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The Spectre of Edgar Allan Poe (1974)

Dir: Mohy Quandour

Losing his critics job at the local newspaper for being too damn rude, up and coming (but already troubled) writer Edgar Allan Poe (Robert Walker Jr) has only one glint of light in his dark world, that of his fiancé, Lenore.

Sadly Lenore (Mary Grover) falls into a sudden coma after frolicking around the rose bushes and is presumed to be dead.
A heartbroken Poe fortunately hears Lenore awaken (while melodramatically throwing himself onto her coffin) and at the last possible moment he saves her from being buried alive, but the experience has broken her mind and bleached her hair.

On the advice of his friend, Dr. Forrest (Tom Drake) , a devastated Poe commits Lenore to an asylum run by the mysterious Dr. Grimaldi (Cesar Romero).
While there Poe and Forrest learn, from his embittered assistant Joseph (Mario Milano), that Grimaldi is doing strange experiments on some of his patients and even the Doctor’s Wife , Lisa (Carol Ohmart), seems ill at ease.

After a nightmarish journey around the asylum’s basement by Poe (that Grimaldi shrugs off as his fevered imagination) Poe and Forrest reluctantly leave the catatonic Lenore in the asylum, but they decide to sneak back in that night and investigate further…

 

This now rather obscure curio managed to snare a respectable enough cast with it’s intriguing idea, but much like it’s star Robert Walker Jr (son of the rather tragic Robert Walker from Hitchcock’s excellent “Strangers on a Train”) the film is a herald of much promise that sadly produced something far less successful at the end of the day.

After the failure of “Ensign Pulver”, the utterly misjudged sequel to the delightful “Mister Roberts” where Walker Jr took over Jack Lemmon’s career boosting role, the actor’s career took a severe hit and basically a few forgotten B films and mucho TV work was to be his career from then on, and although he has his moments in “The Spectre of Edgar Allan Poe” Walker fails to grab this most theatrical of roles fully and as such many moments for a truly memorable performance are wasted.
His foppish hairdo that slops down over one side of his face does little to help his rather fey and wishy washy performance either. Neither do shots of him leaning against a tree posed like a standing version of Rodin‘s ‘The Thinker’!
I mean please, enough is enough!

The rest of the cast are okay with special mention to Frank Packard (”The Great Gundown”) as the deformed loony Jonah and Carol Ohmart as Lisa Grimaldi who has some prime moments later on and makes the most of them. But this is only to be expected after earlier appearing surrounded by the grandest of madness in Jack Hill’s “Spider Baby”.

And Tom Drake makes a likeable (if rather bland during the opening and closing narration) and unexpected hero in the form of the mannered Dr. Forrest and delivers lines like “I haven’t looked at a madman in quite a while myself” (after Poe asks if he can visit some of the inmates!) with a commendably straight face.
Romero brings none of his theatrical strength that made his Joker so memorable on the TV “Batman” series and despite chances to really get his teeth into his misguided villain role he refuses to take them. Seemingly going for a more ‘serious’ turn that quite frankly gets lost in a schlock item as this where big is better .

The production itself is obviously low budget and (just like Andy Milligan’s historical opuses) the first half of the film especially can’t disguise the fact this is the 1970’s not the 1800’s!
When the film reaches the asylum though things get much better.
Although certain rooms in the main part of the asylum look rather like a rundown squat, this decaying reality counterbalances the fine words of Grimaldi about his enterprise perfectly. As much as Grimaldi’s grandstanding belies the decaying truth of his asylum, his respectable manners belie the less than respectable acts he carries out.

The delightfully atmospheric dungeons and cellars to the asylum are the best though, with the obviously simply set design made moodily effective by being almost always shrouded in shadows that are broken only by the yellowed light of flaming torches.
And talking of lighting, the gleefully melodramatic, full-on Bedlam, sequences of raving madmen behind bars illuminated by yellowed candle light are the highlights of the film.

There’s an awful lot of creeping around dark corridors here though to pad the running time out and where the torch/candle lighting was suitably effective the less illuminated scenes are a real chore.
Not sure if this was the transfer (the film has only ever surfaced on long out of print VHS releases as far as I know) or the cinematography itself, but it’s so dark at times that when, during an ironic conversation between Poe and Forrest about going back to the asylum where the line “When it gets dark”, is uttered, it is in fact so dark already you can only see their shirt collars!

The Poe aspects of the plot are never fully realised sadly, (as surely one of the world’s most troubled , dark and tragic of writers being used in a fictional plot about mad doctors and loony filled asylums would be horror movie gold) and the film is rather too tame in it’s style and direction to feature such a madness enshrouded set-up. But there are some ‘Poe moments’ here to have fun with.
The genuinely haunting effect his lost Lenore (so strong in Poe’s works of course) has on him is well done, there is a nice ‘trapped cat’ gag, the premature burial fear involving Lenore is very well handled and a secret chamber containing a platform surrounded by rising water filled with snakes is a typically Poe influenced gadget of medieval torture.

Although the film plays very much like a colour 40’s gothic melodrama for the most part, as this was the 70’s a bit of spicing up was obviously required in the violence department.
Sadly the film was then (as again happened to many of Milligan’s ‘historical’ horror flicks) cut to get a more cash friendly ‘PG’ rating.
We are still left with a few moments though like a blood dripping throat wound, a wooden stake in a chest, a bloody arm wound, and an iron spike in the back, but the most famous scene (as it was used on some posters/video box art) is that of a man with a medieval axe in his face but sadly the cuts mean that we never get to see this sight at all in the actual movie as it is removed with a crude edit!

The final scene of the finale though, despite being shown only via a shadow on the wall, is surprisingly dour and effectively macabre and packs a violent punch and for once Walker’s dreamy mannerisms work as with a lilting moan of despair Poe succumbs to the mental trauma that will famously dog him for the rest of his rather tragic life.
What the hell the makers were thinking when they shoved that awful song over the end credits though is anyone’s guess as it ruins the dark mood that has been set up in the film’s last few minutes.

So we are left with a rather sedate and mannered, sometimes rather bland little item but one that thankfully manages to bounce into life during the last third and that pulls off a few effectively atmospheric moments of the macabre throughout.