Theater of Blood (DVD)

This Vincent Price horror/comedy vehicle came out in 1973, the same era as his wonderfully campy and creepy Dr. Phibes films. In Theater of Blood (aka the more apt “Much Ado About Murder”) Price plays hammy Shakespearian-specializing stage hack Edward Lionheart, a man whose heart is reduced to rubble when yet again he loses the critics’ annual prize to a younger, more famous actor. In dramatic fashion, he plunges from the window of a high rise building before the eyes of his critics and drowns in the Thames. …Or does he?

Time passes, and when the circle of critics is broken by one death after another — each dispatched via a method found in The Bard’s tragedies — the London police begin to suspect that Lionheart is still very much alive. They team up with his reluctant daughter Edwina (Diana Rigg) to catch him before there’s a citywide dearth of theater critics.

Theater of Blood is an outstanding, highly campy, super hammy, gotta-love-it black comedy that doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to the horror aspects. All the cemetery’s a stage and there are gruesome deaths on the order of Joan of Arc (electricity doubles for fire), Titus Andronicus (a man is forced to gorge on poodle-pie till he bursts), The Merchant of Venice (the titular pound of flesh is extracted), plus many more.

Revenge is a dish best served by Price, who’s perfection as the conceited thesp who will stop at nothing to get his coveted acting award. Rigg is by turns sexy and silly in a dual role that adds gloriously to the gruesome farce. The all-star victims include Price’s real-life wife Coral Browne, Robert Morley, Harry Andrews, Ian Hendry, Jack Hawkins, Denis Price and Diana Dors. The dialogue is thorny, the music’s groovy man, and the composition/cinematography is gorgeously lush and indulgently arty.

To rent or buy… that is the question. If you like gallows humor, Vincent Price, and Elizabethan prose buy it — if you don’t then pinch a penny, and just rent it.

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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson