Vincent Price is a psychedelic sadist on a revenge kick in London. When he’s not exclusively talking through a hole in the back of his neck or playing happy melodies on a pipe organ in his art deco mansion, he’s plotting the murder of every single doctor who had anything to do with the surgery in which his wife died years ago. Meanwhile, some of Scotland Yard’s worst detectives are on his trail. And Vincent doesn’t just want his targets to die. No, he wants ’em to die slowly, painfully and in ways that often involve being nibbled to death by carnivorous rats, bats and insects.
You might say that he’s a man with a vision.
And so is director Robert Fuest! His other most notable credits include several episodes of the British television series The Avengers. This film is consistently stylish, colorful, ridiculous and entertaining as fuck. It’s a little bit acidhead plastic fantastic, a little bit Hammer-influenced, a whisper of a precursor to the Saw movies and whole lot of campy, goofball, 1971 horseshit—all in the best way, of course.