FANTASIA OBSCURA: Horror Legends Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff… in a Comedy?
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, you need a break from the unrelenting terror, just to have a laugh…
The Comedy of Terrors (1963)
Distributed by: American International
Directed by: Jacques Tourneur
On paper, it’s a hell of a group: Tourneur, the director of Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie, working off of a script from Richard Matheson whose I Am Legend was a classic that became an iconic film. And, they have to play with in the cast Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, and Basil Rathbone.
It’s one hell of a cast and crew assembled on the same set. You get them all together and you’re going to have… a zany slapstick comedy?!?
We open cold before the credits on a funeral during the late 19th century, where Waldo Trumbull (Price) and his assistant Felix Gillie (Lorrie) are the undertakers overseeing the solemn service of providing dignity as they bury a man. Said dignity flees after the family leaves the cemetery, however, when the two plop the deceased out of the casket (which we find later has been re-used over and over for 13 years) and in sped-up film bury him cold, having robbed the estate the cost of a coffin.
Waldo, an abusive drunk, comes home to his wife Amaryllis (Joyce Jameson) and father in law Amos Hinchley (Karloff), where he insults her and ignores him. We discover through the insults the couple lob at each other that he married into the family to get Amos’ business and doesn’t think much of her desire to be an opera singer. Amos, meanwhile, is of no help to her, being both deaf and senile; every appeal she makes, Amos responds to by passing her the sugar bowl.
Because he drinks away most of the profits, Waldo is just barely above water most of the time. This is an issue with his landlord, John Black (Rathbone), who informs Waldo that because he is a year in arrears on rent that he has 24 hours to pay up or be put out.
In response, Waldo does what he usually does: He takes Felix, a former break-in artist, out with him to a rich person’s home, where Felix lets Waldo in, and Waldo does in the occupant, drumming up business in the process. We watch as he does in a likely target (Buddy Mason in his last role) and eagerly chats up his young vibrant widow (Beverly Powers, credited in the film as “Beverly Hills” for… prominent reasons, shall we say…) to get her business, but then watch Waldo get double-crossed by the widow, who skips town with the family fortune without paying for the funeral.
Desperate, Waldo finally comes upon the idea of doing away with Black, hoping to do away with his debt while making a handsome profit at the same time. It’s a perfect plan; what could go wrong…?
Plenty, apparently. In addition to Waldo and Felix’s general ineptitude, there’s Black’s having catalepsy, which makes any effort to positively tell if he’s dead or not liable to get a false positive by most detection methods of the day. And when he’s up from the dead and quoting from his favorite work, The Tragedy of Mac– um, “That Scottish Gig,” things don’t go well for our, um, “heroes”…
As we watch these poor players that strut and fret their hour upon the stage, there’s a good question that comes up: Is this really a genre film? On the one hand, we have actors and talent who have done lots of work in horror, but the circumstances are more suggestive of being immersed in the genre than actually engaged in it. Trying to kill a man who plays dead and comes back now and then for laughs is hardly a recipe for a fright film.
And yet, the plot points and story beats as we watch Black come after Waldo and Felix could very easily make up a good slasher film. Black’s pursuit of his victims carries the same feel as we watch that we’d see when watching Halloween or The Shining, especially as he chops through doors and searches in the room for his prey. All we need is the axe to make contact with someone’s body, and we move from suggesting to being a slasher film.
Not that this needs to be one, as the film works well as a comedy with elements of horror at least painted upon it. Matheson’s script has some decent chuckles, and the cast gamely gives it a lot of care as they hurtle through the action. The casual viewer might be tempted to say that the crew certainly looked like they were having fun on this shoot, and it’s an infectious feeling that allows for people who are watching and want a laugh to find one easily enough.
While the production certainly felt happy to be together, the audience of the day supposedly wasn’t entirely happy to see them. Matheson as associate producer would claim that producer Samuel Arkoff told him that the production lost money, which seems hard to fathom considering how the usual release from AI were such sparse affairs. Whether for the stated reason or due to other concerns, this would be 
the last time Karloff, Lorrie, and Price would do an atmospheric comedy together, only their second after The Raven.
Which is a shame, as they managed to pair a decent comic script with a decent collected cast. The company even featured Ornagey the cat, credited as “Rhubarb” for this film, who actually worked opposite Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, whose role is to do double takes now and then and sit upon Black’s chest to get him to wake up.
So of course because he’s atop him in the film, it makes sense that he has billing in the credits over and atop Rathbone…
…well, I thought that was funny…
NEXT TIME: We stand still as we look at the past, and how it influences our present…
