If you are an Edgar Allan Poe fan, then this movie is for you!   But, if you are not a fan of “bloody violence and grisly images” (IMDb), you may have to avoid it.   This is why the movie is rated R.

I’m a fan of mild horror.  For example, I don’t like movies where people are killing people just for the thrill of it.  Rob Zombie comes to mind.

This movie was released in 2012, but I enjoyed seeing it again recently.    However, I didn’t remember that the Pit and the Pendulum (one of Poe’s short stories) scene in this movie followed all the way through slicing a man in half.  It made me jump out of my chair with each pass of the huge blade.   I thought the director would have left that scene to our imagination.  Poe’s short story ends differently—the man is rescued.

John Cusack does a great job of portraying Poe as a sad drunk mourning over his dead wife.    He hasn’t been able to write for a long time though he is supposed to be writing for a newspaper headed by Maddux (Kevin McNally Maddux of Pirates of the Caribbean, Downton Abby, Supernatural, New Tricks, Underworld, etc.).  

And, because Poe has not written any new stories in years, a villain hopes to inspire him to write more by reenacting Poe’s previous short stories at a high price.   Poe is the prime suspect at first.   The movie is a series of puzzles that Poe and Detective Fields (Luke Evans of Dracula Untold, The Alienist, Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, Beauty and the Beast, etc.) must figure out.  But, there is romance and dancing to curb some of the violence.

The movie is fast-paced because they have to find his kidnapped fiancé, Emily Hamilton (Alice Eve of Replicas, Star Trek into Darkness, Men in Black 3, etc.) before she becomes one of the grisly bodies.    Her father, Captain Charles Hamilton (Brendan Gleeson of Harry Potter, Edge of Tomorrow, The Village, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, etc.), hated Poe’s guts even before his daughter’s kidnapping.   

The excellent villain is played by Sam Hazeldine (The Huntsman, The Hitman’s Bodyguard, The Village, Ripper Street, The Wolfman, etc.), but I’m not going to tell you what character he plays.   The ending is unexpected.   The director is James McTeigue.

Written by Rosa L. Griffin