Popular reviews

• 

  Review by Ian West ★★★★ 3

  Corman’s Poe cycle kickstarter is an economical and atmospheric visual feast—decorated with beautiful sets, matte paintings, and gothadelic sequences to die for... plus the murderous house in this gives off major ‘ding dong you’re dead!’ vibes to any visitor stupid enough to enter. Starting off the fall season by revisiting these movies has been an excellent decision... House of Usher is an atmos heavy winner if you ask me... complete with yet another untouchable Price performance—that blonde hair!!

• 

  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★★ 10

  97

  The perennial 1960s American Gothic setting, and a mood-board for spooky, autumnal vibes. The Usher mansion itself being a monument to the fissures of familial desolation, from mental illness to egomania and the lingering, perpetual stench of Death rising from the crypt. Probably Roger Corman's most tasteful Poe adaptation, and so assured that its moments of dreamy color and swift action are both visceral and psychological. The House is constructed initially as having only two spaces, the grand entrance and the second floor with scattered decadent rooms, but Corman soon unveils ancient, evil history within the foundations of the stone, and secret passages that interlock and create an elaborate maze out of a previously coherent spatial configuration. When Vincent Price is on screen, nothing else matters, even as he is only one harrowing piece of a larger atmospheric tapestry.

• 

  Review by nathaxnne [hiatus] ★★★★★ 9

  What we know as Life is but the Larval stage of the Great Conqueror Worm. What we understand as health is but the prelude to illness. What we see as sanity is but the first symptoms of madness. There is a Vast Edifice of Negation, a Mansion with Many Rooms which descends ever deeper into the earth, farther down than even the earth can go. The vapors which weep up from the vents is but the faint stirring breath of Liberation. Strange notes bent from Unknown Instruments beckon us to hush and lean in towards the Abyss, closer, ever closer. Life is a nervous affliction for which we now possess a cure, unpalatable though it may seem to the uninitiated,…

• 

  Review by kat🕷 ★★★★ 2

  I find the atmosphere in this house and the art on the walls really scary in it‘s best way. Also the morbid nature of Roderick Usher played by Vincent Price, who even manages to make a simple "Good morning" sound meaningful, is excellent.

• 

  Review by sakana1 ★★★½ 20

  True gothic magic, anchored by Mark Damon's determinedly bland, clueless horror white guy hero Philip Winthrop, and his physical and emotional opposite, bleach-haired Vincent Price as Roderick Usher, glorying in his own noisy, performative fragility. It's wonderful to watch the two play off one another: dark and solid against pale and angular; fierce combativeness against resigned submission; bursting life against waiting death.

  The whole package is just as good as you'd expect, and includes visual flourishes (the color saturated nightmare, the bloody fingers, reaching from beneath the top of the coffin) that surprise and delight even the most cynical of viewers, alongside a fantastic, riveting performance from Price, who works his usual magic and manages to be entirely convincing and…

• 

  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★½ 2

  17th Review for The Collab Weekly Movie Watch

  Some actors have a natural talent for playing a specific type of character on film. Unlike some people who dislike becoming being typecast, others like Vincent Price seem to relish it.

  Indeed, it is obvious almost immediately that his performance is the best part of the film. It is not that the other actors are not good, in fact it is quite the opposite, Mark Damon plays a very sympathetic Philip as you care about his safety and you are also drawn into the mystery that surrounds this entire house. Myrna Fahey also manages to make an impact with her little screen time. Her case was very reminiscent of "Mill of the…

• 

  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★ 1

  The first of what would become many more colorful, cinemascope post-Hammer old-school horror retelling collaborations between legendarily swagged out screen creep Vincent Prince, economical B-movie maestro Roger Corman and the Gothic tales of Edger Allen Poe (which I assume were either cheap or public domain) and their bleak, tortured, very evocative visions of the architecture of death. In this case, a poisonous aristocratic family legacy of violence and sin (personified in Price's blonde, vampiric patriarch) that has fatalistically manifested itself in the tangible, decaying production design of the gothic mansion itself. Crumbling stone foundations/dungeons, creaking dusty wooden furniture, vengeful fireplaces and chandeliers; all drenched in a thick layer of fog and cobwebs that make the entire environment of the film…

• 

  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★ 1

  Such a blast of decadence. One can complain of House of Usher dramatic limitations, the young couple is certainly weak and generic, but that misses the film central point. Price is here a mix of master of cerimonies and subject matter, the film is about aristrocacy rotten on the inside, so it presents itself as a solo performance all about Price's relationship to the decor. On those terms, it is a complete success.

• 

  Review by Dr. Ethan Lyon ★★★★ 24

  3rd Roger Corman (after The Masque of Red Death, The Premature Burial, before The Pit and the Pendulum, Tales of Terror, The Tomb of Ligeia, The Haunted Palace, X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes and The Raven)

  I’d like to take a moment of your time and ask you to consider this in the light of disability. Namely, I’d like you to think of this as a film about the nightmare of trying to live a normal life when you are afflicted by something that affects every aspect of your life, and where those around you push and pull you in all directions until you have no will of your own. All of which to say is that in…

• 

  Review by lauren t 🥀🌿 ★★★★½ 4

  what a gothic banger. dread hangs in the air, and that shit is thick. it builds and permeates, as everything caught within deteriorates. grounds once lush now barren, the lavish mansion slowly but visibly crumbling, and its inhabitants fixated on an inescapable evil curse. the visuals are nothing short of striking, and Price especially is such a pleasure to watch, though Myrna Fahey as Madeline gives him a run for his money at the end for sure. I also can’t get over that we got that dream sequence here, highkey some shit I adore! so wonderfully surreal and psychedelic, I loved the descent into the basement and getting a glimpse of the what lurks there on the other side. enthralling.

• 

  Review by Josh Gillam ★★ 2

  Believing his family to be suffering from a terrible curse, troubled nobleman Roderick Usher (Vincent Price) attempts to prevent the union of his sister and her fiancé as strange things begin to happen in his desolate mansion, in Roger Corman’s horror based on Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, co-starring Mark Damon and Myrna Fahey.

  This was the first Poe adaptation Corman and AIP ever did, and while the brooding baroque style really sets the tone for their later outings it still feels like the director is trying to find the right tone for the film. There are some wonderfully surreal moments here, especially in the brilliantly unsettling dream sequences, but these little moments somehow didn’t quite add up into a…

• 

  Review by Ziglet_mir ★★★½ 4

  Viewed with the Amazing Edith’s *Collab Film Group*. The finale to our 3rd Annual Halloween Grab Bag Extravanganza. This was the winner of 1960 horror.

  Happy Halloween!

  Roger Corman is the most prolific producer in cinema history, and while those credits stretch passed the 500-mark club, he has a respectable handful of directing credits (56) that may or may not be praised by filmgoers. The running joke in Hollywood was that Corman could negotiate the production of a film on a pay phone, shoot it within the confines of the booth, and finance it with the change found in the slot—now that is quite the reputation. Needless to say, this also leaves Corman’s image as either a master of the B-film or…