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THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER
Rating: 
USA. 1979.
Director – James L. Conway, Screenplay – Stephen Lord, Based on the Short Story by Edgar Allan Poe, Producer – Charles E. Sellier Jr. Production Company – Schick Sunn Classics.
Cast:
Robert Hays (Jonathan Criswell), Martin Landau (Roderick Usher), Charlene Tilton (Jennifer Criswell), Ray Walston (Thaddeus), Dimitra Arliss (Madeleine Usher)
Plot: 1839. Newlywed architect Jonathan Criswell receives a letter from his old friend Roderick Usher asking Jonathan to come and visit him. Arriving, Jonathan finds Roderick and his sister Madeleine aged beyond their years. Roderick tells him how they have both been maddened by a crippling hyper-alertness of senses. In trying to find a way of bolstering the house against frequent earth tremors, Jonathan learns of the unspeakable atrocities and devil worship practiced by Roderick’s ancestors. These have brought a curse on the House of Usher, meaning that none of the family can live beyond their 37th year. During another tremor, a falling chandelier kills Madeleine. She is placed in the family crypt. However, she has been unwittingly buried alive and emerges maddened to attack Roderick.
This must not only be the worst version of the oft-filmed Edgar Allan Poe short story The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) but the worst Edgar Allan Poe adaptation ever made. The perpetrators are Sunn Classics, a company that specialized in tv adaptations of classic stories – The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1980), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1981) and the notoriously bad adaptation of The Time Machine (1978) – and sensationalistic cinematically-released documentaries on subjects that have ranged from Bigfoot in Mysterious Monsters (1976) to life after death in Beyond and Back (1978), The Bermuda Triangle (1975), In Search of Noah’s Ark (1977) and In Search of Historic Jesus (1980) and tv series The Greatest Heroes of the Bible (1978). Their version of The Fall of the House of Usher had a simultaneous cinema and tv release – although no attempt has been made in the cinema print to disguise the tv origin with the fade-outs for commercial breaks having been left in during dramatic climaxes.
The film radiates an appalling cheapness, from the bad colour processing to the hilarious cardboard facade of the exterior of the house. Even the reading of the Poe story seems second-hand, taken more from the classic Roger Corman film adaptation The House of Usher (1960) than the Poe story. The casting is downright laughable. This was Martin Landau in the days after Mission: Impossible (1966-72) and before he turned his career around and won an Oscar, where he was subsisting on an income derived from parts in B-movies and giving performances in these that had him in strong contention for being one of the world’s worst over-actors. Here he plays with a grotesque hamminess that is fascinating to watch. Bubble-gum vacuous Dallas-bimbo Charlene Tilton is equally miscast as the heroine. Even funnier is the casting of the boyishly cute Robert Hays who speaks of knowing Usher 25 years before – something that would surely have placed him in diapers.
Director James L. Conway directed many of the abovementioned Sunn Classics films. He also directed their handful of ventures into sf – the UFO films Hangar 18 (1980) and Earthbound (1980), and made one horror film The Boogens (1981). These days, Conway works in tv and has been a regular director on all the modern tv incarnations of Star Trek, among other shows.
Other adaptations of the Edgar Allan Poe story are:– Jean Epstein’s Jean Epstein’s French silent version The Fall of the House of Usher (1928); a dreary British version The Fall of the House of Usher (1948); Jesus Franco’s cheap The Fall of the House of Usher (1983) with Howard Vernon; Harry Alan Towers’ equally cheap House of Usher (1989) with Oliver Reed; the low-budget modernized The House of Usher (2006); and David DeCoteau’s softcore gay House of Usher (2008).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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