Vincent Price fulfills the vicarious dreams of many an actor as the "hero" of the stylish horror romp Theatre of Blood. Price plays Edward Lionheart, a Shakespearean ham who exacts a cunning revenge when he is denied a "Best Actor of the Year" award by an aggregation of influential London theatre critics. After supposedly committing suicide, Lionheart, together with his loyal but woefully misguided daughter Edwina (Diana Rigg) and a group of zombie-like derelicts, arranges the deaths of all eight critics, with each killing inspired by a scene from a Shakespeare play. Michael Hordern is drowned in a butt of malmsey a la Richard III; Richard Coote loses a pound of flesh, in the manner of The Merchant of Venice; Robert Morley is force-fed his own poodles in a variation on the climax of Titus Andronicus; and so forth. Only Ian Hendry, the most likeable and least pretentious of the critics, begins to detect a subtle pattern emerging when his colleagues begins dropping like flies. Theatre of Blood is admittedly a one-joke movie, and does fall victim to repetition and predictability after a while; still, Price is a delight to watch, while the various victims seem to be having a high old time getting knocked off. Sidebar: one of the most violent retributions is enacted upon Coral Browne, who in real life fell in love with Vincent Price on the set of Theatre of Blood and shortly thereafter became his third wife.