Ten Days of Terror!: And Soon the Darkness

Film: And Soon the Darkness
Format: Streaming video from Amazon/Freevee on Fire!

The name And Soon the Darkness is an objectively cool name for a horror movie. Based on that name, it’s clear that we’re going somewhere dark, but where we’re going is not clear. Are there going to be demons in this? Witches? Something supernatural? A deadly cult? There are a lot of possibilities with that title. Sadly, it’s the best part of the film. It’s possible that in 1970 And Soon the Darkness was a lot more inventive than it appears now, but this film is easy to predict. It aims for a twist ending, and even that isn’t much of a shock, and it has to cheat to get there.

It's something I’ve talked about on this blog before, but And Soon the Darkness is a prime example of a significant problem in plotting. What is that problem? It’s having characters act in particular ways because the plot requires it rather than taking the time to give us character reasons to get to the desired end. If your characters are forced to act in stupid, unnatural ways or in ways that don’t fit with them, the movie doesn’t work. If getting to the event you want requires a scientist character to (for instance) forget a basic formula or not know something a college freshman would know, your story has a problem. And that’s the issue with And Soon the Darkness. There’s a lot to get into here, so you can expect that everything past this point will be considered under a spoiler tag.

Strange Weather We're Having

Films: The Devil’s Rain
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

Sometimes you just can’t explain a movie. That’s certainly the case with The Devil’s Rain, a low-budget horror movie with substantially goofy special effects that has an absolutely staggering cast list. I have no idea what the budget for this was, but most of it had to be the cast. That said, it’s worth noting that Ernest Borgnine has stated that this was made with Mafia money and that he never got paid for his work on the film.

So let’s talk about that cast for a moment. Ernest Borgnine is a stand-out, but much of the rest of the cast is stellar as well. William Shatner! Tom Skerritt! Ida Goddam Lupino! Eddie Albert and Keenan Wynn! John Travolta in an early role! And arch-fiend Anton LeVay himself as a satanic high priest. I have absolutely no explanation for any of this.

The Doctor Is In...Kinda

Film: Dr. Phibes Rises Again
Format: Internet video on the new internet machine.

I enjoyed The Abominable Dr. Phibes when I watched it. It was strange, but it was right in the wheelhouse of Vincent Price. Our anti-hero, Phibes (Price) was horribly disfigured in a car accident on his way to the hospital where his wife has died on the operating table. Blaming the doctors for his accident and his wife’s death, Phibes takes his revenge on them with bizarre death traps. I didn’t expect or even want a sequel, and yet here we are with Dr. Phibes Rises Again. Phibes is the same, but pretty much nothing else is. This movie is tonally different from the first and goes in directions that the first never really hints at.

At the end of the first movie, Phibes has enacted his revenge, and he joins his wife in a sarcophagus and replaces his blood with embalming fluid. So, naturally, we’re going to reverse that process for this movie. Phibes (still played by Vincent Price), well, rises again. And suddenly Phibes is an expert on an ancient Egyptian burial site and a magical river that gives and restores life to people. His plan is to take the body of his wife Victoria (Caroline Munro) to this place at the right moment in time for her to be resurrected and the two of them to be granted something akin to immortality.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Abominable Dr. Phibes

Film: The Abominable Dr. Phibes
Format: Internet video on laptop.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes is a film I know only by reputation. For whatever reason, this film is incredibly difficult to find, but the sequel is surprisingly easy to locate. Anyway, when I found this online, I knew it was one I would watch right away. Part of this was from fear of the film vanishing and part because this was a film I very much wanted to see. I tend to like Vincent Price. Even if the movie is crap, Price is always worth watching.

Like plenty of horror movies of the era, The Abominable Dr. Phibes doesn’t waste lot of precious time with a convoluted plot. No, this is as simple as they come. Dr. Anton Phibes (Vincent Price) was allegedly killed in a car accident. No such luck, as it turns out. Instead he’s just incredibly disfigured. Phibes is powered by revenge, not for himself but for his dead wife. He is convinced that his wife was taken from him too soon by the incompetence of a cadre of doctors and a nurse. Now, working in the shadows, Phibes plans to enact his revenge by killing each of the doctors in turn, each on killed by a murder themed as reminiscent of one of the plagues of Egypt. Sort of—there are a few that are more tangential to the actual plagues.