Summer of Blood: In Egypt's land
There have undoubtedly been sequels that more thoroughly squandered the glories of a strong original than 1972's Dr. Phibes Rises Again, though very few that I find more personally irritating. The Abominable Dr. Phibes, from 1971, is a film I greatly cherish, a singular blend of Gothic horror, camp, viciously outré death scenes, dreamily surreal tableaux, and deadpan dark comedy, all of it tied up by my favorite Vincent Price performance of all time. In principle, I could be sold on the charms of "more of the same" when the same is that good, but the risk of any sequel to such a gaudy rara avis as the first Dr. Phibes is that its strengths are too intangible to just repeat endlessly. And that is no less true of a film with a substantial bleed-over in creative personnel from the first movie as we find in Dr. Phibes Rises Again; director Robert Fuest is back, and he's taken on screenwriting duties (along with Robert Blees), after allegedly rewriting much of James Whiton and William Goldstein's script for the first movie. Some crew heads are back and some aren't, but I'd argue that the two most important have returned: set designer Brian Eatwell and props master Rex Hobbs. And of course the one truly indispensable figure has come back, with Vincent Price returning to the role of mute (undead?) disfigured genius and psychopath Dr. Anton Phibes, no matter that he very emphatically and as a crucial matter of thematic resonance died at the end of The Abominable Dr. Phibes. No matter, we can work around that kind of thing. He rises again. It says so right there.
And yet, Dr. Phibes Rises Again is such a profoundly flat thing! It's a retread that vaguely understands the appeal of the original in a mechanical sense but not an artistic one, and so its attempts to just pile up more of the same thing end up feeling like a diminishment of the original, not even a mere tired repeat. What makes The Abominable Dr. Phibes such an eccentric marvel can be hard to pin down, since so much of it is going in so many ways, but I think there are two things above all that clearly register as great strengths: the peerlessly well-modulated, bombastic camp performance that Price gives despite delivering all of his lines in voiceover and being unable to move any part of his face other than his eyes; and the gaudy, almost literally delirious quality to the kills in the film, which have the artisinal baroque weirdness of a particularly frothy Italian giallo mixed with the cheap exploitation that was the bread and butter of American International Pictures (which produced it). Dr. Phibes Rises Again attempts to bring both of these things back. In both cases, it very palpably goes not far enough. Let us consider them in order.
Price's performance is the harder shortcoming to figure out. It should work. He's doing all of the same tricks, and doing them in much the same way in some cases, but it's completely without the spark of absolutely weirdness that happened last time. Part of this is, I think, that Fuest and Blees are knowingly writing to Price's performance in the first film, trying to give him even more melodramatic purple prose than he got in the first film, and that was quite a lot to start with. Something that especially leaps out at me is that he keeps saying, in damn near every scene and often multiples times per scene, the name "Victoria", and it's always included as a kind of hammy flourish. It's a good name for that - "Vick-TORRR-ee-aaaaaaah!" You can really just gnaw at it like a dog on a marrow bone for a good long time, and Price does. But I think the ubiquity of the name kinds of flattens that out, and it speaks to the overall strategy for writing dialogue: putting in very obvious readings. In the first Phibes, the speeches were more generically bombastic and keening, and Price's genius laid in finding the properly deranged emphases to give them the right amount of garish grandeur. In Rises Again, he's basically being channeled into line deliveries, and so he feels less energised and the character feels less surprising and larger than life. It is basically the exact same problem that happened in the writing of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, reducing Johnny Depp's performance as Captain Jack Sparrow from slippery trickster to gaudy cartoon.
The kill scenes, meanwhile, are just boring. The Abominable Dr. Phibes had an obvious advantage in the way its story was built: all of the deaths were thematically linked to the plagues visited upon Egypt by God in Exodus (or, anyway, some sufficiently plausible made-up plagues). Dr. Phibes Rises Again sort of picks up the baton by moving the action to Egypt itself, but now the deaths are just random over-complicated traps because Phibes is a supervillain with time to kill, including setting up a huge lair full of elaborate murder devices prior to the events of the first film (I mean this literally, it's clarified in dialogue that he went to Egypt to prepare, probably in the hope that we'd think less about how baffling and contrived it is that he just so happens to have e.g. a giant fan the size of jet engine to stage a sandstorm). They're sort of Egyptian-desert-themed: two different deaths by sand, one by eagle (which isn't even a trap, it's just Phibes siccing his trained killer eagle on a dude), and one involving scorpions, one of only three properly Phibesian deaths in the film, as a man is locked in a giant golden scorpion chair with pinchers driving spikes into his wrists. It's not a good Phibesian death, but at least it's tacky. The only good death is the second one, with a man being stuffed into a giant novelty gin bottle and thrown overboard a steamer.
