Owned release: The 2007 MGM release, as included in the DVD box set Vincent Price: MGM Scream Legends Collection.
Acquired: July of 2011, if I remember correctly - I believe I picked this up along with a couple other discs at a going-out-of-business sale at the Borders in Mount Kisco.
Seen before?: No, and that's where I'll begin.
I don't recall how long the desire to see The Abominable Dr. Phibes has been with me, but if I had to guess, I'd say it's between twenty and twenty-five years. When I first started getting into horror, there were several reference books I would consult as to what titles were worth tracking down, and all of them necessarily featured this film as either the first or one of the first listed titles. The baroque high concept - a revenge-minded mad scientist slaying his enemies via murders inspired by the Biblical 10 plagues of Egypt - sounded too good to pass up. Yet I don't recall ever seeing a copy in any of my local video stores, so it gradually got pushed to the back of my mental queue, filed as A Thing I'll See Some Day alongside titles like I, Madman and The Beast Must Die! and the next film I'll be watching/reviewing. By the time I purchased it in 2011, I had a different problem - my collector's mentality had led me to a sort of option paralysis, where I would consistently buy things, get excited about owning them, and then shelve them and never watch them. All this is a lot of throat-clearing to avoid the fact that I've finally watched a film I've wanted to see for over half my life and found myself with little to say about it.
I don't know exactly at what point I realized I wasn't into this film. I know I was still very much enjoying it when Terry-Thomas showed up. But I guess I gradually disengaged from there. Maybe it began when I realized Phibes was, aside from the devices he's constructed to allow the recreation of his voice, a mute, which runs counter to why you'd cast Vincent Price in any given role. Maybe it was when it sunk in that, despite the title and the top billing, the script is constructed so that Phibes is essentially a supporting character in the story, with the detectives on his trail serving as the leads in what is a half-baked discovery narrative. Maybe it was when it hit me that, for all its florid ridiculousness regarding the manners of its murders, the tone and pacing belong to something much more bemused and down-to-earth; while the veddy British matter-of-factness works in the favor of a line of dialogue like the exasperated, "A brass unicorn has been catapulted across a London street and impaled an eminent surgeon," it mostly dampens the more deranged elements, making them feel like just another thing that happens. And if you have a scene where a psychotic genius is feeding forest-green liquid plant goop through a tube onto a sleeping nurse's face followed by locusts to feed on the goop and the face, and my only reaction is to marvel at what a heavy sleeper the nurse must be for this gambit to come off... yeah, I've probably lost interest a bit.
I'm left to take bits and pieces and use them to imagine a film more my speed - the delicious opening, which starts as a standard Gothic introduction with a black-clad figure playing an organ in a culvert bathed in blood-red light before immediately taking the piss from that with the introduction of the clockwork brass band; a sweaty Terry-Thomas leering at a scantily-clad snake dancer on a filmstrip run by a hand-cranked projector, shot from a rear angle so the motion of his arm easily calls to mind the lewd action under suggestion; Phibes dryly holding a sheet of plastic with the stenciled form of a naked woman on it up to the cloaked form of his own body; the polite tetchiness of the jeweler when being interviewed by Detective Trout about the medals he unknowingly crafted for Phibes, crowned by calling the detective "Pike" instead of his real name. On that last point: There's a running thread about poorly-pronounced or misremembered names, encompassing also a couple different attempts at pronouncing Phibes's name and a doctor whose everyone agrees his name begins with a K, and I'm not sure what to do with that other than file it away as an odd joke of continuity that doesn't quite come off.
And then there's the last fifteen minutes, where Phibes finally shakes off its veneer of gentility and goes for broke. Price hisses through his talk-box and forces Joseph Cotton into a situation where he has to cut a key out of his own son to free him from an acid-shower trap, cackling, "Work faster, Doctor! The acid is descending!" while Cotton struggles to hold his concentration; meanwhile, Phibes's beautiful mute assistant Vulnavia tears apart the set with a huge gold-plated axe and the cops bumble about trying to cut through the madness and get a grip on the situation. To watch this ripping setpiece is to know what James Wan spent a good portion of his formative years obsessively rewatching - while the gleaming marble and bright lighting is worlds away from the rust and shadow and sickly neons of Saw, it's pretty easy to see the climax here as the prototype for the world of Jigsaw. Is this a positive or a negative? Depends on where you stand.
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