TheRetroCritic

Ryo to the rescue!

It must be impossible to be a Vincent Price fan and not completely adore this nutty little movie about a mad mask-wearing doctor who plots an elaborate series of revenge murders against the group of doctors who failed to save his wife after a tragic accident. The Abominable Dr Phibes is super kitsch and pretty surreal making it feel more like some sort of macabre psychedelic painting than a straight-up horror film. There are a lot of ideas in there and really they shouldn't work together but somehow they do. On one side you've got Phibes, a completely gothic creation akin to the likes of The Phantom Of The Opera, on the other you've got English cops straight out of an Ealing comedy and in the middle a bunch of weird doctors, each of them looking like they belong to another type of film altogether. Like a Sherlock Holmes mystery or a Columbo episode. Hell, even Terry Thomas pops up out of the blue in an oddly seedy cameo! Terry Thomas lol Basically the joy of this m

Terry Gilliam rarely gets to go all-out creatively anymore and that's a real shame because, for a while there, it seemed as if no project was too nutty for him to handle. Oh who am I kidding? Every single one of his projects is nutty. Hence why financing them must be so daunting! The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen was a huge flop but so many masterpieces were, from  Night Of The Hunter to Blade Runner . You can't judge a film's quality based on how much money it made, you just can't. Gilliam's film is one I've always considered to be a masterpiece of the fantasy genre. Its epic scale, its surreal visuals, its playful anarchism, I just loved every minute of it as a kid, even if by the end I had no idea what the hell I had just watched. It was an adventure like no other and I was completely taken with all these larger-than-life characters and their crazy odyssey. One second you were inside a volcano speaking to Roman gods, the next you were playing card