Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Jim Clark
Starring: Vincent Price, Natasha Pyne, Peter Cushing, Robert Quarry, Adrienne Corri, Linda Hayden
Two decades before Scream delivered a postmodern dissection of the slasher sub-genre, a series of British movies starring Vincent Price were similarly examining the actor's role in a climate in which Gothic horror had gone out of fashion, replaced by the sort of movies that would themselves give rise to the slasher phenomenon. These films - The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Dr. Phibes Rises Again, Theatre of Blood and Madhouse - were essentially slasher movies before such a designation had been assigned. They featured Price playing a villain who offs his enemies in a series of elaborate ways. What could be more slasher?
1974's Madhouse is the most postmodern of the bunch. Price plays Paul Toombes, an actor best known for portraying the villainous character of "Dr Death" in a series of horror movies. The clips of Dr Death's movies peppered throughout Madhouse are actually taken from various films Price starred in for American International Pictures, who co-produced Madhouse with Britain's Amicus. It's at a viewing of one such film that Toombes' career is abruptly ended when his new fiancée Ellen (Julie Crosthwait) is beheaded by an unknown assailant. The audience knows that the killer donned Dr Death's ensemble of a skull face mask, flowing cloak and black gloves (an influence on Ghostface perhaps?), which leads Toombes to believe he was responsible himself. With the police unable to pin the murder on Toombes, he avoids prison but succumbs to madness, said to wander the streets of Hollywood mumbling to himself.
12 years later Toombes is given a chance to revive his career when former adult movie producer turned TV impresario Oliver Quayle (Robert Quarry) brings him to England for a Dr Death TV show. Toombes is reluctant but feels he owes a debt to his old friend Herbert Flay (Peter Cushing), the screenwriter of the movies that made him famous, and who is now penning the TV series.
Liberally adapted from Angus Hall's novel 'Doubleday', Madhouse reworks the formula that worked so well for the previous year's Theatre of Blood. That movie saw Price played a hammy stage actor who gets revenge on his critics by recreating murders from Shakespeare plays. In Madhouse, bodies start to pile up once Toombes arrives in England, each victim killed in a way that corresponds to a murder in one of his Dr Death films. This premise worked in Theatre of Blood because of our familiarity with Shakespeare, but as Dr Death's movies don't exist in the real world the concept doesn't land here. We have to wait to be told after each murder that the killing bears a resemblance to Toombes' fictional work.
In the hands of acclaimed editor turned not so acclaimed director Jim Clark, the killings are staged in bland fashion, with little in the way of suspenseful build-up. At best they're unintentionally laughable thanks to some highly unconvincing effects. The influence of the era's Italian thrillers can be seen in the fetishisation of the killer's black gloves, but Madhouse has none of the lurid style of its continental cousins.
Madhouse doesn't work as a thriller. It's more interesting for horror fans on a meta level if you read the character of Toombes as representative of the various once adored horror stars who were struggling to adapt to the rapidly changing genre landscape of the '70s. It's no Targets, but it gives Price a similar chance to argue his case as the one Peter Bogdanovich afforded Boris Karloff. The movie's best scene sees Toombes appear on a chat show hosted by none other than Michael Parkinson (as naturally convincing here as he would later be in the controversial Ghostwatch two decades later), in which he argues that the sort of horror movies he is known for provide an essential means of taming the beast that resides within us all. Horror fans will also get a kick out of seeing Cushing dress as Dracula, a role he never got to play, at a costume party where Quarry is decked out in his Count Yorga ensemble.
Madhouse is on UK bluray from Eureka Entertainment from June 22nd.