Watch The Mad Magician For Free

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

While this film invites comparison to House of Wax, this film is totally it's own, while House of Wax was a remake of a 1930' s film. The crew of House of Wax sort of stayed together to do this one. Both films were originally in 3D. Both films have the same director.What is interesting here is that the women in the cast at ages 23 (Mary Murphy Karen Lee) and 35 Ava Gabor (Claire Ormond) are younger than the males in the cast, the film focus is so much on magic that you hardly notice the women. The plot involves Price as the mad magician(Don Gallico / Gallico the Great) who people seem to keep stealing his trick from him. So he gets upset with these thieves and starts killing them. Then he develops masks of these deceased people he has killed including (John Emery -The Great Rinaldi) and keeps them alive performing as them on stage. Meanwhile, Price's own persona seems gentle and kind to humanity.Ava Gabor (Claire Ormond) plays Prices Ex-Wife, stolen from him by a rich man (Donald Randolph ...Ross Ormond ) that Price kills while she is overseas spending all of his money. She comes back, gets wise to the hidden death of her husband, and gets murdered by Price to continue the cover up. As the tricks pile up, a police detective who uses finger prints to catch killers, catches on to Prices plot. (Patrick O'Neal). The unmasking has a really hot conclusion.While it is not House of Wax, the cast is literally stacked with people that were in a lot of 1950's Sci-Fi films.

This early Vincent Price horror film, borrowed quite liberally from The Phantom Of The Opera, has Price playing the role of a master magician who for some reason is tied to a contract whereby he creates various tricks and illusions for other name magicians, but can't go out on his own. Sounds to me like he needed a good lawyer.Set in the Gay Nineties, The Mad Magician has Price finally snapping with that insane arrangement and starting to reek some vengeance on those who are responsible for his predicament as he sees it. Several murders have the police baffled because Price is a master of illusion. He's also a master of masks, the kind that would not be really developed until a few generations passed, the kind that is used in Hollywood today.Price gives his usual professional performance. I wonder why in his career he never did tackle The Phantom Of The Opera. I'm guessing he thought that between them Lon Chaney, Claude Rains, and Herbert Lom did just about all there could be done with the part.

The line went all the way around the Elm Theater in Elmwood, Ct., when this was shown in 1954.It wasn't screened in 3-D, but still scared me silly! I now own a film print of it, as well as a 35mm 3-D print of House Of Wax. Wax had bigger budget, stereo sound called WarnerPhonic if I recall. Both are excellent, and the two together are definitely my choices for Price's best, followed by SHOCK and DRAGONWYCK. I know many will like his later films, which have many great titles also; House of Usher, Comedy of Terrors, The Raven, Theater of Blood,.....I could go on and on. And I should have included THE TINGLER and HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL in my favorites....especially THE TINGLER, which also had a color partial scene in it, and was definitely equal to WAX and MAGICIAN in its terror.Gotta love VP for being so "swarmy"!!!!

This was enjoyable, but certainly no classic. It's fun to watch the actor Vincent Price in these insane roles. I was surprised to read, in the credits, Eva Gabor was a player; I thought she looked familiar, but she did not have the familiar wig from later years. The furnace was hot, but the disguises were easy to see through, I thought. The final scene had good suspense, but I knew Mr. Price's character was going to hop on that conveyor belt.Lenita Lane and Jay Novello seemed very familiar as the Prentiss couple. They must have played these kind of roles in other films; they should starred in a TV sit-com together. ***** The Mad Magician (5/19/54) John Brahm ~ Vincent Price, Mary Murphy, Eva Gabor