Diary of a Madman (1963)

Best movie of this year hands down!

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Vincent Price is in very fine form as he portrays a 19th century French magistrate named Simon Cordier. After a fateful discussion with a condemned man (Harvey Stephens), Cordier becomes susceptible to the machinations of an evil spirit which is called a Horla. The Horla (voiced by Joseph Ruskin) very much forces itself on Cordier, compelling him to kill.Based on the writings of Guy de Maupassant, and scripted by producer Robert E. Kent, "Diary of a Madman" gets its title due to the fact that the doomed Cordier takes the time to set down his thoughts. The balance of the film deals with the battle of wills between the magistrate and the spirit. Effectively given voice by Ruskin, the Horla is quite the sardonic and contemptuous entity.But don't go into this one expecting a lot of horror elements, or anything resembling a "body count" sort of affair. "Diary of a Madman" is rather light on horror; indeed, it even spends a fair amount of time detailing the evolving relationship between Cordier and the young lady Odette Mallotte (gorgeous Nancy Kovack), who serves as a model when a psychiatrist (Nelson Olmsted) advises Cordier to return to his old hobby of sculpting.Special effects are kept to a minimum, keeping this from turning into cheese. The lighting effect on Prices' eyes is amusing, and there's one show stopping moment of clay animation, as the facial expression on a sculpture changes. Art director Daniel Haller and cinematographer Ellis W. Carter certainly give the production an exquisite look, and the music by Richard LaSalle is full of foreboding.Price is again a perfect picture of elegance as a bedeviled antagonist, and the scenes of him and Ruskin interacting are compelling. The supporting cast is superb: Chris Warfield as Odettes' painter husband, Elaine Devry as his friend, Edward Colmans as her father, Ian Wolfe and Mary Adams as the magistrates' staff, Stephen Roberts as a police captain, Lewis Martin as a priest, and Dick Wilson as an employee in Cordiers' office.As directed by Reginald Le Borg, this isn't a great story & film, but it is reasonably entertaining, and definitely worth a look for any Vincent Price fan.Six out of 10.

This film really needed a little more something - maybe a quicker pace? It does drag on in places for way to long. Now don't get me wrong it is worth watching and mainly for Vincent Price. Price is the biggest draw or attraction in this film, but then again he is for all his films. Price drives this film while the others in the film pale in comparison and are a bore to watch.It is exactly the way the synopsis reads: Simon Cordier (Price), a sculptor possessed by an evil invisible spirit, hires a model to pose for him then learns thereafter that she has been brutally murdered.I can say there is an invisible man, a spirit of sorts, that haunts Simon Cordier (Price). If that sounds interesting then you might like the film.7/10

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.

Most horror movies made between the '50's and '70's weren't very much psychological once and featured for instance monsters, gore and tons of blood. In that regard "Diary of a Madman" is a quite refreshing movie. It lies its emphasis on the psychological aspects of the movie and uses it for its tension, mystery and just overall horror, even though the movie still features a 'supernatural' horror theme.The movie has a well build up and constructed story, that only gets better and better as it heads toward the ending. The movie begins quite typical but soon becomes very intriguing when it becomes obvious that just is not just another average standard '60's horror flick, with Vincent Price in the lead role. The movie shows how the highly respected magistrate/sculptor slowly looses his mind when he is being possessed by a strange mysterious spirit called an Horla. Of course no one believes him at first when he starts to hear and see things. He starts to question his own sanity, until the Horla has him in his almost complete control. Good old Vincent Price however decides to fight back and we already at the start sort of know what has happened, since the movie is told in the past time, when people read his diary in which he described the strange events that had happened.So you don't really have to expect an horror movie with monster, gore and scare effects. This movie is mostly about its build-up and overall atmosphere. It's a psychological movie, though visually the movie is also a good one.The movie features quite some early and variating special effects and other cinematic tricks. It's quite clumsy looking all of course but at least you can say that they really tried and put some effort in it to making something new.Vincent Price of course always had been at his best in roles such as these, so this movie forms no exception to that. He is highly convincing as the respected magistrate but also as the 'madman'. Two of course total opposite elements, which Price perfectly knows to handle, without ever making anything look ridicules or totally unbelievable. It's a real surprisingly good and quite different '60's horror flick, that deserves to be seen and known better, starring genre-legend Vincent Price!8/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/