House of Usher

Solid Roger Corman horror adaptation of Poe's story. Movie's MVP is Vincent Price, in a commanding performance. I liked the old school spooky look of the mansion, the eerie dank dungeon crypt sets, and unsettling blue tinted nightmare sequence. Towards the end, I was surprised how much gore the early 1960's censors allowed to be shown. Kudos also to Richard Matheson for his script.

A very interesting film, with good suspense premises and a Victorian environment that knows how to involve us. This film is, very basically, a very light and uncompromising adaptation of the Edgar Alan Poe short story of the same name. It's not an extraordinary film: it's full of the usual cinema clichés of its time (we need to understand this well) and sometimes it looks a lot like a play in the way the actors act, which also seems to me to be fits reasonably into the cinematographic style of that time. Still, it's an enjoyable film, has a good cast, good sets and costumes, a pleasantly dense, Victorian atmosphere, and a story that has coherence and elegance. I won't go into the script too much, I think the skeleton of the tale is very present even though there is a good deal of invention mixed up. As the house is a character in the tale and a symbol of decay, moral and mental, of the family that inhabits it, it played a very important role in the plot, although it is evident throughout the film that its inhabitants are the real villains. Vincent Price is a good actor and brings us here another excellent work, where he embodies a crazy villain, but very dignified and chivalrous, with ademands of old aristocracy. I liked his work, but as I mentioned, I felt the actor was, at times, overly theatrical. It's an option that I understand, however, and it seems to me to be coherent with the style of the film, as a whole. Mark Damon is decent for the role of “knight in shining armor” the script reserves for him, and does a satisfying job. Myrna Fahey is also a good choice to play the “damsel in distress”, with the right to fainting and occasional hysteria. On a technical level, it seems to me to be a contained film, perhaps because of a limited budget and a conscious commitment to creating an interesting story, based on the work of the cast. The cinematography is not particularly remarkable, but it has good colors and light, a good filming job, and the editing was also well done, with the film dragging in places, but without this making us really tired. The house, an additional character to the story, is very elegant and suitably dreary, with settings denoting elegance. I liked the detail that the family portraits are basically modernist works where the face is distorted. With an excellent work of environment, the film works very well for fans of gothic suspense.