Theatre of Blood

a film review in verse
 
An Oscar winner starring in
a horror film sounds like a sin.
But great actors have brought to bear
a lot of charm to monsters’ lairs.
It’s just a shame that Vincent Price
wasn’t treated very nice.
He deserved the Oscar more
than many men who’ve swept the board.
 
It must have seemed a mercy, then,
to let him speak the Bard’s blank ten.
Iambic rhythms pouring from
the gullet of this strutting tom.
A chilling festival of shock
made glory by the son of schlock,
the film stars Price as Lionheart,
a thesp who starts to kill, for art.
 
Skewered by the critics, he
decides to skewer them, and see
if Shakespeare’s tragedies
can be made flesh in days like these.
The ‘70s, to be precise,
and so the sixty-something Price
kidnaps and cooks Robert Morley’s
beloved pets... dog-and-ale pie, with peas.
 
Titus Andronicus, that one.
Plus there’s lots of bloody fun
with Troilus and Cressida,
Othello, Julius Caesar,
Henry the VI, Part 1, King Lear,
and Cymbeline. It’s weird
and humorous to see Shakespeare
be wrought in technicolour fear.