(2006) **
Jill Michaelson gets a phone call from her old college boyfriend, "Rick" Usher, saying that his sister, "Maddy", has died. Jill goes to stay with Rick, gets romantic again, but confused too as she starts the see the sister walking around the grounds. Add on top of that a creepy assistant, and Jill doesn't know what to think.
Differences from the original Poe short story here are fewer than what one would have expected. Rather than make the narrator a childhood friend of Usher's, the narrator becomes an old girlfriend. A key turning point in the original story is the apparent death of the sister. This film speeds things up making that the start of the film, and the slow discovery that she is still alive takes the rest of the film to develop.
Although this modern take is fairly true to the original, the biggest thing lacking was the use of the house. Poe spends 3 of the 15 pages of his story devoted to how creepy the house is. This film just makes the assistant/butler creepy. The rest of the creepiness in the movie is devoted to fleshing out the incest subplot that may be hinted at in Poe's story, but is the turning point of this film.
Overall, not a bad movie, but very slow. These 75 minutes feel like two hours plus.
2 comments:
All I know is, the picture of the woman on the poster is really annoying me.
I keep expecting the real-life Usher is going to be in one of these versions. Because that's the kind of stupid we've come to expect.
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