Theatre of Blood

This came recommended to me because I'd made a comment about needing to see more Vincent Price on BlueSky. I loved the premise when I read it. It sounded delicious. I'd seen a few Price movies before this, and while he'd been a baddie in some of them, this seemed like a step above. He wasn't just a bad guy, he was a psychopath. An actor killing his critics? A proto-slasher with VINCENT FRIGGIN' PRICE?!? Come on now. It saddens me, then, to say that this left me rather cold. It's not Vincent Price's fault. Like always, he is a joy to watch, and he sinks into this role of a deluded stage thespian who has become consumed by his art and lashes out with murderous flourish and preposterous artistic design at his critics. Every moment he is on screen, I was counting teeth marks on the sets, and I mean that as a compliment. He pulled off the mad, psychotic killer role perfectly. I couldn't have asked for more. Unfortunately, it's everything around Price that let me down. The main issue is the script. Theatre Of Blood is a cyclical script, but not in the way the sun rises and sets is a cycle; more in the way that a salesman's route down a street going door to door is cyclical. It is repetitive to the point of numbness; he sets up a scenario into which one of his critics stumbles into, they're somehow not sufficiently alarmed to run like hell, kill, the remaining critics rub their hands together in consternation, the police do the same, repeat for 100 minutes. Metronomes aren't as steady and predictable as this script's pace. I've gotten bigger surprises from the opening and closing of my garage door. And there's like eight critics, so that's EIGHT TIMES this cycle has to repeat. At least a good slasher has the decency to give you a couple "warm-up" kills, then have the killer lie in wait, then rattle them off in a marathon in the final act. Theatre Of Blood's relentless steadiness had me itching for something, anything, different to happen, and it never does. The story also depends on some insultingly moronic moments, like the killer revealing himself to one of his victims (the obvious protagonist), having the upper hand, but then not killing him because the plot demands it. The movie shows a character is in cahoots with Price's Edward Lionheart fairly early on, but seems to forget it showed the audience, because it treats this person screwing over the protagonist like a plot twist. And then treats that said person had been wearing a disguise and was at numerous murder sites as ANOTHER plot twist, when nobody in their right mind would be fooled by the disguise. Some of the kills require so much set dressing, in a literal, sense, that it breaks suspension of disbelief; there's one where a critic is made to believe he's on a TV show about cooks coming into the homes of people and cooking a unique meal for them (yes, culinary home invasion is a TV show in this world). To pull this off, Lionheart has an actual TV camera there. This man is supposed to be presumed dead and homeless, living in a closed-down, ramshackle theater. How in the hell is he affording this? How does he afford, or even know how to, wire up a set of hair curlers to a beautician's hair dryer and become electrical conduits, so he can fry a woman? Sure, Theatre Of Blood has some very inventive kills, and can get pretty evil with them (the cooking one involves making a man choke to death on force-fed pot pie made of the man's dogs), but its at the cost of reality actually functioning. And it seriously doesn't help that the victims and the protagonists are really crappy people. The whole motivation for Lionheart is that he got stiffed on an acting award by this round table of critics in favor of a newcomer. By the critics' own admissions, they did so out of spite; they thought he was haughty and full of himself, so they used the opportunity to take him down a peg by giving it to someone less deserving. It drives Lionheart to attempt suicide by jumping into the Thames, and when he is saved, that's when he hatches his murderous plan. I'm not saying this justifies their murders, but it doesn't make the victims sympathetic either; they're snobby aristocrats, throwing stones at the peasants from the tower windows because it amuses them to see the pain. But Lionheart is a total lunatic, letting bad reviews and not getting an award turn him into Michael Myers. So, my choices are to cheer for a bunch of arrogant, self-important gatekeepers that conspired to screw over an actor just for the lulz and inadvertently drove him to attempt suicide, or the actor whose snubbing caused him to snap and go on a homicidal rampage. Thanks, I hate it. I suppose to some, Price's acting and the depths of his evilness will be the draw, and hey, if it gives you what you want, good on you. But I was done with this movie by the third iteration of the cycle, and there was still five to go. I didn't like the characters, I didn't like the repetition, and the effects, creativity, and Price's acting weren't enough to compensate for me.