The Masque Of The Red Death (1964) While this may be the least scary of the Vincent Price/Roger Corman/Edgar Allen Poe films, nobody can deny it's the most lush and stylish.......
This film's more like wandering through a carnival fun house with a Medieval Depravity theme.......ooooo,plauge-stricken people bleeding through their pores!.......oooooo, devil worshipers stabbing themselves!.......ooooooo, a depraved midget with a child ballerina as his bride!
Your Master of Disaster for all this festering fun.......Prince Prospero, who could only be played by that snickering hambone, Vincent Price.
The Prince decides to hold an all-night bash for his equally hateful nobles.... all of them taking refuge in the Prince's castle while the Red Death turns the countryside peasants into bleeding raw meat........
But wait! Who's that red-hooded mysterious figure lounging up against a tree......sounding like he's planning to make the Prince's orgy of evil a one night stand......literally.
And what will happen to the sweet little peasant girl (Jane Asher) who's been dragged into the festivities........will Prospero defile her as she races through the castle rooms, all of them more brightly color coded than that horse who trots through the Emerald City in "The Wizard Of Oz".....
As you may have gathered from our description, the movie's deliriously nuts from beginning to end........and a non-stop visual feast, courtesy of its master cameraman turned cult film director Nicolas Roeg. Unlike his previous Poe horror adaptations, the ever lightning-fast Corman shot this in England, where he had access to sumptuous, expensive sets originally built for "Becket" and "A Man For All Seasons"
So with all the eye-popping sets and Corman's swirling, perpetual-motion tracking shots, the overall effect is like watching a Renaissance fair gone rogue, populated with drug-addled cosplayers......
We don't even want to think about what sheer hell a director would catch today, if he tried casting a little girl as a midget's wife and then used an adult actress to dub in her lines. Yes , it's every bit as strange is it sounds and looks........but for a movie that borders on phantasmagorical, it's perfect.
You've got to love Hoptoad the Midget, though...….tricking a serial rapist sleaze (Patrick Magee) into donning a gorilla suit so he can set him on fire while the horny bastard's in
mid-debauch...…(as Jim Carrey would say in "The Mask"......it's smokkkkkin'!)
No, something this studied and dreamily lurid won't scare you.......but still remains one of BQ's goodies that captures the over-the-top, goofball Halloween spirit like no other movie.....
4 stars (****).......pop in it and grin like pumpkin....
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