The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) features Vincent Price as a revenge killer, out to wipe out the surgical team who failed his wife in her moment of need. As an ornament to his efforts, each death will symbolize in some way the nine plagues of Egypt, although the last is not obviously completed.
I was mystified as to how a brass unicorn catapulted through the body of one victim was related to a plague, but perhaps I’ve already forgotten.
Then again, this movie is about obscurity, from deaths to the identity of the Price’s assistant; unless the editing for TV was quite destructive, the audience is never permitted to know her identity or role; she’s listed as Vulnavia in the credits, but I do not believe that name, or any other, is mentioned in the movie.
Much else is attributed airily to expertise, such as the reproduction of Vincent’s voice, himself the victim of an accident on the same day his wife died. Just how does he do that? Whose ashes were buried in his grave? How was his wife’s body, dead these 4 years, so well preserved so that he might reside next to her for eternity?
But this movie has a queerly detached feel to it. I think this is due to the fact that no great effort was made to make sympathetic characters. The surgical team is, for the most part, little more than moving targets; the police almost laughably incompetent; and Price and his assistant principally mysterious. We see events, we’re presented logic and motivations, but it’s almost academic, a quaint puzzle to be solved by the desperate chief surgeon and the police, who are principally harassed by a commissioner more interested in publicity than effectuality.
For all this, there is certainly some competency: the deaths are effective, sometimes chilling; Vincent, limited as he is by the script, still evokes some mild sympathy and even horror, his domicile full of his inventions calculated to put a chill of concern into any visitor.
Still, in the end, I felt a little empty. It failed to emotionally involve me, so I was not excited.
