Madhouse (1974)

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Happy Halloween, you guys! And welcome to the final episode in the much talked about (here in Derek's living room) Vincent Price is Right Movie Marathon!

To finish it out, the guys sat down to watch 1974's Madhouse, which not only starred Vincent Price, but also included Peter Cushing at no extra charge!

What a bargain!

Paul Toombes (Price) has everything going for him. He's a famous actor, known for his role as Dr. Death in a series of successful movies. He is engaged to his beautiful costar, Ellen (Julie Crosthwaite). Top of the world, ma!

But then it all comes crashing down when, shortly after publicly arguing with Paul, Ellen turns up dead, and Paul is the one who finds her. Needless to say, Paul does not handle it well, and spends the next twelve years in an asylum. When he is finally released, he travels to London, where his writing partner, Herbert Flay (Cushing), lives. On the cruise to England, a young lady (Linda Hayden) recognizes Toombes and immediately starts badgering him, all the way up to the point where he gets off the ship and into a car to go to Herbert's house.

A girl? In my bedroom? Ooh! How scandalous!

Once there, Paul and Herbert start planning a Dr. Death television show, and to prepare Paul to return to his part, Herbert makes him sit down and watch one of his old movies, which sends Paul into a twitchy freak-out.

While roaming through the house, Paul goes to the basement, where he finds his former costar and Herbert's wife, Faye (Adrienne Corri), hanging out with the spiders down there and badly disfigured from an assault years ago.

But she has a great personality.

At the same time, the young lady from the cruise has found Herbert's house, and she makes her way onto the property to try getting to Paul again. Unfortunately, a dark and vaguely familiar skull-faced person stabs her through the throat with what looks like a grilling fork, then dumps her body in a boat and sends it out into the middle of a lake, only to be fished out by a group of boys not long after.

The police, of course, are naturally suspicious of the guy who was just let out of a nuthouse and played a murderous doctor in a number of orders. However, they cannot tie him to it, so he goes on his way and starts making the TV show he came here for in the first place, although that does not go well, either.

But at least his wormy producer (Robert Quarry) is there!

Unhappy with his new costar (Jenny Lee Wright), Paul tears into her. And, once again, the mysterious guy who dresses very similar to Paul as Dr. Death makes an appearance and makes her all dead, hanging her with her own hair.

On his way back to Herbert's after a day at work that could have gone better, Paul is confronted by the parents of the girl from the cruise (Ellis Dale and Catherine Willmer). It seems they found his pocket watch on their daughter's dead body, and they are now going to blackmail him, demanding he pay them to not turn the watch over to the police. That doesn't last long, however, as the mystery guy comes and turns them into a kabob.

And Paul had not one more fuck to give.

All is still not well, however, and Paul's assistant turns up dead, causing Paul to begin questioning whether it actually is himself that is doing all this killing. With no reasonable options available, Paul decides to end it all in fire.

Or does he...? And if it's not Paul being all murdery, who is? Also, what's up with that wormy producer? You'll have to tune in to find out!

Derek really enjoyed this one, and was especially pleased to see Peter Cushing working with Price. He also had a vaguely unhealthy interest in Linda Hayden's character. She's...she's really something. And he digs it.

Jake also loved the movie, and is particularly impressed with how Price's simple Dr. Death makeup works so effectively. It really is impressive, and reminds both of them of Heath Ledger's makeup in The Dark Knight. Very cool.

So get your medical bag, put on your spookiest cloak, and check out the latest episode!

The Tingler

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William Castle was the King of Movie Gimmicks. He would crank out horror films with skeletons that floated over the audience, smoke machines, planted moviegoers that screamed, and buzzers installed in random seats to zap people during the scary parts.

Vincent Price was one of the most beloved horror icons ever. His gentlemanly appearance, calm delivery, and unnerving laugh made him a staple of the early horror genre, as well as the occasional pop music video or Scooby-Doo episode. Quite a resume.

So it only seems that these two masters of their art would work together several times during the late fifties and early sixties. One such project was today's movie, 1959's The Tingler.

It literally starts with people screaming in your face, so strap in.

Price plays pathologist Dr. Warren Chapin, a guy who performs what he deems to be unnecessary autopsies on prisoners who have been executed by the state. After one such autopsy, a man walks into his autopsy room, introduces himself as Oliver Higgins (Philip Coolidge), announces he watched the execution, and then starts asking Chapin all kinds of questions about his job. Chapin seems unconcerned about the surprising lack of security in the building, and starts explaining his theories about fear and what causes it. The two become fast friends, and Chapin offers Ollie a ride home.