To be clear, the problems with Dr. Phibes Rises Again go deeper than these two particular areas being weaker than the first film. It is, in general, not a very well-made thing. That's clear literally before the story begins: the very first thing that happens is a narrator (Gary Owens) racing through the plot of the first movie over a montage of footage from that movie, giving us his précis in the authoritative but breathlessly excited tone of a WWII-era newsreel announcer. Which is artless and all, but forgivable enough; even with only about 15 months separating the release of the two films, in the pre-home video days, that's a lot of time to forget the fine points of The Abominable Dr. Phibes. And that might have been better, honestly, because this film's scenario is incompatible with the fine points of The Abominable Dr. Phibes. But much worse than that, the recap is scattered, out of order, and largely pointless, spending time clarifying points that are simply not at all germane to the stories of either film, and swallowing the actual dramatic thrust of the first movie.
So by the time this movie actually begins in earnest, I'm already feeling a touch annoyed, and it never does much of anything to soothe me. The conflict this time is between Phibes, who wishes to take his wife's corpse to an Egyptian site where he can bring her back from the dead - but only during a precise arrangement of the planets that only occurs once every 2000 years - and Darius Biederbeck (Robert Quarry), who wants to find this site to make himself immortal, and to that end stole the map that Phibes had in his lair sometime in the three years since the last film ended. Two of the Scotland Yard investigators from the last film, Inspector Trout (Peter Jeffrey) and Superintendent Waverly (John Cater) get involved when Phibes and his mute assistant Vulnavia (Valli Kemp, replacing Virginia North) murder Biederbeck's burly manservant (Milton Reid). They attempt to do this with clockwork snakes; then, since the clockwork snakes (played by real snakes when they're not close-ups on props) don't actually kill him, they just shoot a snake-shaped dagger into his ear. Which feels like it speaks to where we are with the level of creativity of this film's deaths relative to the first.
That's one more narrative line that the first film had, and it creates a major problem for the film: instead of just the mildly amusing bluster and bumblefuckery of the police (who still provide the broadest comic relief in a film that's much more explicitly comic than before), it also gives us a proper antagonist in Biederbeck (making it all the odder that he is credited, at the end, as one of the film's two "protagonists", along with Price), and he gets a lot of screentime. It is not time well-spent: Quarry is a dull screen presence, and the American-born actor is providing a lifeless English accent to further stifle his energy. AIP was trying very hard to push Quarry as a new leading man in the early 1970s: Dr. Phibes Rises Again was his very next film after headlining the decent-sized hit Count Yorga, Vampire and its sequel. His star never ended up rising all that high, and his unengaging work here is a pretty clear example of why, but the studio's desire to shore up a new horror lead (to replace Price, in effect, which led to considerable bad blood between the men on set) took precedence, and so we get a film that routinely jams on the brakes every time it leaves Phibes for his joyless opposite number and the generic heavies he lugs around.
But, again, it's not like Phibes is in great form himself. It's just less special watching him. And his interactions with Vulnavia, one of the highlights of the first movie, all stumble over North's absence. Kemp, a fashion model, as a grand total of four screen credits, and Vulnavia #2 is the only one of those that isn't a spear-carrying role. She's not an actor, literally, so it's not fair to judge her for not acting. And yet, not-acting is exactly what we get: striding through sets and completing the blocking as designed, but never giving a sense of personality. And she has no chemistry with Price. North was legitimately unearthly and uncanny in the first film; the absence of that extra element of pure weirdness is keenly felt here.
