Review – The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

Or “The Fall of the House of Usher” with a lot of uninteresting twists and turns built in. Seriously, neither the pit nor the pendulum actually puts in an appearance until the last 15 minutes or so. The rest of the story is almost pure soap opera. For a Vincent Price movie ostensibly based on a Poe story (and with a script by Richard Matheson to boot), this should have been a much better movie. Of course even a bad Price Poe is likely to be better than many other horror vehicles before or since. This just isn’t anywhere near as good as I’d hoped. Mildly amusing