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 The film is referred to as a
"triple treat of terror" and goes on to detail all the nasty business in the
movie including, "murder, necrophilia, dementia, live burials, open tombs,
exhumation, resurrection, zombies, and feline vengeance." They tout the
presence of Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and Basil Rathbone. Each of the three
stories is mentioned and summarized in a single sentence. 1962, 89 minutes, Widescreen, DVD
This is one of those Vincent Price/Roger Corman/Edgar Allen Poe projects that
were so prevalent and successful in the 1960s. It's an anthology title
consisting of three stories based on the works of Poe. They're penned by
Richard Matheson, whose writing credits include episodes of The Twilight Zone and the novella I Am Legend which was the basis for The Omega Man, The Last Man On Earth, and Night of the Living Dead. He also wrote What Dreams May Come, but we won't hold that against him. The first story is Morella. Vincent
Price (he stars in all of three of the stories) plays a pathetic loser who
lives all by himself in his seaside mansion/castle that may as well be his
tomb. His daughter whom he hasn't seen since he sent her away as a baby comes
back to see him and he's not all about the whole reunion thing. Seems that
shortly after his wife, Morella gave birth to her daughter, Morella took ill at
a party and died thereafter. It's been a hard and fast rule with me that I
kind of lay off the party scene for at least four months after birthing some
screaming brat, six months if you're planning on going to a rave that's so
popular with the kids nowadays. It turns out that Vinny has kind of held this
grudge against the kid for killing the mother all these years. Immediately,
the long-lost daughter counters that by dropping this bomb on Vincent: she has
only a few months to live! What is it with the women of this family? I mean,
I understand you probably are a little uneasy with the fancy and colorful
dressing gowns that Vincent seems to favor in this one, but come on! You knew
he was a simp when you married him! Surely you saw The Fly ! As soon as Vincent finds out he's daughter's going to croak, he's all over
her
and asking her to stay and trying to be a dad and wanting to go out to the
mansion/castle's back yard and have a game of catch! There's something else a little squirrelly about Vinny Price in this one.
Remember how he was living in this big ole place all by hisself? Well, it
turns out that that may not be technically correct. See, he's got this corpse
stashed in one of the bedrooms. Guess who that is. Yep, Morella. Just cause
your wife buys it, who says you gots to bury her right away? You can
understand how other things might keep getting in the way. You've got to go to
Wal-Mart to pick up another 30 pack of Keystone Light, the big game is on, TBS
is showing their 14 days of 007 and whoops! The next thing you know, it's been
26 years and Morella hasn't been buried yet! Once Vincent starts to make
amends with his daughter, Morella's ghost gets cranky and puts the death touch
on the daughter. So the daughter dies and Price goes to check on her and she's
turned into Morella. Morella then tries to embrace Vincent and probably do
some suckface and a little grabass, but Vincent isn't in the mood if you catch
my meaning. That whole scene was disturbing on any number of levels. Was it
his daughter, was it the dead wife? Either way, it would've been a felony if
he had answered his animal urges then. Well, he knocks over a candle since
we're about a third of the way through the movie and the next episode is ready
to go and every thing catches fire and that's that.  Story number two is a little ditty called The Black Cat. This one doesn't have any thing to do with the one Universal made with Bela
Lugosi and Boris Karloff thirty years before. Peter Lorre plays a drunk who
drinks a lot (really?), treats his wife badly, and drinks a lot. His wife is
this pretty young thing and you wonder why she ever hooked up with his
penguin-shaped form, but she did say wistfully that he "used to be romantic
once" so maybe we're only seeing Pete after he's gone to seed. Lorre's
character is the type that gets thrown out of bars and begs people for money on
the street, then goes home and cajoles the Mrs. to pony up some of the funds
she's hidden so that he can go on his next bender. One day he's out stumbling
home
when he stumbles upon a wine tasting convention. Inside is a bunch of
nancy-boys swishing their wine and who knows what else. Vincent Price is there
and plays this ace wine taster guy and naturally Peter challenges him to a dual
of wine tasting ability. What follows is a very funny sequence where Price
goes through all this rigamarole to taste his little bit of wine, complete
with facial expressions and funny sounds while Lorre simply demands that they
fill his glass so that he can chug it. Lorre matches Price with his
knowledge of wines and their origins and eventually passes out. Price helps
him home where he meets the lovely Mrs. Town Drunk and they immediately begin
to have an affair. Lorre finds out and walls them up along with the titular
black cat in his basement. Soon thereafter Peter starts to see things and he
imagines that Vincent and his wife are tossing his severed head back and forth
in a well done scene. The police show up to investigate his wife's
disappearance and everyone hears that darn cat yowling behind the wall. The
police dig where the sound is, find the bodies and the jig is up. The black
cat is still alive and sitting on top of the dead wife's head (aww, Snookums!