Weirdness is, in general, missing. There are some touches of the bizarre and surreal, mostly on the steamer to Africa; Phibes has a huge light-up robot band just hanging out on deck, the gin bottle. Largely, though, Fuest can't replicate the dreamy theatricality of the first film, even when it seems to be the express goal to do so, as in the chrome staircase that dominates the main room in Phibes's Egyptian lair. The Abominable Dr. Phibes operates as a series of baroque tableaux; Dr. Phibes Rises Again merely stages some half-assed conversation scenes and hopes that Price can salvage them. Sadly, he cannot; of all the "colorful madman murders people in overcomplicated ways" films he made over the years (this is by my count the fourth of six, and the second in a run of four such films in four consecutive years), this is easily my least-favorite.
Body Count: 7, two fewer than in the first movie. As mentioned, the lessened absurdity of the deaths is an even greater flaw than the lower quantity.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
And yet, Dr. Phibes Rises Again is such a profoundly flat thing! It's a retread that vaguely understands the appeal of the original in a mechanical sense but not an artistic one, and so its attempts to just pile up more of the same thing end up feeling like a diminishment of the original, not even a mere tired repeat. What makes The Abominable Dr. Phibes such an eccentric marvel can be hard to pin down, since so much of it is going in so many ways, but I think there are two things above all that clearly register as great strengths: the peerlessly well-modulated, bombastic camp performance that Price gives despite delivering all of his lines in voiceover and being unable to move any part of his face other than his eyes; and the gaudy, almost literally delirious quality to the kills in the film, which have the artisinal baroque weirdness of a particularly frothy Italian giallo mixed with the cheap exploitation that was the bread and butter of American International Pictures (which produced it). Dr. Phibes Rises Again attempts to bring both of these things back. In both cases, it very palpably goes not far enough. Let us consider them in order.
Price's performance is the harder shortcoming to figure out. It should work. He's doing all of the same tricks, and doing them in much the same way in some cases, but it's completely without the spark of absolutely weirdness that happened last time. Part of this is, I think, that Fuest and Blees are knowingly writing to Price's performance in the first film, trying to give him even more melodramatic purple prose than he got in the first film, and that was quite a lot to start with. Something that especially leaps out at me is that he keeps saying, in damn near every scene and often multiples times per scene, the name "Victoria", and it's always included as a kind of hammy flourish. It's a good name for that - "Vick-TORRR-ee-aaaaaaah!" You can really just gnaw at it like a dog on a marrow bone for a good long time, and Price does. But I think the ubiquity of the name kinds of flattens that out, and it speaks to the overall strategy for writing dialogue: putting in very obvious readings. In the first Phibes, the speeches were more generically bombastic and keening, and Price's genius laid in finding the properly deranged emphases to give them the right amount of garish grandeur. In Rises Again, he's basically being channeled into line deliveries, and so he feels less energised and the character feels less surprising and larger than life. It is basically the exact same problem that happened in the writing of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, reducing Johnny Depp's performance as Captain Jack Sparrow from slippery trickster to gaudy cartoon.
The kill scenes, meanwhile, are just boring. The Abominable Dr. Phibes had an obvious advantage in the way its story was built: all of the deaths were thematically linked to the plagues visited upon Egypt by God in Exodus (or, anyway, some sufficiently plausible made-up plagues). Dr. Phibes Rises Again sort of picks up the baton by moving the action to Egypt itself, but now the deaths are just random over-complicated traps because Phibes is a supervillain with time to kill, including setting up a huge lair full of elaborate murder devices prior to the events of the first film (I mean this literally, it's clarified in dialogue that he went to Egypt to prepare, probably in the hope that we'd think less about how baffling and contrived it is that he just so happens to have e.g. a giant fan the size of jet engine to stage a sandstorm). They're sort of Egyptian-desert-themed: two different deaths by sand, one by eagle (which isn't even a trap, it's just Phibes siccing his trained killer eagle on a dude), and one involving scorpions, one of only three properly Phibesian deaths in the film, as a man is locked in a giant golden scorpion chair with pinchers driving spikes into his wrists. It's not a good Phibesian death, but at least it's tacky. The only good death is the second one, with a man being stuffed into a giant novelty gin bottle and thrown overboard a steamer.
