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Count Prospero (Vincent Price) rules his peasants cruelly &
violently, e.g. bruning down one of their villages despite the coming of
winter. But he is as decadent as he is evil, holding a big celebration
at his castle while the Red Death roams the contryside, & having
poor peasant girl Francesca (Jane Asher) attending the festivities on his side -
which she only does because Prospero holds her father & her fiancé
Gino (david Weston) prisoner. And, he also is into Satanism. But of course,
trouble soon is brewing, as his former mistress & fellow devil
worshipper Juliana (Hazel Court) sees a rival in Francesca, & decides to help her to escape
with Gino & her father - but of course they are recaptured by
Prospero, & forced to play a cruel game at Prospero's next
celebration, a game which would end fatally for Francesca's father,
while Gino is thrown out of the castle right into the clutches of the
Red Death. Later, when some peasants approach Prospero's castle to seek
refuge from the Red Death, he has them brutally killed. But all that
won't help him, as, at the climax of Prospero's celebrations, the
Masque, the Red Death has already entered the castle, soon killing all
the guests. & though Prospero mistakes him for his master Satan, he
is not spared ("Death knows no master !") & in the end, as
he unmasks the Red Death, he looks into his own face ... Only Francesca
is allowed to leave the castle alive. In the end, in a field,
differently coloured Deaths from different parts of the country meet,
each accounting how much he has taken in .... Of all the
Edgar Allan Poe adaptations Roger Corman did during the early 60's, this
one, insluenced of all films by Ingmar Bergman's Det
Sjunde Inseglet/The Seventh Seal
(1957), is easily the most accomplished, as it does not rely on cheap shock
effects but on a disquieting atmosphere caught in highly choreographed,
stylish pictures in perfect colour-compositions, which somewhat take the
focus from Vincent Price as the film's (& most of the Corman Poe's) central
character (even though essentially the film still is his). Also, the
decision not to convolute one Poe short story with lots of supporitng
characters & thought-up subplots to bring it to feature length was a
wise one. Instead, Poe's Masque of the Red Death was combined
with another story of his, Hop Frog (with Skip Martin in the lead
of that segment of the film), which has nothing to do with
Masque ... in plot but shares essentially the same basic
decadence of its central characters. Must-see !
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