Halloween Edition: Madhouse (1974) Movie Review

Madhouse (1974) Movie Review

Loosely based on the novel "Devil's Day" by Angus Hall, this movie features Vincent Price who plays Dr. Death. The movie starts out years earlier and shows that his girlfriend was killed during one of his premiere parties causing him to wonder if he killed her and he ends up losing his mind and winds up in a mental hospital. Years later, everything old becomes new again and an agent wants him to play Dr. Death in a new series for a younger generation. He agrees and as they begin filming the cast and crew start dying in the same ways that deaths were shown in the old Dr. Death series.

I'm really not one for time jumping unless it's done right, which in this film, it's not. We jump about thirty years from the opening sequence to the rest of the movie and nobody looks older. It's been thirty years but everyone looks exactly the same. This generation sure aged well. The scenes with Ellen's parents that come looking for her daughter and dangle the watch that she stole from Dr. Death in his face are useless and I'm pretty sure they were only added to the movie to make the list of possible killers longer. Their scenes are the most bizarre in the movie and really don't fit in. Also I would just like to mention that the title of the movie "Madhouse" along with the tagline "If stark terror were ecstasy.... living here would be sheer bliss" are both misleading. I assumed that the whole movie would take place in a house, it doesn't. I assumed that there would be some sort of terrifying scenes in this movie, but there wasn't.

I like the fact that the audience is also left to question if in fact Dr. Death really is the killer as well as Vincent Price's character questioning that at the same time. I also like the fact that the movies played with Dr. Death are actually old movies that feature Vincent Price in some of his previous movies with American International Pictures which include The Haunted Palace, The Pit and the Pendulum, Tales of Terror, The Raven, Scream and Scream Again and House of Usher. 

Although the movies seems very tame due to it's older age, it's still another winner for Vincent Price fans. He plays a terrific internally conflicted character and it's another movie where the audience gets to play along trying to find the killer (my favourite kind) before it's revealed in the last moments of the movie. Although the movie didn't take place in a house, any movie with Vincent Price as the title character is sure to be a little "mad". 

Grade: C

Check back tomorrow for a horror movie review from a 1988 title!

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