Grade: C
Synopsis: A fictionalized story of the young peasant girl (Jennifer Jones) and her visions of the Virgin Mary in 1858 Lourdes, France.
The Song of Bernadette is a surprisingly well-done melodrama, largely because it avoids coming off as too preachy or sentimental, but rather it allows the viewer the leeway to accept the titular character’s visions as real, or as hallucinations. Granted, it does go out of its way to paint Vincent Price’s character as a bad guy, but even that’s not taken to the extreme you might expect. MORE »
Posted 503 days ago in Movie Reviews and Vincent Price. No responses
Grade: D+
Synopsis: Recently turned into a raven, a magician (Peter Lorre) talks a fellow magician (Vincent Price) into helping him exact revenge on the magician (Boris Karloff) responsible.
The Raven is an ill-conceived horror spoof from director Roger Corman and screenwriter Richard Matheson, loosely based on the poem by Edgar Allan Poe.
The problem here is the tone. Rather than keeping things low-key and opting for a black comedy, the filmmaker’s go over the top from scene one. The result is a camp-fest that’s neither scary nor funny, and only mildly witty at best. MORE »
Posted 580 days ago in Movie Reviews, Boris Karloff, Jack Nicholson, Roger Corman and Vincent Price. 2 responses
Grade: C+
Synopsis: A young farm girl’s (Gene Tierney) distant cousin (Vincent Price) invites her to live in his gothic mansion as a companion for his young daughter.
Though Vincent Price didn’t know it at the time, Dragonwyck was something of a warm-up for the gothic horror films he would later become synonymous with. While this film is certainly a step up from most of those later movies, it will likely remind many of Price’s Edgar Allen Poe adaptations with Roger Corman, particularly House of Usher (1960). MORE »
Posted 606 days ago in Movie Reviews and Vincent Price. No responses
Grade: C+
Synopsis: A priest (Gregory Peck) spends his life growing a Catholic mission in China.
The Keys of the Kingdom is a very well made, albeit a bit talky, drama, featuring a great performance by Gregory Peck.
The script by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Nunnally Johnson has a lot of exposition, which makes for a rough start. Instead of showing us, the film tells us how Gregory Peck’s character had to work twice as hard as everyone else did, and how he tried and failed at several perishes. To make matters worse, the things the film does show early on, such has Peck’s character’s somewhat traumatic childhood, are ruined by stiff performances. You’d have thought Roddy McDowell was in a library given how weakly he cried out for his parents when they were in jeopardy. Still, the story’s epic scope and the film’s good production compensate for the opening missteps, as do the performances by Peck and Thomas Mitchell. MORE »
Posted 704 days ago in Movie Reviews and Vincent Price. No responses
Grade: D+
Synopsis: In a creepy old mansion, a mystery writer and her guests find themselves stalked by a masked killer known as “The Bat.”
The Bat should have been a William Castle film. Castle would have injected just the right amount of black humor to go along with the mystery, effectively offsetting the film’s biggest weakness: its female supporting cast. MORE »
Posted 741 days ago in Movie Reviews and Vincent Price. No responses
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