The Butterfly Ball (1977)

          The symbiotic relationship between movies and rock music generated some oddities during the ’70s, and this obscure hybrid of concert footage, live-action scenes, and a single animated vignette is nothing if not odd. A musical extravaganza intended for children but featuring several hard-rock singers, the piece was put together by Roger Glover, the longtime bassist of UK band Deep Purple, but the process involved a few fits and starts. In 1973, an illustrated children’s book titled The Butterfly’s Ball, and the Grasshopper’s Feast was released. It was based on William Roscoe’s 1802 poem of the same name. As the title suggests, the story is a fanciful lark about a party for woodland critters. A short cartoon was made from one section of the book, and Glover wrote the accompanying music. This generated a minor UK hit single titled “Love Is All,” with vocals by heavy-metal howler Ronnie James Dio, and plans were made for a full-length animated feature. Yet by the time Glover finished writing songs for the proposed movie, production was cancelled.

          Undaunted, Glover staged a live concert in at London’s famed Royal Albert Hall, recruiting several celebrities to perform his song suite, which bears the abbreviated title The Butterfly Ball. Footage of the 1975 concert comprises most of this movie. The picture also features the “Love Is All” short, as well as weird interstitial bits of performers in animal costumes strolling through London. The film climaxes with a live-action version of the ball, at which the various animal characters sit around a table in a scene straight out of Alice in Wonderland. Despite Glover’s obvious passion for the project, The Butterfly Ball is inherently half-assed—it’s like watching the recording session of the soundtrack for an unmade movie, with glimpses of test footage suggesting what the movie might have been like. That said, the concert has appealing moments.

          Vincent Price, eschewing his normal horror-movie style, participated in the concert as narrator, sitting in a chair above the stage and reading the illustrated book’s whimsical lines. Each song has a different singer, so the film presents an eclectic range of vocal styles. Hard-rockers including David Coverdale put muscle into their numbers, while twee songbirds including model/actress Twiggy offer more ethereal sounds. John Lawton provides one of the loveliest vocals, for the gospel-tinged ballad “Little Chalk Blue,” and he also subs for Dio on the movie’s epic-length rendition of “Love Is All.” Alas, most of the tunes come across as weak imitations of the Lennon-McCartney songbook, with fanciful numbers such as “Sir Maximus Mouse” bearing their Sgt. Pepper’s/White Album influences far too obviously.

The Butterfly Ball: FUNKY

The Devil’s Triangle (1974) & The Bermuda Triangle (1979)

          The Bermuda Triangle, that mysterious section of the Atlantic Ocean into which a vast number of boats and planes have inexplicably disappeared, enjoyed pop-culture prominence in the ’70s, when all things paranormal were grist for the infotainment mill. For instance, two feature-length documentaries were made about the Triangle. The first of the documentaries was a terrible hack job called The Devil’s Triangle, which would have been unwatchable had the filmmakers not hired horror-cinema legend Vincent Price to narrate. Featuring dull interview clips, utilitarian stock footage, and silly artistic renderings that look like courtroom sketches, The Devil’s Triangle offers nothing more than bland descriptions of mysterious events. (And if the promise of a score by prog-rock titans King Crimson gets your blood pumping, lower your expectations because the music is unmemorable.) Price, who does not appear on camera, does his best to infuse the florid script with creepy-crawly energy, but by the zillionth time he ends a sentence with “in the Devil’s Triangle,” the novelty has eroded. Additionally, director/co-writer Richard Winer doesn’t even bother to propose possible explanations for the Triangle phenomenon, instead forcing Price to croak cryptic crap: “What is this wrath-flinging, horrifying curse that prevails in the Devil’s Triangle? An affliction so incredible that even the United States Coast Guard is reluctant to make an observation on the matter?”

          For entertainingly outrageous answers to such questions, one must shift attention to a later film, The Bermuda Triangle, which was unleashed by the titans of fact-deficient “documentaries,” Sunn Classic Pictures. Hosted by bearish-looking Brad Crandall, who lent his melodious speaking voice and professorial visage to several Sunn Classic joints, The Bermuda Triangle is a smorgasbord of pseudoscience. In between vignettes of Crandall speaking while he walks around locations related to the Triangle mystery, like a now-closed U.S. airbase in Fort Lauderdale, the picture features re-enactments of Triangle incidents that are staged like scenes from low-budget horror movies. Flyers freak out when the sky turns green around their planes; sailors reel when ghost ships appear from strange mists; seadogs crumble when inexplicable forces cause them to shift in and out of tangible reality.

          Nearly every sensational theory about the Triangle that’s ever been put forth is depicted with the same degree of ominousness. Abandoned WWII mines destroying ships! Giant waterspouts rising from the ocean to engulf aircraft! Undersea earthquakes causing massive tidal waves! Viewers are even treated to the theory that the Triangle is related to the mythical lost kingdom of Atlantis—apparently, ancient Atlanteans created a “magnetic force crystal that harnessed the awesome power of the stars,” but the crystal’s energy activated volcanoes that consumed Atlantis; now, centuries later, the crystal rests at the bottom of the ocean, blasting laser beams that explode passing vessels. But wait—we haven’t even gotten to the part about UFOs traveling through the triangle via transdimensional gateways! Boasting better production values than most Sunn Classic cheapies (even though the special effects are laughably bad), The Bermuda Triangleis highly enjoyable by dint of sheer ridiculousness.

