If I was living in the middle of a pandemic I guess I too would simply hide out in Vincent Price's gothic, psychedelic Satan cult castle for rich perverts. Prince Prospero is one of very best Poe performances that Corman and Price conceived of during their run together, primarily due to his almost perfect intersection of aristocratic egotistical elegance (never has a character blatantly loved flamboyant costume dress-up and goofy one-liners and scenery chewing as much as Price clearly did himself) and playfully icky sadism. He is not as psychologically tortured or sympathetically guilt-ridden as other Poe protagonists, but simply a man who follows a basic misanthropic idea to its logical conclusion: that if God is dead and moral secular punishment isn't real (because he is wealthy and politically powerful), he might as well essentially start cultivating, and more importantly artificially staging, his own perfect vision of what Hell on Earth might look like for him and his new buddy Satan. Which he does by gleefully smirking and delighting in peasant fear, torture and mass-murder, as well as throwing lavish, depraved black mass parties, feasts and masquerade balls that turn all the other nobles into corrupt surface pleasure animals completely desensitized to the gruesome cruelty just outside their walls (and soon within). But little does he know, no matter how good of a servant he is for the Lord of Darkness, no matter how much he deliberately poisons the world trying to make everyone view objective evils as amusing jests... Mortality and terminal illness cannot be bargained with, they come for us all equally. Making this one of the most effective realizations of that central harrowing idea that was consistent in almost all of Poe's work due to how familiar he was with it in his personal life. (His mother and wife both dying of tuberculosis at a very young age.) Huge shoutout to Corman and Roeg who shoot this thing for maximum devilish mood that effectively capture the material's atmosphere described as an almost beautifully seductive doom; vibrant dreamy colors, decadently lavish sets/costumes, some absolutely insane lighting, lens and angle decisions during the bloody interpretive ballet of death finale. Maybe the most surreal and artsy Corman ever got to be while still delivering on all the disturbing B-horror thrills.Full discussion on ep 332 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.
