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Weekend Discussion Thread: The Deserving Vincent Price MovieAn alert regular suggests:
I’m going to go with classic Corman: “The Masque of the Red Death.” You have to see it to believe it. Though, I have to say that when this topic comes up, this comes to mind… What’s your pick? 44 Replies to “Weekend Discussion Thread: The Deserving Vincent Price Movie”Commenting at Satellite News
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The Raven (1963) –
Price plays depressed magician Erasmus Craven who ends up in a supernatural duel with the evil wife stealing magician Dr. Scarabus played by Boris Karloff. The mixture of clever special effects and humor is irresistible.
PS – I love the Haunted Hill music video, Sampo!
I like to see them do Dr. Phibes, either one. These are clever and bizarre movies. VP at his best and would be a perfect target.
I’d go with ‘Dr Goldfoot And The Girl Bombs’, a lackluster sequel to the dumb but amusing ‘Dr Goldfoot And The Bikini Machine’.
I would like to see “Pit and the Pendulum” riffed by Jonah & the Bots, and it was directed by one Roger Corman. A double win!!
The Mads riffed ‘The Tingler’ to great effect. ‘The Last Man on Earth’ is another film that would be great. Vincent Price’s straight performance in the face of absurdity makes so many of his films great for riffing!
Since I’m currently on a workplace computer which blocks YouTube, I have no idea what Sampo’s pick is. Could someone enlighten me?
I would go with either The Tingler (since MST3K really needs a William Castle film) or The Story of Mankind (where Price is the Devil).
As an aside, I was kind of expecting the weekend discussion to be about the tour, since it’s the last day.
Stretching a bit, but Price as Egghead in the “Batman” TV series. Only one of a few who deduced Batman’s secret identity. The first show where Edward Everett Horton plays Chief Screaming Chicken would be ripe for the crew.
Egg-selent.
….mmmmmm…..
Two I’d sign off on for MST treatment, because I hate them badly and want to see them hurt as much as they hurt me:
“The Tingler.” Like most of William Castle’s stuff, it’s beautifully shot and staged, starts out promisingly, and then gets mean-spirited and cruel for cheap effect.
“Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs.” Mario Bava directed this right before “Danger: Diabolik!” To quote the beloved and still-missed Dr. Cranky, “Proof That Jesus Died in Vain.”
AUGH! I didn’t hear about this. Who what when where why? Any video available?
Here Comes Peter Cottontail. I’d love to see MST take on some Rankin/Bass. Price voices the evil January Q. Irontail.
‘The Last Man on Earth’ is my favorite Vincent Price film (and a waaaaay better adaptation of I Am Legend than the Will Smith movie). Still, the vampire/zombie people would make for good riff fodder.
Doesn’t look like anyone else answered you yet: “The House on Haunted Hill”.
I’m bad at these threads…
How many of his movies seen?
…
It looks like The Great Mouse Detective and Edward Scissorhands (TV shows: Batman, The Brady Bunch, The Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby-doo and Tiny Toon Adventures. )
Lots of great ones here, but no question in my mind: “The Fly”
Yep, lots of great ones already mentioned. I think “The House of Usher” would be fun riffing romp.
And here’s my favorite Vincent Price tribute, by John Waters for TCM: https://youtu.be/Yd5VKx1UJUI I agree with so many of the sentiments — Price was never pretentious, although many of his characters were. He was classy, but always with a sly wink.
I’m going to go with THE STORY OF MANKIND…It’s about the Spirit of Man(Ronald Coleman)debates history with the devil(Price)before a court of fate,because of the hydrogen bomb..Also stars the Marx Brothers,Dennis Hopper,Peter Lorre,Agnes Moorehead,John Carradine,Cesar Romero,Marie Windsor,Hedy Lamarr…
Rifftrax did The House on Haunted Hill for a live show of course, and that was fun. I wouldn’t call The Tingler unnecessarily cruel; maybe “just cruel enough for a horror movie.” Vincent Price is never truly riffable of course; you get your money’s worth when he’s in the movie. The Corman-Poe movies are always a treat.
I saw that dismaying waste of good color film stock first run. I was eleven years old, and figured that anything with the Marx Brothers had to be ‘way cool. Talk about “innocence lost.” That was my first experience with actually getting angry at a movie.
Off-the-wall idea: The Ten Commandments. While I normally don’t like their taking on good movies (and I consider this one very good), it is very self-important with lots of melodrama, which always makes for good riffing.
Bonus: It also includes John Carradine!
I have seen it, I do believe it, and with a Richard Matheson script and “good” Roger Corman directing, it’s probably one of the better color-Poes.
(Except that this was late in the series, when American Int’l was getting out of teen drive-in monsters and leaning more toward the new late-60’s hippie dynamics of “Satanic orgies”…Eww.)
If you’re giggling at the dubbed-over toddler-beauty-pageant-contestant playing an “adult” female midget, well, how else would YOU film Poe’s “Hop-Toad”?–Two Corman-Poes for the price of one.
And the consensus last time was, there really AREN’T that many bad Vincent Price performances to pick on. Unless you’re going to go the easy route of saying “House on Haunted Hill must be bad, why else would RT have done it??” (Which nobody really does anymore, now that Public-Domain is pretty much part of any RT discussion.)
For example, just look at fading Amicus horror-anthology The Monster Club: You’d think that would be silly and campy enough for a few giggles, but darnit, he’s even a charming good-sport in that one, too.
