Shifting Lairs

I think I got more than four hours sleep last night, I'm not sure. Certainly not more than five. After a day spent vacuuming and dusting and moving furniture that hadn't been moved in a decade I was forcibly reminded that I have allergies. Sleeping in that room was difficult. I have no medication for allergies of any kind. The best I could do was make myself a hot toddy and watch a horror movie, which seemed to help.

I didn't take apart my computer until I got up at 6:20am. A couple hours later it was realised that since having my modem and router unplugged meant there was no WiFi, and therefore inconvenienced people who are not me, my computer had to be put back together immediately. So now I'm in an upstairs room where I'll be staying for a week. Since I never actually believed assurances work on my room would be finished in one day I wasn't surprised when grudgingly told the truth.

So here I am, tired, sneezing, coughing, and hoping I can be lucid at school to-night.

I'm starting to get quite a backlog of horror movies I've watched. At some point last week I watched The Abominable Dr. Phibes, a decent horror/comedy from 1971. Vincent Price stars as Phibes, a famous organist who lost his face in a car accident and now wears rubber prosthetics and speaks through some kind of tube and grammar phone rig.

He's sworn revenge against, and is systematically killing, a team of surgeons who failed to save his wife's life during a critical operation. Joseph Cotten plays Dr. Vesalius, the head surgeon and the film's protagonist to Phibes' villain.

This was the newest Joseph Cotten movie I've seen and it was nice to see he was still in good form. Still, most people probably went to see the movie for the top billed Vincent Price. I've often though how strange it is that Joseph Cotten was in so many great films (Citizen Kane, Shadow of a Doubt, The Third Man, Portrait of Jennie, Niagara) but his name doesn't often seem to come up when discussing classic Hollywood actors.

Anyway, The Abominable Dr. Phibes is pretty unabashedly campy with Phibes killing his victims with rats hidden on a plane, locusts dropped onto a sleeper from a hole in the ceiling, and, course, some big, adorable bats.

The movie has a nice look--Phibe's lair is very art nouveau. For some reason he has a house band of mechanical men and a beautiful, silent female assistant whose costumes combine with the music to give the film something of the distinctly late 60s/early 70s nostalgia for the 1920s.