The Comedy of Terrors is one of those films that one wants to like more than one does. It has a director with top-notch credentials in the genre (Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), The Leopard Man (1943), Night of the Demon (1957)), a first-rate cast (Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone), Richard Matheson on script duties, Floyd Crosby behind the camera and Daniel Haller looking after the sets. But, although it’s better than American International’s previous full-length comedy in the Edgar Allan Poe mode, The Raven (1963) (this makes no claims to be based on Poe, though Price’s character tries a drunken stab at a few lines from The Raven), it’s still not as good as the sum of its parts.

In the late 19th century in the New England town of New Gilead, drunken undertaker Waldo Trumbull (Price) has taken over the running of the business from his elderly and senile father in law Amos Hinchley (Karloff) after marrying his daughter Amaryllis (Joyce Jameson). With the weaselly Felix Gillie (Lorre) by his side, the unscrupulous Trumbull reuses coffins, murders potential wealthy clients and tries to poison Hinchley. Threatened with eviction by his landlord John F. Black (Rathbone), Trumbull murders shipping merchant Mr Phipps (Buddy Mason) but is double crossed by the man’s widow who flees left town with her late husband’s money, leaving the funeral bill unpaid. The only option left seems to be to murder Black and having accidentally given him a heart attack, Trumbull and Gillie prepare him for burial only to find that he’s cataleptic and is very hard for them to keep down.

There are some fine moments here – Price’s bitchiness, though often bordering on the misogynistic when he rails against Amaryllis, is often very funny indeed and Rathbone gets a rare 60s part that actually suited him, and he steals the show at every turn. But Tourneur has no real affinity for comedy – it’s not a genre he’s particularly associated with – and he allows everything to be played in the broadest of strokes. In fact, he seems to find genuine laughs so hard to come by that he has to resort to cheap tricks like accelerated motion, comedy sound effects and “funny” musical cues from Les Baxter, none of which are ever as amusing as he thinks they are.

Lorre was nearing the end and would die two months after the film’s release but still puts in a decent enough turn as the bungling sidekick to Price and they make for a likeable pair of rogues. Sadly Karloff, suffering severe arthritis, had to give up the role of Black to play the less demanding role of Hinchley and is subsequently wasted in a part that anyone could have done, though his funeral eulogy scene is a hoot and his best moment in the film – he really should have been given the chance to do more comedy. Add to that an annoying turn from Joyce Jameson (Amaryllis’ tendency to burst into very bad opera singing gets very annoying, very quickly) and a hammy one from vaudevillian Joe E. Brown in one of his final screen appearances and suddenly that glittering cast doesn’t seem like such an impressive draw any more.

Despite spirited turns from Price and Rathbone, both of whom make the film worth watching, The Comedy of Terrors never really catches fire. It’s repetitive, episodic, obvious and never really works as either comedy or horror. Tourneur does better with the latter than the former and the artificiality of the sets is actually used rather well, but he’s a very long way here from his best work in the genre. When it gets things right – mainly in allowing Price, Lorre and particularly Rathbone free rein to indulge in Matheson’s often very witty dialogue – it’s entertaining enough, but it never quite scales the heights one would expect given the talents involved and Tourneur’s apparent lack of confidence in the jokes and reliance on comedy audio cues is a disappointment.

Today, The Comedy of Terrors has its fans, finally finding the audience that largely eluded it when it was first released in December 1963. In Philip J. Riley’s book The Making of the Raven, Matheson is quoted as saying that “it didn’t lose any money. […] It’s such a contradiction in terms, though. Terror sells and comedy makes them go away, so it’s like they’re walking in two directions at once. But I thought it was very clever to do a take off of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors […] I think they were probably sorry they didn’t use a Poe title, because Poe had a certain marketability. I guess they couldn’t figure out how to market it.” As a result, the film was a box office disappointment though far from a flop. Matheson had plans to reunite the same cast for another film for AIP, Sweethearts and Horrors, with Price recast as a ventriloquist, Karloff as a children’s television host, Rathbone as a musical comedy star, Lorre as a magician and Tallulah Bankhead taking over the female lead. But a combination of The Comedy of Terrors disappointing performance and Lorre’s death put paid to that.