SteinMo What a freaking movie. So many twists and turns. Absolutely intense from start to finish.

Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Cheryl A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

lonchaney20 I checked this obscure British horror film out after reading that it's a personal favorite of French critic Alain Petit (an early champion of and collaborator with Jess Franco). Despite it barely running over an hour, Barnett opens his film with a banal and unnecessary wraparound segment in which a bunch of snobs at a "Gentlemen's Club" start arguing about the merits of horror stories. A doctor (played by the utterly forgettable Vernon Charles) mentions that his favorite horror story is Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," then grabs a Poe collection off of a nearby shelf and begins to read it to the other club members. Evidently he gets bored with Poe's original story, because he starts making up a bunch of crazy nonsense about torture chambers, old hags, and demonic severed heads that can only be killed with fire - all things that Poe was famous for.Admittedly I was extremely tired and may or may not have dreamed half of this, but the story (or what fraction of it I could make out through the muffled audio) concerns a curse put on Roderick and Madeline Usher after their father beheads his wife's lover, having caught them making whoopee in the local torture chamber. The curse, as the family butler tells Roderick in the exposition-heavy opening, can only be ended by setting the head on fire, but it's guarded by a deadly hag - none other than their long lost mother! If they fail to burn the head, then Roderick and his sister will die when they turn thirty. The first half hour or so thus deals with attempts by the butler and Roderick to get the head, which predictably end with a family friend getting brutally murdered while Roderick and his faithful butler flee like the cowards they are. After this the butler claims that the only other way for Roderick to save his own life is to murder his sister (the logic of this completely eludes me), to which end they start poisoning her nightly milk, Hitchcock-style. Only in the last twenty minutes or so do we finally get to a reasonably faithful adaptation of Poe's story.There is a lot to recommend about this film: the moody, low-key cinematography by director Barnett is often stunning, evoking both German Expressionism and Carl Dreyer's Vampyr. I was also intrigued by Barnett's unconventional, almost somnambulistic handling of the film's action scenes, which largely play out in wide shots and without any music, anticipating Jean Rollin by almost two decades. Speaking of Rollin, I feel this film gave me greater insight into why his films are better appreciated outside of France. As I noted, Petit was a huge fan of this film, blown away by its strange visuals and dreamlike horror. As an English-speaking viewer, however, I found my enjoyment somewhat hindered by the wooden dialogue and even more wooden performances. French viewers frequently complain about these things in Rollin's work, so I felt this gave me a taste of how his work might play to the average French viewer. That said, there is a poetic vision at work in Rollin that I didn't detect here; it's beautifully photographed, yes, but ultimately rather hollow and lacking in sincerity. While I appreciate the oddball touches that Barnett and company add to Poe's story, it's not nearly enough for me to recommend this as some lost classic. If you can only bring yourself to watch one obscure Usher adaptation, check out the Spanish version of Jess Franco's El hundimiento de la casa Usher (1983) instead.(It should be noted this film occasionally plays on TCM, but I watched a mediocre bootleg copy which may have been missing about ten minutes. It was already too long at one hour and two minutes, so I can only imagine what excitement I missed out on.)

classicsoncall Perhaps my best recommendation for this film would be the truly creepy and atmospheric sets used to simulate the Gothic House of Usher; one might consider it the 'Psycho' house on steroids. Beyond that however, the premise of this Edgar Allan Poe tale is executed rather poorly, made somewhat difficult to follow with poor sound quality, especially when the setting transitions to the 'temple' basement where the acoustics really take a hit. The makings of a good story are readily apparent, but the actors perform in a rather stagy manner, and ancillary characters like the family servants pop up and disappear in random fashion. Particularly puzzling was the gentleman named Richard (Tony-Powell Bristow) who showed up long enough to get his foot caught in a bear trap; we never do find out what happened to him. I suppose one is to assume that Lady Madeline (Gwendoline Watford) was a ghost even though some interpretations claim she was 'buried' alive. Brother Roderick's (Kat Tendeter) gunshots apparently had no effect on her, either that or they missed all together. Especially curious to me was why the Usher Mansion burst into flames to close out the tragedy; after all it was made of stone. Curiosity seekers may find this film interesting in some aspects, but don't look for any credibility to the story. The old hag (Lucy Pavey) was a nice touch, but you have to take it on faith that she was the mother of Sir Roderick and Lady Madeline. Apparently they didn't know she was alive and well (in a manner of speaking) in the chamber of horrors known as the temple.

Hitchcoc This is an adequate psychological ghost story. There are similarities between it and the Poe story. But there are so many additional distractions that one has a hard time seeing the general point. Roderick and Madeline Usher are the last in line and they are as cracked at the building in which they live (if you can call it live). Roderick's friend Jonathan comes to visit and I guess his only reason for being there is to tell the story. People get murdered. There are agendas that weren't in the original. There are lots of good atmospheric shots. But the pacing of this movie is so slow. If someone walks to the old temple, we see every footstep. When the old lady leaves the temple and goes to the house, she plods along, on step at a time. If this film had been edited properly, it would have lasted about forty minutes. Still, perhaps the effort was worthwhile.

arel_1 I caught up with this on TCM as part of their October 2012 schedule. It's really not that bad, given that it was made on a budget of about two shillings thruppence and someone decided to tack on that ghastly footage in the gentlemen's club to pad the length. Granted, it's not quite the story Poe wrote, but taken as an old-dark-house thriller that just happens to be about the House of Usher... Anyway, I've seen worse photography in higher budget films, the amateur actors in the story proper were reasonably competent (especially young Gwen Watford, who went on from this film debut to better things in film, on stage, and on the Beeb), and the climax closeups were quite convincing--as well they should be, since many of the closeups came from WWII newsreel footage carefully edited.