DoctorOod

I actually suffered through this entire shovelful of cinematic tripe. The participants must have been desperate for money, but even that cannot excuse the miserable demonstration of their pitiful efforts and the eternal embarrassment that must attach to them. The acting (if it may be so called) was wooden and slack jawed; the music just...sucked, just sucked, is the appropriate description; and the direction was incompetent and hopelessly lost and inept. I will single out Judy Geeson, the famed British actress and putative star of this mess, for special praise: her most memorable and rewarding effort was the Giving Birth scene. It was hysterically, ridiculously, inconceivably funny and gave me the only laugh I had throughout this entire sodden mess.

Universal embalmed the Phantom in a Technicolor coffin in 1943. Spectacular sets and costuming, a cloying romantic triangle, inappropriate comedy, and plodding direction doom a production that cannot be saved by even this large, talented cast. It is not a horror movie. It is an MGM musical kind of production (without the pizzazz) in which the horror elements are subordinated to an onslaught of boring opera that adds nothing to the story or pacing. The original with Chaney, and Hammer's version with Herbert Lom are by far superior and more engaging. The pretentious abomination of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical version can trace its lineage to this film, as can the 1998 floperoo starring Julian Sands.

As other reviewers have noted, it was apparently shot without a script and grafted on to another unfinished movie. Christopher Lee is the attraction here, but even he can't salvage this doomed production. Its incomparable awfulness encompases: 1) the single worst acting performance ever committed to film (Ardisson, as "Gugo," itself an unforgettable travesty); 2) the flabby has-been stripper Alma De Rio stumbling through a dance in which she waddles drunkenly while wiggling her hefty avordupois (without removing a stitch, thank God); and, 3) a solo guitar dirge opening "theme" that sounds like a 10 year-old trying to pick out a tune on an instrument for the first time. Execrable and stupefying, like watching an animal eating another animal's vomit.or feces.