loomis78-815-989034 Paul Toombes (Price) is an acclaimed Horror film star who rose to stardom playing a character called Dr. Death. As the film starts, Toombes discovers his blonde fiancée (Linda Hayden) dead at a Hollywood party causing him to go into hiding for years. He is lured out of retirement for a British TV series in which Paul will be able to reprise his role of Dr. Death by the films screenwriter Herbert (Cushing). Once on location, a mysterious killer dressed as Dr. Death is stalking about killing cast members. Has Toombes gone off the deep end and is killing people for real? Or is it someone else trying to frame it. This joint production from AIP and Amicus has a distinct British feel to it despite Price in the lead role. The movie flirts with being a slasher movie and the gore is amped up with decapitations and the like, but the plot is straight out of the early 1960's and is quite predictable. Price chews up the screen in a role that reflected himself at the time of an aging horror actor. Cushing is completely wasted in his minor supporting role, and the entire story feels like it should have been made ten years earlier. Dr. Death is a cool killer and the prowling scenes work well, but you can guess everything that is going to happen way before it does, and the surprise ending doesn't surprise anyone. This would strictly be for Vincent Price fans who want to see the legend in a starring role one last time.

moonspinner55 Rather tame, tepid screamer from American International, one with a PG rating and a cast full of weary oldsters and bland female murder victims. Vincent Price would seem to be snugly cast as the star of the "Dr. Death" horror movie series, coaxed back to the role after a 12-year hiatus following the unsolved slaying of his fiancée at a Hollywood party, who may be blacking out and killing people for real. But Price can barely summon up the energy to get through this leaden picture, and--what with clammy British locations and plodding set-ups--viewers can hardly blame him. Director Jim Clark can't seem to get anything right, not the scenes utilizing old movie clips nor the unravelling of Price's sanity. Showing us the actor's back teeth as he screams in shock, Clark is exploiting Price (just as he exploits Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff in the clips), feasting on the star's sagging, hairy face in unflattering close-ups. It's a hack job, made by hacks and actors in need of their paychecks, with a quasi-campy tone that is never acknowledged and shoddy cinematography worse than any television series of the era. *1/2 from ****

ikrani I think that's the problem this movie has: it didn't cast Vincent Price as Vincent Price. Sure, he's gone under different names in his films, but let's be honest, we don't watch him for his characters, we watch him to see all the cool little things that Vincent Price does while on screen. He's much like Tim Curry in that respect.This film, however, casts Vincent as Paul Toombes: a down-and-out horror icon whose haunted by the events of his past after his fiancé was murdered (after she was revealed to be a former adult film actress). This of course puts Paul in a bad mood and we get the moody, socially inept Vincent Price that no one wanted and nobody asked for. Adding to the body count of people murdered by the unexplained figure Doctor Death are Paul's liaison into the brave new world of television studios, a young actress who tries much to hard to get in bed with the uninterested Toombes, and her nagging parents who are so annoying that you'll jump up in jubilee when the mysterious murder skewers them in the most joyous of skewerings.Only at the film's conclusion does it release Vincent Price from within the confines of Paul Toombes' moody self, end on a happy note that makes absolutely no sense but will ultimately leave you feeling good inside, even if it DOES make absolutely no sense.Not the best of Vincent Price's films, but one that is no danger of being remade any time soon.

Tony Bush This was one of the very last of a kind - the tail end of an era of a conventional type of horror film that had dominated since the 1950s.Hammer Studios were shutting up shop, heading for a last ditch life-preserver in the form of the TV market before slipping off the radar. AIP and Amicus similarly sliding into a terminal decline. Explicit and pioneering movies such as The Exorcist, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, were leading the new wave. Directors such as Friedkin, Hooper, Carpenter, Cronenberg were soon to see their star in the ascendant. The days of plastic fangs, Max Factor blood, Gothic castles, garish Technicolour and a flash or two of heaving bosom, were gone forever.MADHOUSE added a few melancholy notes to the swansong.As the title suggests, it is indeed mad. And there's a house in it. It succeeds in being painfully camp, eccentric, hackneyed, desperate, confused and befuddled. The narrative has no internal logic and the characters who populate it are cardboard ciphers reciting awful dialogue and carving the ham as thick as you like. Yet...Vincent Price and Peter Cushing always do their best to entertain and elevate the material they're given way beyond it's lowbrow standard of quality. Cushing, especially, always acts as if he's been given something of Shakespearean standards to deliver. Price, ever insightful, knows all about dross and attacks it as a matter of course with a sustained barrage of enthused overacting as he's fully aware that's his only way to slap some meaningful dynamic into it. It doesn't really salvage the film, granted, but both these men do what they can to give it some spark of life.When I was a kid I loved this sort of stuff. Back then it seemed to add up better. Now, the nostalgia factor is the main draw. MADHOUSE is indeed one deranged film in that nothing works or makes any sense, so much so that the more absurd it gets the more surreal and curiously engaging it becomes. The idea is relatively sound: horror movie actor Paul Toombes (Price) is implicated in a grisly murder, has a mental breakdown and quits the screen. Years later, writer friend and colleague Herbert Flay (Cushing) entices him to England to revive his Dr Death character in a TV show. Then people start dying around him in gruesome ways and he becomes the main focus of suspicion.The supporting cast are mostly cannon-fodder, window dressing waiting around to get bumped off. They might as well be china ducks in a fairground shooting gallery for all anyone cares about them. There's a crazy woman in the cellar looking after a menagerie of spiders, chat show host Michael Parkinson pops up to interview Toombes and there are lots of clips from earlier (much higher calibre) AIP horror flicks featuring Price. It meanders along in a haphazard fashion until it grinds to a halt with what was probably intended to be a creepy grand guignol conclusion that in fact leaves the viewer thinking "What?" Finally, if evidence was needed of the end of an era for a particular type of movie genre, MADHOUSE is a suitable citation for winding down. Despite everything, though, it still manages to be mildly diverting fun. But that's about as good as it gets.