SoTrumpBelieve Must See Movie...

Brendon Jones It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

lonchaney20 I checked this obscure British horror film out after reading that it's a personal favorite of French critic Alain Petit (an early champion of and collaborator with Jess Franco). Despite it barely running over an hour, Barnett opens his film with a banal and unnecessary wraparound segment in which a bunch of snobs at a "Gentlemen's Club" start arguing about the merits of horror stories. A doctor (played by the utterly forgettable Vernon Charles) mentions that his favorite horror story is Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," then grabs a Poe collection off of a nearby shelf and begins to read it to the other club members. Evidently he gets bored with Poe's original story, because he starts making up a bunch of crazy nonsense about torture chambers, old hags, and demonic severed heads that can only be killed with fire - all things that Poe was famous for.Admittedly I was extremely tired and may or may not have dreamed half of this, but the story (or what fraction of it I could make out through the muffled audio) concerns a curse put on Roderick and Madeline Usher after their father beheads his wife's lover, having caught them making whoopee in the local torture chamber. The curse, as the family butler tells Roderick in the exposition-heavy opening, can only be ended by setting the head on fire, but it's guarded by a deadly hag - none other than their long lost mother! If they fail to burn the head, then Roderick and his sister will die when they turn thirty. The first half hour or so thus deals with attempts by the butler and Roderick to get the head, which predictably end with a family friend getting brutally murdered while Roderick and his faithful butler flee like the cowards they are. After this the butler claims that the only other way for Roderick to save his own life is to murder his sister (the logic of this completely eludes me), to which end they start poisoning her nightly milk, Hitchcock-style. Only in the last twenty minutes or so do we finally get to a reasonably faithful adaptation of Poe's story.There is a lot to recommend about this film: the moody, low-key cinematography by director Barnett is often stunning, evoking both German Expressionism and Carl Dreyer's Vampyr. I was also intrigued by Barnett's unconventional, almost somnambulistic handling of the film's action scenes, which largely play out in wide shots and without any music, anticipating Jean Rollin by almost two decades. Speaking of Rollin, I feel this film gave me greater insight into why his films are better appreciated outside of France. As I noted, Petit was a huge fan of this film, blown away by its strange visuals and dreamlike horror. As an English-speaking viewer, however, I found my enjoyment somewhat hindered by the wooden dialogue and even more wooden performances. French viewers frequently complain about these things in Rollin's work, so I felt this gave me a taste of how his work might play to the average French viewer. That said, there is a poetic vision at work in Rollin that I didn't detect here; it's beautifully photographed, yes, but ultimately rather hollow and lacking in sincerity. While I appreciate the oddball touches that Barnett and company add to Poe's story, it's not nearly enough for me to recommend this as some lost classic. If you can only bring yourself to watch one obscure Usher adaptation, check out the Spanish version of Jess Franco's El hundimiento de la casa Usher (1983) instead.(It should be noted this film occasionally plays on TCM, but I watched a mediocre bootleg copy which may have been missing about ten minutes. It was already too long at one hour and two minutes, so I can only imagine what excitement I missed out on.)

Lee Eisenberg This 1949 British version of Edgar Allan Poe's story isn't as fun as Roger Corman's version starring Vincent Price but it still has its charms. It goes more for cheap shocks than atmosphere. They gave it an interesting angle with the framing device of a gentleman's club, although it's not until towards the end that the movie really gets going. Basically, "The Fall of the House of Usher" is an OK movie to watch around Halloween. I don't know most of the cast, but it turns out that Gwen Watford (Madeline) played Wendy's mother in Richard Attenborough's "Cry Freedom" (about anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko).Corny, but fun.

tom-456 I don't see the point of this movie at all. I don't know why TCM bothers to show it, except that they probably don't have to pay anything at all to show it. The story is only vaguely similar to Poe's story. The similarities are largely superficial and barely adequate to justify borrowing the title from Poe's story. It is just weird. The story is just strange, most of it involving the old hag that escapes and wanders all over everywhere. The acting is horrifically bad. The technical quality is so bad that I could barely believe that it was made in the post-WWII era. It just does not have any redeeming qualities whatsoever. And it certainly does a horrible injustice to Poe. Evidently, some people believe that because Poe wrote stories that were macabre, that this makes it okay for anyone to re-write the story however they see fit, leaving out some elements and adding whole other aspects that they made up, as if Poe's work should be viewed as a template of sorts for other would-be Poes to embellish in whatever manner suits the fancy. If ever there was a movie that would not be any regret for all copies to be lost and the movie itself forgotten, this would probably be it.

preppy-3 VERY loose adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story. Jonathan (Irving Steen) pays a visit to childhood friend Roderick Usher (Kaye Tendeter). He finds Roderick terribly depressed and his sister Madeline Usher (Gwen Witford) suffering some kind of illness. And what's in that old house in the woods?They took the main characters from the book, added new ones, changed the ending of the story but it still works. It is slow-moving, static and has bad dialogue but I've seen worse. There's an eerie atmosphere throughout with spooky music and depressing dark sets. The acting isn't half bad but only Witford went on to a career in the field. It all ends on a dark and stormy night which is actually quite chilling. A pretty good unknown horror film. I give it a 7.