Dr. Phibes Rises Again [PG]

For three years, Anton Phibes has lain in peaceful slumber beside his dead beloved. But now the moon has reached its proper perch and he has risen again with a plan to resurrect his wife Victoria. He travels to a secret lair in Egypt where he hopes to discover the River of Life that will wash him and Victoria anew with eternal life. But his plan becomes a race as another man obsessed with eternal life is after the same thing and hot on Phibe’s trail. 

I didn’t enjoy it as much as the first movie, but I do have to concede that, despite its bad editing and heavy-handed Vincent Price monologues, it’s still a fun and bad-but-in-a-good-way cult movie. The Dr. Phibes movies you come to love because they are so outlandish and really very stupid in a number of ways, but that just adds to the humour and the fun of them; like Batman & Robin. 

Where the film falls down here is, as I mentioned, in the bad editing and the heavy monologues given to Vincent Price. 

Whilst Price is a wonderful actor with a penchant for the theatrical and a voice that one could hear reciting both Poe and Shakespeare simultaneously, some of his monologues were just horrible and a waste of his breath. Further hilarity gets added to them as Price delivers them with such gusto and somewhat clichéd theatrical passion that they just become funny. Not to mention the amount of times the writers had him repeat himself, which got a tad tedious to say the least: “my sweet Victoria, my beloved, my sweet beloved, my beloved Victoria” etc, etc, etc, yawn. 

And then the story itself was pretty weak and there were a number of parts where you felt that the writers came to a ravine and had to quickly build a makeshift bridge. 

Then there is the editing. Now, I am in two minds about this because on the one hand it’s very jaggedly put together that half the time you feel as though you’ve missed some crucial action: this-guy-was-on-one-end-of-the-room-and-now-suddenly-he’s-on-the-other type thing. But on the other hand, its jaggedness and the general amateurish and no-hearted way it’s just thrown together sort of makes it funny. The editing is so bad that you cannot help but laugh at it. 

This, mingled with the many scenes that feature Phibes practically conjuring ridiculous machines out of thin air –seriously, where do you get a giant fan in the middle of the Egyptian desert?-  just make the entire thing quite laughable, but in a good sort of way. You’re repulsed by how bad it is, and yet you can’t look away. 

Much like the creative murders that occur, which is a positive point that carries on from the first movie. It’s nice to see that Phibes hasn’t lost his sense of creativity in three years. Just as before, the sets are epic and pretty impressive, the costumes are immaculate, there is still a Hitchcockian humour that comes from the bumbling ineptitude of the authorities, –even more so in this one actually- and the use of music is still very fascinating, particularly the reprise of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, which Price himself sings. 

Starring Robert Quarry, Beryl Reid, Valli Kemp, Peter Jeffrey, Fiona Lewis, Terry-Thomas, Hugh Griffith, John Cater, Gerald Sim, Lewis Fiander, John Thaw, Keith Buckley, and Peter Cushing, Dr. Phibes Rises Again is a so-bad-it’s-good cult movie that I can see myself coming to love the more I watch it. Filled with violence, action, murder, suspense, romance, and comedy, I wasn’t impressed, yet I could not look away.