Beyond the Cycle: 2. The Comedy of Terrors (1963)

When I did the first set of these blogs, I complained about not liking The Raven all that much, thanks mostly to the abrupt left turn from Moody Horror into Broad Comedy.  I tried to make it clear, however, that I don’t NECESSARILY have a problem with injecting humor into Gothic Horror trappings.  Rather, I just find The Raven too slapstick and zany for my tastes, at least when the likes of Poe is involved.  After all, I think "The Black Cat" is the best part of Tales of Terror, and that’s far and away the most comedic of the bunch.  But it’s also got a nasty edge to it that I think gels much more naturally with the Gothic aesthetic.  These stories are all about madness and curses and people getting buried alive, after all.  If you’re going to try and make a joke out of that, I expect the joke to have a bit of BITE, you know?  To underline my point, I closed my Raven blog by positively shouting out The Comedy of Terrors as a prime example of how this sort of thing could be done properly.  And hey, now that I need MORE blog content, let’s talk more about that movie!

The Comedy of Terrors was not directed by Roger Corman, but rather Horror pioneer Jacques Tourneur, who’d worked with Val Newton on classics like I Walked With A Zombie and Cat People.  Much of the usual Corman crew is on hand however, with Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and Boris Karloff all returning from The Raven, along with Basil Rathbone and Joyce Jameson from Tales of Terror.  And while having Price in the lead is obviously the most important part for MY purposes, the biggest historical connection between Comedy of Terrors and the Poe Cycle is the fact that it was written by Richard Matheson, Corman’s preferred scribe for most of the Poe movies.  Part of the reason The Raven went as wacky as it did was because Matheson was getting pretty bored with the whole Gothic Horror thing.  Indeed, after so many stories about people getting buried alive, it’s a bit surprising that it took Matheson as long as it did to finally make a story explicitly about gravediggers.  Normally, in this type of movie, that would be the set-up for a movie about bodysnatching grave robbers, but Comedy of Terrors flips expectations right off the bat by having the body be the LAST thing anybody cares about.  Waldo Trumbull (Price) is an undertaker who thinks that it’s a waste of time and money to put so much effort into making a coffin, only to immediately bury the thing in the ground.  I actually agree with him on that (chuck my carcass straight into the hole and use that extra money for catering the funeral, I don't care), but his solution is rather underhanded: just use the one coffin over and over. They do the whole funeral thing, but once the funeral's over Waldo sneaks back to dig the coffin back up, dumping the stiff in the process.  And, of course, it does without saying that Waldo still charges full price for his “services.”  Yeah, Waldo’s not a very nice guy, and that’s probably my favorite thing about The Comedy of Terrors right there.  Normally, Vincent Price is good at infusing his characters with some level of likability, or at least pitiful sympathy.  But here?  Here, Waldo’s just a straight-up jerk.  He’s a drunken, loutish, abusive boor, who only seems to find joy in the misery of others, and he’s an absolute delight to watch.  Gleefully contemptuous of everyone and not even attempting to hide it, ever second this character in on screen oozes sleaze and malice.  This is no tortured, tragic figure wracked with existential dread, he’s quite happy being abjectly miserable and dragging everybody else down with him.  Price pretty much always looks like he’s having fun in these things, but he seems positively euphoric as the ambulatory dumpster fire that is Waldo Trumbull.

It helps, of course, that even the nominally “sympathetic” characters of Comedy of Terrors are, quite frankly, a bunch of idiots.  Trumbull’s assistant Felix (Lorre) is an incompetent, weak-willed dope, his wife Amaryllis (Jameson) is a delusional tone-deaf wannabe opera singer, and her father (Karloff) is a doddering senile old fool.  Everything around Trumbull is so exasperating that, in the deepest recesses of by black heart, I can find some vicarious thrill and even genuine catharsis in watching Price be the vile, nasty crank that I could never get away with being in real life.  Even as Trumbull’s schemes get more and more deplorable as the film rolls on, his surrounding are so infuriating that, even if I intellectually know he’s in the wrong, I don’t fee THAT bad watching it happen.   And he still gets some poetic comeuppance in the end, too, so it’s all okay!

And even those of you who aren’t barely-restrained sociopaths like me will still probably get a kick out of this ghoulish little romp, just because of what a hoot it is to watch.  The pacing is good, the directing is tight, and acting is more or less top notch across the board.  In case you couldn’t tell, I really like Vincent Price in this.  I’ve said before that Price towers above the rabble of blowhards who overact because they don’t know how to do anything else, in that HE did it by conscious choice.  The man refined hamming it up to a precise science, and comparing Comedy of Terrors to his many straight Gothic Horrors is a fine example of that principle at work.  In a lot of ways, he’s every bit as broad here as he is while playing Egghead in Batman, any yet it also comes across as significantly more vicious and mean spirited.  Matheson’s writing obviously makes a difference as well, but Price’s performance would have a different air about it no matter what dialog he was given.  It’s immediately obvious, just from screen presence alone, that his man, however cartoonish, is equal parts hateful and dangerous.