When they arrive at Ollie's residence, it is above a silent movie theater that Ollie owns and runs with his "deaf and dumb" (Ollie's words; not our) wife, Martha (Judith Evelyn). They go upstairs to the apartment to have tea, but butterfingers Chapin, who is, we remind you, a doctor, drops the saucer to his teacup and cuts his hand, causing Martha to freak out and faint. After making sure Martha is not actually injured and will be okay, Chapin heads home to his wife, Isabela (Patricia Cutts), only to find his sister-in-law, Lucy (Pamela Lincoln) getting ready for a date with her fiancee, David (Lincoln's real-life fiancee, Darryl Hickman), who also happens to be Chapin's assistant when he does his fear experiments. Lucy tells Chapin that Isabela is out doing errands.

When Lucy goes upstairs to finish getting ready, Chapin looks outside to see his wife kissing some guy in the driveway that is not him, which seems wrong. She comes in and the two of them snipe at each other until David shows up, at which point Lucy comes downstairs, and she and David leave, giving Chapin and Isabela some space to argue properly.

There. That's better.

Chapin fires a gun at Isabela, and she drops to the floor. He picks her up and takes her to his office, where he happens to have an x-ray machine, and takes several x-rays of her. When she comes to, he explains to her that there were only blanks in the gun, and she unknowingly helped him with a hypothesis concerning a parasite he believes every human hosts: A "tingler".

A tingler, Chapin explains, is the cause of that tingling sensation down a person's spine when they experience fear. It feeds on that fear, and if it gets enough, it can kill the  host and crush their spine. Pretty nasty stuff. Even more disturbing, the only way to weaken the creature is to scream. It is never explained why. And the x-rays he took of Isabela show something on her spine. He believes he found it.

And he's, uh...pretty "excited" by the idea...

The next step in Chapin's experiment is to create some fear for himself and, as he claims to fear nothing, the only obvious option for him is to inject himself with a buttload of lysergic acid and see what happens. You read that right: He mainlines some LSD "for science." And it goes about as well as you might expect; first he opens a window and claims it is locked, and then he sees wavy lines when he looks at a skeleton. Then he screams and everything is okay. Just like when someone really takes LSD.

Obviously, the next step is to go see Ollie and Martha, and load Martha up to see what happens when someone who is tripping balls and has to deal with their own tingler but cannot scream. (It sounds dirty, but it's not.) Then Chapin prescribes barbiturates for when she comes down and leaves. Weird guy.But then shit gets weird.

Color? In a black-and-white movie? Madness!

Martha dies of fright, and Ollie throws her body in the trunk of his car to take it to Chapin, wants to hack her back open and see if he was right about this whole "tingler" thing. Lo-and-behold, it turns out he was, which seems logical only because this would have been an even worse movie had he turned out to have been completely wrong. ("Huh. Weird. There's just gooey stuff around her spine. My bad. Throw her on the pile with the others, I guess.")

He removes the tingler and examines it before putting it in a box to take...well, we're not sure where. Maybe back to the morgue. He also tells Ollie to toss Martha back into the car trunk and take her to the police, who will handle it? Somehow? It's a little hazy because Derek and Jake had pretty much lost interest by this point.

But they remained fixated on the tingler's ability to hump
anything with which it came into contact.

Ollie leaves, and Chapin takes a nap, only to wake up with the tingler humping his chest.His wife had put it there while he was sleeping, in the hopes that he would get all kinds of dead from it. Fortunately for him, he wakes up in time and puts it back in its box. He then receives a call from the police wondering where the body was that he had promised them. Chapin realizes that something is up, and he heads to Ollie's place.

Meanwhile, Ollie is at home, packing like he's planning to take a vacation.We also discover that he took Martha home and just flopped her on her bed and covered her. When Chapin arrives and confronts him, Ollie pulls a gun, but Chapin is having none of that; he's going to the police. At least, he was, until he notices that the tingler, which he had brought with him for some reason, has escaped from its box and slithered down into the ventilation, which leads to the packed theater downstairs!

Will Chapin and Ollie let bygones be bygones and team up to find the little critter? Or will it escape after humping an unsuspecting moviegoer's leg? Or will we get an unsatisfying ending where nothing is really resolved because there wasn't a decent ending written? Or could it be all three? You'll have to listen to find out!

Jake did not like this movie, and really, who could blame him? The plot was almost non-existent, and what little bit there was appeared to have been cobbled together from leftovers and half-ideas from other movies. But Vicent Price sure was creepy!

Derek disagrees wholeheartedly. The movie was garbage, but it seems pretty clear that the gimmick came well before the story was conceived, and only the bare minimum of effort was put into constructing a plot to justify it. Also, the tingler looks like the ear creatures from Wrath of Khan.

So scream...SCREAM FOR YOUR LIFE (or just to make sure everyone around you is still awake) and check out the latest episode!

