Smoreni Zmaj Movie is inspired by Po's stories, but it's not really adaptation, cause it does not stick to them and follows them loosely. Beside that, there's no even H out of horror, so if you expect tension and fright or if you are hard core fan of Po, you should skip it. In my opinion, the only thing in this movie that's worth it is Vincent Price and his voice that gives special hypnotic note to whole thing.6,5/10Morella - 4,5/10The Black Cat - 6/10The Case of M. Valdemar - 6/10Vincent Price - 9/10

Rainey Dawn Three stories based on Poe's tales: Morella, The Black Cat and The Case of M. Valdemar. It's been years since I've seen this film and watching it again I must say all three tales are just as good as I remembered them to be. Worth watching if you enjoy the classic horror movies. Now why this film's genre is labeled as comedy I don't know - it's is NOT a comedy. The only thing comical is Peter Lorre's performance as the drunk. All three are types of ghost stories - but the last one maybe a spirit/zombie story would be a way to describe it. Morella - A woman who died a few months after giving birth to her daughter. She blamed her on daughter while lying on her deathbed. This tale is pretty good but needed a bit more to tie in why the daughter is dying.The Black Cat - A drunken man that no longer cares for his wife nor his cat - for he has fallen in love with booze. His wife falls for another man. In the end, the black cat and the ghost of the lovers will get their revenge on the boozer. I loved this ending! Quite wicked - and mainly due to that vengeful cat! The Case of M. Valdemar - A mesmerizer with intentions of marrying the dead patients wife while he holds the dead man's spirit captive. This one is quite bizarre - and quite an ending as the mesmerism is broken.Well performed by all. It goes without saying that Vincent Price is excellent as always in all three chilling tales. Peter Lorre plays the drunken Montresor quite comically (the only tale sprinkled with comedy). And Basil Rathbone is superb as the twisted mesmerizer Carmichael.8.5/10

mark.waltz What was probably too tense for T.V. anthology series like "Thriller" or "The Twilight Zone" ended up on the big screen in multi-story feature films which took short stories and adapted them into segments 2-20-30 minutes long. "Tales of Terror" has three stories, two dramatic and one comic, but all having two things in common: Edgar Allan Poe and Vincent Price. Wine flows in all three segments, and in all of them, the underlying motive for some of the characters is a definite act of lust.The first segment, "Morella", shows the revenge of a dead woman (Leona Gage) against the daughter she blames for her early demise and the husband (Price) who has built a shrine to her and worshiped her for years, neglecting his daughter. Why Morella is so vindictive is never really explained other than the fact that she blames giving birth for dying three months later. In spite of that detail being omitted, it is truly suspenseful and ends deliciously horrifically.The most popular of the three segments is the middle one, a variation of "The Black Cat", and not at all like the 1934 Karloff/Lugosi movie of the same name. This is the comical filling in the horror sandwich, obvious from the moment that the portly Peter Lorre comes home drunk to his much younger sexpot wife (Joyce Jameson), demanding money so he can go out and drink some more wine. He ends up in a wine drinking contest with professional wine taster Price who escorts the drunken Lorre home and meets the busty Jameson whom he is soon seeing on the side. Lorre plots delicious revenge, not realizing that his worst enemy will be the one to give him away."The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar", the final part, is perhaps the goriest and definitely the most eerie. It is also extremely disturbing in the sense that it shows, with great pain, what happens when a body dies but the mind still lives, in this case Price being the victim of the witch doctor-like Basil Rathbone. It is the fact that Price considers Rathbone a friend that this ends up being the most evil of all actions in the three stories, because there seems to be no reason for Rathbone's obsessive desire to keep Price's mind still alive, in torture with a dead, decomposing body, and it seems to be even more horrific than being buried alive.In watching these Gothic horror films from American International, the viewer can find a ton of entertainment, but there are some elements of each of these stories which classifies women in general in three ways: absolutely evil, absolutely good, and absolutely unfaithful. There are no in betweens for his female characters, while Price's characters are all urbane, witty, romantic and all of a sudden nefarious. Another aspect of many of these stories is the way Price turns from noble to insane, and the gruesome ways (usually a fire) his characters are dispatched.

Robert J. Maxwell There are three tales of terror, each based on a story by Poe. In the first, a gloomy adaptation of "Morella", which has always sounded as much to me like an Italian cheese as a Poe title, Vincent Price lives in a cobweb-ridden castle, alone except for one servant with whom he exchanges few words, except, "Get out." He receives an unannounced visit from the beautiful daughter he sent away as a child, blaming her for the death of her mother in childbirth. Price sulks and his tall figure flaps around in an open dressing gown until finally he is provoked into strangling his own daughter, at which point the dead body of his wife, which he has carefully preserved, insinuates itself to a dusty gray life and -- and then I don't know what happened next, officer. I think Morella -- that is, the once-dead wife, strangles Price, but I'm not sure because, by this time, my usually normal head had an overheated merry-go-round inside it.Tale Number Two, "The Black Cat," is obviously meant as a traditional comic interlude because the central figure is the aging, blubbery, drunken, pop-eyed Peter Lorre. Now, I can't remember the original stories too well because it's been years since I've read them. But I think this one is what they call a "pastiche." Because I think I remember "The Black Cat," and in that one the dead body is buried under the floorboards, isn't it? The dead body gets walled up in the basement in "The Cask of the Amontillado." Peter Lorre doesn't do a drunk very well. It requires a certain finesse to undertake the role, which my Uncle Mort demonstrated to perfection. Lorre is obnoxious and mean, but Vincent Price is quite good as the dead body.The last tale is a souped-up version of "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," in which a "mesmerist" (Basil Rathbone) hypnotizes his patient, Price, at the moment of death and keeps him in a state of suspended trance. Price closes his eyes and reports that he is now dead. In the original, Valdemar is kept in this liminal state for seven months until, finally released, he crumbles into "a seething putrid mass" all at once. In the movie, Rathbone is evil and begins to make the dead Valdemar issue orders to Rathbone's advantage. Ultimately, the dead Price, all gray and red-eyed, as who wouldn't be, climbs out of bed and strangles the terrified Rathbone before crumbling into the seething, putrid, etc.I know Roger Corman operated with a tiny budget and all that, but his work was lurid and commercial too. Twenty years earlier, Val Lewton was working within similar financial strictures over at RKO and producing imaginative and respectable psychological horror stuff. Poe would have been an apt source for dark and carefully-crafted movies. Instead, Corman, like water, like a putrid seething fluid, always seemed to seek the lowest elevation.They didn't entertain me much but these tales must have worked with a lot of people at the time because there were a whole string of them. Boris Karloff was dragged into the stock company. If Corman could have done it, he'd have hypnotize Bela Lugosi's corpse and brought it back to life to play a few more parts. The end product was deliberate self parody which was no funnier than the first, serious productions.