THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES

Vincent Price is Dr. Anton Phibes: organist, theologian, inventor, presumed-dead widower and the kind of doctor who responds to medical malpractice by constructing an Art Deco murder palace and killing nine doctors according to the Biblical plagues of Egypt. Phibes himself has no face and can’t speak without plugging his neck into a gramophone, but he does have a silent assistant named Vulnavia, a mechanical orchestra and an inexhaustible flair for pageantry.

THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES is a revenge movie dressed for its own funeral, swathed in velvet, clockwork and candlelight and determined to put a lot more bodies in the ground before the service is over. Robert Fuest’s candy-colored nightmare gives Vincent Price one of his greatest roles while perversely denying him the use of his actual voice for most of it. Equal parts horror movie, black comedy and deranged interior-design catalog, PHIBES is macabre, ridiculous, gorgeous and completely committed to the proposition that if you’re going to murder nine people, you might as well make a show out of it.