Love Means Never Having To Say You’re Ugly: THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES (AIP 1971)


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For a 13-year-old monster-crazed kid in 1971, attending the latest Vincent Price movie at the local theater on Saturday afternoon was a major event. Price was THE horror star of the time, having assumed the mantle when King Karloff passed away a few years before. Not to take anything away from Mr. Cushing and Mr. Lee, but “Vincent Price Movies” had become, like “John Wayne Movies “, a sort of genre unto themselves. AIP had squeezed about every nickel they could  out of the Edgar Allan Poe name so, with the release of THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES, a new character was created for the horror star, the avenging evil genius Dr. Anton Phibes.

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Phibes is a concert organist, theologian, scientist, and master of acoustics who uses his knowledge and vast wealth to gain revenge on the nine surgeons who (to his mind) botched an operation that killed his wife. We first see…

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Horror On The Lens: The Devil’s Rain (dir by Robert Fuest)


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Satanic priest Jonathan Corbis (Ernest Borgnine) has spent decades pursuing the Preston family.  The Prestons, it turns out, have a book of powerful Satanic magic in their possession.  After Corbis causes the Preston patriarch to melt in the rain, Mark Preston (William Shatner) decides to confront Corbis and his followers…

Released in 1975, the Devil’s Rain was presumably made to capitalize on the success of films like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist.  The film itself is a bit incoherent but it’s worth watching just to see shameless overactors William Shatner and Ernest Borgnine acting opposite each other.  The cast also includes Ida Lupino, Keenan Wynn, Tom Skerritt, and Eddie Albert, which means that there’s not a single bit of scenery that doesn’t get chewed at some point.

If watch carefully, you can spot John Travolta making his screen debut towards the end of the film.