I felt several emotions while watching Tales of Terror. Terror, however was not one of them. It's quite a comical bastardization of E. A. Poe's writings, with Vincent Price mugging away for cameras. There are in fact, three so-called tales of terror: Morella, The Black Cat, and The Case of M. Valdemar. Each of the
episodes runs approximately half an hour and runs the gamut between patently ridiculous (The Black Cat) and extraordinarily dull (Morella). Poe's short stories are often feeling or emotion rather than plot, but these re-tellings of Poe's stories (as directed by Roger Corman) are as dry and mechanical as possible, relying soley on whatever device was used in the original story to carry the attempts at suspense. Bad sets, bad lighting, bad direction (Corman zoom ins and zoom outs to transition each scene in one of the tales) and cheesy acting all add up to a lot of non-frightening-ness. One of my favorite Poe short stories, The Case of M. Valdemar, gets closest to the original feel, but as I've said before, it's a very paint by-the-numbers affair that squanders any creepy feelings it may have generated. All in all, Tales of Terror is a campy waste of time.
September 8, 2010