How could you?). No time to let it all sink in though, cause we're hurtling on
to the third story. The last entry in our tales of terror competition is called The Case of M.
Valdemar. Valdemar is played by Vincent Price (by the time this movie had
finally wrapped up, I was seeing Vinny Price everyone I looked!) In this one,
Price is on his deathbed and there is some hokum about Basil Rathbone keeping
control of his mind through hypnotism. Price croaks pretty quick, but Basil
continues to keep him from completely dying by refusing to relinquish control
of his mind and let him rest in peace. You see, Vincent has this hot young
widow that he wants, but the widow has eyes for this other, younger dude, that
Vincent approved of. Soon Basil is trying to force himself on her, but Vincent
is still sort of alive in a living dead kind of way, so he gets up out of bed
to teach Basil some manners. You would've thought that Sherlock Holmes would
know how a gentleman treats a lady, but with these snooty Brits who can tell?
Vincent at this point in time is sporting some really bad white pancake makeup
to show that he is dead. Umm, yeah, I hate to mention this but dead people do
not look like mimes that have been left out in the sun too long. He jumps
Basil and then melts on him! It left quite a mess on the bedroom floor, but
it's nothing a steamvac probably couldn't take of. Frankly Basil should've
melted down because of this terribly loud red jacket he wore throughout the
affair. Everytime he came on, I had to squint.  The first two tales were pretty good. Morella generated a nice creepy,
desolate atmosphere. The large dusty, cob-web filled mansion sitting on the
rocks by the seaside was a nice way of establishing the utter isolation that
Vincent Price's character had imposed on himself. The fact that even after his
daughter came back and he made at least a tentative step toward caring about
something other than his own grief, he was still destroyed shows how powerful
and consuming that urge to retreat within ourselves can be when we don't like
how the world dumps on us. Some folks are too far gone to be saved from
themselves. You can't erase 26 years of living with your wife's corpse
overnight. He wouldn't let her go and in the end she wouldn't let him go and
they literally burned in their own private hell, destroying their daughter in
the process. Social Services probably should've intervened at some point. The
middle story was the best by far. Peter Lorre gave a standout performance that
was funny and pathetic at the same time. He was pathetic in that he made his
wife's life crap, never showed any kind of affection for her and then when she
found someone who cared about her, he got all jealous and walled'em up. I
wasn't really sorry to see Vincent's uppity wine taster go, but what did the
wife do to deserve that treatment? Basically, Lorre was careening out of
control the entire time, be it in the streets begging for money, tearing up his
apartment looking for money, passing out at the wine tasting club, or killing
off his wife and her lover. He's a physical representation of an addiction,
it's taken control of him and he's helpless to stop it, even if it means the
destruction of himself and those around him. He should probably switch to
light beer. Just makes you a little dizzy and sleepy, kind of like the last
story. The story of this Valdemar guy? Just awful. It made no sense to me.
I never figured out what the whole point of Basil's mind control was. Why
would anybody want that? And the whole angle with him going after Vincent's
widow was too stupid to be believed. And then they all melted down! What?
Does any of this make any sense to anyone? The back of the box said the
hypnotism sequences were monitored by the executive director of the American
Hypnosis Institute. Is that even still around? Somebody should have been
monitoring Richard Matheson, because his typewriter was
definitely on fumes at this point. I think I can sum it all up in the words of
Mr. Meat Loaf: "don't be sad, cause two out of three ain't bad."
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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