House on Haunted Hill (1959)

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In April of last year, the guys sat down to watch the 1999 remake of The House on Haunted Hill. Their responses to it were mixed. So for this year's Halloween marathon (dubbed as The Price is Right Halloween Marathon by Jake), it seemed appropriate that they should watch the original 1959 William Castle version, starring Vincent Price and an ensemble cast of vaguely familiar faces, some of which are very punchable.

And booze. Lots of booze.

Frederick Loren (Price) is throwing a birthday party for his wife, Annabelle (Carol Ohmart), at an Andrew Lloyd Wright-designed house he rented for the occasion. It's a pretty unconventional party, in that the five guests Frederick invited do not know him or his wife, and also his wife hates him and has tried at least once in the past to poison him to death. Oh, and the house is supposedly haunted. So you know a good time is going to be had!

Among the guests is Watson Pritchard (Elisha Cook), who owns the house, and he takes everyone around for a tour, taking special care to show them the pool of acid under the floor of the basement. Apparently, it was installed so a previous renter who made wine could shove people into it who didn't care for his product. Pritchard tells everyone that the house is haunted, prompting two of the guest--Lance (Richard Long) and Nora (Carolyn Craig)--to hang back after the group leaves the basement so the two of them can investigate further. Immediately, Lance locks himself in a closet and gets knocked out, and Nora screams bloody murder when she sees what she believed to be a ghost.

Marty! We've got to go back...to the FUTURE!

Back upstairs, Frederick explains to everyone why he invited them and how he will give anybody who stays the entire night ten thousand dollars. He also passes out guns as party favors. He really wants someone to die, apparently.

Nora comes running in and tells everyone that Lance is missing in the basement. She also tells them about the "ghost" she saw. They all follow her back down there and find Lance in the closet he went into, unconscious on  the floor. when they wake him up, he explains that he didn't see who hit him, and Nora starts freaking out, so everyone goes back upstairs, where Dr. Trent (Alan Marshal) treats the bump on Lance's head and Nora's breakdown continues as she demands to go home,and everyone else freshens their drinks.

Booze: It's what's for dinner!

Frederick attempts to allay Nora's fears by explaining that the "ghost"she saw was actually the caretaker's (Howard Hoffman) blind wife (Leona Anderson), just as they both appear at the room's entrance. Their appearance doesn't help their case,and Nora continues to say she wants to leave. The decision is taken away from her, however, when the caretakers leave before Frederick can explain to everyone that they can leave with the caretakers before midnight if they don't want to stay. Whoops.

From there, things start going downhill immediately. Nora tells Lance something tried to strangle her and leave her for dead. Lance thinks this is great, because whatever it was--the both believe it may be Frederick--will think she's dead and leave her alone. In the meantime, Lance and Dr. Trent start poking around, trying to find clues, when they hear a scream. They find Annabelle hanging from a noose in the hallway upstairs, but they don't think it was suicide; instead, they suspect Frederick, which is not really a reach, as they had all seen and heard the two of them arguing.

For his part, Pritchard decides to guard all the booze by keeping it safe in his belly.

Determined to make sure no more people die, Lance and Dr. Trent tell everyone to stay in their rooms with their guns at the ready, should the killer decide to visit. In her room, Nora sees the ghost of Annabelle outside her window, and a rope comes through it and tries to strangle her. However, she yells "NO!" at it until it goes away. Then she turns around and immediately runs out the door, eventually making her way to the basement.

Dr. Trent and Frederick split up and search the house. Lance, for his part, leaves his room and finds a secret room where,once again, he gets trapped. This guy is about useless. Dr. Trent meets up with Annabelle, who is not only not dead, but is also plotting with him to kill Frederick because Dr. Trent is diddling her pooter. Their plan involves getting Nora so worked up that she shoots anybody who comes near her, and then making sure that the one person who comes hear her is Frederick. It's foolproof!

And get this: It actually works! Frederick works his way to the basement, where Nora has run from the "ghost" of Annabelle. As he walks in, she turns and shoots him. She runs out, and Trent comes in to get rid of the body by dropping it in the acid pit. Annabelle comes in shortly after to make sure the deed was done, and she is confronted by a skeleton waling toward her!

Say, baby...Come her often?

Is it the ghost of Frederick? Is it one of the other people who have died there? And what happened to Lance? Will Pritchard run out of booze and tear a hole through the wall to get outside so he can find more? And is Nora nuts or what? Also, what the hell? You'll have to tune in to find out!

Jake liked Vincent Price better in this than in the last movie because he was more...Vincent Price-y. He was also deeply impressed by the skeleton special effects. They are SO realistic! His one complaint is the lack of actual haunting in this haunted house movie. Not a lot of ghosts happening.

