Unpleasant, alcoholic Waldo Trumbull (Vincent Price) runs the funeral business he’s taken over from his wife’s father (Boris Karloff). To dig up business, he and his employee, Felix Gillie (Peter Lorre), murder elderly members of the town. When their landlord (Basil Rathbone) comes for a year’s back rent, Trumbull decides he is next.
The major actors—along with writer Richard Matheson—of The Raven reunite for this dark farce. The major change is in director; Jacque Tourneur—best known for Curse of the Demon and his collaborations with Val Lewton, Cat People (1942), I Walked With a Zombie (1943), and The Leopard Man—was a genius with B&W on the cheep, and here shows he was even better with color, creating a vibrant picture. With this team, The Comedy of Terror was sure to be great…
Well, maybe good…
I guess I can settle for fair.
Price, Lorre, and Rathbone are all fine in scenery-chewing mode, but they’ve all done it better before. Karloff was too ill to do much of anything. The jokes are passable. but it goes on far too long. This is the stuff of a twenty minute short. Make this a third of an anthology feature and then the material would be put to good use. But as is, it is stretched. Every gag is repeated six or seven times. Each scene is twice as long as it needs to be. Since the outcome is clear early on, dragging it out is tiresome. The bits, taken on their own, may be good, but this is way too much of a good thing.