USA
94 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Every so often there's a classic movie that I suddenly realize I haven't seen yet and I get the irrepressible urge to fix that. Today it's Phibes Time. This is one of those horror movies, of which there really aren't any made lately that can compare, that's just fun. Not because it's aged in an amusing way, or because something about it is unintentionally hilarious, but because everything about it is executed in such a deliberately over-the-top way that it creates a complete and total picture of a scenario that is inherently absurd. The only other movie I can think of that has a comparable feeling is Phantom of the Paradise, so that should serve as an indicator of what you're in for.
For almost exactly the first ten minutes of this film, there's no dialogue at all. We're asked to give our full attention to the dubious deeds of the title character, Dr. Phibes - although at this point we don't know his name or anything about him yet. No extraneous goings-on are there to distract us from watching Phibes go ham on a stage organ, activate his presumably self-made band of animatronic musicians ("Dr. Phibes' Clockwork Wizards", prog rock bands in need of a name take note), and then get driven via chauffeur to go put a bunch of bats in a guy's bedroom that eat him alive. The first bit of dialogue comes when the bat victim's butler walks in to greet him in the morning and discovers his body, along with the bats. This is such a fantastic opening because everything Phibes does speaks for itself. It's not really prudent to question why he's doing any of this because the doing of it is itself the answer. There's a sense of extravagance throughout the whole film that is crucial to its individuality and its success as a movie.
My favorite thing about all of this is the fact that Dr. Phibes is an original character. This is probably a no-brainer to most people but I had to keep looking it up because everything about him feels like it stems from some other character written by some well-known horror author. I kept expecting to hear that this was adapted from a story by a minor short-story writer of the 1800s, or something like that. Dr. Phibes is such a distinct character that - to me, at least, maybe watching this in 1971 felt different - he feels like... for lack of a better term, he feels like A Something. You know, the way that you can watch an adaptation of Dracula and recognize that Dracula is A Dracula, or watch a Frankenstein production and recognize that that's A Frankenstein's Monster. Dr. Phibes feels like A Dr. Phibes. Like somebody they should have been selling dime-store Halloween masks of.
Because everything he does is so outlandish, this is not a movie where you root too much for the bad guy to be caught. This is a movie about the bad guy, but he's so wild and fun to watch that you kind of forget he's doing bad things. Ye olde spoilers for a 52-year-old movie: Dr. Phibes is killing doctors because they participated in the failed surgery that he believes killed his wife after a car accident that also left him unable to speak (but he does have a sort of nasty DIY electrolarynx, because god forbid we can't hear Vincent Price monologue). The police are laughably ineffective at doing anything whatsoever to stop any of these killings. They figure out what's going on fairly quickly, and have a complete list of every doctor who is going to be targeted, but they're just so inept and Dr. Phibes is on such an entirely different level that eight doctors get killed before it looks like there's even the slightest chance that the last one might be saved. The police are also pretty funny to watch, of course, because they're all extremely British and constantly squabbling with each other. There's maybe one of them who is actually competent, but even with him you never really feel like there's a possibility that they'll catch Phibes in the end.
As an aside, Phibes is killing his victims according to the set of plagues visited upon the Pharaohs as punishment for keeping the Israelites enslaved - why? For the drama. No half-measures with Dr. Phibes, that's why. But I wanted to mention that it was very surprising to me that whenever possible, this film uses the actual animals described in the curse. Those bats we get to see during the first kill are real live bats, and when is the last time you saw an actual bat in a horror movie instead of a terrible furry puppet on wires? They're absolutely adorable, little fuzzy puppies with wings. I was so taken aback by seeing actual, unembellished, live bats in a film that I think it automatically earned the rest of the movie some favor in my eyes.
This movie is so packed full of art deco gothic macabre-ness that it's hard to believe it's not better-known or didn't spawn something more extensive than a solidly "just pretty good" sequel and a modest cult following. Vincent Price is great as always and takes the whole cliche "revenge for dead wife" motivation to another level. The set decoration is incredible, those scenes of Phibes' grand manor with all his weird fake ballroom backdrops and mechanical musicians invented to serve his singular tastes - all of that is so good. I hesitate to say things like this because cinema today is at an entirely different place than it was in 1971, and there are incredible films being made now, but this movie feels like something that just isn't made anymore. That feeling of drama for no other reason than the sheer sense of mood, the maximalism, all the ridiculous "unnecessary" flourishes: All of that, if it were present in a movie made today, would get the movie branded with some moniker that would take away a little bit of the inherent quality of just being wild for wildness' sake. This is a movie that doesn't feel like it has - or needs - a reason to be so out there. I can see me rewatching this, especially to show it to other people, more than a few times in the future.
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