User Reviews

What was probably too tense for T.V. anthology series like "Thriller" or "The Twilight Zone" ended up on the big screen in multi-story feature films which took short stories and adapted them into segments 2-20-30 minutes long. "Tales of Terror" has three stories, two dramatic and one comic, but all having two things in common: Edgar Allan Poe and Vincent Price. Wine flows in all three segments, and in all of them, the underlying motive for some of the characters is a definite act of lust.

The first segment, "Morella", shows the revenge of a dead woman (Leona Gage) against the daughter she blames for her early demise and the husband (Price) who has built a shrine to her and worshiped her for years, neglecting his daughter. Why Morella is so vindictive is never really explained other than the fact that she blames giving birth for dying three months later. In spite of that detail being omitted, it is truly suspenseful and ends deliciously horrifically.

The most popular of the three segments is the middle one, a variation of "The Black Cat", and not at all like the 1934 Karloff/Lugosi movie of the same name. This is the comical filling in the horror sandwich, obvious from the moment that the portly Peter Lorre comes home drunk to his much younger sexpot wife (Joyce Jameson), demanding money so he can go out and drink some more wine. He ends up in a wine drinking contest with professional wine taster Price who escorts the drunken Lorre home and meets the busty Jameson whom he is soon seeing on the side. Lorre plots delicious revenge, not realizing that his worst enemy will be the one to give him away.

"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar", the final part, is perhaps the goriest and definitely the most eerie. It is also extremely disturbing in the sense that it shows, with great pain, what happens when a body dies but the mind still lives, in this case Price being the victim of the witch doctor-like Basil Rathbone. It is the fact that Price considers Rathbone a friend that this ends up being the most evil of all actions in the three stories, because there seems to be no reason for Rathbone's obsessive desire to keep Price's mind still alive, in torture with a dead, decomposing body, and it seems to be even more horrific than being buried alive.

In watching these Gothic horror films from American International, the viewer can find a ton of entertainment, but there are some elements of each of these stories which classifies women in general in three ways: absolutely evil, absolutely good, and absolutely unfaithful. There are no in betweens for his female characters, while Price's characters are all urbane, witty, romantic and all of a sudden nefarious. Another aspect of many of these stories is the way Price turns from noble to insane, and the gruesome ways (usually a fire) his characters are dispatched.

An alternate title add's "Edgar Allen Poe's" to the beginning of the title, though fans of Poe's stories will be a tad confused to say the least because these stories are only broadly inspired by his stories. For example, the tale BLACK CAT is actually created by morphing Poe's "The Black Cat" with "The Cask of Amontillado" and allowing the writers to add and hack away a lot of material. Unfortunately, American International Pictures (never a place of "high art") used the titles but often little more of Poe's stories for a batch of movies starring Vincent Price. Some of them are very watchable and good, but they usually have contempt for the original material--straying extremely far from the original in most cases. Often, the public thought they were seeing a Poe tale, but it was really an all-new story from start to finish.

Despite this, this is still a pretty good film--particularly the third tale of the trilogy. I would score them as follows: the story about Morella (4), The Black Cat (6) and The hypnosis segment (9). So, as you can see, the stories got progressively better. The one about Morella just didn't make much sense and was dull. The Black Cat was, for me, too comedic in tone to be anything other than ordinary. But, the segment starring Basil Rathbone and Vincent Price was exciting and the only negative was the gross and silly melting special effect. Many will like it, but I think it was a bit too much. As for the acting and production values, they were pretty good for an AIP movie. Nothing to get excited over, but for fans of horror, I am sure you won't be disappointed.

As a kid, Vincent Price was right up there with my favorite horror movie icons, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, even though they were a generation apart. My first introduction to his films was probably "House on Haunted Hill" and even though somewhat dated now, it managed to give me the willies back in the day. In "Tales of Terror", Price teams up with horror director Roger Corman in a somewhat overly lavish production of three stories based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe. In particular, the extravagant use of color doesn't lend itself to the creepiness of the subject matter, and the picture might have been better served in good old black and white.

Of the three vignettes, I enjoyed the Black Cat story the best, particularly with Peter Lorre in full bloom matching wits with Price in a wine tasting challenge. Both actors go a bit over the top in their characterizations, and one might best describe the facial expressions of Fortunato Luchresi as, well, Price-less. The ending was somewhat telegraphed by the frequent appearance of Lorre's hated black cat, nevertheless an ironically classic Poe ending.

The Morella and Valdemar bookending segments are merely adequate at best. The first story doesn't end on any kind of note that makes sense considering the rest of the story, as the title character takes out a decades long revenge on her husband when it was her daughter she blamed for her own demise. With Valdemar, so much effort went into the subject of 'mesmeric control' that it would have been more appropriate for Price's character to overcome Carmichael (Basil Rathbone) using the power of thought. Not having read Poe's original treatment, I guess I would have handled the whole thing just a bit differently.

What struck me the most about Vincent Price's involvement in this film was the fact that his character died in each chapter. I don't know that a lot of actors would be willing to go that distance for the sake of their craft. But Price always delivered the goods with a classic stature and a melodious voice that made him just such a treat to watch and enjoy.

