Trout (Peter Jeffrey) is always one step behind the doctor, perhaps because he is the only competent man on the police force. A favortie moment is watching the hapless Bobbies try to figure out how to remove the body of a man skewered to a wall by a metal unicorn; since the unicorn’s horn is threaded like a screw they have to turn the body around and around. (Each grisly crime-scene investigation plays like the Monty Python “crunchy frog” skit.) Phibes has something special saved for lead surgeon Dr. Vesalius (Joseph Cotten). The last biblical plague is the Death of the First Born and Phibes strikes at Vesalius’ son with a diabolically clever variation of the old “you can saw through your arm quicker than you can saw through the hand-cuffs” bit.
Phibes’ devotion to his departed wife is sincerely touching but it raises questions about the exact nature of his relationship with his spectacularly sexy assistant with the comically suggestive name Vulnavia (Virginia North). She’s both surrogate daughter and symbol of nemesis… the sexualized manifestation of retribution, which is the now-sexless Phibes’ sole passion. The scene of Phibes and Vulnavia observing a plane crash is particularly beautiful.
We have no reason to think Phibes has a legitimate gripe against the medical profession but we root for him because he has style. The art direction/production design is spectacular, particularly Phibes’ elegantly crafted murder devices, each as lovely as an art-deco hood ornament.
The first movie was popular enough to spawn the next year’s DR. PHIBES RISES AGAIN, directed by Fuest and co-written by Fuest and Robert Blees (Remembered for scripting the Star Trek pilot “The Cage”). The sequel is inferior but not without its charms. Phibes seeks an ancient Egyptian papyrus that holds the key resurrecting his beloved Victoria (Caroline Munro) Mysteriously long-lived Egyptologist Darius Beiderbeck (Robert Quarry) has it, and he and Phibes race to Egypt to find the River of Life, which bestows immortality. Beiderbeck is joined by fiancée Diane (Fiona Lewis) and Professor Ambrose (Hugh Griffith), and Phibes travels with a new Vulnavia (played by Valli Kemp), his wife's body, and the doctor's collection of clockwork musicians. You can’t really “do” Egypt without clockwork musicians. When the sequel came out some fans, apparently not previously realizing these movies are whimsical, objected the bizarre “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” finale.
