Madhouse (1974) - film review

Paul Toombes was once a major Hollywood star.  He owed his fame to a series of cheap horror films in which he played Dr Death, a character who makes a habit of killing attractive young women in the most horrible ways imaginable, but always with style.  At a party to celebrate the completion of his fifth Dr Death film, Paul announces that he is to be engaged.  Minutes after he learns that his fiancée was once a porn star, Paul finds her dead, her head nicely cut off, and he promptly has a nervous breakdown.  The police are convinced that Paul killed his betrothed, but through lack of evidence no case can be brought against him.   Some years later, Paul emerges from obscurity, apparently recovered from his breakdown.  At the insistence of his old friend, Herbert Flay, he travels to England to reprise his famous character in a series written by Flay for British television.  Things get off to a bad start when Paul falls out with his co-star, but that problem is resolved when she is killed, in a distinctly Dr Death-like fashion.  Paul then accidentally kills his director, but luckily he has a sympathetic producer,  Other equally gruesome murders follow in quick succession and Paul soon realises that resurrecting Dr Death probably wasn’t such a good idea...

An utterly mad but, equally, utterly enjoyable send up of the low budget horror film, Madhouse brings together two of the actors who are most associated with the shoestring spine-tingler, Vincent Price and Peter Cushing.  More comedy-whodunit than traditional horror film, there are few real thrills but plenty of Grand Guignol fun to be had, with Vincent Price and Adrienne Corri evidently competing to see who can give the campest performance (Corri wins, by a spider’s hairy leg).  

The film was a co-production between American International Pictures (AIP) and the British company Amicus Productions, both of which had been successful at turning out low budget horror films for over a decade.  The release of The Exorcist in 1973 brought a quantum leap in viewer-expectations of the horror genre and effectively killed off this kind of cheap Gothic nonsense, helping the demise of the British film industry (partly by putting the last nail in the coffin of Amicus’s nearest rival, Hammer).  Cushing and Price had previously worked together on AIP’s Scream and Scream Again (1970) and Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972).  

Whilst Madhouse has been reviled for its camp excesses and rather silly plot, it is nevertheless highly entertaining and is surprisingly well-made, given its derisory budget.  It is a film that both celebrates the classic Gothic horror film and ridicules it, in roughly equal measure.  It is particularly satisfying for aficionados of the genre, who are rewarded with a few glimpses of Boris Karloff and Basil Rathbone in clips lifted from various old horror films.  The highlight of this mad, self-referential bonanza is Michael Parkinson interviewing Vincent Price.  As the latter makes a hasty exit to confront Dr Death in the corridors of a television centre, Parky is left talking to an empty chair, a reference to Price’s earlier non-appearance as the Invisible Man in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948).  This film is a scream, but definitely not of the blood curdling variety...

© James Travers 2009

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