Keep searching, you’ll find a find that we didn’t find. :)
I remember seeing this with our rowdy all-night audience: At the end of the movie, after our poor scientist has tragically sacrificed himself–and thank you, the movie’s now OVER!–we get a long two to three minute dialogue scene of Price and one of the other characters trying to figure out, in detail, how to cover up and destroy all traces of the experiment, and pin his death circumstantially on the lab janitor. After such thorough and detailed micro-managed exploration of how the two characters were going to frame the janitor offscreen, the audience applauded…Good work, gentlemen, good work.
Now, “Return of the Fly”, maybe….
Yyyyeah. That one’s BAD. Bikini Machine was US 60’s Batman-era camp, but Girl Bombs was a cheap Italian sequel-knockoff, with wonderfully rich and witty 60’s-Italian humor.
Nobody’s picking on Dr. Phibes. GOOD. Leave Dr. Phibes alone. I just refreshed my recollection of Dr. Phibes Rises Again on YouTube, the last five minutes–THAT, kids, is why I watch movies.
“Some…WHERE..over the rainbow…”
War Gods of the Deep (aka City in the Sea) is perfect fodder for riffing. It stars Tab Hunter as Doug McClure in a weird lost city movie
the Tingler, sounds like an adult film to me.
anyway i am thinking outside the box but how about The Ten Commandments (1956). he was in that film.
damn you beat me to it.
new one outside the box, The Whales of August. maybe Bridget and Mary Jo could riff that.
The 1956 Ten Commandments movie deserves to be taken out and shot, not just riffed. It is bloated beyond belief and Charlton Heston makes Moses as bland as matzah. The over-the-top performances of Vincent Price, Yul Brynner, and Edward G. Robinson [the only Jew in a movie about the story of Passover and he plays a bad guy–nice going, Cecil B. de Mille!] are the only things that save the 4 hours from being total torture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfIySQvxB3o
Yeah, Dr Goldfoot, or “the Dr Goldfoot franchise” as it would be today, is pretty much it for this topic. VP was always entertaining, and had the good taste and/or good luck to appear in movies that were well made. Even HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL is not that bad, just dragged down by the incredible blandness of everybody else in the cast, with the exception of the always reliable Elisha Cook Jr and the perhaps intriguingly icy Carol Ohmart.
*******
By the way, I recently watched two movies in which Joe Don Baker is really good – CHARLEY VARRICK (sadistic Mob enforcer on the trail of Walter Matthau) and THE OUTFIT (genial ex-bankrobber helping Robert Duvall shake down the Mob).
I know this isn’t a movie but I nominate “The return of the Sorcerer”. Not only does Vincent Price play 2 parts but his character claims a goat is his father! A plus it has Bill Bixby.
Didn’t Frank Conniff mention something about The Baron of Arizona in a DVD extra?
As already mentioned, I’d go with “The Pit and the Pendulum”.
The comedian that plays Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, once said it best. The film is one long walk to an unsatisfying payoff. Not to mention does no justice to the original story by Edgar Allen Poe.
Why not “The Hilarious House of Frightenstein” (Canadian kids TV show)???
I’ve never seen it, but after reading the Wiki article, sounds like it very well might lend itself to riffing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hilarious_House_of_Frightensteinhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hilarious_House_of_Frightenstein
A Night Gallery episode, for those wondering–And since it wanted to “seriously” portray the occult, the climax has sorcerer Price trying to invoke demonic spirits with “Abracadabra! Abracadabra!!”, as the writer wanted to convince us the word once had roots in deep forbidden arcana. The result pretty much looks like it sounds.
Some of us did. :(
Basically a kids’ local-host Laugh-in, with Price not appearing in the same show, and just introducing the sketches with filler-rhyme:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IsP_Bd30r4
Well, you did ask…And even then, he was a good sport, like in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”.
“The Bribe”
Well, not to stray too far from the topic, but, hey, you started it–Joe Don Baker in Adam at Six AM. He was effin’ BRILLIANT, in a totally loose, sympathetic role [of course, Adam at Six AM is one of those iconically-impossible-to-find movies that is currently available only as a VHS on Amazon for $149.99, and yes, I have a copy, and no, you can’t borrow it]. How this great young actor turned into Thomas Jefferson Geronimo III is way beyond ME.
There’s a topic in here somewhere, though.
It was in The Incredible Mr. Lippert, on the King Dinosaur DVD in Volume XXIII.
I bought the Rifftrax Son of Sinbad a couple days ago. Vincent Price as Omar Khayyam. It’s bad, and the boring kind of bad to boot.
The sad part is that it’s an adaption of one of Clark Ashton Smith’s better stories, but they replaced all the Cthulhu mythos stuff with generic (and silly) Satanism
It was one of the movies on their most recent tour. I saw it with my 13-year old in Durham back in August.
They don’t tape them (they don’t feel like fiddling with the rights holders to make that sort of thing happen, and understandably so), but I wish they did. Their interpretations of sign language left me gasping for air.
Follow them on facebook (The Mads Are Back), and see them if they come anywhere close!
IIRC Harpo’s scene was especially cringe inducing.
you must be thinking of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB6VGKccul8
“Last Man on Earth” seems the most obvious, since it’s already in public domain, as is “The Bat” (1959) a bit of a drag, but it has Agnes Moorehead, Darla Hood (from “The Little Rascals”) and a “Scooby Doo” style hooded villain; I really like “The Ten Commandments,” so I don’t get all the hate expressed here… but at Four Hours it’s not really a candidate for Riffing…”House of Wax” or it’s semi-ripoff, “The Mad Magician” have a lot to recommend them…huffy, pretentious characters, plot holes, lapses in logic, cornball attempts at humor, condescending to women, etc.
the Ten Commandments, the book was better.
But I heard the author was a real dick about rights fees and refused to collaborate on the screenplay.