'TOWER OF LONDON'.....CORMAN-IZED "RICHARD III......LOW BUDGET BUT PRICE IS PRICELSS.....

Tower of London (1962)

  

       One hell of a hoot to see and one of the most obscure and little talked about baubles in the vast, vast Roger Corman filmography.....

   It's a mad, mad mash-up of Shakespeare's 'Richard III' with heavy chunk's of Corman's own Poe-sploitation horrors, like "House of Usher" and "The Pit and The Pendulum" thrown into the mix.

     And who else could take center stage as the world's most reviled crippled, humpbacked murderous Royal but beloved horror ham Vincent Price?

      Leering, snickering, snarling and sniveling, Price, clearly takes orgiastic joy in parading himself around the film's cheapjack castle setting.....like a sadistic game show host  who can hardly contain his giggling as he kills off all the contestants. 

     Don't bother listening for the Bard's classic  dialogue. This film's deathless prose came from the pen of Leo Gordon, who pursued parallel careers as both screenwriter and actor, playing thuggish heavies in B westerns and TV episodes. 

      But back to our boy Vinnie P., who, in the course of the movie's swift 79 minutes, methodically kills off almost the entire supporting cast.  Virtually no one gets out alive in the line-up of backstabbing, rack-stretching, strangulations and one poor shmuck forced to share an iron helmet with a hungry rat tossed inside it. Ooo, yummy.  

     (We pity that poor starlet stretched so much on the rack, she's tall enough to date Jacob Elordi...)

      Price's Richard does suffer mightily as the ghosts of  his slaughtered victims return to tease, torment and haunt him. And Price makes the most of every minute he's on screen(in this film, about 99% of the time.) The Price-inator doesn't just chew the scenery, he swallows it whole. 

      In a karmic twist of fate for Corman, the supervising producer Edward Small was an even more ruthless, corner-cutting cheapeskate than Corman himself. But Roger soldiered on and "Tower of London" doesn't look more threadbare than any of his other self produced 7 day wonders like "Little Shop of Horrors". 

       Corman fanatics and fans of 1950's sci-i, horror and pulpy exploitation will love spotting all the familiar faces in the cast......Michael Pate, Bruce Gordon, Sandra Knight, Gene Roth and Morris Ankrum (who trades his usual military General outfit for the robes of an Archbishop.)

       A great guilty pleasure treasure......what a damn shame they couldn't scrape up a few more buckeroos to make it in color.  3 stars (***).....beware students who try to use this as a substitute for reading the Shakespeare play......this ain't no Cliff's Notes, kiddies.......