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Die Polizei steht vor einem Rätsel: Ein Wahnsinniger tötet einen renommierten Theaterkritiker nach dem anderen und keiner hat auch nur den leisesten Verdacht. Peregrine Devlin Vorsitzender des Kritikerzirkels, kommt jedoch eine Idee: Er hält den seit zwei Jahren als tot erachteten Shakespeare-Mimen Edward Lionheart für den Mörder, denn die Taten wurden allesamt wie die Morde in Shakespeares Dramen verübt. Außerdem verwehrte der Kritikerzirkel Lionheart damals den so sicher geglaubten Kritikerpreis, worauf der Schauspieler sich anscheinend selbst umbrachte. Trotz Polizeischutz für die noch lebenden Kritiker kennt der Einfallsreichtum von Lionheart, der alles andere als tot ist, keine Grenzen und so holt er sich einen nach dem anderen...
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Imagine the thrill of getting to kill your biggest critics. Now imagine that as Vincent Price.Forever my favorite genre actor—I’ve seen a solid 50+ of his movies and haven’t seen a bad performance yet. He’s so deliciously devious in this I can’t help but sit here and watch with a giant shit eating grin on my face.
Yeah, I’m sure Shakespeare would’ve appreciated his works being endlessly adapted into both Oscar bait and genre films year in and year out (I mean, who doesn’t love a nice dry hand job from Kenneth Branagh every now and then?), but you know what he would’ve loved even more? Vincent Price using his plays as an excuse to put on an absolute masterclass in hamminess as a petty, slighted thespian who slices & stabs & drowns & force-feeds & electrocutes his critics to death with surprisingly legit blood and gore in a dark comedy revenge tale homage to the creativity and uniqueness of Shakespeare’s own penchant for grisly murder scenes. Who needs another black-and-white overly faithful take on Macbeth when you can have Vinnie P and a young smokeshow Diana Rigg graphically cutting a dude’s heart out of his chest?Underrated Movies that More People Should See
The genius of the film is recognizing that Shakespeare’s plays are stocked with heinous and gruesome scenes; however, they usually took place off stage in Jacobean times and were stagey and anemically filmed on the screen prior to 1971 (Polanski’s Macbeth.) What would it be like if Hector was really dragged tied to the tail a horse, or Caesar slashed down by a mob of amateurs, or if Iago had extracted a pound of flesh from Antonio? It’s a testimony to the infinite fungibility of Shakespeare that he can be used as the basis for a thespian gore-fest. Vincent Price is at his absolute best as a crazed Prospero with a cast of drunken minion Calibans and a homicidal Cordelia, Diana Rigg (who played Regan to Olivier’s Lear.) Despite the films campy excesses and all of Price’s overripe scenery-chewing, the film has one of the most original To-Be-or-Not-to-Be monologues and Lear-howling-at-the-death-of-Cordelia scenes on film. Let’s not forget that John Wilkes Booth was one of the most famous Shakespeareans of his day and described by his critics as “an outrageous scene stealer.”
A scorned Shakespearean actor exacts elaborate, play-inspired revenge on the critics who ruined his career.
Douglas Hickox directed the 1973 horror-comedy classic.
