Saturday, December 31, 2005

Movie review - "Comedy of Terrors" (1963) **1/2

Not officially part of a Poe cycle, though it was made by AIP and stars Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre. It was written by Richard Matheson, but is not based on Poe, and was directed by Jacque Tourneur, not Roger Corman.

The cast are a delight and the film easy enough to watch - there isn't enough story here for a feature though, it would have been better as a chapter in an omnibus film.

Vincent Price plays a useless funeral director who occasionally kills people to ensure he has some business; Lorre is his assistant and Rathbone his landlord and Karloff (who does barely nothing in the film) is his father in law.

The film has a lot of energy - it is often silly and full of knockabout comedy including "speeded up action" that was an AIP staple in their beach party movies - and seems faster paced than the Corman Poes, but this is a comedy and in Corman's films the characters seemed to spend most of their time walking around spooky house, so its natural it seems slower.

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