By
Hank Reineke
The Cinerama Releasing Co. was in its seventh year of film
distribution in 1973. The distributor
had earned a reputation in the industry for working successfully with producers
to distribute independent films. Such business
partnerships had proven beneficial to both parties. In 1973 Cinerama scored big with two
modest-budget indie hits: Michael Campus’s Blaxploitation pic The Mack (1973) and Phil Karlson’s Walking Tall (1973). Since the horror film genre was a (mostly) dependable
box office gamble for low-budget film productions, Cinerama scored handsomely
in 1972 with the domestically produced Willard
rat-fest and the decidedly more up-scale and colorfully creepy Amicus-import Tales from the Crypt.
Hoping to continue to capitalize on this successful
trend, Cinerama was preparing to distribute a slate of new horrors in 1973: the
British Amicus production And Now the
Screaming Starts, the U.S. produced mystery-horror Terror in the Wax Museum, and indie Freedom Art’s Doctor Death. Box
Office reported in September of 1973, that Cinerama had only recently acquired
the rights to Doctor Death. It promised the film would showcase “optical
effects unseen before on screen... the illusion of souls passing from one body
to another.” That was they called ballyhoo. We’d actually seen it all before, as the effects
offered in Doctor Death had been
present as early as the silent film era. Doctor Death, whose full title
is actually Doctor Death: Seeker of Souls,
was the brainchild of producer/director Eddie Saeta and associate producer/screenwriter
Sal Ponti. It was the latter’s first
(and only) produced screenplay. Ponti worked mostly – if infrequently - as a
film actor and occasional songwriter. In
contrast, director Saeta had a long-running career in Hollywood, working on
studio lots and behind the camera from 1937 on. He was second generation Hollywood. Saeta’s dad had worked in the electrical department for Columbia Pictures
from the late 1920s on.
It was through his father’s connections that Eddie Saeta worked
as a messenger for Columbia studio chief Harry Cohn. He worked his way through the ranks,
ultimately serving as an assistant or 2nd unit director for such
studios as Columbia and Monogram. He mostly
assisted in churning out such low-budget fares as westerns, East Side Kids
films and even The Three Stooges in Orbit
(1962). (That latter film explains the
curious and brief walk through of septuagenarian Moe Howard in Doctor Death). In his later years, Saeta also worked
extensively as an AD on television. Eagle-eyed James Bond fans might also
recognize Saeta’s name from his front end credit as co-Location Manager for
1971’s Diamonds are Forever.
Ponti’s original script wasn’t uninteresting in
concept. Distraught over the loss of his
wife in a deadly automobile accident he blames on himself, Dr. Fred Saunders
(Barry Coe) goes to great lengths to see her revived by supernatural means. He visits her corpse daily where she lies in
state in a conveniently unlocked crypt. Though his friend Greg (Stewart Moss) presses, “For God sake, let Laura
rest in peace!” Fred is unable to do so. He visits any number of charlatans who profess revivification but who
are unable to deliver on their promises.
Things change when Fred meets Tana (Florence Marley) who
professes the greatness of an ex-magician known as “Doctor Death” (John
Considine). She describes the not-so-good Doctor as, “The genius of all ages,
the man who has conquered death.” The problem with Doctor Death is that while
he’s actually pretty good in his practice of “selective reincarnation,” he also
displays many characteristics you’d prefer your resurrectionist to not have: he’s a pompous, selfish,
sadistic, pervert with a necrophilic bent.
He’s also a vampire… of a sort. We learn Doctor Death is more than a thousand
year’s old. He sustains himself not on
the feeding of blood of his victims, but by the absorption of their souls. Dracula, of course, is Dracula. He too may be a thousand or so years old, but
he manages to retain his original physical appearance through the centuries. As someone who absorbs the souls of others,
Doctor Death conversely takes on the physical appearance of whomever his latest
victim might be. Through his soul
absorptions, the doctor has appeared over centuries in any number of multi-racial,
multi-ethic and transgender forms. The
problem facing the grieving Fred is that Doctor Death, the heralded “genius of
all ages,” has been unable to rustle up a suitable fresh corpse to transpose
its soul to that of the still very dead Linda. Which was sort of the point of Fred’s hiring him.
Doctor
Death was released in November of 1973, the film
unflatteringly described by one critic as, “one of a handful of year end
grotesqueries being dumped into theaters like a movie distributor’s version of
a clearance table.” The reviews of Doctor Death were, in fact, mostly poor
to middling. A Pittsburgh Press critic offered, the picture looked “like a grainy
blow-up of a 16mm film and with the sort of flat soundtrack that usually
accompanies porno films, this would-be horror item is horrible in ways not
intended.” But I’d say such criticism is
a bit unfair. Though the film’s Colorlab visuals are dark and gritty,
this is after all an early 1970s production. Some of the film’s exterior’s sequences were photographed in and around
Los Angeles’s Sunset Boulevard. It was
intended to appear a bit seedy.
I’d argue the cinematography of Emil Oster and Kent
Wakeford – both pros - was at least on par with such contemporary L.A. based horror-themed
productions as The Night Stalker, the
Count Yorga and Blacula films, and TV’s Night
Gallery. In any case, if one’s nostalgic for the 1970s, this film is for
you. The first-half of the decade is duly
represented by telltale flashes of ‘70s hairstyles and clothing, of gaudy apartment
furnishings and oversize gas-guzzling automobiles.
