(no subject)

As a treat, I've just re-watched The Abominable Dr Phibes (Amazon: "an unusually beautiful* horror classic in which Vincent Price stars as the titular genius who specialises in organ music, theology and concocting bizarre deaths for anyone who wrongs him") in preparation for getting out the sequel (which I have not yet seen) on DVD.

* Sumptuous art deco sets!

The Ten Plagues, according to Dr Phibes, are known as katakh (!?), and happened according to the following canonical order (the real order following in square brackets):

1. שחין Boils (caused in the film by bee stings) [6]
2. דבר Bats (IRL a murrain on cattle [5])
3. צפרדע Frog—true to the midrash, although possibly this was just a coincidence, this plague consisted of one giant frog rather than a multitude of little ones. [2]
4. דם Blood [1]
5. כנים Rats (IRL fleas—and illustrated at 29:40 with the drawing of something else altogether) [3] (but occurred out of sequence as seventh in the film)
6. ברד Hailstones [7] (but occurred out of sequence as sixth in the film)
7. ערוב Wild beasts (IRL swarms of flies [KJV], "a mixture of noxious animals" [Rashi] [4])
8. ארבה Locusts [8]
9. מכת בכרות Death of the firstborn [10]
10. חשך Darkness [9]

You'd have thought with such a well-known Biblical passage, they'd follow both the canonical identity of the plagues and their canonical order—or at least openly acknowledged that Phibes was deviating from that order—rather than risking people spotting and drawing attention to this error (aka diddling with the Biblical account), but evidently not...

Still, even though on second viewing (the first was in about 1990, when my critical faculties were much less honed), I spotted a number of minor flaws of this kind, it remained fun viewing (and I say this as someone who doesn't like horror films in general; it's more subtly humorous than scary). (Review elsewhere on the Web: "One danger to aging horror films is that one generation's terror has a way of turning into the next generation's camp. The Abominable Dr Phibes avoids this danger, because it was always, intentionally, camp.")