Edger Allan Poe's classic 1842 short story, The Masque of the Red Death is only about 2,300 words long. It has almost no characters and not much plot. Most of it is a setting description, immediately followed by a horrifying end. Roger Corman, a century later, was the master of efficient workman filmmaking. But getting 2,300 words to fill out a ninety-minute movie is a tall order even for the B-movie king himself. How do you do it?
Hiring horror legend Vincent Price as the villainous protagonist, Prince Prospero is a good start. Prospero is the only named character in Poe's story. In the movie and the story, Prospero is an arrogant lord who locks himself up in his castle to party with his friends while a plague destroys the Gothic fantasy countryside. In the story he was just a 1%er who thought he could ride out the apocalypse. In Corman's movie, he's a hedonist, sadist, and sure enough, a Satanist. He tortures villagers and his noble friends alike for his own amusement and out of true faith for the Dark Lord. That means you have an hour and a half of Vince Price hamming it up with a wonderfully bitchy smirk. He is the reason you watch Masque of the Red Death.
Since Red Death needs an actually sympathetic protagonist, we have Francesca (Jane Asher) and Gino (David Weston), a pair of good Christian peasants. Francesca is beautiful and has a pointy rack, so Prince Prospero decides to seduce her to the Dark Side. Neither good character ends up terribly interesting. They are the wet blankets of moral and sanity in this otherwise debauched film. I guess audiences needed that in 1964.
That still, however, only gives you half a movie. So there are quite a few subplots involving the various intrigues of Prince Prospero's court. Alfredo (Patrick Magee) lusts after a dwarf dancer (who is very unfortunately played by a little girl dubbed by an adult woman, so Alfredo is made a pedophile by implication). This annoys the dancer's partner, Hop-Frog (Skip Martin), a character from a totally different Poe story. We have a few gruesome moments to fill up the running time. Hop-Frog's revenge is more violent than you would expect out of a 1960s movie. Juliana (Hazel Court) attempts to commune with Satan and her death is awesome as well.
But most of Masque of the Red Death is a wordy, close to tedious horror movie. There is a forty minute section of Prince Prospero again and again being a pompous asshole. As fun as Vincent Price is, there just isn't much to the guy.
That almost squanders a lot of the great atmosphere Masque of the Red Death started out with. We open with this incredible image of a red-hooded figure sitting by a dead tree in the thick Gothic night air. It takes us almost an hour to finally get to the Masque where Death falls upon Prospero and his awful rich friends. The ending is absolutely worth it. Corman paints all his actors in dripping red, moving in a Danse Macabre on the handsome castle set. That is way worth it.
Everything in between though... Eh. A bit good, a bit bad. Still, there is never a bad time to depict the wealthy finally seeing justice for their crimes against the world. Give me a Masque of the Red Death remake for 2020. Lord knows there are far too many Prince Prosperos in the real world.
Next Time: Evil Dead (2013), a remake I absolutely hated seven years ago. But everybody I know insists this movie is great. I'll give it a second chance.
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