Tales of Terror (!!)

(1962)
**
" A Trilogy of Shock and Horror!"

Man. I don't even know whether this deserves 2 stars. Lets just say it was pretty hard to watch. But so that Edgar Allen Poe doesn't do somersaults in his grave I will give him the full second star.
Yes, these are short movies based on Edgar Allen Poe's stories. So you would think, classic, right? Well, from what I gather, all the good horror classics had already been made by the end of the 50's, so here they were really scraping the bottom of the barrel.
I must say that I couldn't bear watching the third of the three shorts because the first two were that lame.

Morella

It all starts with some dude talking about a dying man's heartbeat and theres some visual of an actual heart beating, and its all conceptual campfire story-ish stuff. Why not, that can be fun. We are open to this "imagination" thing while watching a movie. After a weird 3 layer collage of a cliff and water, a transparency of a house and fog, and a painted on sky, we zoom in on a very sixties 1900's carriage and one too many smoke machines. A lovely lady with a silly name, Lenora, and with an even sillier blonde wig and standard period costume hops out with her massive chest of booty. The coach driver is in no hurry to stay. Clearly this place is haunted. Maybe. We think.
She peers into the house and a truckload of cobwebs are everywhere. You KNOW some set designer went wild when he found out they invented fake cobwebs. They were like "Wheeehee" if i'm going to loose all respect after making this movie I'm going out in STYLE. She peers into many many similar looking rooms. EGAD! a Whole tarantula. A very very busy tarantula. (At which point the boyfriend quips, looks like my old dorm room) (yes dorm rooms in Belgium are full of fake cobwebs too). She then finds her daddy. Who apparently hates her for having "killed" her mother during conception. The mother who's silly name is, Morella, has an even sillier not so credible 26 years old corpsish look. Yes her mother has been lying on her death bed for 26 years and looks like a zombie, instead of a pile of rot. To not spoil the very unexpected ending I will briefly sum it up. A body switcheroo, a very confusing form of revenge, and everyone dead in a fire. Everyone dying was kind of satisfying, but I truly wish it had taken longer. They even sucked the satisfaction out of that.

The Black Cat
Now the best part of this little movie, was that the face of the "Montresor Herringbone" character or Peter Lorre looks like this :

Funny eh :).
Sooo, Montresor Herringbone (que que que?) drunkenly sings his way home. He gets there only to badger his wife for more drinking money, who annoyingly calls him Montresor in a very American accent 50,000 times. He throws their cute kitty cat very violently in the air many times (seriously though, it did this really chuckle inducing cartwheel in the air that only a cat can do) because he hates it for no real reason. After being kicked out of a bar he outdoes winetaster, Vincent Price or "Fortunato" at a wine merchant's convention and gets stupid drunk. Fortunato drags Montresor back to his home and Fortunato gets very friendly with the wifey behind the drunkards back. A scene with hallucinations, squishy camera lenses and dead people playing with Montresor's head ensues. Then...the cat betrays Montresor. If you are confused, don't worry, I still am too.
At this point, I felt kind of nauseous,cried a tear at the whole 5 euros that had gone into that investment and went to sleep happy it was over.