Of all the directors to have come and gone in Hollywood, perhaps no other director had such a P.T. Barnum sense of showmanship than William Castle. Castle made gimmick shot laden 3D films in the 1950s before doing a string of successful gimmick films in the late 50s and early 60s. His best known gimmicks were Emergo, used for The House on Haunted Hill, where an inflatable skeleton was wheeled over the audience's heads in one scene, Illusion-O for 13 Ghosts with it's silly ghost viewer (not a 3D movie as some have speculated), and perhaps most (in)famous of all, Percepto used for 1959's The Tingler. Percepto was the gimmick where certain theater seats were wired to give off an electric shock. At a certain part of the movie, the screen goes black and Vincent Price warns the audience to scream for their lives. In order to ensure that screams would follow, yes, the seats would give off a shock. Nobody could even dare such a gimmick today but in 1959, William Castle did.
The story of the movie manages to mostly hold it's own. Vincent Price plays a pathologist with an unhealthy interest in the tingling sensation you get when afraid. He thinks that the sensation is caused by a thing which can crush spines and determines he's going to find out more about it. He scares his unfaithful wife and manages to get X-Rays of an insect like creature on her spine. Dubbing it The Tingler, he's determined to catch a specimen for study. Naturally, the best way to do this is to scare himself by using LSD. Sadly for Vinnie, he screams before the creature can kill him and thus be captured (don't ask--Vinnie is just shy of being his usual nuts self in this). Interestingly, this is the first use of LSD in a movie and unlike later movies that made taking a Trip look like a gas, this one actually makes it look kinda frightening. Vinnie might oversell it a bit, but then again maybe he doesn't. I've never actually seen someone Trip, but I'm not counting on this for authenticity either.
Luckily for him, however, the deaf mute wife of a silent movie theater owner experiences some very weird things and ends up dying of fright. A full fledged Tingler is found attached to her spine. Price detaches the creature to study it. His wife uses it to try to kill him, but a well timed scream from the wife's ward stuns the creature.
Meantime, Price figures out that the theater owner killed his wife. He takes the Tingler back to the theater to put the Tingler back in the wife's body, thinking that that would be the only way to kill the beastie. Unfortunately, the creature escapes into the movie theater itself, cueing our long awaited gimmick scene, which admittedly is pretty pointless on TV.
Vincent Price, like Bela Lugosi before him, was one of those actors who was always professional. No matter how good, bad, or indifferent the movie he was in, he always put forward an effort and was frequently the best thing about the movie. The Tingler isn't a bad movie but it does take a while to get going. Point in fact, it takes nearly a full hour for the creature to show up, and this is only an 85 minute movie. Much of that first hour is a little too talky and in the hands of a lesser actor than Price would be almost deadly dull. The weird events that beset the deaf mute are great, but again that's almost an hour in. And while the film is somewhat suspenseful and scary when the creature is running around, some of it is pretty darn hokey and silly, too. There's a misplaced sense of timing when the creature starts into the theater with too many shots from the silent movie To-lable Dave taking away from the moment. Compared to the movie theater scene in The Blob, released just one year before, The Tingler falls down on the job big time.
A lot of people complain that 3D effect shots in 3D movies are pretty pointless in 2D. This is true, but of all the gimmicks, Percepto is perhaps the most pointless on TV. Unless you're actually going to wire your sofa up to duplicate the effect, the shots were the screen goes black and Price urges everyone to scream for all their worth because the Tingler is loose in the theater are downright goofy and pointless. New York's Film Forum theater occasionally shows The Tingler in Percepto and I guess under those circumstances it would be more fun.
All in all though, one watches this movie wanting to like it much better than one ends up doing. Price's other Castle production, The House on Haunted Hill, is much scarier and more fun and his best work--the Corman Poe productions--was still in front of him. I won't call The Tingler a bad movie, but it could and should have been better. Watch it if you want, but watch it primarily for Price and don't expect too much out of it.
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