I watched the 1971 movie “The Abominable Dr. Phibes” last night on the Svengoolie show last night and I just have a few remarks. It starred Vincent Price as the ghoulish Dr. Phibes who was really cranky about doctors who he accused of botching the medical treatment of his wife who died in the hospital.
Supposedly, Dr. Phibes was killed in a fiery car crash on his way to the hospital to see her. Of course, he survived to take revenge on the doctors by killing them in a pattern that mimicked the deadly biblical plagues, which most people remember from another movie, “The 10 Commandments.”
I’ve never seen “The Abominable Dr. Phibes” and like most of the movies on Svengoolie, it was fodder for corny jokes, of which Svengoolie always has a big supply.
There was even a psychiatrist victim. The way Dr. Phibes knocked him off was to somehow get him invited to a costume party where he gives him a special whole head mask of a frog. It has a diabolical mechanism which slowly tightens around the psychiatrist’s neck, finally cutting his throat.
I guess you could say the psychiatrist croaked (see what I did there?).
OK, so frogs are consistent with one of the plagues foretold by Moses and is loosely based on the biblical scripture of Exodus.
On the other hand, there were several other murders of doctors which made you scratch your head about the biblical plague plot.
Dr. Phibes impaled one doctor by shooting a large brass statue of a unicorn at him from a block away. One of the humorous (dark humor, of course) parts of the movie were the inept police who were supposed to be protecting the doctors from Dr. Phibes. They tried to figure out how to unscrew the horn of the brass unicorn from the victim (clockwise or counterclockwise?). Although I’m anything but a biblical scholar, as I recall, there was no plague of brass unicorn statues impaling the Israelites.
One of the more bizarre plagues was juiced brussels sprouts followed by locusts which apparently think it’s a tasty sauce that leads to them chewing the face off a nurse.
Speaking of going faceless, toward the end of the film, Dr. Phibes reveals he has no face. This either means that his face was burned away in the car accident or that one of his favorite foods was brussels sprouts garnished with locusts.
It looks like you can watch The Abominable Dr. Phibes on the Internet Archive, which apparently survived being hacked a month ago.
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