IslandGuru Who payed the critics

Invaderbank The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Hayleigh Joseph This is ultimately a movie about the very bad things that can happen when we don't address our unease, when we just try to brush it off, whether that's to fit in or to preserve our self-image.

BaronBl00d To be honest I have never been a great fan of director Gordon Hessler. I didn't like Scream, and Scream Again, hated Cry of the Banshee, and thought The Oblong Box was okay. I did like his Sinbad film and really liked his Kolchak episode(The Spanish Moss Murders)to be fair. I always thought he was one of those directors that tended to have a lot to work with but never fully utilized his wealth. Directors like Herscell Gordon Lewis, Larry Buchanan, and Ed Wood never had a third or fourth of what Hessler was working with but sometimes blindsided him with their efforts. So...to spin a long story short...I went into Murders in the Rue Morgue with some trepidation and had limited expectations. It surprised me. It didn't suck. Nor is it great, but Hessler did a lot of things right here though the film has some obvious flaws. Hessler does create a very European-feeling film despite having Jason Robards in the lead(it helps that most of the rest of the cast is European like Herbert Lom, Adolfo Celi(see him in a lot of films from this time period it seems), Christine Kaufmann, Lili Palmer, Peter Arne, and virtually everyone else except Michael Dunn). Hessler also creates some good visuals with some repeated dream sequences of a man falling from the theater rafters and an ax being wielded by a man in evening dress. Hessler also gets some scenes with acid and the plays being performed on stage very nicely done. His script is a huge problem as Poe is more of a backdrop for another retelling of The Phantom of the Opera. the story itself about a man seeking revenge is okay - I really like what happened to Robards at the end. Nonetheless, much of the story makes no sense, a staple in a Hessler film it seems to me. While there are some shortcomings, I am offering up a mild vote of confidence for Murders in the Rue Morgue as it is watchable, does have some merit, and is one of Hessler's better films - for what that is worth.

JasparLamarCrabb Not terrible, but pretty close. It's difficult to not be disappointed in a movie that features Jason Robards, Herbert Lom AND Michael Dunn and still manages to be dull. Robards leads an theatre troupe whose members are being killed after being splashed with acid. Detective Adolfo Celi suspects Lom (who "died" years earlier). Aside from the presence of various men in gorilla costumes, the movie bears little resembles to Poe's story. Nevertheless it's well directed by Gordon Hessler with a lot of period detail (and Spain makes a nice substitute for France). Robards is just OK, Lom is fairly creepy and Dunn is exploited as a sinister dwarf. Christine Kaufmann (a actress of little talent and even less presence) plays Robards nubile young wife, plagued by nightmares and premonitions of things to come. Lili Palmer appears briefly as Kaufmann's mother.

MARIO GAUCI Apart from SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN (1969), this was the one Hessler film I was most looking forward to, also because I failed to grab the single opportunity I had had so far to give it a view; the fact that it was, in all probability, the 87-minute cut messed up by the studio (which I would love to watch, if only for the sake of comparison), keeps gnawing at me even now!Now, for my thoughts on the film: despite an interesting 'revisionist' premise (with its various subtexts) - inspired by but not based on the Poe original - all in all, I found the film rather dull and Hessler's direction disappointingly lifeless, if pictorially valid (as we had come to expect of him by now). Still, one cannot really blame AIP for straying so far away from the main source: as Hessler himself says in the interview on the DVD, everybody already knew the ending to Poe's story - so it would not have 'worked' had they simply adapted this to the screen. Therefore, the writers had to reinvent the plot – and the way they went about it, i.e. 'working' around Poe's very tale (as it's being presented at a Grand Guignol theater) was actually quite ingenious! Having said that, however, what kind of a story do you 'invent' that could center around the stage if not the old 'Phantom of the Opera' routine?! So, I guess, every 'revisionist' adaptation - however novel – has a downside, too!While I don't really see Vincent Price in either lead role, it's very much true that – as it is - Herbert Lom was basically going through the paces (having been THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA [1962] for Hammer), while Jason Robards' mind was clearly elsewhere. Truth be told, theirs was interesting casting, but I have a hunch it would have worked even better had the two roles been reversed (as Robards himself seems to have suggested during filming!). The rest of the cast – Christine Kaufmann, Adolfo Celi, Michael Dunn and Lilli Palmer – were up to their (mostly unassuming) tasks, if not particularly outstanding.The dream sequences (rather cerebral for this type of film) drew attention to themselves, particularly through the use of slow motion - and they were certainly effective, if not exactly creepy. As I have already stated, the theatrical and period atmosphere was well captured, in spite of the low budget, though I never felt like I 'was' in Paris (maybe because I knew beforehand that it was actually filmed in Spain?)!Not having watched the 'original' version, I don't know whether I would have actually liked this 'Director's Cut' more if I had – which I did, by the way, but I somehow expected it to be better (maybe after the overwhelming positive response the recent discovery of this restored cut has generated?). I certainly don't think it holds a candle to Universal's flawed but fascinating 'Expressionist' version of 1932 (not very popular around these boards, I gather?) – though in all fairness, it's not quite the same movie, so there you are!

john-852 AIP cut this and added color tints to the flash forwards and flashbacks and changed the ending. This has run on the Encore Mystery network since Feb. 2002 in a restored 98 min version...11 minutes longer than the AIP hack job. A dvd should follow sometime in 2003.