Audience Member
Deserves to be a classic, it is a pioneering slasher film without too much gore, but still keeping the suspense.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
02/27/23
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R P
I was excited to watch Madhouse with Vincent Price and Peter Cushing. They are always great actors. However I wasn't a fan of this one. I found myself getting sidetracked with anything that caught my attention other than Madhouse.
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Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
10/07/21
Full Review
dave s
Madhouse is Vincent Price's disappointing follow-up to the previous year's Theatre of Blood. Price plays Paul Toombes, an actor attempting a comeback after his fiancé was murdered a decade earlier. When a series of similar murders are committed, all fingers point to the mentally fragile actor. Unlike its predecessor, Madhouse tends to take itself too seriously, which is fine as long as there are some chills or scares along the way. The movie tends to flat line early and never seems to rise to anything beyond either a weak horror film or a mediocre mystery. Price, as always, makes a decent attempt to salvage things but the script just isn't strong enough. And do your best to ignore the silly ending.
Rated 2/5 Stars •
Rated 2 out of 5 stars
03/30/23
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Landon J
Vincent Price mystery horror. Not overly scary but its a memorable Vincent Price film.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
01/11/21
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Frances H
This flick was not supposed to be laughable, but was so bad it was hilarious!
Rated 1.5/5 Stars •
Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars
10/28/20
Full Review
Audience Member
It just wouldn't be Shocktober without Vincent Price. He appeared in so many horror movies, turning out such quality performances, that he became a horror cinema legend. Some of those movies are genuine classics, others campy fun, others forgettable. Madhouse, released in 1974, combines the campy entertainment of Price's most famous horror films (the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations he made with Roger Corman) with a more hard edged 1970's horror sensibility. It is also, in its own way, a tribute to Price's career in horror.
Price plays Paul Toombes, an aging actor famous for playing the character Dr. Death in a series of horror movies. After his fiancée is murdered gruesomely, Toombes suffers a mental breakdown and disappears from the limelight. The writer of the Dr. Death movies, Herbert Flay (Peter Cushing, another horror legend), arranges a comeback for Toombes with a new Dr. Death series. Yes, putting a traumatized man who may or may not have murdered someone into a situation similar to the one that traumatized him in the first place is a bad idea. Toombes arrives in London and even before the cameras roll, the bodies start piling up.
Madhouse is ostensibly a murder mystery (who is dressing up like Dr. Death and murdering people?) though there is little doubt about the identity of the killer and their goal of framing Toombes for the murders, or driving him mad, or both. That doesn't hurt the film, however, because the real entertainment comes from its approach to horror: a mixture of shock visuals, admiration for the genre, and a dash of camp. The plot follows the structure of a slasher movie though that subgenre would not be solidified until the early 1980's. One by one people are murdered in different and more elaborate ways: decapitated, hanged with their own hair, crushed by a bed. The kills are not especially gory or violent especially when compared to other 70's horror films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, released the same year as Madhouse, or Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left, released two years earlier.
There's a sly sense of humor to Madhouse. Any horror movie with characters named Toombes and Flay can't take itself too seriously. There's even a costume party scene that has Peter Cushing (famous for playing the vampire hunter Van Helsing in numerous Hammer Films) dressed as Dracula. Living in the basement of Cushing's house—a dungeon straight out of a Hammer horror movie—is his ex-wife Fay Flay (Adrienne Corri), who was disfigured in an accident and is now obsessed with spiders. The clips we see of the "Dr. Death" movies are actually scenes from older Vincent Price movies: Roger Corman's The Raven and Tales of Terror, both distributed by AIP, the company behind Madhouse. Using footage from another movie to pad out a new low budget movie was something fairly common at the time, especially in horror (Roger Corman would do this several times with footage from The Terror). In Madhouse this device feels a bit more justified since the story is about a horror movie star confronting his past. Viewing the film today, these clips of Price's older movies feel like a tribute to his career and talent. Though Vincent Price's career would continue into the 1990's, by 1974 he had already appeared in enough horror movies that a film playing on his horror career felt justified.
The reason to watch Madhouse is, of course, Vincent Price. Other roles have given him more to sink his teeth into but he still plays the part of a reluctant actor unsure of his sanity very well. For me the highlights of the movie are his speeches; these are the scenes where he really gets to shine. Watching him talk about death while lighting candles is just what you want from a Vincent Price movie. My favorite scene is of Price talking about the nature of horror movies and their appeal to viewers. A TV interviewer asks, "Why do you think that your films have been so very successful?" Toombes replies, "Well, I think it's because they're not about the ordinary everyday world around us. They're about a world that's deep inside of us. A world of impulses and instincts that we have been taught to suppress. That sounds a bit spooky…" Spooky and true sentiments, wonderfully delivered by Vincent Price.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
02/27/23
Full Review
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