And it’s not just Price who’s in top form either, his double act with Peter Lorre is as solid as ever.  The character dynamic between Trumbull and Gillie might be the polar opposite of their roles in The Raven and Tales of Terror, but their on-screen chemistry is as strong as always.  Karloff, while doing little more than providing comic relief in an already comedic movie, is something of a revelation, in the sense that he’s virtually unrecognizable.  You know that one Karloff impression that a whole generation of comics thought they could do?  The Monster Mash voice?  Yeah, he’s a million miles away from that here, totally disappearing into his hair-brained old fool role.  Typecasting is a frightful thing, so it’s always nice seeing an actor do a good job in a role other than what I’m used to seeing him in.  Also, I want it put in my will that my funeral HAS to start off with a complete recitation of Karloff’s eulogizing here.  More funerals need to include the words “this unhappy tumulus.“   Really, the only weak link is Joyce Jameson, and even that’s not really her fault, but rather the script seemingly unsure whether to make her a sympathetic victim of Trumbull’s abuse or a genuinely irritating annoyance.  The “She thinks she can sing” gag is hit a little too frequently to be anything more than legitimately aggravating, and that doesn’t gel well with her “Don’t poison my Dad” moments where she does come across as a long-suffering heroine.  She’s clearly doing what she’s asked, I just don't think Matheson and Tourneur had a proper handle of what they wanted that to be.

And that’s the thing: I like The Comedy of Terrors a lot, and I’ll recommend it to just about anybody who likes this strand of 60’s Gothic Horror, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s perfect.  Jacques Tourneur does a fine job directing, but somewhere between him and cinematographer Jack Crosby, the movie tuned out a lot more drab-looking than the Corman flicks.  And given that Crosby also worked on most of those movies too, I have to assume it was Tourneur who decided to cut back on the color, which was not the right move.  Yeah, I know on paper it SOUNDS like less color would be a good thing in a movie like this, but Corman showing off the fact that he was splurging and filming in color is one of the many charms of the Poe movies.  With so few splashes of color, Comedy of Terrors winds up being far less memorable visually as it is performance-wise.  While I stand by my opinion that The Raven over-does the zaniness worse, Comedy of Terrors still has enough moments of Three Stooges-esque slapstick and sight gags that a little extra visual flair seems more appropriate than the vast stretches of browns and grays.  Even in scenes where the set has clearly been dressed with some fanciful props and colorful furniture, the lighting manages to suck the color out of just about everything and leave it all a dirty, smudged mess, and that simply doesn’t vibe with the energy of the material at all.  Speaking of which, Matheson’s script tries a bit too hard to be clever several places, with wordy dialog often teetering on the brink of unwieldy.  To a certain extent, that’s intentional, since Trumbull constantly tries to look more sophisticated than he actually is.  And make no mistake, Price manages the sudden shifts between flowery eloquence and crude bluntness masterfully.  But not everybody can be Vincent Price, can they?  Jameson in particular occasionally comes across more like a high schooler reciting Shakespeare lines she doesn’t actually understand… which is funny given that Basil Rathbone literally recites Shakespeare for much of his screen time.  None of these complaints break the movie for me, but they do make me wish it had been handled a bit differently.

In fact, more than anything, I wish Matheson had given this script over to Roger Corman, and the two of them had found some way to slap a random Poe name onto it and incorporate it into the Cycle proper.  Indeed, while not a flop, The Comedy of Terrors wasn’t anywhere near the financial success that the Corman movies had been, and the prevailing theory at AIP seems to have been that the problem was the title, or more accurately the absence of one.  One wonders if the reason Nicholson and Arkoff went behind Corman’s back on The Haunted Palace and rebranded it as a Poe adaptation was out of regret over NOT doing so with Comedy of Terrors.  And yeah, I really do with they’d gone digging through that Big Book of Poe Works and found some random poem to name it after.  Sure, dubbing this tale of a conniving, murderous undertaker “The Spirits Of The Dead” or “The Valley Of Unrest” wouldn’t have made much sense, but would it really have been any weirder than turning The Raven into a tale about dueling sorcerers?  If more people actually knew about this moive as a result, I think it'd be worth it.

Oh, but speaking of both Boris Karloff and the practice of slapping new names onto H.P. Lovecraft adaptations, guess what we’ve got to talk about NEXT time…