Beyond the Cycle: 7. Madouse (1974)

Vincent Price didn’t stop making horror flicks for American International Pictures just because they gave up on continuing Roger Corman’s Poe Cycle.  If anything, he had another minor career resurgence in the Doctor Phibes movies, which led directly to the pseudo-career send off Theater of Blood.  Granted, Theater of Blood wasn’t an AIP movie, he did that one for United Artists, but it still seemed like a blatant attempt to take the Phibes formula and turn it into a tribute to Price’s career as a whole.  AIP would try pretty much the exact same thing a year later, however, teaming up with British studio Amicus to create Madhouse: a much more blatant attempt to basically have Vincent Price play the role of Vincent Price at the end of his career.

The set up is actually quite compelling: Price plays actor Paul Toombes, famed for playing the titular character in the "Dr. Death" series of films, but tortured by the possibility that he might actually be a psychotic murderer without realizing it.  Most compelling, the movie takes full advantage of AIP’s involvement by frequently using clips of earlier Price flicks to represent the old Dr. Death movies.  On paper, that’s a really neat idea, both because it allows the movie to create the illusion of a broader scope and bigger budget than it actually has, and also as a way to underline the meta-text of putting a bow on Price’ time at AIP.  They’d already pulled a similar trick back in ’68, punctuating the excellent Boris Karloff send-off Targets with extensive footage from the decidedly less excellent The Terror (as well as The Criminal Code, which I really have no opinions on) to represent the most recent movie by Karloff’s fictional stand-in Byron Orlok.  Unfortunately, where Targets was legitimately the best movie Karloff had been in for years, Madhouse doesn’t come anywhere that same level of success.  Certainly, Price brings his A game every bit as much as Karloff did; but as it happens, director Jim Clark was nowhere near as clever at integrating the pre-existing footage into his movie as Peter Bodgonavitch was with his (which is odd, since Jim Clark won an Oscar as an editor).  This is is probably going to sound like a really nitpick thing to lead off this blog with, but I do think it’s emblematic of the larger problems at the heart of Madhouse.

See, the Dr. Death character is very visually striking: skulking around in a cloak and hat and wearing ghoulish black and white corpse paint all over his face.  It’s a genuinely memorable look and I can totally believe that such a character would be the cultural icon the movie presents him as.  The problem is, the character bears absolutely NO resemblance to any of the characters Vincent Price played in any of the Roger Corman movies.  Again, that sounds like I’m being nitpicky, but it’s actually really important my key complaints.  The movie shows Price and company watching clips from these films, and I'm supposed to draw an emotional connection, both of this being a younger version of the Toombs character and as a representation of Vincent Price’s whole career.  And yet, the glimpses of that career we’re shown bear virtually no resemblance to the “present day” they’re supposed to be connected to, and end up being more of a distraction than anything.  I mean, Dr. Death is presented as a sort of promo-slasher character, yet he’s represented via clips of Price in The Raven throwing around silly magic spells.  At times, it comes across as if the AIP clips were thrown in at the very last minute, or even spliced in after shooting was finished.  I know they weren’t, and there’s even some VERY minimal attempts to re-edit the clips for better continuity (such as sticking literally a SINGLE shot of Dr. Death into some Haunted Palace footage), but these clips still feel deeply detached from the main body of the film. As a result, that distracting detachment really drains Madhouse of much of the emotional impact the concept ought to have.  Or if you don’t buy that, then let me run this by you: the running gag throughout the whole movie -the whole reason anybody thinks Toombs is killing people- is because the murders seem to be based on set pieces in the Dr. Death films.  Basic movie making logic dictates that all those clips from the Dr. Death movies would be where the audience first sees the "original" versions of those killings, thus making it a pay-off when we see them happen in "real life".  But no, instead we randomly get Basil Rathbone hypnotizing Price in Tales of Terror and stuff like that.  So then, when a girl gets killed with a pitchfork, and it's up to some detective to TELL the audience that this apparently also happened in a movie we've never seen, it doesn't end up meaning anything.  And that’s not even getting into the fact that these “movie scenes” are really just nonsensical jumbles of shots without any semblance of internal narrative or pacing.  Seriously, it's painfully obvious that the AIP footage was cut up to fit the pacing of the Madhouse scenes and not the other way around, resulting in the stock footage being little more than formless jumbles of people screaming.  Again, Jim Clark was an Oscar-winning editor.  I have no idea what happened there.