Doctor
Death is occasionally defended as a misunderstood horror-comedy. That’s a bit of a stretch though it’s clear
that Ponti’s script did try to lace his tale with a sprinkling of graveyard
humor. The problem is that the satire,
as written, is just too subtle (or perhaps so poorly played throughout) that
many critics missed this angle. Variety thought the film too
melodramatic and this, they reckoned, is what invoked “unconscious laughs” by
those attending. But perhaps some of
those chuckles were intentional. The Louisville
Courier-Journal, on the other hand, saw no humor in the film at all. They lambasted, “A new horror has been
released from the creaky medieval dungeons, and to tell the honest truth, [it]
should have stayed there.”
Well, I disagree. Doctor Death, while no classic, does
manage to offer ninety-minutes of dark entertainment and a smile or two. The Los
Angeles Times was one of the few newspapers to recognize the film’s lighter
aspects, describing Doctor Death as a
“silly but kinda cute and ultimately entertaining spoof” of the horror-pic biz -
with Considine playing the role of an “ersatz John Carradine.” The San
Francisco Examiner also noted Doctor
Death was, in essence, “a gruesome horror film that tries unsuccessfully to
equate merriment with slaughter.” “The
film sustains a certain amount of suspense,” its critic conceded. “But its unpleasant theme is quite repellant,
especially in sequences that suggest Considine’s necrophilic [sic] persuasion.”
New York’s Independent
Film Journal thought Considine’s performance, “rampantly theatrical, and
that’s not a help because he isn’t rampantly hammy as well. And it would take an actor as overblown as
Vincent Price to get some good fun into the good doctor.” This is a pretty prescient observation. Throughout Doctor Death, I also reflected on how Considine’s cool portrayal of
the loathsome magician-turned-resurrectionist was simply off. He was OK when the role tasked him to be manipulative
and sinister, but the absence of black-comedy winks are also painfully in evidence. It would
have taken someone of Vincent Price’s caliber to pull it off. Price had, managed to successfully mix horror
and humor a decade earlier in such earlier productions as Roger Corman’s The Raven (1963) and Jacques Tourneur’s The Comedy of Terrors (1963). And, of course, in the more recent and devilishly
tongue-in-cheek horror classic Theatre of
Blood.
It’s of some interest to note that Price was about to play
a character named “Dr. Death” in the forthcoming Amicus/A.I.P. co- production
of Madhouse (1974). It’s likely had Saeta’s flick not beaten Madhouse to the gate, the Price film
might even have been released under it’s working title: The Revenge of Dr. Death. It’s almost certain the poor box-office reception of Cinerama’s Doctor Death was part of the decision of
the Madhouse team’s intent to re-title
and separate their new Vincent Price/Peter Cushing vehicle far from Saeta’s
bargain basement production.
It’s also worth noting that even Cinerama and
theater-owners thought Doctor Death not
strong enough to stand alone. The film
wasn’t playing on many upscale first-run screens, the picture almost completely
relegated to grindhouses and west-coast drive-ins. Depending on the market, Doctor Death was part of a double or triple feature bill. These combo-bills mixed newish pics (Scream, Blacula, Scream (1973) and The Legend of Hell House (1973), with psychological
thrillers and mysteries (Scream, Baby,
Scream (1969), The Butcher
(1970), Bluebeard (1972), The Other (1972) and A Name for Evil (1973). The film was also paired with an assortment
of horror pictures on their second and third runs: (Count Yorga, Vampire (1970), Countess
Dracula (1971), Lady Frankenstein
(1971), The House That Dripped Blood (1971)
and Asylum (1972). There were even a few golden oldies sprinkled
into the bills when prints were available: (The
Pit and the Pendulum (1964) and the incongruous A Long Ride from Hell (1968), a spaghetti western with Steve (Hercules)
Reeves.
Even with such support, the box-office of Doctor Death was mostly weak. In its first week of screenings in San
Francisco, the film pulled in a mere $4,500. When the film rolled out regionally, it pulled in only $2,500 on its
first week Pittsburgh, but did slightly better in Detroit with a take of
$4,000. But as Christmas week
approached, even the Detroit sank to $2,500. The film did some surprising first week receipts in Chicago with a gross
of $30,000. It might have been helpful
that in Chicago the film had been paired as a double with the old school mystery
Terror in the Wax Museum: a film featuring
familiar faces (Ray Milland, Elsa Lanchester, John Carradine and Broderick
Crawford). Regardless, the combo’s take in the Windy City dropped to $16,500 on
week two and (as per Variety) a “tepid”
$10,000 of earnings on week three. Though the film seemed destined to play New York City’s “Deuce” strip on
its initial run, by mid-January of 1974, Doctor
Death would only made it to screens near the upper regions of New York
State before disappearing completely from sight.
In any event, the folks at Scorpion Releasing are making
sure that Doctor Death doesn’t
disappear from your home video screen. This release, taken from a 2015
High-Definition master from the Original Camera Negative is as good as it
likely will ever look. The special
features include both an audio commentary and separate interview with actor
John Considine, as well the reminiscences of director Eddie’s son, Steve. The set arounds out with the film’s trailer
and a “new” light-hearted introduction courtesy of Doctor Death himself. I suggest fans of 1970s fringy horror make
their appointment with doctor.
Click here to order from Amazon