(1934)
Dir - Alberto Mondadori
Overall: MEH
This silent, avant-garde Edgar Allan Poe adaptation from Alberto Mondadori, (who only directed two films, both shorts), was not even the only one based off The Tell Tale Heart to be released that year, another also existing from Belfast-born Brian Desmond Hurst which became the first talkie version of the story. This one is a bit perplexing in both presentation and the complete lack of information circulating about it. Filmed in a rather ramshackle single room with a particularly mobile camera, featuring one actor with a fake eye that is so off-putting that it looks like he is wearing a mask, plus another character who hallucinates seeing said eye floating around in the air, his cup, and dinner plate, it is all played out with no music, sound, or even intertitles. So it is a strange experience to say the least.
(1936)
Dir - Gianni Hoepli/Ubaldo Magnaghi
Overall: GOOD
Made by two independent filmmakers Gianni Hoepli and Ubaldo Magnaghi, (each of whom have no other entries as directorial efforts), Il caso Valdemar is based off Edgar Allan Poe's The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar and represents the first ever film interpretation of the story. While it meanders a bit in the middle with a series of nuns entering and leaving rooms while looking sad and concerned, these scenes as well as the entire short are stylistically engaging with many closeups, odd angles and the like, all combined with the lack of dialog making it a compelling enough bit of avant-garde movie-making. The main point of interest though comes at the end with a very surprising amount of gore, the likes of which would not be regularly scene again in genre or really any other cinema for a number of decades.
(1938)
Dir - Gordon Douglas
Overall: GOOD
The last Our Gang short produced by creator Hal Roach before MGM would continue the series without him for another six years, Hide and Shriek finds Alfalfa running his own private detective office, enlisting Buckwheat and Porky as chief operatives, and ultimately getting themselves temporarily trapped in an as yet to be opened haunted house attraction. As one could guess, nothing here is remotely frightening, but the ghoulish amusement ride they struggle to escape is cleverly designed with a recorded voice over fiendishly encouraging them to get caught on a treadmill, have skeletons descend from the sky to play a creepy organ, and get stuck on a bench heading towards a spinning seesaw. It is not the most gut-busting ten minutes ever caught on celluloid, but it is harmless fun nonetheless.
(1939)
Dir - Del Lord
Overall: GOOD
While it is the thirty-seventh entry in their most famous Columbia period and first to evoke a significant enough horror theme, We Want Our Mummy is not necessarily one of the strongest Three Stooges shorts. It is the usual gag of Moe, Larry, and especially Curly being hired as idiots, running around and hitting each other, some bad guys being up to something, the end. That said, the Stooges at the peak of their powers never produced lackluster results and there are enough predictable site gags, puns, and legendary violence from the trio on display, (as well as Curly's endlessly great dog-barking faces), to not make it any kind of waste. Far as Stooges history goes, this was also the first film of theirs to use the sliding strings version of "Three Blind Mice", which would become the group's theme song for the next four years.
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