“Oh, and he was such a wonderful poet. He wrote about the most beautiful things. Things about…about midgets with eye trouble and…and little girls with bald heads.”
Incredible, trashy drug adventure starring Vincent Price as Tomas De Quincey, an early 19th-century adventurer involved with helping runaway slave girls and victims of a tong war in San Francisco. Garbed in black from head to toe, Price narrates his adventures. The highlight: a long, unbelievable, violent, slow-motion drug trip/fight scene—worth the price of admission! In the late ‘60s this Albert Zugsmith epic was a favorite of drugged patrons at midnight shows. At the slave auction where beautiful Oriental girls are displayed in hanging bamboo cages, Vincent befriends a tiny wisecracking female Oriental dwarf. The tong leader turns out to be a woman in drag and the story ends in a sewer. At least real Orientals were given major roles for a change. It was Zugsmith’s last production shown legally to viewers under 18. His next was Fanny Hill, directed by Russ Meyer.
