Review of “The Comedy of Terrors” (1963)

Our Saturday pizza and bad movie night featured a flick we’d seen before, a spoof on horror flicks. It plays with tropes familiar in both horror and comedy.

Plot:

Waldo Trumbull (Vincent Price) and his assistant Felix Gillie (Peter Lorre) run a funeral business in late 19^th century New England, cutting corners by reusing the same casket—for years. The opening scene shows them waiting for the mourners to leave a funeral, dumping the deceased into the open grave, loading the casket into their horse-drawn hearse, and quickly throwing dirt over the poor man.

Waldo drinks. Felix is a convicted bank robber and a picklock, the latter an ability that seems to have helped him escape from prison. They’re not above drumming up business by murdering by smothering (wealthy) sleeping victims with a pillow.

At home, Waldo verbally abuses his wife, Amaryllis (Joyce Jameson), who complains she gave up an opera career to marry him. Her singing—suffice to say it has to be heard to be appreciated.

Felix thinks she sings like a nightingale. He’s in love with her.

Amaryllis’ elderly father, Hinchley (Boris Karloff), who founded the funeral business his son-in-law now runs, is ill and deaf. Waldo threatens to add “medicine” from a bottle marked “POISON” to his food. Amaryllis always intervenes, much to the dismay of her clueless father.

And now, threatening to bring all that domestic harmony to a screeching halt, Waldo’s landlord, Mr. Black (Basil Rathbone), demands Waldo pay his back rent—one year’s worth—within twenty-four hours—or he will evict the lot of them.

Waldo snarls at Mr. Black as he walks off, but as he later tells Mr. Gillie, he has an idea how he might kill two birds with one pillow.

Thoughts:

The viewer has to accept the absurdity of the various situations before enjoying this movie. Waldo is nasty to his wife. He repeatedly threatens to kill his father-in-law. His wife acts like this is a simple annoyance, as if he left the toilet seat up. Despite Felix’s fumbling attempts at romancing her, she remains faithful to him—until she doesn’t.

Much to the delight of Waldo and Mr. Gilles, the doctor pronounces Mr. Black dead before they get a chance to suffocate him.

“Are you sure?” Mr. Black’s servant asks. “He had cataleptic* fits.”

The doctor has no doubts.

The viewer sees Mr. Black’s nose twitch. Apparently, he’s allergic to Amaryllis’s cat, Cleopatra.

The title is a play on Shakespeare’s A Comedy of Errors. In an homage to reciting bad Shakespeare, before things go south for him, Mr. Black is sitting in bed with a book that looks like a dinner menu, reading from the bard aloud in a deep, sonorous voice. He gets out of bed, picks up a sword, and slices several candles before jabbing it through a screen where Mr. Gillie is hiding, missing him by a hair. It is amusing and quite silly.

In another slapstick scene, Waldo and Mr. Gillie creep up a staircase lined with plaster busts on pedestals. They’re looking for a “client.” The viewer knows what’s going to happen.

Toward the end of the movie, many people who seem dead make a comeback.

I could not find this available for free. According to Justwatch, it can be rented on YouTube or GooglePlay or watched on AppleTV, however.

I had a lot of fun with this, but I wouldn’t want to invite any of these characters over for dinner.


* A state of immobility. In literature, it’s often used to mimic death.

Title: Comedy of Terrors (1963)

Directed by
Jacques Tourneur

Writing Credits
Richard Matheson…(screenplay)
Richard Matheson…(novel) (uncredited)
Elsie Lee…(novel)(uncredited)

Cast (in credits order)
Vincent Price…Waldo Trumbull
Peter Lorre…Felix Gillie
Boris Karloff…Hinchley
Joyce Jameson…Amaryllis
Joe E. Brown…Cemetery Keeper
Beverly Powers…Mrs. Phipps (as Beverly Hills)
Basil Rathbone…Mr. Black

Released: 1963
Length: 1 hour, 24 minutes