he only thing worthwhile I got out of this partial birth abortion was that people with birth defects are to be feared and shunned as opposed to be merely pitied. Other than that bit of advice, I can’t say that this was much in the way of anything other than a completely cynical effort from director Roger Corman and star Vincent Price designed to milk the whole Edgar Allan Poe thing until the udder was raw despite the bulk of the movie being based on H.P. Lovecraft’s novella The Strange Case Of Charles Dexter Ward!
Vincent Price plays a warlock named Joseph Curwen who was the chief supervillain in the town of Arkham. He’s using The Nerconomicon to summon up a race of old gods from the bowels of the earth. He also has the ability to entrance all the loose women in the town and ties them up over top of the gateway to hell that he has in his castle and lowers them down to the monsters waiting below.
Curwen’s goal is to mate these Old Ones with human babes in an effort to presumably do something. I was never quite sure what the point of all this was. I guess it was so the Old Ones could have their offspring running around on Earth, but I never quite understood why they just didn’t climb out of Curwen’s stupid pit and reclaim their rightful position as supreme rulers of us pathetic humans.
For that matter, I was never sure what Curwen was getting out of this arrangement either. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this arrangement kind of blew chunks for everyone involved because all the babies these chicks had were deformed!
Before you get all excited about seeing an army of deformed freaks menacing the narrow-minded townspeople, the main deformities these people suffered involved having silly putty stretched over their eyes. Kind of a handicap sure, but then again they could also rub their face on the Sunday funnies and have their mom read the Family Circus off of them, so it was pretty much a wash in my estimation.
An angry mob gets fed up with Curwen and burns him alive, but before he’s totally crispy fried, Curwen issues a big nasty curse on them promising that he’ll have his revenge on their descendants.
Over a hundred years pass and Vincent Price rolls into Arkham again, this time as a guy named Charles Dexter Ward, a descendant of Joe Curwen, and he has his sultry wife with him. He’s in town to check out this really sweet ancestral home that he’s suddenly inherited and the townspeople give him the cold shoulder due to his uncanny resemblance to Joe Curwen. Apparently these geeks have nothing better to do than sit around the local tavern and remember what some warlock who lived a hundred years ago looked like.
Ward and his wife go out to the house and are met by Lon Chaney, Jr. of all people! He’s playing a warlock buddy of Joe’s named Simon and is pretending to be the caretaker of the castle, but is really just waiting for Curwen to come back to life.
Among all the usual amenities that come standard with haunted castles such as hidden dungeon, gateway to a world of unspeakable monsters, and a really big dining room, this one also comes equipped with a haunted painting!
Yep, this is one of those deals where a painting of the bad guy is used somehow to control the body of Ward. Most of the movie is devoted to these episodes where the goody-goody Charlie is taken control of by Curwen.
This proves to be real enthralling as we get to see Vincent be nice to his wife, then turn mean, then he’s kind of nice and ready to leave the house, then he’s trying to rape her and announcing that he’s moving into the haunted palace forever.
That’s great that you are able to get away with abusing your wife and stuff and I guess women will put up with a lot when they’re living in a palace, no matter how haunted, but what the fudge happened to all these Old Ones you’re supposed to be hanging out with? You’ve got deities from another dimension at your disposal and you spend your time snapping at your significant other and palling around with has-been Wolf Man, Lon Chaney. Jr.?
Eventually, Curwen completely takes over Ward and he embarks on his revenge spree. He carries a little grocery list of people he wants to kill and starts doing so in a variety of ways before the townspeople can finally get roused enough to form another mob to end the madness.
A really worthless Corman/Price project that flounders on virtually every level. Obviously, it was cheaper to have Ward harass his wife than to try and bring a race of ancient monsters back to prominence, but the early promise of these monsters that lived in his secret basement leaves the viewer with great disappointment when they later play no role whatsoever in the rest of the movie.
Price isn’t particularly interesting in this one, doing the same haughty bad guy routine you’ve seen a billion times before. The other main characters fare no better with the wife putting up with way too much to be sympathetic while a doctor who gets involved is an oblivious toad.
Simply put, it’s a deadly dull period horror movie without any horror and without any atmosphere to speak of. Price and Corman would try again a year later to much better results with The Masque Of The Red Death.
© 2009 MonsterHunter