Derek is really worried about Pritchard's liver. This dude is constantly knocking back the booze. A few times, he even grabs for the bottle as Frederick is waving it around while he explains the rules of the evening. It's a little unnerving.

So get boozed up, lock all the doors, and check out this week's episode!

Pit and the Pendulum

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It's October again,folks! And you know what that means: The guys have chosen an arbitrary subject them to follow for an entire month! And this month, it's one of the Old Masters of Horror, Vincent Price.

And what a way to start! This time around, they're watching Roger Corman's 1961 adaption of the Edgar Allen Poe classic, Pit and the Pendulum.

Poe, Price, Pit, Pendulum...It's got everything!

Francis (John Kerr) is on his way to Spain in order to find out what happened to his sister, Elizabeth (Barbara Steele). Elizabeth's husband, Nicholas Medina (Price) has sent word that Elizabeth has died.

When Francis arrives, he is greeted by Catherine (Luana Anders), who at first tells him that Nicholas is unavailable, as he is grieving and not feeling well. This turns out to not be true almost immediately, as Nicholas comes out of his room to speak with Francis, telling him that Elizabeth died due to some sort of blood disorder.

And not at all anything to do with murder or anything.

Francis feels this explanation does not hold water, and his suspicions are confirmed when Dr. Leon (Antony Carbone) arrives for dinner and tells him that Elizabeth died of heart failure. Now quite angry at Nicholas, Francis demands to see his sister was interred. On the way there, they stop by the castle's torture chamber (a leftover from when Nicholas's father was a part of the Spanish Inquisition--nobody expected that), and Nicholas explains what really happened to Elizabeth: She became obsessed with the torture chamber and its machinery, coming more and more unglued, until she one day closed herself in an iron maiden. He also says that her last word was "Sebastian," Nicholas' father's name. (He also plays his own father in a different flashback.)

Once again, Francis calls "bullshit," and refuses to believe it's true. When he tells Catherine what he thinks, she tells him that Nicholas might be a little...off because, as a child (played by Larry Turner), he witnessed his father catching Isabella and his uncle, Bartolome (Charles Victor), in an affair. Sebastian reacts by beating Bartolome with a poker and torturing Isabella to death.

And, judging by his expression, he also walked in on his parents "doing it."

Also once again, Dr. Leon tells Nicholas that this is, in fact, not true at all. instead, Isabella was stuck behind a brick wall and left to die, a lateral change to the story, at best. This experience caused Nicholas to go just a little bit crazy, and he is now terrified that Elizabeth was also interred while still alive. Dr. Leon also rains on that parade, stating that there is no way that have happened, despite the fact that this is 16th Century Spain and they are basically cave people.

That evening, Elizabeth's room is the center of a lot of spooky stuff, including a voice whispering at the maid (Lynette Bernay), playing the harpsichord, and completely trashing the room. While searching the room, Francis discovers a tunnel that leads to Nicholas' chambers. and he accuses him of doing all this. By this point, Nicholas is so confused and messed-up that even he isn't sure he'snot doing it. This prompts them to go open the tomb where Elizabeth's body is kept.

WHAT'S IN THE FUCKIN' BOX?!

They discover a corpse with a horrified expression and scratches on the inside of the lid, causing Nicholas to faint and be carried off to his room. While he drifts in and out of consciousness, he hears a woman's voice whispering his name, coming from the tunnel between his room and Elizabeth's. He follows it and finds himself at Elizabeth's tomb, where he also finds a not-desiccated-corpse-at-all Elizabeth, starts walking toward him. Again, he freaks out and, not realizing he is being sort of corralled, soon finds himself at the top of the stairs leading down to the torture chamber.

With one final lunge, Elizabeth causes Nicholas to fall down the stairs. Immediately, Dr. Leon, who, it turns out, was having an affair with Elizabeth and had planned this whole thing with her, shows up and checks him, telling Elizabeth that "he's gone." Again, almost immediately, this turns out to be not true. He's not dead. But he's definitely not his normal self anymore.

"Normal"compared to his usual state, that is.

But what's wrong with him? Will bad things happen? And what about this pendulum thingie we've been hearing so much about? How does that fit in? You'll have to listen to find out!

Derek is concerned about Dr. Leon's credentials. The guy is terrible at being a doctor, even by 16th Century standards. Someone should have looked into that. Also, how come he gets saddled with all the exposition? Probably because he doesn't have any patients.

Jake is surprised at the quality of this film, especially considering that it is a Roger Corman film. The sets are great. (Probably because they were used in a different, possibly bigger budget film--Corman did that a lot.) He also thinks Vincent Price was not suited for playing a grieving widower. But the crazy bit is good.

So slip on those pantaloons and frilly collar, and listen to the new episode!