Coffin Baby (2013)

"Hollywood, California is turned upside down by a series of strange and horrific murders creating chaos and turmoil in tinsel town. One particular victim is kidnapped, held captive and subjected to witness the torture and murder of numerous other victims. It is by her will, strength, and faith that she must survive the ordeal. Her escape seems hopeless and only worsens when outside supernatural forces become more difficult to contend with than her captor..."

To be honest, I didn't think this was going to be any good, and I only watched it because of the Lianne Spiderbaby plagiarism scandal. According to the IMDb, Lianne Spiderbaby has a bit part in it as "Samantha's sisters [sic] double", but it's only a "blink and you'll miss it" moment.

For anyone else who cares, "Coffin Baby" is supposed to be a follow-up to Tobe Hooper's "Toolbox Murders" remake from 2004. Most people thought that the project was abandoned a long time ago, but apparently not. The "rough cut" version is now floating around the big name video streaming sites as a dubious freebie.

Based on this allegedly incomplete version, I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by the opening scene. I have no idea who the gorgeous blonde is, but the tension and cat scare really did it for me! No, I'm kidding, the cat scare is as clichéd as the acting is abysmal. But damn, the gore which ends that scene is lush!

Unfortunately, it takes almost another 20 minutes before the meaningless plot gives way to more gory goodness. In that time, you have to put up with a badly handycam-filmed police investigation full of non-actors. I swear that if I didn't know any better, I'd assume that the camera was covered in butter so that it kept slipping out of the cameraman's hands, or he had some kind of seizure. Nothing else could explain the poorly framed shots and constant movement when there needn't be any.

Chauntal Lewis is hawt! Miserable-looking here but usually hawt!

Chauntal Lewis, playing the sister of the first victim, is extremely attractive and seems to be able to act a bit, but her character soon becomes as irritating as everyone else. Excessively loud American girls who don't follow instructions from authority figures are torture porn fodder just waiting to happen! To give credit where it's due though, Chauntal does provide a credible performance as a "scream queen". She definitely has a fine pair of lungs on her!

Once she's been kidnapped by a Dr. Phibes lookalike (I have no idea what the character's real name is) and locked in a cage, Chauntal is mostly tortured by having some kind of henna tattoo or supernatural branding burnt off her right forearm. I can't say that I disapprove of Dr. Phibes' actions because tattoos on women are absolutely disgusting anyway, but I assume it's all about either removing or invoking the power of magical sigils. Why? I haven't got a clue.

Roughly half an hour in, things change for the worse when what can only be described as a car full of wannabe "gangstas" and Elissa Dowling turn up to provide some unnecessary comic relief before getting killed in various brutal ways. Not to be mean about it, but I've never seen Elissa Dowling in anything decent, and I'm constantly amazed by how she keeps getting employed. Actually, I think I may have just answered that question for myself. There are some horrid practical effects and a lot of wish fulfilment in this scene, but it's still only filler.

"They see us rollin', they hatin'."

Between Dr. Phibes killing a random blonde, feeding Chauntal with popcorn while forcing her to watch a crappy movie, and hosing her down erotically, a police team led by Brian Krause from "Charmed" interrogate the sisters' joint boyfriend to create more padding. Somewhere in this mess, the story of their ménage à trois and their murdered baby comes out for what seems like absolutely no reason whatsoever.

Then it all starts to get even weirder as, after 10 days, Chauntel eats a cockroach, gets given an orchid because Dr. Phibes now loves her, and feasts on cooked human flesh from another blonde victim who looks just like the one who was killed earlier but with her previously sawn-off leg intact again. Hmmmm, so the Monty Python sketch about legs growing back is true after all!

At this point any attempt at maintaining the daily chronology or creating a logical plot goes right out of the window. There are more victims of the killer's toolbox (including the serial sister-shagging boyfriend), lots more blood and guts (plus a heart), Dr. Phibes gets an incomplete backstory about his dead mother in a coffin, and Chauntal starts to go through bouts of Stockholm syndrome as she's tortured into madness. This may only be a workprint, but there's no way it could ever be recut into something that makes sense.

"Love means never having to say you're ugly."

Rather than spoil any more of this utter crap for you by retelling the entire story like one of those lame "Women in Horror" bloggers who doesn't know the difference between a review and a synopsis, suffice it to say that things do not improve. I couldn't tell you if any of what happens with a little girl ghost and a cameo from Bruce Dern as a preacher is supposed to be real or an extended dream sequence anyway. It's all too muddled with zombies, ghosts, and decomposing corpses everywhere.

Somewhere along the line, writer/director Dean Jones obviously couldn't decide whether to go for a "They're all in Hell" cop-out ending or remake "Unborn Sins" (2005), so he did both and wasted several beautifully choreographed action sequences in the process. The abortion now known as "Coffin Baby" is the result.

By the way, I think Lianne Spiderbaby was a double for the first blonde victim in the bag rather than being Samantha's sister. At least I've cleared that up.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

"After a team of surgeons botch his beloved wife's surgery, leaving her for dead, the emotionally distraught Dr. Phibes creatively concocts a fatal prescription for revenge. Using the Good Book as his guide, Phibes unleashes a score of old testament atrocities - from a plague of locusts to an attack of rats - on his enemies."

Have you ever rewatched a film from your childhood with memories of it being really good only to discover as an adult that it was a load of old crap? Well, that's how I felt about "The Abominable Dr. Phibes" except that I never liked it much as a child either.

