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Spider and butterfly in the opening titles, which is Poe and which is Lovecraft? "Palace? In America?" More like a mausoleum, it belongs to the New England warlock who's burned for his unholy rites and is claimed by the descendent from Boston a century later, Vincent Price in both cases. The place comes with a cursed oil painting and a greenish Lon Chaney Jr. as the cadaverous caretaker, "one becomes accustomed to the darkness here." The sensitive occupant becomes a vessel for his ancestor's vengeful specter, his wife (Debra Paget) is duly alarmed by his sudden interest in necromancing. ("Stupid woman, she doesn't know what it is to love," he scoffs before returning to his incantations to revive the putrefied corpse of his mistress.) A sepulchral elegance to bridge two morbid bards, a Gothic opera in Roger Corman's lushest style. Sunlight perpetually banished from the set, the first screen pronunciation of "Cthulhu" and "Yog-sothoth," a foggy junction where eyeless wretches converge. "Nightmarish, yes... but not a nightmare. They are quite real, I'm sorry to say." Sins of the past and cycles of evil, the realm of mutant progeny. The local hothead (Leo Gordon) is cornered in his own living room and dispatched into the fireplace, a similarly charred fate awaits his timorous colleague (Elisha Cook Jr.) in a tenebrous alley. (Even the righteous townspeople have misshapen secrets locked away in attics.) Corman builds to a crescendo in the dungeon, with a demonic portal opened and sealed in a conflagration and Price's gleam of undefeated malevolence. "Have you not gorged yourself enough on revenge?" "You do not know the extent of my appetite." With Cathie Merchant, Frank Maxwell, Milton Parsons, John Dierkes, Barboura Morris, Guy Wilkerson, and Bruno VeSota.
--- Fernando F. Croce |