3/07 UPDATE: Yeah, yeah, you’ve heard it all before. Stagnant website promises updates and then disappears again. Well, not us, baby! Arnold and Andy have at long last celebrated the release of their first movie guide book, ZOMBIEMANIA! And although they have another book in the works, there’s still time to look back at the ol’ cinejunkie. There will be a major website upgrade shortly, but in the meantime, there are new reviews including a peek at the last-ever AIP Vincent Price vehicle, MADHOUSE, as well as two of Universal’s classic Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes adventures, SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE SECRET WEAPON and DRESSED TO KILL.

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

Best Line: “Would you like to hear uncle make a noise like a duck?”

Score:

In their final outing as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce are in fine form matching wits with a femme fatale hell-bent on collecting three nondescript music boxes that may hold the key to toppling the British economy. No pressure there then. Along the way, Holmes faces mortal danger but never flags in his determination to crack the secret of the boxes and beat the enemy to the prize – a hidden stash of stolen currency engraving plates. Just remember to Serpentine, Shel! No, that’s spelled correctly; IN-LAWS, anyone? Ah well, moving on…

Rathbone not only inhabits the fastidious figure of Holmes like he was born to play the role, he manages to make tangible the slow, deliberate calculation through which Holmes pieces together a sinister plot and unravels the mystery. Similarly, while Rathbone seems as sharp and analytical as you would expect from the famous sleuth, Bruce’s Watson is the very model of a stereotypical blustery Britisher, huffing and puffing and throwing away lines left, right and center. Their camaraderie is palpable, particularly after the actors have been through so many of these productions together. And for all Watson’s apparent ineptitude, he’s still there to provide Holmes with the spark of an idea to propel the case forward. Watson’s reaction to the loss of his friend Stinky early in the film is also very heartfelt and endearing.

I honestly can’t recall any more whether I once heard or read that Basil Rathbone hated working with children or if it was just an assumption made because of his Holmesian persona. Certainly in SON OF FRANKENSTEIN, he demonstrates a wonderful if possibly over-acted enthusiasm when sharing scenes with Donnie Dunagan as his son Peter. But it still seems forced, and so it does here again, if a bit less so, in a brief scene in which Holmes and Watson rescue a little girl from confinement in a closet. Rathbone’s Holmes comforts her surprisingly well, but moving away to instruct Watson and leave the doctor to look after her while he resumes his investigation, you see Holmes’ façade of warmth drop immediately. Is that Holmes betraying his true nature, Rathbone doing the same, or both? We’ll never know, but it works well within the context of the story in any event.

There’s also something enticing about seeing Holmes up against a woman, not least because the character seems exactly the sort of man who would consider himself superior to the opposite sex. But perhaps as a further indication of his advanced intelligence, he never underestimates his female foe. He does however take considerable glee in parroting some of her own words back to her in the film’s final moments. Patricia Morison has the unenviable task of making her Hilda Courtney not only seem like a competent criminal mastermind but a worthy foil for Holmes in the absence of an arch-foe like Professor Moriarty. Fortunately, she manages quite well.

Universal’s Rathbone/Bruce run can’t be seen as anything less than a successful experiment, even if the notion of Holmes traipsing around 1940s London still seems a bit odd. DRESSED TO KILL (a title that doesn’t seem to have any bearing on the actual film, mind you) is a fine way to say goodbye to this classic team.

ATB

Best Line: “The needle to the last, eh, Holmes?”

Score:

The notion of transplanting Sherlock Holmes and his trusty sidekick Dr. Watson from the gaslight era to the present – or from our point of view, the 1940s – is still an odd conceit, but that it worked as well as it did for so long is a tribute to the two men who came to embody these literary icons for so many years. Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce were born to play the razor-witted detective and his bumbling, blustery biographer, and despite the B-movie trappings of the standard-issue WWII espionage plot in SECRET WEAPON, they manage to preserve the dignity of their characters and the source material…which is at least partly represented through elements chosen from Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” (the stick figure cipher we see Holmes and Watson puzzling over comes straight from that tale). Unfortunately, apart from a couple scenes here and there, the film never rises above the level of a pedestrian pot-boiler.

Opening with a fun gambit that introduces Holmes through his expertise in disguise, SECRET WEAPON pits Holmes against no less a threat than the Nazis as he battles to prevent a scientist’s crucial invention – a new bomb sight – from falling into enemy hands. As if that isn’t enough, a plot to exploit this technology has been hatched by Professor Moriarty himself. When it rains…

At first, Universal monster movie mainstay Lionel Atwill seems strangely miscast as Holmes’ arch-enemy, Professor Moriarty, but he redeems himself with a macabre turn late in the film. Attempting to buy time for Watson and Inspector Lestrade to find him, Holmes maneuvers Moriarty into wanting to dispose of his hawk-nosed nemesis through the slow process of exsanguination. Moriarty takes Holmes into the convenient fully-stocked operating room he keeps in his dockside hideaway and inserts a tube in the detective’s arm, letting his blood drain away drop by drop. As Moriarty taunts Holmes with the fact that he is slowly dying with every passing second, one can’t help but suppress a chill. If Atwill could maintain this almost Lugosian level of perverse villainy, he might have been a much more formidable Moriarty, but this is about as good as he gets.

Despite its relatively brief running time, the movie will probably make you glance at your watch more than once before you reach the climactic confrontation between Holmes and Moriarty. The villain is then dispatched by Holmes with a clever bit of misdirection and the judicious use of the dastardly professor’s own failsafe death trap against him, but come on – we all know Moriarty has more lives than a cat. The film then concludes with a trite but understandable bit of patriotic soliloquizing from Holmes, who paraphrases Shakespeare in order to stir up some war bond-buying excitement in the moviegoers.

Not a classic outing for the sleuth by any means, but with a few intriguing touches it makes for a decent way to pass the time. But somebody hand Rathbone a comb – for some reason, his hair is always atypically disheveled in this one.

ATB