H.P. Lovecraft Holiday Special part 2 - The Haunted Palace

THE HAUNTED PALACE



Let’s face it, after the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, my second favorite thing in all things horror is the immortal Vincent Price. I’ve always found Vincent Price’s performances, despite whatever great or meager role that was fed to him, to be outstanding, charismatic, and sinister to the core. The prime example is his film “An Evening with Edgar Allen Poe” where the entire film is nothing but Vincent Price reading aloud some of the most horrific stories by Edgar Allen Poe. The whole premise sounds dry, but it is a thrilling to say the least, especially if watched when alone in the dark. The short stories of Edgar Allen Poe, most notably his narration of maddening short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” become horror incarnate. Of all of the horror movies I’ve ever watched, Vincent Price’s performances in “An Evening with Edgar Allen Poe” was an hour and a half that chilled me to the core and made me an instant fan of Price’s work.



It’s likely that Vincent Price’s most memorable film is “The House on Haunted Hill”, in which he plays Fredrick Loren, an eccentric millionaire. He and his fourth wife, Annabelle, have invited five people to the house for a "Haunted House" party. Whoever stays in the house for one night will earn $10,000 each. As the night progresses, all the guests are trapped inside the house with ghosts, murderers, and other terrors. It’s a fun old movie, and the twist ending made me laugh grimly.

Vincent Price will always be the “King of the Spooky Actors” to me, and the talent that I had seen in “An Evening with Edgar Allen Poe” and “The House on Haunted Hill” would be confined to a genre in which lie some truly ludicrous films, such as “The Raven” (1963) co-starring Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, and Jack Nicholson, “The Abominable Dr. Phibes”, and “Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine.”

That’s not to say that all of Vincent Price’s films are terrible. “The Fly” was an excellent feature, as was “The House of Wax”, and Price played a truly diabolical villain in the 1968 British historical horror film, “Witchfinder General”. In fact, Vincent Price’s trademark, his unique voice, was lent to Ratigan, the villain of Walt Disney’s animated feature, “The Great Mouse Detective”.

In addition, while American International Pictures and director Roger Corman cranked out some truly horrible movies in the guise of being faithful adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe’s work (*COUGH* THE RAVEN (1963) *COUGH*), there are some that have a unique charm, such as, “Mask of the Red Death”, “The Pit and the Pendulum”, and the subject of this review, “The Haunted Palace.”

So, enough of my Vincent Price fandom and onto what was the first FAITHFUL adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story.

I am sensing that you are a fan of Vincent Price?
It is a good tribute to Vincent Price and it establishes your credibility and your personal connection to the material but I would drop the House on Haunted Hill paragraph because it goes too far off topic and for too long. Instead only add the House on Haunted Hill to the paragraph that includes The Fly and Vincent Prices other great movies.

My review is now live:

Edgar Allen Poe's: The Haunted Palace Review
http://www.cheshirecatstudios.com/revie ... ed-palace/

Great review as usual, Laughing Man

By the way, I just wanted to ask what happened to the main site commentators? Most of the old (pre-Summer 2010) reviews have some feedback, but it seems like the latest review aren't getting the proper attention from the visitors. Can't say anything about the view counts, 'cos I don't have access to that

its just that the people reading the reviews aren't posting any comments. LM will constantly let me know how many hits or views my reviews are getting and they almost have always been higher since my first reviews.

(Also LM, connect this review with the other specials )

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Oh, come on...! Sorry, it's not their fault - they're just here for shits and giggles to begin with, so you can't really expect much from them, but at least some feedback would be nice Otherwise, how the hell are the critics and reviewers supposed to know if their work is constructive, intelligent and hilarious, and hasn't sank to, say, TGWTG levels of obnoxiousness and tediousness
Then again, most of the comments at the aforementioned reviews (especially Kenny's Dante's Inferno and Zimes' Splinter Cell) were mostly filled with fallacies and hate comments, so, maybe, it's a good thing you don't get as much as you used to

yeah, although I thought I would have gotten more comments on the WoW review, you just got to get used to most of the comments coming through the forums.

I think I can deal with that That is, when I get my lazy ass to finally write something again Man, I'm a helpless procrastinator...

Like Zimes says, I can pull review stats whenever you want them, but as far as comments on the pages: We made the email address field required to cut out the troll comments and the general total of comments has taken a nose dive. Not that most of the comments were trolling, but people never like to comment when they have to provide some form of identification.

Another issue is that it takes a good month for a review to start appearing in the search engines. Zimes's World of Warcraft review came out in Sept, but it wasn't until late Oct that it started getting Google traffic. But with the Google traffic comes the comments (again using Zimes's WOW review, which has gotten several recent comments).

One item I plan on featuring on the homepage is to pull the comments from the database into a short list. Hopefully it'll help encourage people to drop a comment.