Now I realise that "The Abominable Dr. Phibes" is a cult classic for many people and is not a true horror film for a great many others, but bearing in mind that it was a forerunner of "Se7en" and "Saw", the vengeful serial killer storyline of "The Abominable Dr. Phibes" has become a staple of the horror genre. I've seen people argue that "Se7en" stole its plot directly from "The Abominable Dr. Phibes" minus all the campness and art deco set decorations, and they are probably right. I would argue in return that "The Abominable Dr. Phibes" stole a great many ideas from "The Avengers" and "Batman", and so did everything else from that era. Nothing is ever that original anyway.

The things I've always hated about "The Abominable Dr. Phibes" are mainly to do with the pace at which the story unfolds, the overly comedic British police, and the absolutely useless reactions of Dr. Phibes' (yes, I'm using the American way of abbreviating doctor with the full stop/period) victims.

When I rewatched the DVD earlier this morning, it was hard going to even stay awake for the first ten minutes due to it all being style over substance until the first murder by fruit bats occurred. Actually, it was the second murder as you only get to hear about the first murder using bees from one of the detectives. I don't think anyone at the time could figure out how to create the plague of boils caused by bee stings, but I would have liked to have seen them try.

Out of all the nitpicky things to annoy me the most though were Dr. Phibes' exaggerated hand gestures when he was supposed to be playing the organ. Well, obviously he wasn't really playing it nor were his Frank Sidebottom-headed robot musicians playing any of their instruments either. In spite of all the flawless 1920s set decoration, nobody seemed to care if anything else looked real or not and, in my opinion, that makes it a very bad movie.

Other things which threw me completely out of my willing suspension of disbelief were how I couldn't pin the time period down. The art deco (or art nouveau) stuff could be in vogue at any time, and since things don't change that much in England, it could just be due to well maintained listed buildings. The old cars were definitely later and the Tiger Moth biplane was created in the 1930s (albeit without the 1970s' "No Smoking" sign screwed to the dashboard in the cockpit). The heavy suits worn by the detectives looked very early 1960s although the uniformed police could have been from the '40s or '50s as far as I know. I've read that it was all supposed to be set in 1929, but it was all over the place. Couple all that with the late Peter Jeffrey's obviously 1970s comedic delivery as Inspector Trout and you have one hell of a mess to get your head around.

But since it's all fantasy anyway, maybe these things work in favour of "The Abominable Dr. Phibes" especially when it comes to creating a cult film. I don't really understand how that works or why something so obviously bad gets promoted to greatness, but to each his own. I'm sure that most people will agree with me that "The Abominable Dr. Phibes" is flawed, dated and overrated whatever their opinion of cult films is anyway.

I didn't watch "The Abominable Dr. Phibes' just to pull it apart but to see if it should remain as a recommendation in my "Video Vault". I didn't have a problem with Joseph Cotten's bad acting, the far-fetched nature of the story, or even all the plotholes surrounding the mute Vulnavia. What concerned me the most was that it was actually all very boring. The supposedly ingenious murders and their horrific aftermaths weren't all that entertaining to me as a fully grown adult living in the 21st century. There was no tension or suspense involved in any of the punishments even with the timed one at the end and I didn't know enough about any of the characters apart from Terry Thomas (who always seemed to play the same role in films) to feel anything for them. None of the victims tried to fight back either, and that was just odd.

I suppose that if I ever decided to overthink things then I could probably empathize with Dr. Phibes, but only if I'd ever been married to the uncredited Caroline Munro and lost her. Yeah, losing a gorgeous trophy wife like that would be enough to drive anyone nuts. But surely to gain a non-speaking Virginia North as a replacement would be satisfying enough, wouldn't it? Actually, the more I do think about it, I'd prefer Valli Kemp from the awful sequel "Dr. Phibes Rises Again" which was on the same DVD.

I highly doubt that anyone who saw "The Abominable Dr. Phibes" when it was released in 1971 was horrified or scared by it. British horror films of that time, especially AIP produced films set in Britain, were actually way of sync with the nastiness that American and European filmmakers were delighting their audiences with. If anything, "The Abominable Dr. Phibes" was a throwback to the cosy Roger Corman, Hammer and Amicus style from ten years before and would have stood out glaringly as such amidst the competition. I wasn't there at the time though so all this is just hypothesis.

Another major factor in determining whether or not anyone would still enjoy "The Abominable Dr. Phibes" is how much they like Vincent Price. People who have read further into my blogs will probably already know that I bought Vincent Price's autographed cookbook (signed to Boris Karloff) from the auction of Mrs Evie Karloff's estate which was coincidentally on the day that Vincent Price died (October 25th, 1993). At the time, I was even more into all things horror related especially anything to do with the old guys. If you haven't already seen it, here's a link to a post about Vincent Price's "A Treasury of Great Recipes" on The Bloody Forum and a picture to whet your appetite:

Even though I would class myself as a Vincent Price fan, I really didn't like him as Dr. Phibes. The whole role was a mockery of what he could achieve as an actor. Even though he was hardly the most physical of actors, I still think that "The Last Man on Earth" was his best film with "Witchfinder General" a close second. I know that other people will disagree (especially the essay writers over at vincentprice.org), but everybody who likes Vincent Price chooses a different favourite film of his as being his best anyway.

Anyway, should I leave "The Abominable Dr. Phibes" in the Video Vault and recommend it to you? I think not. Since it was originally a borderline entry with a score of only 5 out of 10, I can't justify putting it anywhere now except The Dungeon. It's a shame, but when your tastes change as much as mine have over the years, it really is a case of putting childish things like this away and moving on.