Prominent doctors throughout London keep turning up dead in a series of gruesome and bizarre murders. Some detective work by Scotland Yard's Inspector Trout leads to the conclusion that the killer is offing his victims based on the ten plagues used against the Pharaoh in the Bible.
Frogs, bats, rats, hail, locusts, a brass unicorn catapulted across a London street ... Everything described in Exodus (stretching interpretations of the text to the breaking point to encompass what Phibes is doing) is employed against the doctors and nurses who tried and failed to save Dr. Anton Phibes' dying wife in a surgical operation.
This movie is so odd. Phibes mopes around his mansion hideout, listening to his clockwork band, playing his organ, melting the faces off of the wax busts of his enemies, reciting poetry to a picture if his dead wife through a voice box connected to his throat - he is unable to speak normally due to the car crash that supposedly took his life.
And while Phibes mopes and mourns, Vulnavia, his beautiful assistant silently brings him flowers, plays the violin, sets a gourmet dinner for the two of them, dances in elaborate costumes, and seemingly tries to gain his attention and affection. But Phibes only has eyes for his dead wife.
Vincent Price gives an impressive, if campy, performance as the aristocratic, obsessed, grotesque, monstrous Dr. Phibes. He performs the entire movie without moving his mouth to speak, as Phibes can only speak through his voice box speaker arrangement. This means Price's performance has to come from body movements and facial intensity, and here he excels at both.
The Abominable Dr. Phibes is not your ordinary horror movie. Through most of there movie, we follow Phibes as he exacts his revenge on the surgeons he perceives killed his wife. Are we supposed to root for him, or for the incompetent, bumbling police? I suppose it's Phibes, as we want to see what he unleashes on the next victim, whether or not we agree with his reason for killing. In this way, this seems to have influenced the Saw movies, with us more-or-less rooting for a madman righting the wrongs he perceives in the world through a series of gruesome traps.
Unlike the Saw movies, however, Dr. Phibes is infused with a dark sense of humor that is really truly funny. The deadpan, oh-so-proper British dialogue from the police along with Phibes' strange mannerisms and the dark humor of many of the death traps lets you know that this isn't to be taken too seriously, and it's okay to have fun with it. That sense of fun is missing from most of the Saw movies, but not from their decades-earlier predecessor, The Abominable Dr. Phibes.
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