And speaking of things that really ought to have more impact than they do, Madhouse is the first ever on-screen pairing of Vincent Price with Peter Cushing, and WOW is that ever wasted.  I mean, it’s nowhere near as big of a waste as The Oblong Box finally getting Prince and Christopher Lee into the same movie and only putting them on screen together for about 30 seconds.  Cushing does indeed interact with Price multiple times throughout the whole film… but it’s still nowhere near as good as it ought to be.  I’m looking to dance around spoilers here, but let’s just say that the plot ends up hamstringing Cushing for much of his time onscreen, leaves him out of more than it should, and by the time he actually gets something meaningful to do it’s too late.

Actually, looking back over what I just wrote, I think the biggest problem with Madhouse might be a foundational matter of genre.  I think it was mistake to try and use this movie as a tribute to Price’s Gothic Horrors while also following in the Doctor Phibes mode of being a Giallo-style murder parade.  To bring up Theater of Blood again, THAT film really commits to being a murder movie, with the implicit subtext being being more of a tribute to public persona of Vincent Price HIMSELF than to any of the specific movies.  The fact that Madhouse so deliberately weds itself to the Corman/Poe movies in certain scenes only makes things jarring when it goes all “black gloves stabbing people” Giallo style in the very next scene.  Again, Theater of Blood or the Phibes movies proves that Vincent Price can be perfectly fine in that mode, and he really does a great job here too.  Still, the handful of scenes early on that actually do lay the Gothic Horror tropes on thick really make me wish the whole of the movie had stuck to that style rather than the English Giallo of the later scenes.  I’ve always been a stickler for total consistency like that, and it’d really give the emotional subtext of the film a lot more resonance.  Or, at the very least, it’d help the “movies bleeding into real life” moments actually look like the movies were bleeding into real life.

And if nothing else, I might have spent more of this blog actually talking about THIS movie instead of constantly drifting off to others, because this is coming off a lot harsher than intended.  Madhouse is nowhere near as good as the movies it pays homage to, but it’s far from bad.  Again, Price is in great form, drifting nicely between that tragic, haunted vibe he did so well and some really hilarious moments of being a bitter, sarcastic old jerk.  He’s uniquely well-equipped for staring in a “WOW show business sucks” movie; able to be charming enough to work as the star even while snapping at all the even worse jerks around him.  And admittedly, if you’re GOING to do the whole Giallo style of movie, the wretched hive of scum and villainy that is the entertainment business provides plenty of the requisite red herrings necessary to keep the mystery rolling.

But then, a good Giallo would be a lot more stylish or over-the-top than Madhouse ends up being.  I mean, when you get down to it, this movie make precious little sense, and I think that’s SUPPOSED to be intentional.  After all, wee ARE meant to be questioning our viewpoint character’s sanity.  And given that there’s clearly an element of satire towards the film establishment, I can also forgive some of the more staggering logical lapses as jabs at the industry meat grinder.  (“Crap, our director was just killed!  Now I have to find a new one by tomorrow!”). But this would seem to call for a much more stylish, surreal look and feel, or at the very least a more broadly zany, camp comedy tone.  Either way, the rather flat, sterile direction they ultimately go with for most of the film feels at best ill-fitting to the material, and at worse lazy.  The final act in particular cries out for a more dream-like touch, because Lord knows nothing about it belongs in the waking world.  This movie isn’t anywhere near weird-looking enough to get away with making as little sense as it does.  And again, I really like the Dr. Death character, and wish the movie shot him better.  It really feels like the scenes with this ghoul running around a studio OUGHT to pop a lot more than they do.  Maybe that’s the flip side of what I was saying earlier about Madhouse’s big mistake being an attempt to split the different between Gothic Horror and Giallo.  It could ALSO be that the urge to play things more classy and sophisticated ended up reigning the film in too hard to actually be flashy where it needed to.  Or maybe Jim Clark was just too boring a filmmaker to do EITHER genre justice, I dunno.

So yeah, I want to like Madhouse more than I do, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like it at all.  Price is still great in all his scenes, including what basically seems designed to have been his final send-off.  Amazing, then, that the man would keep acting for another sixteen years after this.  Still, this would be Price’s final movie for American International, and to be honest, for all my complaints, it is a pretty fitting note to go out on.  Indeed, Madhouse would have made a fitting conclusion to this whole not-quite-Poe Cycle of blogs… but that's not where we’re ending things.

See, to be fully honest, I got massively sidetracked while writing this by going off and watching Targets instead.  In fact, part of me is strongly tempted to go off and write a review of THAT movie, just for the heck of it (Short version: it’s two decent movies, either one of those probably could have been a great one if they weren’t stuck sharing the same run time).  I won’t do that, but it has got me thinking about a certain other Roger Corman movie, one that made a rather prominent appearance in Targets, and one where the the story behind it is ABSOLUTELY more interesting than the movie itself…