Diary of a Madman (1963)

Absolutely amazing

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

This one had the makings of a great Vincent Price horror flick but somehow just manages to be 'ok.' I think part of the problem is that it just sort of hovers around the middle the entire time. It never rises above. No great scenes or moments. It's all competently produced and enjoyable but still there's something missing. Perhaps if director Reginald Le Borg's original vision of the Horla as being some distorted evil voice had been allowed it might have added an extra bit of creepiness to it that would have elevated the picture. But the studio didn't like that idea so we got the rather ordinary and underwhelming voice for the Horla instead.Basically it's a nice sort of Jekyll & Hyde movie with nothing exceptional about it except for the beauty of Nancy Kovack. Wow she was a stunner. I enjoyed it though and I would recommend it to all Price fans or classic horror fans, with the understanding that it's a movie with its limitations. Still entertaining though.

Since he's my favorite actor of all times, I just owe it to myself to track down and watch every single movie, TV-episode, cartoon and narrated documentary the almighty Vincent Price has ever been involved in. This has been going on for several years now, so naturally I have seen the most widely acclaimed and easily available ones numerous times already, and the ones I still occasionally discover are often obscure and practically forgotten for a reason. "Diary of a Madman", for example, certainly isn't a highlight in Price's career and understandably got pushed to the background when it came out in between much bigger crowd-pleasers like "The Raven", "The Haunted Palace", "Last Man on Earth" and "The Masque of Red Death". But seriously, even a mediocre Vincent Price film is still very much worth checking out, and "Diary of a Madman" is actually quite underrated and very entertaining. Simon Cordier has always been known as wealthy and highly respected magistrate, but nevertheless he was an emotionally tormented soul ever since he lost his first wife and child. The movie opens with Cordier's funeral service and a bizarrely horrific confession through his carefully updated diary. Whilst visiting a condemned man in jail, Cordier "inherits" his possession with an evil spirit called "The Horla". The next few days, Simon Cordier undergoes a mental metamorphosis and become restless and aggressive. He decides to take up his old hobby of sculpting again, and by doing so he meets and falls in love with a beautiful model named Odette. But The Horla homing inside Cordier is stronger and forces him to murder the girl and even abuse his magistrate position to have her ex-husband charged for it. Perhaps the main reason why "Diary of a Madman" isn't that great or memorable – not to me, at least – lies with the type of evil good old Vincent struggles with here. "The Horla", spawn from the mind of French novelist Guy De Maupassant, is sort of like a variant on "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" without the physical transformations. The evil spirit talks aloud (and way too much) to his host and behaves itself quite pompous and superior. Whenever Simon Cordier feels its presence, his eyes are covered in flashy green light and the widows blow open. But even worse than its attitude is the fact that the Horla doesn't specifically wants or needs anything. It gains absolutely nothing from possessing Cordier and even less from murdering the poor girl. Fans of obscure and almost- forgotten 60's horror will surely still enjoy "Diary of a Madman" is spite some of the defaults. The dialogs, choreography, camera-work and acting performances are splendid. Reginald Le Borg's direction is a bit absent occasionally. The murder sequence is quite gruesome and sadist for its time and the scenario touches some fairly progressive themes, like adultery.

Simon Cordier (Vincent Price) is a well-respected magistrate who visits a condemned prisoner, Louis Girot (Harvey Stephens), just before the man's execution... and finds him to be possessed by a demon! The film's plot goes in directions one might not expect. The inmate has a very small role, and Price's character is shown to be dead at the beginning -- how far in the future is this? He spends much the time courting a woman and sculpting her bust. None of this is really in any way related to the demon-possessed prisoner.When the demon is free of a body, it may be less murderous, but no less influential, and I find that a nice twist. The demon is a "horla", whatever that is. The original story has been cited as an inspiration for Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu", which also features an extraterrestrial being who influences minds and who is destined to conquer humanity. If this film is important to horror history in any way, it may be seen as an offshoot of Lovecraft.Mike Mayo calls the film "one of Vincent Price's best but least remembered efforts." While I consider Price's greatest but least known role to be "The Mad Magician", Mayo's point is still true. Going into this one with no expectations (having not heard of it), I was fairly impressed. It ranks much higher on my list than others would rank it on theirs, I think.On Scream Factory's excellent disc (part of the Vincent Price Collection, Volume 3) we have another Steve Haberman audio commentary. We must talk about Haberman's style. Rather than discuss anything happening on screen, Haberman goes on a long, passionless tangent about the story's author... but he does make up for this a bit by offering an amusing abbreviated history of Vincent Price's cinematic wives. Haberman is a person who is very smart, does very good research, but has not mastered the way to present it -- he essentially writes bios of people in the film's he is reviewing and reads their biographies. This is very dry and often does not offer much more than Wikipedia could, unfortunately.

Vincent Price is one of my all-time favorite actors, and it is undeniable that most of his greatest work comes from the the 60s. Even though not nearly as memorable as the masterpieces Price was in in the the early 60s (such as Roger Corman's brilliant Poe-cycle, or "The Last Man On Earth"), Reginald Le Borg's "Diary Of A Madman" is a moody and spooky little Horror tale that my fellow Price fans can not afford to miss.Price stars as Simon Cordier, a widowed magistrate, and spare-time sculptor. When Cordier visits a convicted murderer in his cell, the convict keeps swearing that he was forced to murder by an evil spirit. After a subsequent fight, in which Cordier accidentally kills the murderer in self-defense, he soon has to find out that the murderer's claims were not the foul excuses he thought they were, as he suddenly begins to hear the voice of evil himself. It is the voice of a 'Horla', a bizarre entity that feeds on evil, able to take control over people once it has possessed them... The film is based on the story "The Horla" by Guy de Monparnass, a French author whose writings reportedly served as a major inspiration to H.P. Lovecraft. Vincent Price is, as always, great. Pice always played madmen like no other, and the particular role as a possessed man who is still trying to fight the evil spirit possessing him fits him like a glove. It should be a joy for any fan of classic Horror to watch Vincent Price try to fight off evil and turn into a mindless executor of the Horla's will. The Horla is never seen, only heard, but the voice is eerie enough. The film is well-shot on cool settings and in nice colors and Nancy Kovack makes a nice female lead. The rest of the performances are not particularly memorably, but Vincent Price alone is more than enough.As mentioned above, "Diary Of A Madman" is not nearly as memorable as many other contemporary films with Price. Price starred in quite a bunch of brilliant flicks around that time, however, (one of his greatest films, "The Haunted Palace" was made in the same year as this one) and this is still a highly entertaining, eerie and nicely made film that none of his fans should miss. More than once, this film resembles older Vincent Price Classics, but, as far as I am considered, this is legitimate. Overall "Diary Of A Madman" is great, spooky fun that should not be missed by any of my fellow Price-enthusiasts! Highly recommended!