The Fall of the House of Usher

I almost certainly saw this in the ‘60s at a dawn to dusk show at the Don Drive-in in Port Arthur, Texas—where me and a couple other guys would sit through 4 or 5 movies with themes like “Beach Party” or “Edgar Allan Poe”—but I didn’t recall a thing about it. No wonder; it’s pretty forgettable. We watched it Halloween night on a channel that was running a Vincent Price Festival, called “The Price of Fear.” I never read the story, but I see they changed a lot while keeping the general themes of madness, obsession, premature burial, a living house, and general creepiness. Everybody hams it up, most of all that former Champeen Ham (until William Shatner came along), Vincent Price. It is lushly photographed in super-saturated Technicolor by Floyd Crosby, father of our friend David. Rather nice to look at, but pretty boring until it finally gets moving at about the one-hour point.