Best Line: “Why did you want to destroy me? You love Dr. Death!”
Score: 
Representing the last time that Vincent Price and AIP would collaborate on a horror feature, MADHOUSE is shrouded in what I suppose is an appropriately funereal atmosphere. But it’s more than that – there’s a definite sense of an era passing before your eyes, its glory days long since gone. Price himself looks a lot less like the magnetic menace of the earlier Poe pictures and a lot more like the older man who would soon be hawking Milton Bradley’s Hangman game on TV.
Still, aging Price is better than no Price at all, and it’s always pleasant to see the man most remembered as a cad playing a character that is sympathetic and caught up in events rather than orchestrating them. In MADHOUSE, Price is – again appropriately enough –horror film star Paul Toombes (haha, I get it!), and at a trendy soiree he announces his impending marriage. Unfortunately his intended, a former porn star, loses her head before the nuptials, and no I’m not talking about pre-wedding jitters. Price’s reaction to discovering the decapitated corpse of his fiancée is probably one of the most cartoonish, over-the-top exaggerations of grief and shock ever committed to celluloid; it’s truly a wonder to behold. But did Toombes snap, assume the persona of his most popular character Dr. Death and murder his own bride to be, or is someone else trying to ruin Toombes’ life?
Despite his co-star status, Cushing does the same thing he does in many of his 1970s roles, namely appearing for a grand total of a few minutes, mostly at the beginning and ending. That his Herbert Flay is crucial to the resolution of the plot makes it all the more obvious that he’s just not in the movie all that much, although with a performer like Cushing, even a little goes a long way. And he does get to close the film in surreal style.
Oh, and former Count Yorga himself, Robert Quarry, is wasted in a boorish producer role that only offers one glimmer of amusement when he dresses as Yorga for a costume party, the same party at which Cushing’s character is dressed as Dracula. Yes, in-jokes about the cast’s other film work seems to have been the life’s blood of this production.
As with most movies that take you behind the scenes of something that’s supposed to be massively popular, the glimpses we get of Toombes’ Dr. Death films are a mixed bag. When they rely on stock footage of Price’s own previous work (including welcome bits of the far superior HAUNTED PALACE and THE RAVEN), you can believe these might achieve some success, but when you see him in the ridiculous Dr. Death get-up on the set, you can’t imagine anyone watching this unless it turns up in the $1 DVD bin.
One fascinating tidbit however is that much of this movie seems to have been the inspiration for SCREAM, not least the notion of multiple black-cloaked killers in identical outfits. Depending on your opinion of the SCREAM series, however, this could be seen as MADHOUSE’s lasting contribution to pop culture or another reason to consign it to the mists of history. You could also lay part of the responsibility for the current vogue in SAW-style “inventive death” films at the feet of the AIP-era thrillers too, but why burden them any further?
For fans of Vincent Price, MADHOUSE is a tolerable time-filler, but it has the melancholy air and slipshod scripting that prevents it from rising to the sublime tongue-in-cheek level of the PHIBES films or even THEATER OF BLOOD. Instead, MADHOUSE is a missed opportunity for the Price/AIP team to go out in style; instead, they slink away under cover of darkness.
ATB
