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Directed By:
Roger Corman
Not Rated
Genre: Horror/Comedy
Starring: Vincent Price, Boris
Karloff, Peter Lorre and Jack Nickelson
Contains: Mild Violence
WAYNE:
Once upon a midnight dreary while I pondered weak and weary is the opening to one of the best poems in history
by Edgar Allen Poe and in 1963 a very clever and sometimes underrated director adaptated that poem into a movie. Now
Roger Corman is not exactly what you call the perfect diretor, he's dropped his share of balls in his time and directed some
clunkers. But by adaptating this tiny peom into any kind of major movie is brilliant.
The story is this while reading and drinking warm milk
Dr. Erasmus Craven a brilliant magican gets a visitor, a raven who flies in and won't leave. Erasmus
is shocked when the Raven starts to talk. It was his old friend Dr. Bedlo who was foolish enough to challenge
a master magican into a magic battle and a raven was the cost of losing. Erasmus changes Bedlo back and he learns
that his dead wife is in the cluthes of his old enemy.
Now together with Bedlo, Bedlo's son and Erasmus' daughter they go after the soul but is it a trick?
It's not exactly Shakespheare but it's cute, it's fun and it's funny. The cast does an amazing job and for once
Roger Corman brings the plane down in one piece and delivers a more then just barely watchable movie. That's why I award
THE RAVEN, the best of the worst for sheer fun factor.
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