Who payed the critics

Well Deserved Praise

Absolutely the worst movie.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a work by famous writer Edgar Allen Poe that involves some horror as do some of his other creative achievements. And while this one was used by filmmakers many times before, also very early as you see here, I must say I have never really been a fan of the story. So yeah, I am a bit biased here, also due to the fact that I don#t really like silent films most of the time, but I still believe this could have been a better watch. As with many other silent films, there is the problem of a lack of subtitles in a quantity that would help the audience at least in understanding the very basic plot. The ones to blame in this case are director James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber. The cast members do their best I guess. This one is already almost 90 years old and it was chosen to be picked up for the National Film Registry back in 2000. I do not share the praise though and I do not think this American film here is a must-see by any means. Thumbs down, nothing stands out here.

This unusual and memorable movie version of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" has some creative details, and although it is one of the more obscure versions of the story, it offers a distinctive look at a couple of its many interesting aspects. The style is deliberately murky, and it has not so much as an inter-title, so that you do need to know at least the basic plot in order to understand what is happening.The original story is psychologically provocative and often uncomfortable, even by Poe's usual standards, and this adaptation is pretty successful in using symbolism and visual images to bring out various aspects of the mental disorientation and dread that the characters struggle with. You can watch it a couple of times and still notice new details that the film-makers inserted at various points. It focuses particularly on the peculiarly complex relationship between Roderick and Madeline, with the narrator of the original story much less prominent here.Poe's fascinating short story has been the source for many different movie versions, and Jean Epstein made a particularly good one in the same year as this feature. This Watson/Webber version, with its short length and its avant-garde approach, is hard to compare with the full-length versions. For what it tries to do, though, it works pretty well.

This example of cinema is composed as avant garde expressionism. It uses various prism shots, multiple exposures, slow motion (forward and reverse), and inventive uses of sets and miniatures. Creative and experimental, it's a showcase for the filmmakers. However, this is to story telling what ballet is to story telling; you'd have to have some familiarity with the original to make sense of the action. Not meant for human consumption. There's a fine line between "artistic" and "arty," and like most ultimately pointless examples of avant garde, this carefully crafted work is pretentious enough for easy derision by the common observer.

This low-budget thriller was one of the first independent experimental films made in the USA. Heavily influenced by German Expressionist filmmaking (and in particular "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari") this film makes effective use of odd camera angles and stylized sets, and is still quite interesting to watch today as a sort of Gothic mood piece.