For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Although Roger Corman made many feature films based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, this remains his sole anthology film. Consisting of three tales; Morella, The Black Cat and The Facts in the Case of M Valdemar, it's a cracker, partly because I just love anthologies, and partly due to the presence of distinguished horror writer Richard Matheson, who adapted the three stories for film. Once again the ubiquitous Vincent Price stars, along with stalwarts Peter Lorre and Basil Rathbone.The first story, Morella, will be familiar to fans of THE TOMB OF LIGEIA, as it follows almost exactly the same story of Price keeping the memory of his wife alive, and her evil spirit returning from the grave. However this version is greatly condensed and comes across as short and sweet, in the best macabre tradition. Price plays a typically haunted character and gives another believable performance, while the two female actresses support him very well. The special effects of Morella's spirit floating around the castle are also effective, and while quite basic when compared to today's CGI-fests (such as THE FRIGHTENERS), they're still memorably ghoulish. And, of course, we get the burning down at the end, which gives Corman amble opportunity to insert those shots of the burning timbers once again.The second story is an adaptation of The Black Cat, and thankfully it's a lot more faithful than other interpretations (the Lugosi/Karloff classic, made in 1935, which is a brilliant film but has nothing at all to do with the story). One of the main reasons to watch this is the pairing of Price and Lorre, who were something like the Laurel and Hardy of the horror world in the early sixties. The episode is mainly comic, with the horror aspects only appearing at the end, but don't let that put you off. Price relishes his eyeball-rolling role (even more hammy than usual, if that's possible), but the piece belongs to Lorre, who has a ball as a hallucinating drunkard. The comedy highlight has to be the wine tasting competition, which is absolutely hilarious and the funniest that Price and Lorre have ever been. There are some neat macabre touches at the end, including a memorable toss-the-ball game, and of course the walling up, one of Poe's recurring themes of being buried alive. All in all, it's a great little story.However, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar is the best story of them all. It's creepy, it's gruesome, and it's got a slime-dripping monster attacking people at the end. What more could you possibly want? The story by Poe is one of his most famous, and this is the best adaptation of it so far. Price gives his usual solid performance and this time he gets to play a disembodied voice, an excellent chance for the actor's fine vocal chords to really chill the viewer's spine as he moans "release meeeeee!". Basil Rathbone gives a commendably nasty performance as the sinister mesmerist, out for his own gain, and he receives a truly awful comeuppance at the end (thankfully left off screen, therefore making it all the more horrible in our imagination). It brings to mind Rathbone's hypnotically evil performance in TOWER OF London, made over twenty years previously. With solid support from Diane Clare as the wife and lavish costumes to add to the authenticity, this is brilliant Poe at its finest. And the final moments are just freakish, and stomach-churning for the time. Suffice to say I love it. All in all, TALES OF TERROR is an excellent, old-fashioned (in the best sense) horror film, bolstered by good source material from Poe and memorable, over the top performances from a distinguished cast. One of the best.

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.

When I was in 7th grade (many light years ago in a galaxy far, far away), the schools used to show movies on Saturday on 16mm in the cafeteria and they charged like 25 cents to get in. It was a cheap way to see a lot of different movies and this was one of them.We also saw things like "Earth v. The Flying Saucers" (one of Ray Harryhausen's wonderful magic tricks with stop motion animation), and Abbot & Costello Meet Dracula and Frankenstein series of movies. "Ch...Chh...Chip!!!" I guess my generation was a bit more naive than today's is because this one scared the pants off me (particularly the final segment which was taken from the Edgar Allen Poe tale; "The Strange Case of Msr. Valdemar").My parents had dropped me off at the movie and some of my friend's parents took me because my parents had gone out, so I was home all alone.Have you ever had a case of the crawling creepies? Between the experience of the movie and the 8 hours of being home alone, it burned this memory into my brain that won't ever go away, but the strange thing is that despite excellent acting, a great adaptation of Poe's short stories and great direction by the King of nickel horror films, Roger Corman, I never saw this film again until I tripped across a copy of it on DVD on Amazon.As I have often found with films that made a huge impression on me in my younger years, I expected to be disappointed but I was surprised to be caught up in the narrative and acting of all the people involved in the project. It's impossible to hate Peter Lorre, Vincent Price and Basil Rathbone and Roger Corman can definitely make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.This movie helped to launch a lifelong love of Edgar Allen Poe and other writers of horror bent fiction--but not the slasher flicks or needless and gratuitous sex and blood movies of today.If you want a quality piece of horror cinema then go see Dracula with Bela Lagosa, or Frankenstein with Boris Karloff, or even The Fly with Vincent Price.If you're not interested then this review won't mean much to you anyway so you can just breeze by to the next one and no hard feelings.

There are three tales of terror, each based on a story by Poe. In the first, a gloomy adaptation of "Morella", which has always sounded as much to me like an Italian cheese as a Poe title, Vincent Price lives in a cobweb-ridden castle, alone except for one servant with whom he exchanges few words, except, "Get out." He receives an unannounced visit from the beautiful daughter he sent away as a child, blaming her for the death of her mother in childbirth. Price sulks and his tall figure flaps around in an open dressing gown until finally he is provoked into strangling his own daughter, at which point the dead body of his wife, which he has carefully preserved, insinuates itself to a dusty gray life and -- and then I don't know what happened next, officer. I think Morella -- that is, the once-dead wife, strangles Price, but I'm not sure because, by this time, my usually normal head had an overheated merry-go-round inside it.Tale Number Two, "The Black Cat," is obviously meant as a traditional comic interlude because the central figure is the aging, blubbery, drunken, pop-eyed Peter Lorre. Now, I can't remember the original stories too well because it's been years since I've read them. But I think this one is what they call a "pastiche." Because I think I remember "The Black Cat," and in that one the dead body is buried under the floorboards, isn't it? The dead body gets walled up in the basement in "The Cask of the Amontillado." Peter Lorre doesn't do a drunk very well. It requires a certain finesse to undertake the role, which my Uncle Mort demonstrated to perfection. Lorre is obnoxious and mean, but Vincent Price is quite good as the dead body.The last tale is a souped-up version of "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," in which a "mesmerist" (Basil Rathbone) hypnotizes his patient, Price, at the moment of death and keeps him in a state of suspended trance. Price closes his eyes and reports that he is now dead. In the original, Valdemar is kept in this liminal state for seven months until, finally released, he crumbles into "a seething putrid mass" all at once. In the movie, Rathbone is evil and begins to make the dead Valdemar issue orders to Rathbone's advantage. Ultimately, the dead Price, all gray and red-eyed, as who wouldn't be, climbs out of bed and strangles the terrified Rathbone before crumbling into the seething, putrid, etc.I know Roger Corman operated with a tiny budget and all that, but his work was lurid and commercial too. Twenty years earlier, Val Lewton was working within similar financial strictures over at RKO and producing imaginative and respectable psychological horror stuff. Poe would have been an apt source for dark and carefully-crafted movies. Instead, Corman, like water, like a putrid seething fluid, always seemed to seek the lowest elevation.They didn't entertain me much but these tales must have worked with a lot of people at the time because there were a whole string of them. Boris Karloff was dragged into the stock company. If Corman could have done it, he'd have hypnotize Bela Lugosi's corpse and brought it back to life to play a few more parts. The end product was deliberate self parody which was no funnier than the first, serious productions.