It's fearfully boring waiting out the plague in a castle sealed off from the rest of the world. (Cf. Boccaccio's Decameron). Prince Prospero, a merry sadist played by Vincent Price, tries to keep the crew of libertines confined in the place amused with costume balls, child molesting, gladiatorial fights, and tortures of various kinds. At one ball, he orders the dissolute lords and ladies to imitate animals to which they are kin -- a prince roots around on the floor like a pig, another courtiers imitates a writhing worm, and a woman playing the part of a jackass brays as another reveler rides on her back. It's all good fun and Prospero orders his party-goers around with sinister zest. In fact, he plays the part of a director, calculating effects, and devising the sinister mise-en-scene in his palatial halls and labyrinthine dungeons and torture chambers. It certainly seems as if the director of the 1964 Masque of the Red Death, Roger Corman, has made Prospero in his own likeness and the movie, it seems, enacts some aspects of film-making. It would be hard to imagine a picture more radically different from Corman's early American International cheapies such as Bucket of Blood and Little Shop of Horrors. The Masque of the Red Death is visually opulent and very brightly lit -- Corman, a thrifty filmmaker, wants his audience to luxuriate in every penny spent on costumes and decor and, of course, you can't achieve this effect without making sure your audience sees what the budget has purchased; the money has to be on the screen, The movie, ostensibly an adaptation of Poe's story (with "Hop Frog" thrown in a for a good measure), has an elaborate, verbose script involving philosophical and religious issues: if God had been killed by men, who will take His place? Prospero is a Satan-worshipper and chews the scenery with harangues about evil and the paradise of Hell and, ultimately, that each man makes his own religion and serves the god that he has created. This is all sophomoric stuff, but delivered by Vincent Price with robust and velvety gusto.
Prospero tooling around in a flimsy-looking carriage (it looks like a tent on wheels) almost runs over a baby. A bold young man saves the infant thereby enraging Prospero. The evil prince is also intrigued by a comely peasant girl with bright red hair. Exercising his droit du seigneur, he kidnaps the girl and, after threatening to garrot her boyfriend and father, takes them prisoner. (Prospero is hoping to rape the girl and, then, make her choose which will die -- boyfriend or father; it's all in a day's work for a cruel villain.) At the castle, Prospero gives the girl a bath -- Corman specializes in this sort of lurid scene -- and makes the young woman, Francesca, remove her crucifix. A sort of love triangle ensues: it seems that Prospero has another squeeze, Juliana, and has been initiating her into Satanism. Juliana immediately perceives that Francesca is a threat to her and redoubles her efforts to impress Prospero with her pious devotion to the Devil -- in fact, she goes so far as to brand her own breast with a hot iron shaped like an inverted cross to demonstrate her devotion. The plague continues to rage in the countryside. A fat lord and his lady beg for entrance to the castle. The lord offers his wife to Prospero as a bride but the villain has already enjoyed the woman and, so, just fires a cross-bow dart into the man's chest, cavalierly tossing the woman a dagger so that she can kill herself. Later the six surviving peasants from the village where the story began show up, carting some bloody victims of the red death around with them. They meet the same fate as the fat lord. In the castle, the libertines dance and feast. Prospero's henchmen try to get Francesca's boyfriend, Gino, to duel to the death with the girl's father -- the two men refuse. A toylike child dancer prances around in front of the assembled libertines with her protector a dwarf. One of the lords among the dissolute crew in the castle, Alfredo, desires the child and licks his lips lustfully -- the film is surprisingly candid in showing the risk of sexual molestation to the child. This offends the dwarf, who like Rigoletto, plots a horrible revenge on Alfredo; the dwarf is called "Hop Toad" for some reason -- Poe's similarly bloody-minded dwarf jester was called "Hop Frog." Juliana continues her devil worship catechism and advances in her devotions to the point that she swallows some scary-looking red fluid in a goblet and has an elaborate hallucination -- in green vapor, she's repeatedly raped by leering demons who penetrate her various kinds of swords and scimitars; distorting lenses are used in this sequence and the demons as well as the women's face appear as grotesque images in a fun-house mirror. Prospero makes preparations for the climactic masque. After some more depravity, the masquers assemble like a ballet corps for the last waltz. Francesca's father has been killed by Prospero in a macabre game with poisoned daggers. Francesca has decided to give herself to the silky and degenerate Prospero, a fate that she seems to be not at all that adverse to -- there's a sense that she enjoys Prospero's depravity more than the straight-arrow appeal of Gino. Prospero has given orders that no one should wear red to his soiree. Alfredo appears in the garb of a gorilla and ends up burnt alive by Hop Toad. Then, a figure in a red cloak appears and the film whirls toward it's delirious denouement -- lots of ballet with figures oozing gore encircling the doomed Prospero as they expire. (It's a like a Las Vegas floor show in Hell.) (Spoiler-alert: the eerie masked figure in red who embodies the Red Death is revealed to be Prospero's doppelgaenger, thereby proving his assertion that each man makes his own God.) Accordingly, Corman ends with a three-term equation: Prospero the Satanist = Death by the Plague = the master of ceremonies, that is, Roger Corman as director of these festivities. The film is blasphemous in that God is nowhere to be seen and, certainly, doesn't intervene on anyone's behalf. In the final sequence, seven hooded figures, each of them color-coded according to the chambers in Prospero's palace (yellow, purple, white, and black with a red stained glass window) march about the ravaged, autumnal countryside (it's all studio with fog-machines) -- each of them announces that he has summoned "a hundred thousand" to his realm. Curiously, this American International exploitation picture ends up with an elaborate ballet and, then, wintry images of hooded specters among blasted trees, imagery that looks akin to Bergman's The Seventh Seal. Death is on the march.
The movie is shot in delirious technicolor in wide-screen cinemascope. It's rather sedate in some respects, although, of course, the subject matter is lurid. The picture is insanely overlit and bright to the point that a night-time scene in the castle is shot as if in broad daylight -- this is inexplicable from a narrative perspective. The obligatory Saw-style tour of the torture chambers also occurs in bright light. (The spectacular pageant-like camera work is by Nicholas Roeg, later a noteworthy director in his own right -- the picture, which also features the leering Patrick Magee (he was in Clockwork Orange as the poor bastard crippled by Alex and his droogs), seems to have been shot in the U.K. and the movie has some of the brilliant, colorful imagery of Hammer horror films made in the era. I prefer the earlier, less artsy, Corman -- although there's no question that The Masque of the Red Death is entertaining and impressively produced. And the picture has some inexplicable elements: why does the toy-like six year old dancer (credited as "tiny dancer") speak with the dubbed voice of an full-grown Italian harlot?
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