Rent Masque of the Red Death (1964)

Surprisingly... - Masque of the Red Death review by RD

...perverse and hypnotic, for a Corman production. Masque of the Red Death is for me a real diamond in the rough, it's a film that belies its low cost interior and manages to seduce, in part because Price lowers some of the hamminess and what's there fits with the feel of the film. It also has an appropriate perverseness to it, again helped by the performances from Court, Asher and Magee, especially Asher. The 'hero, well, ignore him, he doesn't matter in the least, just sit back and enjoy a surprisingly hypnotic Corman movie that is far more than the sum of its parts and actually, its parts are pretty damn good.

Satan's Interior Decorator - Masque of the Red Death review by griggs

Roger Corman appears to have been given a castle, several tins of paint and no adult supervision. What you get is Poe dyed in the wool, then dyed again.

Colour is the whole show. Prospero’s rooms are drenched in purple, yellow and blood red, and a young Nicolas Roeg shoots them like a haunted Dulux chart. Vincent Price is having a lovely time being appalling, all smug sneers and Satanic small talk, and he’s the main reason to stay for the masque. Jane Asher gives you someone human to cling to while everyone else behaves as if manners were abolished centuries ago.

Under all the velvet, the plague idea still bites. Rich people lock themselves away from the suffering and discover a guest list is no use against death.

Strip the wallpaper off, though, and the story is thin. It’s a parade of gorgeous set-pieces, and I never cared much who survived. Deliciously weird, if rarely frightening.

The Red Death eventually arrives. By then, subtlety’s been dead for an hour.

Long-winded and stagey. - Masque of the Red Death review by NP

I have to admit it: the appeal of Roger Corman’s films are mostly lost on me. Despite its flaws, I enjoyed his ‘comeback’ ‘Frankenstein Unbound’, but every other production I have seen under his name I have found uninvolving, stagey and a bit of a chore to get through.

This effort boasts the charms of Hazel Court and a very young looking Jane Asher, and they both are excellent but strangely without much in the way of character. The same may be said of Prospero, played by the mighty Vincent Price, who saunters and sneers wonderfully through it all. For all his evildoings, his villainy is strictly pantomime in nature.

The story is the weakest link for me. A mash up of Edgar Allan Poe, with references to ‘Hop Toad’, the Raven and even the Pit and the Pendulum, without doing much that is interesting with them – Hop Toad being the exception, due to Skip Martin and Patrick Magee.

A series of set-pieces do not make a riveting story, and despite the visual colour and vigour of the theatricality, I couldn’t muster up much in the way of enthusiasm for this, sadly. My score is 5 out of 10.