It’s time for another film titled The Raven. This one isn’t actually based on the Poe story though and focuses more on a character who is a fan of it. It’s an interesting approach and the film ended up being pretty good so I guess this direction was a good idea. The characters tend to make a lot of dumb mistakes but the writing on the whole is still good so I didn’t really have any big issues with this one. It should keep you pretty engaged the whole time.
The movie starts with a lady named Jean being badly injured in an accident and all the best doctors in the world are unable to heal her. Their only chance is Dr. Richard who retired a long time ago. He is a bit eccentric and downright sinister but Jean must be healed and so Judge makes a strong appeal to him. He’s able to play on Richard’s big ego and so Richard agrees. He heals Jean with ease but in the process falls in love with her. Richard wants to steal her away from the fiancé, Jerry at any costs. So he grabs a convict named Edmond and intentionally messed up his face in a surgery. Now the guy will be forever indebted to Richard and will work as his personal executioner. Can Jerry find a way to stop this guy?
That said, Jerry is pretty oblivious the entire time. He has no idea what is going on and is one of those guys who is a little too confident. Jean tells Jerry that she believes Richard has fallen for her and Jerry just laughs it off. He feels like any reasonable guy should fall for her and he doesn’t feel threatened in the slightest. His confidence is so high that he even agrees to stay the night at Richard’s place along with Jean and Judge. He better hope that Richard isn’t a crazy antagonist.
It’s a very old school attitude, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t even mind Jerry’s overconfidence if he would at least take precautions. The #1 precaution in this situation is certainly going to be declining any invitations to the guy’s home. At the very least you should really be building some serious distance there instead of making this so easy for the villain. Jerry is also knocked out rather easily when it comes time to defend his girlfriend.
As for Jean, well I have to give her some blame here too. Her instincts aren’t completely dead as she recognizes Richard’s obsession with her but then maybe she should be putting some more distance? She is borderline flirting with him the entire time, letting him get really close without saying anything. He basically says that he gave Jerry a job in exchange for losing her and Jean barely reacts. She still wants him to come watch the play and everything. Just not a whole lot of smart decisions going on here at all.
The only one who knew the danger from the start was the Judge. He really tries to get Jean and Jerry to leave the mansion but they just don’t take him seriously. Also they are adults so it’s not like he can just force them to leave. That’s probably the worst part of this whole affair. Ultimately he is no match for Edmond and goes down quickly. Part of me likes to think that he should have just left on his own but that’s not the heroic thing to do here.
As for Richard, well I don’t usually enjoy villains who just have romance on the mind. Jean is his entire goal in this whole affair and that doesn’t make for a very compelling villain. Richard just needed to accept the fact that she was never going to pick him in the end. He most likely would have just ended up murdering her once this sunk in. The guy should have been content to know that he saved someone when the rest of the medical community could not and called it a day there. He would have been a reasonable character at that point.
Finally we have Edmond who is really not that smart. Well I’ve been saying that for quite a few characters but he might take the cake. The guy knows that Richard can’t be trusted which is why he had a gun but still trusts the guy to do an invasive facial surgery? There’s nothing Edmond can do when he’s unconscious and you probably shouldn’t trust someone with a knife unless you are completely sure of their character. The whole thing was just such a bad look for him and his character route goes in a very predictable manner. At least he did make Richard sweat it out when he thought about finishing the guy off on one of the torture machines.
Now you may be thinking that this weak character roster would destroy the film but they were dumb in a fun way. The writing is still very sophisticated throughout. The dialogue is crisp all the way and the pacing is good. This feels like a very fun atmospheric horror film that gets the tension just right. It’s a horror style that you don’t see quite as much nowadays and I definitely miss it. I could watch these old horror titles all the time. They’re just really charming all the way with everyone being a little over the top.
Overall, this film may not be all that scary when you watch it nowadays but you can still feel the intent all the way. There was a lot of care put into the film and I had fun with it. The story is fairly straightforward so it all comes down to the execution and I didn’t think that the film had any big missteps there. What you see is what you get in a lot of ways as there aren’t really any twists and turns in the film. It showed that the writer had a lot of confidence in the story and as a result this one beats the average horror title. I’d definitely recommend checking it out.
Overall 7/10
