Quote:
Originally Posted by neverending
I highly recommend thw 1963 version of The Raven for its teaming of Price, Lorre & Karloff, along with a hilarious script.
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Recommendation noted.:)
Pit & the Pendulum (1961)
It takes quite a high level of creativity and skills to develop a feature length film out of a short story of only 2 or 3 pages, but hats of to Richard Matheson...he always did that hell of a job fascinatingly. An eerie castle complete with torture chamber, murder, insanity, adultery, the ghastly look of premature burial, that huge swinging blade, and enduring performance by the great Vincent Price -- among the fantastic stylish & acclaimed horror films in '60s, Roger Corman's "Pit and the Pendulum" has all the elements that anyone could ask for. This is the solid proof in celluloid arena that Corman could produce suspenseful, atmospheric pictures both economically and efficiently.
Price's portrayal of Nicholas (and also, in flashback, as his father, Sebastian) is so strong and beautiful that the other actors surrounding him seem merely adequate except Barbara Steele in the role of Elizabeth, Nicholas’s dead wife, who didn't go fade in Price’s presence even with a short screen time. I’m not sure that whether these two greats ever starred together in another production or not but surely they could make an adorable on screen pair for ardent horror fans.
Through a great Gothic atmosphere, the colorful cinematography and gorgeous lavish sets, Roger Corman created a macabre masterpiece from Poe's classic tale. The castle's many corridors, steel doors, chamber or even the bluish flashback sequences captures the Gothic horror of Poe's stories and gives them homage in a truly unforgettable way that no one so far have done better than him.
When they flashed to the scene of Elizabeth’s half decomposed corpse, with the mouth open and hands held up as if scratching at the inside of her coffin, or the resurrection scene, where Elizabeth’s “corpse” is walking around in shadows but keeps the viewer imagine seeing her bony face, or the final dungeon sequence when the blade of the pendulum sliced Francis's shirt and last but not the least that final shot of Barbara Steele’s terror-stricken eyes...there are so many remarkable scenes & sequences in this film that I think made the movie is not only a masterpiece of low-budget film-making, a movie that looks even better than most of the big studios productions, even today.
>>: A
The Masque of the Red Death (1964)
This film features Vincent Price in one of his finest roles—as
Prince Prospero. Prospero can easily ranks as his one the most sinister and wicked performance that I have seen so far besides
Dr. Phibes and
Edward Lionheart.
The interesting thing about this film is its raising issues of faith, good and evil, the meaning of life, and humanity’s attitude toward the inevitability of death somewhat resembles Bergman’s
The Seventh Seal in several ways.
Much like his other film adaptation of Poe stories, Corman utilizes color to a great extent. The Red Death cloaked in bright red robes and designing the different chambers that lead to the prince’s shrine to Satan are as usually impressive like his other colorful Poe adaptation. With its vivid, saturated color canvas and its spectacular sets, this film looks like a vision conceived in madness.
Some stories need to be told in a big way. More than a simple account of one man's fall from grace, this is a mythic tale, a morality play as relevant now as it would have been in medieval times. Corman has gifted it with an intensity rarely matched elsewhere in world cinema.
>>: A