{"id":69590,"date":"2014-12-10T16:54:08","date_gmt":"2014-12-10T16:54:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/?p=69590"},"modified":"2014-12-10T16:55:43","modified_gmt":"2014-12-10T16:55:43","slug":"vincent-prices-six-gothic-tales-blu-ray-box-set-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/reviews\/vincent-prices-six-gothic-tales-blu-ray-box-set-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Vincent Price’s Six Gothic Tales Blu-ray box-set review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Six Gothic Tales<\/strong><\/em> collects six of the eight films from Roger Corman\u2019s 1960-1965 flowering of gothic horror, a Technicolor Renaissance where the past and future king of the B-movie teamed up with sardonic horror icon Vincent Price in order to bound gleefully through the back catalogue of 19th<\/sup> Century literary giant Edgar Allan Poe, with varying degrees of fidelity and an uncompromising visual flourish.<\/p>\n

Compared to later efforts, 1960\u2019s The Fall Of The House Of Usher<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0is an intimate and interior affair. It has all soon-to-be Corman\/Poe Cycle staples \u2013 a brooding, melancholy (albeit disquietingly blonde) Vincent Price, a family mystery and a perplexed outsider, a screeching sense of melodrama and overbearing doom, and a willingness to break with the source in the name of cinema.<\/p>\n

If Usher<\/strong><\/em> was the most influential within the canon, it\u2019s 1961\u2019s The Pit And The Pendulum<\/strong><\/em> that stands as the most influential within the genre. Barbara Steele brings an idiosyncratic, wild-eyed glamour, while that knuckle-whitening set piece sowed dark seeds in Stephen King\u2019s imagination and \u2013 as a far-flung example of its influence – prefigured Saw<\/strong><\/em>\u2019s art installation grottiness by close to half a century.<\/p>\n

1962\u2019s three-part anthology Tales Of Terror<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0breaks with tone, even if it doesn\u2019t quite break with tradition. Both \u2018Morella and \u2018The Facts In The Case Of M Valdemar\u2019 deal with vengeance from beyond the grave \u2013 although the latter inducts 14-time Sherlock Holmes<\/strong><\/em> star Basil Rathbone as a worthy foil for Price \u2013 but \u2018The Black Cat\u2019, starring the uneasy Peter Lorre (The Man Who Knew Too Much<\/strong><\/em>) takes a swerve into comedy with Price playing a nostril-flaring wine expert.<\/p>\n

The tonal silliness and the peevish Peter Lorre return for 1963\u2019s slapstick knockabout The Raven<\/strong><\/em>, which uses Poe\u2019s best known prose as a springboard for a tedious wizard-off between Price and the titanic Boris Karloff (Frankenstein<\/strong><\/em>) vaguely reminiscent of Disney\u2019s The Sword In The Stone<\/strong><\/em>. A baby-faced Jack Nicholson pops up though, briefly treating the world to the wide-eyed \u2018Crazy Jack\u2019 face that\u2019ll make his career.<\/p>\n

Though taking its name (and closing line) from Poe\u2019s poem of the same name, The Haunted Palace<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0is instead a crypto-adaptation of HP Lovecraft\u2019s The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward<\/strong><\/em> and is all the more affecting for it.<\/p>\n

\"Vincent<\/a><\/p>\n

Almost alone in the Corman\/Poe Cycle for being genuinely horrific (the Vaseline-screen frog demon aside) throughout, where this franchise began with shiny tunics and psychedelic colour palettes, it draws to a close with eyeless villagers converging on our heroes in a fog-enshrouded town square like the very best that Hammer, Amicus or Tigon could offer.<\/p>\n

Though 1965\u2019s Tomb Of Ligeia<\/strong><\/em> sees the series burst from its crypt of fibreglass stonework and incongruous snatches of California coastline and into the cold morning light of a ruined abbey somewhere in England, the party is well and truly over.<\/p>\n

Price is rocking some stylish beatnik shades and there\u2019s novelty value of seeing him in natural light, but we\u2019ve seen rather a lot of grieving noblemen and lost loves at this point. In the UK, Ligeia<\/strong><\/em> was released as part of a double bill with Mario Bava\u2019s Black Sabbath<\/strong><\/em> and it\u2019s all-to-easy to imagine how tired the former and how vital the latter must have seemed.<\/p>\n

Six Gothic Tales can scarcely claim to be comprehensive, curiously omitting 1964\u2019s much-recalled\u00a0The Masque Of The Red Death<\/strong><\/em> and the sole Price-less offering in 1962\u2019s The Premature Burial<\/strong><\/em>, but no-so-curiously omitting 1963\u2019s The Terror<\/strong><\/em>, a broken mess that passed through the bowels of a possible five directors (including Francis Ford Coppola) without picking up a single nugget of narrative sense on the way.<\/p>\n

Luckily it\u2019s not actually based \u2013 even in the tenuous way in which The Haunted Palace<\/strong><\/em> claimed to be \u2013 on anything Poe put his quill to. We all dodged a raven there, frankly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Roger Corman & Vincent Price team up for 6 Edgar Allan Poe (and HP Lovecraft) movies in HD<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":69689,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"MSN_Categories":"Uncategorized","MSN_Publish_Option":false,"MSN_Is_Local_News":false,"MSN_Is_AIAC_Included":"Empty","MSN_Location":"[]","MSN_Add_Feature_Img_On_Top_Of_Post":false,"MSN_Has_Custom_Author":false,"MSN_Custom_Author":"","MSN_Has_Custom_Canonical_Url":false,"MSN_Custom_Canonical_Url":""},"categories":[2617,8],"tags":[797],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/Vincent-Price-The-Pit-And-The-Pendulum-blu-ray-review.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69590"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69590\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}