There was a time when Malcolm McDowell’s status as a jobbing actor in numerous celluloid stinkers appeared to eclipse his defining roles in Stanley Kubrick’s A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and Lindsay Anderson’s IF.
However, good reviews for Amazon Studios’ Mozart In The Jungle brought him back to public attention in a way he maybe hadn’t experienced for a while. This success may be consolidated by his now taking the lead in a remake of Vincent Price comedy horror classic THE ABOMINABLE DR.PHIBES.
The 1971 movie saw Price’s irrevocably-scarred academic seek revenge on the surgeons who he believed killed his wife following the devastating car crash that put her in hospital and destroyed his face. To make things more interesting he despatched each of them in the florid fashion of the Old Testament’s Ten Plagues Of Egypt. A sequel, DR.PHIBES RISES AGAIN, followed and Price made the similarly-themed THEATRE OF BLOOD later in the decade.
McDowell’s take will be called FOREVER PHIBES and is the brainchild of William Goldstein, who co-wrote the first film. This appears to be an attempt to kickstart a franchise, which Goldstein had been trying to get off the ground throughout the Seventies and Eighties.
McDowell is no stranger to resurrecting popular horror characters, having taken over from Donald Pleasence as another medical man, Dr. Loomis, in Rob Zombie’s reworking of John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN saga.
Source: BleedingCool
