What was probably too tense for T.V. anthology series like "Thriller" or "The Twilight Zone" ended up on the big screen in multi-story feature films which took short stories and adapted them into segments 2-20-30 minutes long. "Tales of Terror" has three stories, two dramatic and one comic, but all having two things in common: Edgar Allan Poe and Vincent Price. Wine flows in all three segments, and in all of them, the underlying motive for some of the characters is a definite act of lust.
The first segment, "Morella", shows the revenge of a dead woman (Leona Gage) against the daughter she blames for her early demise and the husband (Price) who has built a shrine to her and worshiped her for years, neglecting his daughter. Why Morella is so vindictive is never really explained other than the fact that she blames giving birth for dying three months later. In spite of that detail being omitted, it is truly suspenseful and ends deliciously horrifically.
The most popular of the three segments is the middle one, a variation of "The Black Cat", and not at all like the 1934 Karloff/Lugosi movie of the same name. This is the comical filling in the horror sandwich, obvious from the moment that the portly Peter Lorre comes home drunk to his much younger sexpot wife (Joyce Jameson), demanding money so he can go out and drink some more wine. He ends up in a wine drinking contest with professional wine taster Price who escorts the drunken Lorre home and meets the busty Jameson whom he is soon seeing on the side. Lorre plots delicious revenge, not realizing that his worst enemy will be the one to give him away.
"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar", the final part, is perhaps the goriest and definitely the most eerie. It is also extremely disturbing in the sense that it shows, with great pain, what happens when a body dies but the mind still lives, in this case Price being the victim of the witch doctor-like Basil Rathbone. It is the fact that Price considers Rathbone a friend that this ends up being the most evil of all actions in the three stories, because there seems to be no reason for Rathbone's obsessive desire to keep Price's mind still alive, in torture with a dead, decomposing body, and it seems to be even more horrific than being buried alive.
In watching these Gothic horror films from American International, the viewer can find a ton of entertainment, but there are some elements of each of these stories which classifies women in general in three ways: absolutely evil, absolutely good, and absolutely unfaithful. There are no in betweens for his female characters, while Price's characters are all urbane, witty, romantic and all of a sudden nefarious. Another aspect of many of these stories is the way Price turns from noble to insane, and the gruesome ways (usually a fire) his characters are dispatched.
The first segment, "Morella", shows the revenge of a dead woman (Leona Gage) against the daughter she blames for her early demise and the husband (Price) who has built a shrine to her and worshiped her for years, neglecting his daughter. Why Morella is so vindictive is never really explained other than the fact that she blames giving birth for dying three months later. In spite of that detail being omitted, it is truly suspenseful and ends deliciously horrifically.
The most popular of the three segments is the middle one, a variation of "The Black Cat", and not at all like the 1934 Karloff/Lugosi movie of the same name. This is the comical filling in the horror sandwich, obvious from the moment that the portly Peter Lorre comes home drunk to his much younger sexpot wife (Joyce Jameson), demanding money so he can go out and drink some more wine. He ends up in a wine drinking contest with professional wine taster Price who escorts the drunken Lorre home and meets the busty Jameson whom he is soon seeing on the side. Lorre plots delicious revenge, not realizing that his worst enemy will be the one to give him away.
"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar", the final part, is perhaps the goriest and definitely the most eerie. It is also extremely disturbing in the sense that it shows, with great pain, what happens when a body dies but the mind still lives, in this case Price being the victim of the witch doctor-like Basil Rathbone. It is the fact that Price considers Rathbone a friend that this ends up being the most evil of all actions in the three stories, because there seems to be no reason for Rathbone's obsessive desire to keep Price's mind still alive, in torture with a dead, decomposing body, and it seems to be even more horrific than being buried alive.
In watching these Gothic horror films from American International, the viewer can find a ton of entertainment, but there are some elements of each of these stories which classifies women in general in three ways: absolutely evil, absolutely good, and absolutely unfaithful. There are no in betweens for his female characters, while Price's characters are all urbane, witty, romantic and all of a sudden nefarious. Another aspect of many of these stories is the way Price turns from noble to insane, and the gruesome ways (usually a fire) his characters are dispatched.