To be clear, the problems with Dr. Phibes Rises Again go deeper than these two particular areas being weaker than the first film. It is, in general, not a very well-made thing. That's clear literally before the story begins: the very first thing that happens is a narrator (Gary Owens) racing through the plot of the first movie over a montage of footage from that movie, giving us his précis in the authoritative but breathlessly excited tone of a WWII-era newsreel announcer. Which is artless and all, but forgivable enough; even with only about 15 months separating the release of the two films, in the pre-home video days, that's a lot of time to forget the fine points of The Abominable Dr. Phibes. And that might have been better, honestly, because this film's scenario is incompatible with the fine points of The Abominable Dr. Phibes. But much worse than that, the recap is scattered, out of order, and largely pointless, spending time clarifying points that are simply not at all germane to the stories of either film, and swallowing the actual dramatic thrust of the first movie.
So by the time this movie actually begins in earnest, I'm already feeling a touch annoyed, and it never does much of anything to soothe me. The conflict this time is between Phibes, who wishes to take his wife's corpse to an Egyptian site where he can bring her back from the dead - but only during a precise arrangement of the planets that only occurs once every 2000 years - and Darius Biederbeck (Robert Quarry), who wants to find this site to make himself immortal, and to that end stole the map that Phibes had in his lair sometime in the three years since the last film ended. Two of the Scotland Yard investigators from the last film, Inspector Trout (Peter Jeffrey) and Superintendent Waverly (John Cater) get involved when Phibes and his mute assistant Vulnavia (Valli Kemp, replacing Virginia North) murder Biederbeck's burly manservant (Milton Reid). They attempt to do this with clockwork snakes; then, since the clockwork snakes (played by real snakes when they're not close-ups on props) don't actually kill him, they just shoot a snake-shaped dagger into his ear. Which feels like it speaks to where we are with the level of creativity of this film's deaths relative to the first.
That's one more narrative line that the first film had, and it creates a major problem for the film: instead of just the mildly amusing bluster and bumblefuckery of the police (who still provide the broadest comic relief in a film that's much more explicitly comic than before), it also gives us a proper antagonist in Biederbeck (making it all the odder that he is credited, at the end, as one of the film's two "protagonists", along with Price), and he gets a lot of screentime. It is not time well-spent: Quarry is a dull screen presence, and the American-born actor is providing a lifeless English accent to further stifle his energy. AIP was trying very hard to push Quarry as a new leading man in the early 1970s: Dr. Phibes Rises Again was his very next film after headlining the decent-sized hit Count Yorga, Vampire and its sequel. His star never ended up rising all that high, and his unengaging work here is a pretty clear example of why, but the studio's desire to shore up a new horror lead (to replace Price, in effect, which led to considerable bad blood between the men on set) took precedence, and so we get a film that routinely jams on the brakes every time it leaves Phibes for his joyless opposite number and the generic heavies he lugs around.
But, again, it's not like Phibes is in great form himself. It's just less special watching him. And his interactions with Vulnavia, one of the highlights of the first movie, all stumble over North's absence. Kemp, a fashion model, as a grand total of four screen credits, and Vulnavia #2 is the only one of those that isn't a spear-carrying role. She's not an actor, literally, so it's not fair to judge her for not acting. And yet, not-acting is exactly what we get: striding through sets and completing the blocking as designed, but never giving a sense of personality. And she has no chemistry with Price. North was legitimately unearthly and uncanny in the first film; the absence of that extra element of pure weirdness is keenly felt here.
Weirdness is, in general, missing. There are some touches of the bizarre and surreal, mostly on the steamer to Africa; Phibes has a huge light-up robot band just hanging out on deck, the gin bottle. Largely, though, Fuest can't replicate the dreamy theatricality of the first film, even when it seems to be the express goal to do so, as in the chrome staircase that dominates the main room in Phibes's Egyptian lair. The Abominable Dr. Phibes operates as a series of baroque tableaux; Dr. Phibes Rises Again merely stages some half-assed conversation scenes and hopes that Price can salvage them. Sadly, he cannot; of all the "colorful madman murders people in overcomplicated ways" films he made over the years (this is by my count the fourth of six, and the second in a run of four such films in four consecutive years), this is easily my least-favorite.
Body Count: 7, two fewer than in the first movie. As mentioned, the lessened absurdity of the deaths is an even greater flaw than the lower quantity.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
