Year released: 1962
THE CHARGE: You got Edgar Allan Poe, Vincent Price and Roger Corman and can't come up with a better title than that?
THE EVIDENCE: Tales of Terror is one of several collaborations between Vincent Price and director Roger Corman to bring the works of Edgar Allan Poe to the big screen. This one’s a little different from their other films in that it doesn’t focus on one story. Rather, it’s an anthology that presents three Poe tales: Morella, The Black Cat and The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar. Price appears in all three and provides a voice-over introduction to each of the stories as well.
Morella is, quite frankly, weaksauce. Price is a widower whose wife, Morella, was weakened from childbirth and died a few months later. His daughter Lenora, sent away immediately after her mother’s death, returns 25 years later and reveals she only has a short time left to live. They try to take their brief opportunity together to reconcile, but Morella has other ideas.
The story is soap opera nonsense, badly overplayed by Price who still manages to act circles around Maggie Pierce as Lenora. The only interesting thing about the story is the smoky, shadowy overlay used for the ghost of Morella, which was a nice contrast to the typical glowing white forms that populate many ghost stories.
Alcohol: it's not just for breakfast anymore.
The Black Cat is an odd bird. Rather than being a straight adaptation, it takes elements of that story and melds them with another Poe tale: The Cask of Amontillado. It’s also played more as a comedy, with Peter Lorre stumbling around as a drunk who constantly steals money from his ridiculously hot wife Annabel (played by the ridiculously hot Joyce Jameson). Price hams it up as a foppish wine expert having an affair with Annabel and his reactions to Lorre’s crass drunkard are hilarious. It’s a treat watching the two horror icons play off each other in a comedic story, and the result is so successful that they did it again a couple of years later in 1964’s The Comedy of Terrors.
The final tale, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, is the most straightforward adaptation of the trio, looking and feeling more like the classic Poe stories filmed to that date. Price plays the dying Mr. Valdemar who hires a mesmerist named Carmichael, played by Basil Rathbone, to relieve his pain. In exchange, he allows Carmichael to conduct an experiment: just before Valdemar’s death, Carmichael will hypnotize him to see if the moment of death can be prolonged through mesmerism.
A set so luxurious that the Vatican thought it was ostentatious.
Carmichael, of course, turns out to be a power-hungry jerk, trapping Valdemar’s spirit in a kind of limbo. But once Carmichael sets his sights on Valdemar’s wife, nothing will stop Valdemar from protecting her. It’s a classic Poe effort, marred slightly by some goofy camera effects but still making for a decent yarn.
As is common with anthology films, Tales of Terror ends up offering an uneven presentation. The opening tale is a clunker, but the flick is saved by the other two entertaining stories. It’s hard to believe that Roger Corman directed all three tales though, as the visual style of The Black Cat is so different from the other two, relying more heavily on freeze frames and other camera trickery. It could be that Corman utilized a different style due to the comedic nature of the story, but I suspect an assistant director might not have gotten his due here.
THE VERDICT: Tales of Terror is NOT GUILTY and holds up well as a time capsule of 1960s horror, but the studio's marketing department is sentenced to twenty lashes with a cat o' nine tails for criminal blandness.
