Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		4.0
Overall		4.0

The Masque of the Red Death Blu-ray Movie Review

Price parties hearty.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman October 20, 2013

Note: This film is currently available as part of The Vincent Price Collection.

Shout! Factory’s Scream Factory imprint is giving horror fans a little early Halloween present this year, bringing six classic Vincent Price – American International films to high definition for the first time. Though horror tends to be a genre that, to paraphrase one Rodney Dangerfield, “gets no respect”, and indeed probably all of these films were thought of as B- movie drive in fodder back in the day, most if not all of them hold up surprisingly well today, with several of them offering a quasi- hallucinatory quality which Roger Corman, the supposedly low rent auteur who is responsible for the majority of the offerings in this set, states was a deliberate choice (not one necessitated by relatively paltry budgets) in an attempt to viscerally recreate the inner life of the (perhaps troubled) mind. Though Price had made at least a couple of forays into horror in the fifties with such fare as House of Wax 3D and The Fly , it was really the American International pictures that established Price’s “second act” in the film business, offering him more or less steady employment when many of his contemporaries had either resigned themselves to the ostensibly less glamorous world of television or who had outright retired from show business.

One would probably tend not to think of Roger Corman and Ingmar Bergman as comrades in arms, but there’s little doubt that at least the hint of a shadow from Bergman’s iconic The Seventh Seal Blu-ray review is cast over The Masque of the Red Death. While there’s no chess game between Death and a haggard hero (at least not a literal one), there is the same general time frame, the same pall of plague, and indeed the same general type of mysterious cowled figure personifying Mankind’s most atavistic fear. What’s at least a little ironic about The Masque of the Red Death is how luridly colorful it all is, perhaps a none too subtle tip of the hat (and/or hood) to the film’s very title, something that makes it distinctly different from the stark black and white vision of Ingmar Bergman’s Middle Ages.

A lot of the Corman-Poe cycle involve an innocent stranger arriving at a corrupt location and getting embroiled in the dramatic goings on there, but it’s interesting to note that in The Masque of the Red Death, the innocent is actually taken to the illicit place. Vincent Price portrays avowed Satanist Prince Prospero, who like Shakespeare’s identically named character in The Tempest has discovered a “brave new world”, albeit in this case, a Bacchanalian one full of orgiastic acolytes and sycophants who enjoy the largesse of the Prince even if they’re not fully aware of his “side activities”. When the Prince travels through a village that has been beset with the plague, he has it burnt to the ground, more or less kidnapping nubile young peasant girl Francesca (Jane Asher, erstwhile main squeeze of one Paul McCartney).

The Masque of the Red Death is in some ways one of the more atypical Poe-Corman outings, if for no other reason than for once the Price character is not beset by problems of the mind and is in fact more or less a despicable villain. The Satanic element may tend to tie this outing in more firmly with the quasi-Poe effort (actually culled from an H.P. Lovecraft piece) The Haunted Palace, but here, in the artful screenplay by Charles Beaumont and R. Wright Campbell, the degradation of the soul is shown to be even more pervasive than in the earlier film, something alluded to by the conceit of the actual physical disease afflicting more and more people.

The film is notable for several reasons. Hazel Court gives a wonderfully nasty performance as Prospero’s consort who doesn’t take kindly to Francesca’s arrival and who has what is still remembered as one of the film’s great set pieces, a hallucinatory “marriage” to “Old Scratch” himself. Lensing this outing was the legendary Nicolas Roeg, whom Corman hired since the film was shot in England (the two week shoot took place in November 1963 and actually overlapped the assassination of President Kennedy). The production reportedly was able to utilize some of the sets from the then recent film version of Becket, and there’s therefore an unusually opulent feel to much of this film. The Masque of the Red Death has very little of the quasi-campy attitude that some of the other Corman-Poe outings have, and it remains as one of the more resolutely sober minded Poe adaptations, one that may admittedly not have the poetic fervor of Bergman’s piece but which attains its own interesting and quite consistently arresting visual and dramatic allure.

The Masque of the Red Death Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Masque of the Red Death is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Scream Factory, an imprint of Shout! Factory, with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.34:1. This is by far the most colorful of the Corman-Poe entries, one which is simply awash in a huge panoply of hues, from bright, bold primaries, to more subtle pastels. The production design here also makes the sets part of the color scheme, with walls varying from bright yellow to deep purple. Nicolas Roeg's sumptuous cinematography looks great here, with beautifully saturated tones and deep, even impressive, black levels. Once again some of the opticals, including the bizarre turquoise inflected dream sequence, look pretty dirty and grainy, as should be expected. The film boasts a generally very sharp looking appearance (there's some slight anamorphic squeezing at the very edges of frame on occasion, with attendant softness), and I'd personally rate this entry somewhere just slightly behind The Fall of the House of Usher and slightly ahead of The Pit and the Pendulum in overall video quality.

The Masque of the Red Death Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Masque of the Red Death features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono mix presented via DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0. As Steve Haberman points out in his commentary, David Lee's music channels Stravinsky some of the time, notable Le Sacre du Printemps, and the propulsive percussion of the score comes through with abundant clarity and precision. Dialogue is also very well presented. The track has no damage of any kind to report and offers excellent fidelity and wide dynamic range.

The Masque of the Red Death Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Interview with Producer and Director Roger Corman (1080i; 18:52). Corman considers this one of his best films, not just in the Poe cycle, and he talks quite enthusiastically about the original Poe piece and his adaptation.


• Vincent Price's Introduction and Final Words for The Masque of the Red Death (1080i; 3:59) and (1080i; 2:29) are culled from Vincent Price's Gothic Horrors, an Iowa public television broadcast of the film.


• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 2:12)


• Photo Gallery (1080p; 4:27)


• Audio Commentary with Steve Haberman. Haberman is a writer, producer and film historian who obviously deeply loves this film. That means some of his assessments are a bit on the over generous side, but he also provides a wealth of background information in this enjoyable commentary.

The Masque of the Red Death Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Masque of the Red Death offers Price as a fairly hiss-worthy villain, though it's interesting to see how Beaumont and Campbell crafted the role to include something approaching not one, but two, love interests. Fascinatingly philosophical without being obtuse, The Masque of the Red Death is one of the moodier Corman-Poe outings, and it features absolutely breathtaking cinematography by Nicolas Roeg. If it doesn't quite get to the stratospheric heights of The Seventh Seal, that's nothing to be ashamed of. This Blu-ray offers great video and audio and, like all the other films in this set, comes with some fantastic supplements. Highly recommended.