Watch The Fall of the House of Usher For Free

Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Perfect cast and a good story

Absolutely the worst movie.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

I checked this obscure British horror film out after reading that it's a personal favorite of French critic Alain Petit (an early champion of and collaborator with Jess Franco). Despite it barely running over an hour, Barnett opens his film with a banal and unnecessary wraparound segment in which a bunch of snobs at a "Gentlemen's Club" start arguing about the merits of horror stories. A doctor (played by the utterly forgettable Vernon Charles) mentions that his favorite horror story is Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," then grabs a Poe collection off of a nearby shelf and begins to read it to the other club members. Evidently he gets bored with Poe's original story, because he starts making up a bunch of crazy nonsense about torture chambers, old hags, and demonic severed heads that can only be killed with fire - all things that Poe was famous for.Admittedly I was extremely tired and may or may not have dreamed half of this, but the story (or what fraction of it I could make out through the muffled audio) concerns a curse put on Roderick and Madeline Usher after their father beheads his wife's lover, having caught them making whoopee in the local torture chamber. The curse, as the family butler tells Roderick in the exposition-heavy opening, can only be ended by setting the head on fire, but it's guarded by a deadly hag - none other than their long lost mother! If they fail to burn the head, then Roderick and his sister will die when they turn thirty. The first half hour or so thus deals with attempts by the butler and Roderick to get the head, which predictably end with a family friend getting brutally murdered while Roderick and his faithful butler flee like the cowards they are. After this the butler claims that the only other way for Roderick to save his own life is to murder his sister (the logic of this completely eludes me), to which end they start poisoning her nightly milk, Hitchcock-style. Only in the last twenty minutes or so do we finally get to a reasonably faithful adaptation of Poe's story.There is a lot to recommend about this film: the moody, low-key cinematography by director Barnett is often stunning, evoking both German Expressionism and Carl Dreyer's Vampyr. I was also intrigued by Barnett's unconventional, almost somnambulistic handling of the film's action scenes, which largely play out in wide shots and without any music, anticipating Jean Rollin by almost two decades. Speaking of Rollin, I feel this film gave me greater insight into why his films are better appreciated outside of France. As I noted, Petit was a huge fan of this film, blown away by its strange visuals and dreamlike horror. As an English-speaking viewer, however, I found my enjoyment somewhat hindered by the wooden dialogue and even more wooden performances. French viewers frequently complain about these things in Rollin's work, so I felt this gave me a taste of how his work might play to the average French viewer. That said, there is a poetic vision at work in Rollin that I didn't detect here; it's beautifully photographed, yes, but ultimately rather hollow and lacking in sincerity. While I appreciate the oddball touches that Barnett and company add to Poe's story, it's not nearly enough for me to recommend this as some lost classic. If you can only bring yourself to watch one obscure Usher adaptation, check out the Spanish version of Jess Franco's El hundimiento de la casa Usher (1983) instead.(It should be noted this film occasionally plays on TCM, but I watched a mediocre bootleg copy which may have been missing about ten minutes. It was already too long at one hour and two minutes, so I can only imagine what excitement I missed out on.)

Rough around the edges 40s Brit version of the Usher Poe story has some variable, stagy acting and a rather awkward opening (English gentlemen gathered at a retirement club decide to read a ghoulish story, and choose the Usher story for the night), but the stark, B&W photography centered around a gloomy, darkened manor in the middle of a countryside nowhere is a knockout. Add a crazed ancestor inside a temple soon to be loose with a creepy mask (she wields a mean knife, too) and a potential buried-alive scenario that leads to the one trapped in a coffin entombed to break free with revenge on the mind thanks to a possible poisoning, there are positives to take from this lesser known version of the Poe story. I think with better actors this could have been a real winner, but the presentation (absent the creaky score which is just too choppy) is aesthetically striking enough to perhaps at least offer an alternative to (but not an improvement of) Corman's famous version.A young man visits his "melancholy chum" at his ancestral castle and encounters unexpected horror. He's motivated by Roderick Usher to follow him and his butler (with knowledge of secrets regarding the family the children now alive at the estate couldn't have possibly imagined) to a temple which actually serves as the prison of a mad relative who could prove to be quite homicidal if turned loose on the world. Roderick's sister Madeleine is in love with Roderick's friend, Jonathan, trying to locate him when the butler and Roderick return without him (due to Jonathan walking into a bear trap and being left to face the crazy woman alone). Maddy is inadvertently responsible for the mad woman's release, soon returning home only to fall prey to an abrupt illness that takes her life. When Roderick begins to suspect she didn't die, the guilt torments him into his own mania. Jonathan is party to all of this, with the butler also trying to get involved in the safety of Roderick. It doesn't end well for most of them in this bleak portrait of a family falling to ruins due to sins of the past. The butler insists that burning alive the mad woman's head will relinquish the curse of the Ushers, so Roderick and Jonathan oblige him in the attempt to do so. Well, that doesn't go according to plan. The mad woman in the temple is photographed with grim touches that give her quite a look that coincides well with the morose atmosphere of the castle and rural grounds.It ends with the home struck by lightning, crumbling as Jonathan looks on. He has seen those very close to him destroyed. It is an appropriate conclusion, particularly considering the tragedy that seems destined to envelope the Ushers.

The plot of this curious version of the Poe classic differs considerably from the original story, including a number of plot elements and characters that are not in Poe's story at all. Some of the acting seems almost amateurish at times, and the entire production was clearly carried out on a very small budget. However, where this film excels is in its' sense of creepy atmosphere. Indeed, in that respect it reminded me of Carl Theodore Dryer's 1932 film, "Vampyr". Those who have seen that most peculiar horror film will understand to what I refer. In that film, as well as in this one, style and atmosphere completely dominate character and story to the point where the latter two elements almost cease to matter at all. Both "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "Vampyr" are prime examples of how much a creative director can achieve even without benefit of special effects or a large budget.

This is an adequate psychological ghost story. There are similarities between it and the Poe story. But there are so many additional distractions that one has a hard time seeing the general point. Roderick and Madeline Usher are the last in line and they are as cracked at the building in which they live (if you can call it live). Roderick's friend Jonathan comes to visit and I guess his only reason for being there is to tell the story. People get murdered. There are agendas that weren't in the original. There are lots of good atmospheric shots. But the pacing of this movie is so slow. If someone walks to the old temple, we see every footstep. When the old lady leaves the temple and goes to the house, she plods along, on step at a time. If this film had been edited properly, it would have lasted about forty minutes. Still, perhaps the effort was worthwhile.