Decadence, treachery, murder…and Satan! Such are the dearly beloved passions of Prince Prospero (Vincent Price), the 12th century villain of Roger Corman’s delectable Edgar Allen Poe adaptation The Masque of the Red Death. Very loosely based on its source material (as well as Poe’s short story Hop-Frog), this campy Corman classic is brimming with the type of lavish Gothic creepiness pioneered by Hammer Films, and its pedigree is enhanced by Daniel Haller’s gaudy set design, colorful cinematography by future director Nicolas Roeg, and one of the most delicious performances of Price’s storied career. Prospero’s boundless wickedness drives him to imprison a God-worshipping peasant girl (Jane Asher) and then force her to participate in his sadistic games of life and death with her father (Nigel Green) and her lover (David Weston), all while showing little mercy for the debauched nobility who have taken shelter from the Red Death plague inside his castle walls. Corman flirts with pretentious Ingmar Bergman worship throughout, but there’s an irresistible sumptuousness to his faux-medieval mise-en-scène (including the red robe-clad harbinger of death who plays cards outside Prospero’s depraved abode). And Price – whether smiling after the execution of a man who was willing to sell his wife in return for shelter from the Red Death, or delighting in his sister’s (Hazel Court) death after she burns an upside-down cross on her breast and undergoes a surreal marriage to the Devil himself – is at his most deliriously malevolent as the faithful servant of “the Lord of the Flies.”
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