Madhouse (1974)

User Rating:

5.9/10   

Director:

Jim Clark

Writers:

Angus Hall (novel)
Ken Levison (screenplay)

Release Date:

March 1974 (USA)

Genre:

Crime | Horror | Mystery | Thriller

Tagline:

If Stark Terror Were Ecstasy... living here would be sheer bliss!

Plot:

A horror movie star returns to his famous role after years in a mental institution. But the character seems to be committing murders independent of his will.

Plot Keywords:

Murder | Nervous Breakdown | Fiancée | Actor | England

Cast

Vincent Price	...	Paul Toombes
Peter Cushing	...	Herbert Flay
Robert Quarry	...	Oliver Quayle
Adrienne Corri	...	Faye
Linda Hayden	...	Elizabeth Peters
Natasha Pyne	...	Julia
Barry Dennen	...	Blount
Catherine Willmer	...	Louise
Ellis Dayle	...	Alfred
Jenny Lee Wright	...	Carol
John Garrie	...	Harper
Ian Thompson	...	Bradshaw
Julie Crosthwaite	...	Ellen
Peter Halliday	...	Psychiatrist
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Boris Karloff	...	Clip from 'The Raven' (archive footage)
Michael Parkinson	...	TV Interviewer
Basil Rathbone	...	Clip from 'Tales of Terror' (archive footage)

Also Known As:

Deathday
The Madhouse of Dr. Fear
The Revenge of Dr. Death

Runtime:

92 min | USA:89 min

Country:

UK

Language:

English

Color:

Color (Eastmancolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

UK:18 (video rating) | UK:X (original rating) | Iceland:16 | Finland:(Banned) | USA:PG

Company:

American International Pictures (AIP)

Trivia:

Peter Cushing dresses as Dracula, an in-joke reference: he frequently played Van Helsing in Hammer's Dracula series.

Goofs:

Revealing mistakes: Julia's dead body is breathing heavily after Paul Toombes discovers her.

Quotes:

[first lines]
Villager in Movie: Dr. Death, where are you? Let's smoke him out!

Movie Connections:

Featured in Dusk to Dawn Drive-In Trash-o-Rama Show Vol. 3 (1996) (V)

Not bad, but no "Targets"

Despite its star trio of 1970s horror masters--Vincent Price, Peter Cushing and Robert Quarry--"Madhouse" is not so much a horror film as a murder mystery with horror trappings. Very loosely based on Angus Hall's rather trashy novel "Devilday" (in which the central character of horror movie actor "Paul Harvard Toombs" is much more sinister), it features Price in a role that was at the time not too far removed from his real life situation: a film actor who would really like to move past horror films, but who for a variety of reasons was duty bound to keep making them. Price's character suffered a breakdown after his fiancé was horribly murdered. Several years later, after he is contracted to return to his signature role of "Dr. Death" for a television series, a new rash of murders occur and even Toombs himself does not know whether he is responsible or not. Cushing appears as the writer of the "Dr. Death" show and Quarry, in an uncharacteristically amusing performance, plays the producer, a parody of Amicus Films' Milton Subotsky (Amicus and Subotsky co-produced). Adrienne Corri has a bizarre role as a crazed, burn-scarred former actress, who has taken to living in Cushing's basement and raising spiders, which doesn't really fit in with the rest of the film. Still, as a quasi-horror film, "Madhouse" is fine; it contains some great, atmospheric scenes of "Dr. Death" stalking his victims, and despite its flying in from left field, the whole Corri subplot is undeniably unnerving. As a mystery...well, it's not really very hard to figure out who is responsible for the killings. But what "Madhouse" was obviously intended to do, and what it pretty much fails at, is to provide Price with the kind of career summation picture that Peter Bogdanovich gave Boris Karloff through 1968's "Targets." Old film clips from "House of Usher," "Pit and the Pendulum," "Tales of Terror," "The Haunted Palace" and "The Raven" are interspliced to give us a look at the actor's background, but they are not presented in a way that offers any kind of resonance to Toombs/Price's career. I had the opportunity to talk briefly with Vincent Price about this film a couple years after it was made, and he was not very happy with the way it turned out. But purely on the surface level, "Madhouse" is an entertaining, grisly whodunnit that offers good roles to its three stars.