Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated

Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Taha Avalos The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Bezenby Edgar is a right fud living on Rue Morgue with no clue whatsoever when it comes to woman. He also lacks the social skills and has to rely on his playboy mate for advice. When a young chick moves in across the road from him, Edgar immediately endears himself with the audience by standing at his window watching her disrobe (and probably knocking one out in the process).Edgar's all 'she must be mine' but his approach of 'staring at her, then running away' doesn't quite work for some reason. So, he goes to his mate and is all like 'how do I get chicks to dig me?' and his mate's all 'Y'all gotta play it cool, blood'. Edgar plays it cool by heavy duty stalking until the girl relents, goes out for dinner, then rebuffs his light-hearted sexual assault later that evening.Taken aback, Edgar steps up his stalking methods until she relents once again. By this point Edgar's mate is all 'Bra, you gotta lay off a little' so Edgar of course does the opposite and buys the biggest diamond in the world. By this time the chick has met Edgar's mate and giving him the glad eye, but the mate is all 'bros before hos' at first, but there's only so much a playa can take before jack the one-eyed pirate wants to go looking for treasure.Next thing you know the mate and the chick is playing tonsil hockey on the dance floor while poor, stupid Edgar fetches their jackets. The chick gets escorted home by Edgar before he once again tries to put the moves on her in a way that looks like drunken John Hurt fighting a photographer. Rebuffed again, he heads home to his favourite spot: the window where he can watch her get undressed.At that point the mate shows up in the window and the next thing you know Edgar's blowing a gasket as his mate is getting some and he ain't. It's also implied here that Edgar goes on some sort of onanistic frenzy as the next time we see him he's laid out in a chair with a blanket over his crotch.Just in case you've been held captive in a German guy's basement for most of your life and don't know how this story turns out, Edgar kills his mate and is from then on tormented by the constant beating of his dead mate's heart, but will the police and the chick find the body with the help of a black cat and the entire house of Usher and Arthur Gordon Pym? Yes, yes they do, as you know already.We're all familiar with Edgar Allan Poe's 'Tell Tale' series (Tell Tale Heart, Tell Tale Japanese Love Eggs, Tell Tale Danny Dyer) so the real question is how good is the film at telling the story? Well, Edgar's an absolute moron from the start of the film, and his mate genuinely makes an effort to distance himself from the upcoming love disaster, so aye it's not bad

gavin6942 When Edgar sees his girlfriend Betty getting up close and personal with his best friend Carl, he murders Carl in a jealous rage and hides the corpse under the floor of his piano room. Comes the night, and Edgar begins to hear strange sounds coming from under the floor...The problem with this film is that it apparently fell into the public domain, so the DVD copies floating around are pretty rough, and make the film look much cheaper than it really is. A better version (which may never happen), might reveal this to be a lost classic, actually predating Roger Corman's Poe films by a few years.The costumes and such are very nice, and the story is well-written to build up to the part that Poe covered. While this is obviously a Poe tale, the writer (Brian Clemens) deserves much credit, as the bulk is his creation.

The_Void The Tell-Tale Heart is one of the best known of Edgar Allen Poe's works; and I was surprised that I had not seen a film based on it. The original story is just a short story, and while there have been many versions of this tale committed to screen; most of them are only shorts themselves; thus making this film one of the few feature length editions of the story. Well...after having seen it, I have to admit that I'm not surprised there aren't more feature length versions because really there isn't enough plot to stretch to such a long running time. Thus, most of the story of this film has no relation to Poe's original story. We focus on a man named Edgar (a bit of a ham-fisted reference if you ask me); a quiet man that lacks experience with women. When he notices a young lady named Betty in a house across the street; he resolves to romance her and asks his close friend Carl for advice on how to speak to women. He and Betty are getting on well; until he discovers that Carl and Betty are also getting on well, and so Carl is murdered.The film is shot in black and white and looks really cheap throughout. Director Ernest Morris appears not to have the resolve to elevate the film above the mundane and also fails to get a good performance out of his any of his (relatively) unknown cast; which renders the whole production rather bland. Of course, the whole film is just build up to the inevitable situation whereby the murderous central character is haunted by the echoes of the beating heart from the man he has killed, and this leaves most of it feeling rather pointless. To the film's credit, however, it does handle Poe's actual story well and things do become much more interesting once we reach the main part of the film. This version of The Tell-Tale Heart never really gets into the psychological side of Poe's original story; and the reason for that really just goes back to the characters, which aren't interesting enough. Overall, this is really a lacklustre effort and I wouldn't recommend tracking it down; this story is more suited to a short film anyway, and I'm sure that at least one of the many short film versions is superior to this effort.

Skragg Like a few of you, I found this on an inconspicuous DVD along with "Chiller," and I just saw it a few hours ago. This film is as good at "stretching out" a short Poe story as the AIP movies (and I'm VERY attached to those). I'm not familiar with Lawrence Payne, but he was great in the part, as were the Dermot Walsh and Adrienne Corri. But I didn't realize Frank Thornton was the barman till I read it here - I'll have to watch for him next time. As for the ending - which I won't give away here - some people might see it as a "cop-out" ending, but I think it works perfectly well. As some of you say, the "risque" side of this film was slightly surprising for a film of 1960 - I kept thinking I was seeing a Hammer film (minus the cleavage!).