Format: DVD from Cortland Community Library on The New Portable.
Despite his massive impact on the film industry, Vincent Price was never even nominated for an Oscar nor did he ever win an honorary one. That’s a damn shame, because there are decades of movies that would be so much less without his presence. Sure, the sorts of movies that Price made didn’t really warrant Oscar nominations, and there are plenty of them where he is really the only bit of class in the proceedings. In a movie like Theater of Blood (sometimes spelled Theatre of Blood), that sort of “Vincent Price has class” idea is played to the hilt.
Put bluntly, Theater of Blood is the story of the awesomely-named Shakespearean actor Edward Lionheart (Price), spurned by a nonet of critics from winning a theatrical award that he thought he deserved. Distraught, Lionheart committed suicide, or so it was thought. The body, of course, was never recovered, and as we learn over the course of the film, Lionheart was recovered and nursed back to health by a collection of vagrants. Now, two years out, Lionheart is back and planning the deaths of those critics who, he believes, destroyed his career.
