The Comedy of Terrors / The Raven (Midnite Movies Double Feature)

Vincent Price and Peter Lorre star in a chilling double feature. Business is booming at a funeral parlor that employs a murderous undertaker in Comedy of Terrors (Basil Rathbone. 1964/84 min.), and three powerful magicians engage in a battle for supremacy in The Raven (Boris Karloff. 1963/86 min.). Color/NR.
I love Vincent Price and Peter Lorre, not to mention Poe, so I was certainly looking forward to watching these.

The first movie is The Comedy of Terrors and it really is quite funny. Since you've read the plot a million times on these reviews, I'll cut to the chase. Vincent Price and Peter Lorre try to drum up more business for a funeral home through murder, hence more customers.
Vincent Price is laugh out loud funny, and really does have a talent for comedy, as does Peter Lorre. The facial expressions of Price are fantastic, as they were in Tales of Terror and it's an enjoyable film to watch. Watch for the actress called "Beverly Hills" in this one. (You'll recognize her by her, uh, name.) On a last note with this movie, Joyce Jameson, sexy as always, plays the wife of Vincent Price in this, and it's just so nice to watch a film where you know that all the women involved have natural figures from the waist up. No guessing here. This era has passed.

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Comedy, Horror, Suspence,

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Massacre Mafia Style (1978)

For longtime fans of Grindhouse cinema, the trailer for Duke Mitchell's Massacre Mafia Style is a real beloved treasure. Speaking personally, I can say that ever since I first saw it, it's been one of my all time favorites. One thing I always wanted to know after seeing it was whether the actual film lived up to the trailers iconic outrageousness. Well, after viewing the film now for the first time (thanks to a friend sending me a DVD-R copy of it), I am very happy to say that Massacre Mafia Style (aka The Executioner) is a really solid, entertaining, emotional low-budget mafia film.
The main man behind it all was Duke Mitchell, who film geeks may know from movies like Bela Lugosi Meets A Brooklyn Gorilla (1952), which he co-starred in with his then comedy partner Sammy Petrillo. Mitchell and Petrillo were actually an act that was a direct rip-off of Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis. Mitchell was the suave Dean Martin clone and Sammy Petrillo was the boy-monkey Lewis wannabe. They were later sued as a result. In the late 1970s, Mitchell produced, wrote and directed two mafia genre films, Massacre Mafia Style and Gone With The Pope which was never completed before Mitchell's death in 1981, but thanks to the folks at Grindhouse Releasing, the film hopefully will be seeing the light of day on DVD in the near future.

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1978, Crime, Drama, Italy, Suspence, Thriller,

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