Film Summary DCXXIII (The Oblong Box)


So Vincent Price (Julian) and Alister Williamson (Eddward) play these two brothers who are roaming around the African continent.
Said African continent has never given any more contacts than just 'Africa'. It's an old stereotype I really wish films could get over at this point, Even in 1969. Come on, give us a name of somewhere.
I get you want to go with like the Tarzan motif and just have it be the foreign far away land that's undescribed. In which case give us a jungle or say they're in the Deep Congo.

Anyways these two guys are in ''Africa'' and Allister's character is about to be strung up on to this cross and mutilated for some sort of ritual experience.
To which Vincent Price has character walks in absolutely stunned. The film fades into credits and we see that all of this it happened years ago. And now Julian is living in his large manner back in England with his brother. chained up in his room. He's gone slightly mad from the mutilation / ceremonial experience.

For some weird reason there's this group of people wandering around who want to free his brother and they may also want to kill him to use them as a cadaver for Christopher Lee's character who keeps surgically experimenting on dead people that he has brought to his home.
But at some point he ends up with Edward who turns out not to be dead because of this knockout potion medicine that makes a person seem dead.
And why'll that was going on Julian had to find a fake corpse to present to the local Town committee as it's tradition for their family once somebody dies.

So we end up with a stranger getting killed to become the fake corpse to put in place of Edward's body so that nobody saw the mutilation.
But then the thieves steal Edwards body, take it over to Christopher Lee and a different group of delinquents throw the murdered body into the river (which gets found out later on. That part of the story doesn't really go anywhere.)
And then Christopher Lee opens up the coffin containing Edwards corpse. Edward then awakes, tries to strangle Lee and decides to work out his differences with Christopher Lee's character.
None of this we ever see.

Now he's living inside Christopher Lee's home and goes out at night seeking revenge for the people who put them in such a bad state.
Mainly it's this Witch Doctor who created the potion to put him in a death sleep and his brother who is actually the man who was supposed to be mutilated in that Ritual from earlier.

Yeah turns out Vincent Price's character was actually this horrible warlord, slave driver who did all these disgusting things to the people within this part of ''Africa''.
but the local people weren't sure which brother did the crime.
So they strong one of them up and hope for the best.
Why they didn't just kill them both I'll never know.

It really makes you disinterested in Vincent Price as a character at the end knowing that he's actually this horrible monster of a man.
Now he does regret what he's doing and he wants to get away from it all and Escape into a life free of torment. But you can't really leave something like that behind. Not that it matters, he'll end up possessed by his brother's Soul at the end of the movie anyway.

This is another film that feels like they had two or three different stories to tell but didn't have enough information for any of them.
So they just kind of crammed this all together and hope for the best.
It also feels like they weren't entirely sure if they could make an entire feature-length film.
As a very large part of the film in the middle is just this brothel scene of a bunch of people dancing singing and making out with each other.
You could call it a titillation scene but it's pretty mundane even by the standards of the day.
It doesn't really add too much to the overall story.
Just felt like bad padding. Still there's some fun character work with Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and Alister Williamson.

It's Alistair who should have been credited as the main character though.
He plays the titular murderer with his fancy clothing and strange looking red mask.
It makes for a fairly good design and they don't show his face for about 95% of the film so you're left with this Eerie ''what does he look like under the mask feeling.''
And like most films when it's revealed it's underwhelming. They probably should have just left that part ambiguous but whatever.

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