Premature Burial (1962)

 "I don't enjoy life. I merely experience greater or lesser degrees of tedium."

I haven't seen any of Roger Corman's Poe films for quite a while. This is mainly because there aren't many left to blog and I don't want to end up with none left. This one, while its reputation is solid enough, is not much talked about. 

Well, it's brilliant. From a short story by Poe with very little incident it takes the concept of premature burial itself, the idea of catalpesy making one appear dead; and the horrible irony of the fear of premature burial causing said catalepsy. But little else is taken from Poe, mainly because there isn't much else; Poe's brilliance is in his prose.

So, instead, we have the character of Guy, loosely based on the short story's narrator (Ray Milland does a decent job but the role, alas, is one that Vincent Price was born to play. And, for once in a Corman Poe fim, he doesn't.) and a delightfully gothic, obviously studio-bound setting, which quite rightly prefers the gothic and macabre over the realistic. This is a world where the weather, the Technicolor lighting, the shapes of the trees, all are carefully arranged in order to maximise the gothic eeriness.

More than this, though, the plot is awfully clever. We spend the early scenes building u the tension and enjoying the facr that, as this is shot and scripted the way it is, Guy will be buried alive in the end. We expect the whole film to be predictable... and yet the plot is awfully clever, with multiple twists at the end that are all the more effective for the fact the film gave no indication that any twists would be forthcoming.

Oh, and Alfred from the Adam West Batman series (look at the pages on the right) has easily the best line.