Vincent Price plays Edward Lionheart, the world's hammiest Shakespearean actor--a role that allows Price the actor to have great fun overacting (which may or may not have involved much acting on his part). Having been rightly denied the London theatre critics' award for what he considered his greatest season of Shakespeare productions (each starring himself, of course), he proceeds to kill off the critics one by one, in an order that replicates that season, each critic in a scene lifted from the appropriate play--certainly a unique take on the notion of "serial killer". The London police are baffled (surprise!) and at a loss as to how to stop Lionheart, who moves freely among them in spite of some really awful disguises. (It never seems to occur to them to search his old theatre.) Lionheart saves the principal critic (Ian Hendry), his particular nemesis, for last--and the film ends with a one-on-one confrontation, catastrophe, fire, and all the conventions of the horror genre.
The film suffers from severe incongruities of tone, since it assumes an air of genteel good fun, with irresistibly witty dialogue (including lots of in-jokes, like the name of police inspector) and a charmingly understated musical score. Unfortunately, the murders themselves are astonishingly gory, displaying a grim delight in pain and suffering more appropriate to one of the films of Anthony Hickox (director Douglas Hickox's son, who made such gruesome gems as Warlock 2). One critic is surgically decapitated (a la The Winter's Tale), another is electrocuted in a beauty-salon chair (Joan of Arc, from Henry IV), another has his heart removed (a rewrite of The Merchant of Venice) and mailed to Hendry. Was all this blood and explicit violence really necessary in a movie that elsewhere aspires to such civilised gentility?
Except for Price, the cast consists entirely of distinguished British actors, almost all with fine Shakespearean performances in their resumés--and who seem to be having great fun mocking their profession. So it's amusing to have Price be almost the only one who gets to declaim lines from the Bard--or at least it is for a while, but Price's acting really is pretty tiresome. Diana Rigg is beautiful and affecting in her thankless role as Lionheart's daughter--thankless because she's supposed to be the mystery figure (is she helping him or not?), but then she's an open participant in a murder well before the climax of the film, so there goes the suspense!
Despite these problems, Theatre of Blood is a unique and irresistible film, cleverly developed from a basic premise that is hard to beat. And it might even encourage the viewer to reread (or even read) some of the plays on which it is based.
The film suffers from severe incongruities of tone, since it assumes an air of genteel good fun, with irresistibly witty dialogue (including lots of in-jokes, like the name of police inspector) and a charmingly understated musical score. Unfortunately, the murders themselves are astonishingly gory, displaying a grim delight in pain and suffering more appropriate to one of the films of Anthony Hickox (director Douglas Hickox's son, who made such gruesome gems as Warlock 2). One critic is surgically decapitated (a la The Winter's Tale), another is electrocuted in a beauty-salon chair (Joan of Arc, from Henry IV), another has his heart removed (a rewrite of The Merchant of Venice) and mailed to Hendry. Was all this blood and explicit violence really necessary in a movie that elsewhere aspires to such civilised gentility?
Except for Price, the cast consists entirely of distinguished British actors, almost all with fine Shakespearean performances in their resumés--and who seem to be having great fun mocking their profession. So it's amusing to have Price be almost the only one who gets to declaim lines from the Bard--or at least it is for a while, but Price's acting really is pretty tiresome. Diana Rigg is beautiful and affecting in her thankless role as Lionheart's daughter--thankless because she's supposed to be the mystery figure (is she helping him or not?), but then she's an open participant in a murder well before the climax of the film, so there goes the suspense!
Despite these problems, Theatre of Blood is a unique and irresistible film, cleverly developed from a basic premise that is hard to beat. And it might even encourage the viewer to reread (or even read) some of the plays on which it is based.