TheRetroCritic

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

Over the years, Paul Thomas Anderson seems to have perfected his journey into tackling big themes through personal stories and through flawed, toxic characters. Case and point: The Master . Religion was a prominent theme in Anderson's previous effort There Will Be Blood and you could say that the whole film, despite outlining the rise and fall of Daniel Day Lewis' oil tycoon, was indeed about the relationship between business and religion. With his latest, we take a look at cults, yes, but also humanity in general. Here we have a Scientology-style organisation, "The Cause", based on the idea that Man is not an animal and, in fact, is far more important and deeper than he realizes and along comes Joaquin Phoenix's drifter, a down-and-out alcoholic drifter with a sex fixation. Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffmann), the cult's "master", decides to make him his pet-project, his guinea-pig. But it seems that proving the core theory that man isn