A surefire way to win me over with your film is to have an opening credit montage with your work animals.
In this case Rhubarb the cat.
Who was surprisingly more active throughout the film that I thought she would be.
Usually with stunt cats they have 2 minutes of screen time and then they're never seen again.
However Rhubarb does pop up constantly. Jumping from one place to the next.
She has no bearing on the plot.
But that doesn't matter and she's never in danger which was kind of nice as well.
Anyways this is a movie all about the world's skeeviest mortician.
A man who's been using the same coffin for every surface (for over 13 years) who doesn't treat his employees very well. Who's rude and vindictive to his own wife and only married her for business of her father.
A man who in truly desperate times resorts to murder to fund his own Mortuary business and who despite being the worst possible person around is still an incredibly entertaining character.
I was a bit skeptical about this film at first. It's very slapstick and not all that appealing to me at the time.
But my God Vincent Price and Peter Lorre just pull it off.
Vincent Price is having an absolutely fantastic time chewing the scenery and acting like the world's worst scumbag while somehow still being Charming.
Peter Lorre is having a lot of fun as a down-on-his-luck servant who unfortunately can't get out of the bad situation because of his criminal past.
Vincent Price is aa drunkard who's had one spot of business in the last nine months. He spends every waking moment drinking and hasn't paid his the landlord in almost a year.
To put it simply.
Times are extremely desperate and the only way he can keep himself afloat his by artificially creating business via his own murdering.
It all leads to the eventual attempted murder of the landlord himself.
Who it is shown as almost impossible to kill.
The guy is knocked out several times and just keeps coming back from the dead.
I'd say he's like a zombie but that would imply that he ever truly died to begin with.
There's also this strange love triangle between Vincent Price's wife and Peter Lorre's character. Only Price's character couldn't possibly give a damn.
He deplores his wife. He eventually tries to murder her simply for his own amusement after being fed up with the whole affair.
It's incredibly silly film and it works out fairly well. It's practically a spoof movie but it still tries to stay true to its own coherent universe.
There's a sword fight at the end of the movie between Vincent Price and Peter Lorre in where Lorre's character attempts to deal a fatal blow to Price.
But in doing so he hit Price with the flat side of the sword and merely annoys him.
It's a comedic scene but I appreciate it all the same.
You always see people sword fighting in movies.
People who have never handled a weapon like that in their life, and they always deal lethal blows.
But in actuality if you don't know how to handle a sword there's a fair chance you won't actually hurt your opponent. It takes a bit of gravitas to properly manipulate a sword and I enjoyed that that seemed to be seen here.
Even if that probably wasn't the director's intent.
All in all it was an enjoyable film. It won me over in the end.
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