Theatre of Blood

Vincent Price triumphs with his melodramatic performance. The plot has notable commonalities with the earlier “The Abominable Dr. Phibes” (a man presumed dead gets his revenge by flamboyantly killing everyone who caused him untold suffering), but this is more successful than that prior film.

It turns out there’s a solid rationale for the mad protagonist’s irrepressible showmanship here – he’s a consummate theater actor accused of overacting by numerous critics -, and the same core theme of the actor/critic relationship assumes an allegorical weight that transcends the related events in light of the film’s meta-cinematic nature.

The ten death scenes are visually engaging re-creations (some critics have even brought up “the aesthetics of crime”) of ten scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. In order: 1. “Julius Caesar”; 2. “Troilus and Cressida”; 3. “Cymbeline, King of Britain”; 4. “The Merchant of Venice” (with an added “twist” on the original plot); 5. “The Life and Death of King Richard III”; 6. “Romeo and Juliet”; 7. “Othello”; 8. “King Henry VI, Part I”; 9. “Titus Andronicus”; 10. “King Lear”.