The Red Circle

At its core The Abominable Dr. Phibes is a love story, albeit a darkly comedic and horrifyingly twisted love story. Director Robert Fuest created the greatest Tim Burton flick, before Tim Buton knew how to work a camera. He managed to combine horror, dark comedy, absurd camp, and bizarre romance in just the right doses. Also, because this was the 70s, the film had a dual identity as a revenge picture. Too much you say? Well, that is the point; a rare picture where too much is still not enough (see Dr. Phibes Rises Again). Vincent Price as the title character is covered under layers of makeup -  literally looking as if he already had the face of “Dr. Phibes” and the effects team made him look like the actor “Vincent Price.” Even throughout this process you can see the actor grin as he laughs at the audience through every kill.

Reveling in every note of War March of the Priests, Price, as Phibes, opens the film at play in his secret lair; accompanied by animatronic musicians. He is about to play out out his grand guignol. The last sentence alone would be enough for me to want to see this film, but there is more. Using The Ten Plagues of Egypt, Phibes manages revenge on the surgeons responsible for the wrongful death of his beautiful wife in the accident that left him a blank slate of ugly. My particularly favorite revenge scenario is had when Dr. Phibes plays off “The Plague of Frogs” (Click, Click, Click…). Triumphantly convinced of success, Phibes retreats to be by his wife’s lifeless side. Here, still very much alive, he shows us all what is love by draining out his own blood and replacing it with embalming fluid, in a process usually reserved for corpses. It was Price’s tour de force performance (the only way he knew how to give them) that merged with Fuest’s completely out there art deco horror and made us realize this was a love story after all and as the gloriously 70’s tagline for Dr. Phibes says, “Love means never having to say you’re ugly.”

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