I Racconti di Edgar Allan Poe sono l’emblema dell’orrore e del dramma, in particolar modo di quel che avviene nel post-mortem… come in "Morella", the first episode being the very sad story of a daughter unjustly blamed for her mother's death in childbirth. The episode portrays a Vincent Price at first desperate and unable to reason, but then compassionate and again able to be a father to a cruelly abandoned daughter.
The story despite being minimized to a rather short duration shows the usual excellent pith of Corman's film transposition, also beautiful and never cloying the more sentimental scenes, as well as excellent the last more spooky and horror segments.
But Edgar Allan Poe's tales are also the banner of the goliardic and the Macabre and what happens instead before death, as in the second tale, "Il Gatto nero", che rappresenta una stesura a metà strada tra "Il barile di Amontillado" e appunto "Il gatto nero". Questo secondo episodio risulta leggermente penalizzato se messo a confronto col racconto di Poe, ma è impossibile non apprezzarlo, sia per le ambientazioni create da Corman, sia per il duetto, magnifico, indimenticabile di Peter Lorre e Vincent Price nelle vesti di due concorreti una sfida tra intenditori di vino.
Even for the emblematic ending, the film manages to live up to the hype, where another important key to Edgar Allan Poe's interpretation reigns, namely the mocking and inexorable justice of fate, which sometimes imparts to the wicked what they deserve.
In conclusion, Edgar Allan Poe was also a master at telling the mystery and the unknown, even better if these are told in the very moment of death. The third and final tale, "Valdemar", rediscovers the composure of Horror intent on the mysteries of the mind, the unknown, but especially in this episode the mysterious art of mesmerism is discussed. A wealthy gentleman named Valdemar allows a doctor with not-so-conventional methods to perform mesmerism experiments on him. But the mesmerist's recklessness and levity will soon have consequences. Also good is this third episode, which sees an aged Vincent Price playing a dying gentleman then reduced almost to a fleshy specter by the mesmerism experiments done by the character played by Basil Rathbone.
Frankly, I cannot say whether this three-pronged Corman attack with Tales of Terror succeeds in reaching the heights of the incredible triptych that preceded it (The living and the dead (60), The well and the pendulum (61) e Buried alive (62), but the level is certainly very high and the time allotted for each episode is rather short. In my view such an anthology film in Corman's series could not be missed, and judging by the rather high end result, as already mentioned, it is a great blessing that it was made at a time when a Vincent Price or a Peter Lorre could have been acting in it, but let us not forget to say that it is a blessing that someone like Corman came up with the idea to make it.
Review of Dark Boiler