The Devil’s Triangle: LAME

The Bermuda Triangle: GROOVY

Madhouse (1974)

Built around a premise that’s too gimmicky to take seriously, Madhouse marked the end of Vincent Price’s run as a leading star of horror movies—after this picture, he mostly drifted into cameos and voice performances that winked at his glory (gory?) days. Considering how many fine shockers Price made, it’s a shame he didn’t bid adieu to the genre with a better movie, although one can imagine that Madhouse might have worked had a wittier director been in charge. Price plays Paul Toombes, a faded movie star known for playing big-screen killer Dr. Death. Following a tragedy, Toombes gets tossed into a mental hospital, thus marking him among potential employers damaged goods. Later, bereft of better options, Toombes accepts a humiliating offer to reprise his Dr. Death character for a tacky TV show. Once the show debuts, someone dressed as Dr. Death starts killing people related to the program. Is Toombes the killer? Or must Toombes unmask a murderer who’s trying to frame him? If you watch Madhouse, you’ll be amazed how little you care about the answers to these questions. Director Jim Clark, a top-notch film editor who briefly left the cutting room to helm a string of undistinguished projects, relies on such obnoxious tropes as fisheye lenses and in-your-face camera moves. Seeing as how the story is innately florid, juicing the action with adrenalized camerawork was not the wisest move, because Madhouse starts to feel grating and loud very early in its running time. It doesn’t help that Price looks bored, or that the actor had just made a very similar film, Theatre of Blood (1973), which was superior in both conception and execution. It’s a measure of Madhouse’s mediocrity, in fact, that even supporting players Peter Cushing and Robert Quarry—both of whom were as prone to onscreen flamboyance as Price—fail to make memorable impressions. Madhouse gets the job done, more or less, by providing bloody kills and perfunctory thrills. Plus, of course, Price is a unique presence even in the worst circumstances. But Madhouse is plagued by a been-there/done-that malaise from start to finish. No wonder Clark gave up on directing and returned to editing—a wise move, seeing as how, a decade later, he won an Oscar a for cutting The Killing Fields (1985).

Madhouse: FUNKY

Theatre of Blood (1973)

          The enjoyably nasty Theatre of Blood is one of Vincent Price’s best shockers, not only because of the droll storyline—an actor murders his critics—but because Price gets to demonstrate so many colors in his dramatic spectrum. Although once again consigned to incarnating a homicidal madman, the horror-cinema legend also “plays” several key characters from the Shakespearean canon, because each of his crimes is themed to a particular work by the Bard. Thus, rather than merely speechifying about how he’s been wronged by the world—the usual mode for Price’s villains—the character of Edward Lionheart performs snippets from Hamlet (“To be or not to be”), Julius Caesar (“Friends, Romans, Countrymen”), and so on. It’s apparent that Price is having a blast, and his good cheer makes up for the overall gruesomeness of the movie.

         Plus, while director Douglas Hickock can’t match the high style of other ’70s filmmakers who worked with Price (notably Robert Fuest, who made the gonzo Dr. Phibes movies, to which the storyline of Theatre of Blood owes a considerable debt), Hickock benefits from an exemplary supporting cast. Diana Rigg plays Lionheart’s daughter/accomplice, and actors portraying Lionheart’s “guest victims” (as they’re billed in the trailer) include such venerable Brits as Harry Andrews, Jack Hawkins, Michael Hordern, and Robert Morley.

          The story begins with Lionheart suffering the final humiliation of an unsatisfying career: Critics deny him the award he longed to win for his farewell season. Lionheart tries to kill himself but survives, then finds a hiding place and schemes, along with various murderous helpers, to kill each of his detractors in spectacular fashion. The bloody deaths involve cannibalism, decapitation, dismemberment, and other such horrors; as a result, Theatre of Blood lives up to its title with a fair amount of stomach-churning gore. Thankfully, the grimy stuff is complemented with a measure of wit. However, the storyline is quite episodic, so depending on one’s taste for bloodshed or Shakespeare (or both), the pattern of outlandish murders might seem repetitious after a while.

          What keeps the movie watchable, therefore, is Price’s giddy flamboyance. Masterfully employing his singular voice and rearranging his elastic features into masks of artistic anguish or sadistic glee, as the scene demands, Price plays for the cheap seats in every scene, somehow managing to simultaneously deliver a credible performance and spoof his reputation for hammy showboating. Although Theatre of Blood never quite rises above its fright-cinema constraints, the way the Dr. Phibesmovies did with their perverse campiness, the movie is a treat for fans of offbeat horror films and, of course, for devotees of Price’s unique screen persona.

Theatre of Blood: GROOVY