Year:  1969
Rating: 6.0

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In one of those odd coincidences that only the Universe can explain I chose a film today that I thought was a Michael Caine film. But that is the Wrong Box, not the Oblong Box - so I didn't get Michael Caine but I got in fact another AIP Edgar Allan Poe adaption with Vincent Price (having just seen War Gods of the Deep the day before). As is often the case with these Poe adaptations the plot of the film has nothing to do with what Poe wrote - in this case it was a short story of an oblong box brought on a boat that carries the wife of a man who when the boat sinks goes down with it. Interesting idea for a possible horror film, but this only stole the name. This one begins in Africa where a brother's face is turned inside out and he is brought back to England and bad things begin to happen.


It is a pretty solid film with all the Victorian trappings that these Poe adaptations have. Lots of killings and horror though it is hard to judge these films because of how much more excessive and graphic horror films have become in the intervening 50 years. But I much prefer my blood in tame amounts and will gladly watch anything with Price and Christopher Lee together. The scene of the bawdy tavern and ensuing murder is quite good. London back then was in fact somewhat like that. The director Gordon Hessler did a few other horror films around the same time - Scream and Scream Again, Cry of the Banshee (both with Price ) and Murders in the Rue Morgue, of course based on another Poe story.