31 Days of HELL-O-Ween 2020
The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)
The Abominable Dr. Phibes is bonkers. There's no other way to describe it: Bonkers.
When I was a kid and saw it (along with a bunch of other Vincent Price B-Movies), I remembered Vincent Price with his weird vocoder, getting revenge on various people he believed contributed to his wife's death. But mostly I remembered the unmasking at the end, a grotesque reveal for which I was waiting. Heck, most of the B-Movie/Horror/Sci-Fi I grew up on as a child were mostly boring, and I would mostly only pay attention when something interesting involving monsters/robots/aliens was on the screen.
So, when I re-watched it again yesterday to grab some screen shots, it was like seeing the movie again for the first time. As a dumb kid, I didn't realize how completely bug nuts the film is. Part horror, part comedy, part thriller, part slapstick camp, part Surrealist Phantom of the Opera, and all of it just banana cuckoo pants.
The revenge scheme is vaguely based on the 10 Plagues from Exodus. It includes (but isn't limited to): A masquerade with a man's head crushed inside a frog mask like something from a "Saw" movie; a lady murdered by having honey poured on her face and then eaten by grasshoppers (!); a man run through a bronze statue of a Unicorn (I forget what part of Exodus has unicorns... but it's been a while since I read the Bible), with the witnesses almost off camera having to unscrew him from the wall by spinning his body around it (all you see are his legs rotate onto and off of screen a couple times). I found it delirious fun. Did I mention it ends with "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" playing over the end credits? Yeah, it's that kind of movie.
I was half-thinking of it just doing a portrait of Vincent Price from the movie, but the corroded version was just too irresistible. I saw that version in way too many of the horror magazines I owned as a kid such as in Forrest Ackerman's "Famous Monsters of Filmland", or ads in "Eerie" and "Creepy" magazines.
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STEP ONE: These are the hastily done pencils, done on 8-1/2" x 11" toned cardstock with a black colored pencil.
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STEP TWO: And the usual halfway point or so, which almost always looks like trash and I ask myself if I should just start over. Whenever I see one of the half-draw pictures for the Work-In-Progress in a search rather than the finished one, a little piece of my soul breaks off and dies.
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STEP THREE: Followed by the finished painting. If I had the time, I would have liked to keep working on Phibe's teeth a little more. They need a little more work (I'm talking painting-wise, not orthodontally).
Sorry to cut this short, but I gotta try and get two--count 'em TWO--pictures done by this evening to keep on schedule through the weekend. Sigh.
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Done with Watercolor/Gouache on 8-1/2" x 11" toned cardstock.
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