|
"It is with death and dying that we concern ourselves." The model might be Rossellini's L'Amore, the filmmaker's art through the actor's contrasting moods, thus Vincent Price refracted in a précis of Roger Corman's Poe series. The opening tale, Morella, compresses House of Usher and Pit and the Pendulum for the grief-consumed father with a returning daughter (Maggie Pierce) and a mummified wife (Leona Gage). Tarantulas at the dinner table in the crumbling manse, up in flames it all goes with incest and necrophilia fused. The Black Cat is tilted towards A Bucket of Blood and keyed to Peter Lorre's feel for slimy farce. "Could you spare a coin for a moral cripple?" Fightin' words at the wine-tasting convention, a face-off with Price's pretentious fop distorted by an increasingly blotto camera-eye. The cuckold's revenge has his wife (Joyce Jameson) and his rival entombed in the cellar, "a nice professional job" but for the feline intruder that delivers the meowing punchline. Stately tracking shots in the first story, freeze-frames followed by zooms in the second, the colored swirl of a mesmerist's lantern in The Case of M. Valdemar. Price's ailing aristocrat offers himself to experiments in hopes of ending his agony—the unscrupulous hypnotist (Basil Rathbone) covets his client's wife (Debra Paget) and takes over his soul, the process is filmed in close-up to evoke Major Amberson's expiration turned psychedelic. Out of articulo mortis, the puddle of "oozing liquid putrescence" in the Victorian boudoir. "Forgive me for my most untimely sense of humor." Romero and Argento take up the tribute in Two Evil Eyes. With David Frankham, Wally Campo, and Alan DeWitt.
--- Fernando F. Croce |