Great movie.
LaVey wishes.
Great movie and NOT a “kiddie” movie at all! It’s very clever, well written, well acted by a marvelous ensemble cast! The sequel isn’t as good, but still worth seeing.
Looks like a depiction of wickedness carried out in a most poetic and whimsical fashion.
Whatever people might dream up as being spectacularly satanic, it’s generally the more humdrum forms of evil by which the devil almost always gets his way (when he gets his way, which God makes pretty difficult to keep up). Like C. S. Lewis put it through his Screwtape character, murder is no better than cards to damn a man, if cards will do the trick.
God could vastly more easily redeem a Dr. Phibes situation (if it could even come to pass) than the situation of gang bangers. At least Dr. Phibes seems to want to salute something higher, even though his ideas are utterly cuckoo. His revenge ideas are simply not characteristic of the revenge plots we know of in the world.