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Theatre of Blood, 1973, directed by Douglas Hickox. Vincent Price, Diana Rigg, Ian Hendry, Coral Browne, Robert Morley, Harry Andrews, Jack Hawkins, Diana Dors, Dennis Price.

Of all of his horror movies, Vincent Price said Theatre of Blood was his favorite. It's not hard to see why. Price's career is enormously diverse--he gave good and memorable performances in films like Laura, Champagne for Caesar, and His Kind of Woman--but by the end of his career, he was hopelessly typecast as a horror icon. I'm sure he chafed at the boundaries of the genre. This film lets Price show his considerable Shakespearean chops--exaggerated, to be sure, but the talent is certainly there. Any actor would relish the premise of the film...but I'm putting my horse before my cart to market, to quote Richard III.

Price plays Edward Lionheart, a Shakespearean actor of incredible ego who is snubbed by the London critics' circle. Wounded, he does what any normal actor would do in his place: he fakes his own death then begins bumping off his critics one by one in scenes "inspired" by Shakespeare. This isn't as outlandish as it seems--try reading Titus Andronicus sometime to see that The Bard provides plenty of fuel for ghastly murders. Price is aided in this pursuit by his equally deranged daughter (Diana Rigg), whose penchant for crossdressing is all of a piece with the film's premise. The cops are on the trail, and it's a race to see if they'll catch Lionheart before he bumps off the last of his critics.

Anyone who is even remotely familiar with the horror movies of the early 1970s will recognize this as a cash-in on Robert Fuest's Dr. Phibes movies--also starring Price--with their strange, "themed" deaths. But this movie trumps them and absolutely closes the book on them. Some of this film's set-piece murders are straightforward--the takings from Lear and Julius Caesar, for example. Most of them are outlandish re-readings of the Bard: the sight of Price with an enormous Afro and the mannerisms of a fey hairdresser as he wires Coral Browne (the future Mrs. Vincent Price) for burning at the steak a la Joan of Arc...well, it's not something you see every day. But let's go back to Titus Andronicus for a second. That play gives us one of the more outlandish death scenes in all of movies: In the play, Queen Tamora is fed a pie into which the bones and blood of her two sons has been folded. In this movie, Robert Morley's character has no children of his own, but he has a pair of poodles upon which he dotes. You can extrapolate from there. Really, how can any film hope to match that? To this film's credit, no one has even tried...

All in all, this is great fun if you have a taste for The Bard, for Price, or for the grand guignol. And if you have a taste for all three? Well so much the better. The opportunity to hear Price (over) acting as Lear, Shylock, and Iago is just too good to pass up.