I made the stupid mistake before this film of actually reading the Poe stories on which it is based, thereby making it seem even sillier and shallower by comparison than it probably already was. Corman was never really interested in the real Poe, jettisoning his very difficult (both intellectually and ethically) ideas, cool stylistic method of relating the most appalling incidents and the tension between his narrative verbosity and tautly compact plots, declamatic precision and immense suggestiveness; retaining only the very superficial cod-Gothic trappings and the reputation for mental disease and horror the name Edgar Allen Poe conjures up.

So, in TALES OF TERROR, the adaptations of Poe are a nonsense. Rigorous tales written to dramatise philosophical tenets are turned into daft melodramas. Ciphers are turned into caricatures. The most intricately constructed allegories are literalised and made to seem childishly crass. Giving characters motivations and histories make a mockery of Poe's fictional chessmanship.

But if it's bad Poe, it's terrific Corman, and sometimes his additions bring interesting variations of their own. The first and third tales are the weakest. 'Morella' ignores most of the plot of the very short tale, and deals with the events after its climax. A young woman, Lenora Locke, arrives at a derelict castle, having been sent away by her father 26 years previously after the death of her mother, for which she was somehow blamed. Her father is initially hostile, clearly insane with the grief; the house, Miss Havisham-like, is exactly as it was on the day Morella died, a banquet table wreathed in cobwebs and tarantulas, the dead woman's skeleton, unburied in her chamber. Gradually, though Locke's sanity returns through the love of his daughter, dying herself after a lifetime of bad marriages and ill-treatment by men. But Morella still demands revenge.

Corman counters Poe's misogyny by shifting the viewpoint away from the male narrator to a fermale heroine who barely exists in the tale. It is she who enters the house, experiences its horrors, restores its doomed inmate. The revenge of Morella also moves away from the narrator to this daughter, only its instrument in the story. Poe's necro-aesthetics and musing on the fragmented mind and the Ideal Soul are ignored, but there is nothing put in their place - consequently, the film doesn't make much sense. We don't understand why Morella should want to wreak revenge on someone who might have killed her as a baby.

The plot becomes dominated by the women - the heroine is killed, Morella takes her place - masculinity is impotent and goes irretrievably insane; the house of the mind goes up in flames. The film's tortuous melodramatics are uninteresting, and Vincent Price's heart doesn't seem in it, but there is remarkable narrative commentary from the wonderful music, and a brisk fluidity to Corman's filming that demands admiration.

The third film, 'The Facts Of The Case Of M. Valdemar', is perhaps closest in story to its plot, but furthest from its spirit. Poe's story about a hypnotist who managed, through mesmerism, to keep a man alive after death was written with such detachment that it was printed in a prestigious scientific journal as a true case study. That sense of experiment and report is crucial to the story's success as it reveals the paganistic powers of science, the unfathomable capabilities of the mind, and the terror of a dead man who cannot die. The mesmerist-narrator is always a detached scientist, and while his very detachment in such a case might betoken insanity, it is a far cry from the eye-rolling villainy of Basil Rathbone here, who simply wants to marry the dead man's wife.

Poe wants to show how mad calm, rational science is. Rathbone is simply demonised, with a personal stake in playing with a man's soul. This makes Valdemar's plight less shocking, but Carmichael, within Rathbone's barnstorming limits, is an interesting character, unable to cope with the monster he has created, and finally destroyed by it. The casting of Rathbone is a welcome stroke of genius; still the embodiment of rationalist supreme, Sherlock Holmes, our expectations are compellingly checked here.

If these two films aren't up to much, the centrepiece, 'The Black Cat', is a wonderful black comedy, which strays furthest from its source. Poe's story is one of the most horrific things I've ever read, featuring a once sensitive man who declines into alcoholism, beats his wife, gouges the eye out of, than hangs, a cat, and finally splits his wife's head open with an axe, before walling her corpse in a cellar. It's existential, metaphysical and supernatural depths are despairing to consider, its violence as repellent as literature can get.

The film, on the other hand, is as much bouncy fun as you can have. The unnamed narrator becomes Montresor Herringbone (!), embodied by a very short and fat Peter Lorre. There are moments of unpleasantness as he harrasses his wife for money, but there is little sense of crisis in his paralysis. Price is an absolute hoot as a ludicrous and effete winetaster, Fortunato - the tasting competition is comic genius - who begins an affair with Montresor's wife. Montresor finds out, and determines to revenge himself. The dispatch of Fortunato, his imprisonment, the visit of the police, Montresor's hallucination and dream, and the final revelation should all be deeply horrific, but are instead delightful fun. The playful music, the jokey fade outs, the continuous intimation than repudiating of darkness, the gleeful pantomime performances, all add to the lovely effect.

Not bad; definitely got better as it went. Basically, three short horror stories based on Edgar Allen Poe's writing. The first one had something to do with a dead mother's ghost haunting her daughter and husband, but it was pretty bland and trite, and I don't remember the plot a day later. The second story was about a drunk who kills his adulterous wife and her lover, only to be caught because he tried to kill their cat as well. This one was better than the first, and Peter Lorre does a great job as the odious drunk. That said, it was a little too goofy to be scary, and there was one scene where they just stretched the aspect ratio to show drunk hallucinations, which was stupid. The third story was about a man who is hypnotized at the moment of his death. This one was easily the best; I wish the whole movie had just been a longer version of this. The characters were all well fleshed out with strong motivations from the beginning, but nothing that was too trite. The creepy element in this one was much stronger too. Overall, they average out to a pretty good movie. Oh, and Vincent Price did a great job in the second two.