As fine a film as Roger Corman ever directed for Samuel Z. Arkoff's American Independent Pictures, the Poe adaptation The Masque of the Red Death opens in high style, with an old crone, out collecting wood in the forest, confronted by a Death-type figure in a crimson cloak who predicts the arrival of a plague set to blossom through nearby towns and villages. Satanist prince Prospero (Vincent Price) holes up in his castle for the duration along with the local aristocrats, taking a particular interest in an innocent girl (Jane Asher), whom he's hoping to corrupt, or at least deflower, in the course of the titular masked ball.
It's the film that best demonstrates AIP's kinship with Britain's Hammer, both companies fostering - at their peak - a straight-ahead form of storytelling unencumbered by the frippery and excesses of a lavish budget. That said, Masque's depiction of a society founded on decadence remains wholly credible, conjuring up dwarves plotting against monkeys and trippy rites, and allowing Price to preside over the film's cruel and unusual punishments in such imperious fashion that evil starts to look considerably more intriguing - more seductive - than the virtue represented by Asher and her loved ones.
Director of photography Nic Roeg's lurid colour schemes, pushed to the very limit in the party scenes, are strikingly effective, while the screenplay (by Charles Beaumont and R. Wright Campbell) takes a particular care to preserve Poe's discourse on the existence (or otherwise) of God intact. The result provides a strong hint of the cross-fertilisation going on within film culture during the 1960s, a decade when even opportunist directors operating in the quote-unquote lowest of genres were playing with big ideas, or simply cribbing from their peers: you'd be hard-pushed to put your finger on the exact spot, but there's almost certainly something of Bergman in here.
The Masque of the Red Death is available on DVD through MGM Home Entertainment.
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