The Vincent Price Movie Review

Released in 1969
Directed by Gordon Hessler

In 1969, AIP was coming to the tail end of their Poe adaptation cycle, and it’s here we find The Oblong Box. It doesn’t share anything in common with the Poe story at all; it’s something they just decided to slap on for publicity. They had good reason to trump up the marketing, because not even Christopher Lee or Vincent Price can save this piece of rubbish. It’s bad…really bad.

The film opens with a weird scene where an african witch doctor is doing something to someone, who we later find out is Edward Markham, the brother of Julian Markham(Vincent Price). What the witch doctor is doing is not revealed(witch doctor stuff i guess), but apparently it’s vicious enough to drive Edward insane and leave him disfigured. Cut back to England, where Julian has his crazy brother chained up in the attic. A group of conspirators get another witch doctor to shoot some kind of medicine pellet into his room, which he ingests. The drug puts Edward in a state resembling death, and when his brother finds him they nail him in a coffin and bury him. Fortunately for Edward, the nefarious Dr. Neuhart(Christopher Lee) needs cadavers for his medical experiments, and is promptly exhumed. The rest of the movie is a collection of mismatched scenes where Edward takes his revenge on those who wronged him, including several people that have nothing to do with the story whatsoever.

There’s a funny scene in the movie Ed Wood where Ed says to the movie producer, “If you take a crap movie and put a star in it, then you’ve got something.” The producer bluntly responds, “Yeah, crap with a star.” Two stars, in this case.

Vincent Price looks absolutely bored to tears in this movie. He phones in a mediocre performance beginning at scene one. It’s hard to blame him though, because the god awful script doesn’t give him much to work with. Contractual obligations can be a bitch sometimes.

Christopher Lee does his standard Christopher Lee thing as the icy doctor, but his performance is wasted because his character exists solely as a necessity of the plot and is not fleshed out in any way.

Did I mention how bad the plot is? Well, it’s terrible. It makes no sense, so don’t even try to piece it all together in your brain.

Do yourself a favor and don’t watch this movie. Also, I recommend that you smash with a hammer any VHS/DVD copies of this movie you are unfortunate enough to find so that others may be spared of the agonizing experience that is The Oblong Box.

Tags: edgar allan poe, gothic horror, vincent price

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 6:37 am and is filed under 1960's - American International Years. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.