Review: The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

I did not vibe with this movie.  It is perfectly adequate as far as films go, though not without critique.  It just didn't really work for me.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes is a tale of revenge: Dr. Phibes (Vincent Price) is hideously scarred and believed dead after an accident.  Said accident was caused by him rushing to the hospital where his wife had died during surgery.  Blaming the doctors and nurse that performed the operation for her death and his own disfigurement, he sets about killing them using the plagues of Egypt as his inspiration.

This is a weird movie.  Tonally all over the place, it vacillates between comedy, horror, procedural, and mystery while never really doing any of them well.  Price is excellent in his role, but otherwise the film feels like it isn't quite sure what it wants to be.  The ending is played as if it were a tragedy, but I don't think the audience is really meant to be on Phibes's side, which would be necessary for it to work.

The comedy is mostly on the side of the police, and while a few scenes are rather successful, humor-wise, it is at odds with the fact that all of these people are getting killed, some of them quite brutally.  If this tone had permeated the entire movie, it could have worked, but since so much of it is played straight, it feels especially incongruous.

There is a certain amount of camp to the movie that is what ultimately saves it.  It doesn't quite make it a great movie - although there are some that disagree with that statement and consider this amongst the best work Price has done - but it does make it fascinating to watch.  Price, saddled with a character who cannot move any part of his body above the neck - no, really - sells the hell out of it, delivering monologues with such verve that one wonders what the performance would have looked like with facial movements.

More camp comes from the various manners in which Phibes kills the doctors (and single nurse, which seems weird to foist part of the blame on), which in many cases only use the plagues of Egypt in the broadest interpretation of them.  Many of them lack all reason (the nurse, who gets possibly the most brutal of the kills, requires a person to not only believe that a person would sleep so soundly that they wouldn't feel a large amount of a syrupy substance dumped on their face, but also so soundly that they could be eaten alive without being disturbed in the slightest).  It only works if you just give up on applying anything resembling logic and just roll with what is happening.

It's a bit of a mess, plotwise, which makes sense as the writers had no other major credits before or after this film.  It hobbles along, carried in some parts by Price, in others by camp, and in a few by both, but it doesn't ascend to a climax so much as stumble into a finale that I'm still not sure was adequate for the proceeding film.

Would I recommend it?  Probably?  Vincent Price is a treasure, and there is merit in his performance here, but I might have to watch this movie again before I can decide where I would settle on its rating.

For now, we'll say 6.5 out of 10, but who knows what I'll feel in the future.

Published Oct 18, 2026