If the French title and the concept of an omnibus with Edgar Allan Poe stories, sounds familiar, you are probably thinking of the much better known and far more prestigious "Histoires Extraordinaires" from the year 1968 and directed by the trio of Euro-cinema deities Frederico Fellini, Louis Malle, and Roger Vadim. This particular oldie got made two decades earlier and had a lot less budget to spent on famous casts and fancy filming techniques. And yet - in all honesty - it isn't so much worse than the acclaimed (but overrated) 1968 film.
I love anthologies - every horror fanatic does - and have a weakness for imaginative and unusual wraparound stories. The wraparound story in "Histoires Extraordinaires" is unexciting - and even a tad bit dull - and revolves around four police officers looking back on the most bizarre murder cases they encountered. There are four segments, of which two are adapted from Edgar Allan Poe stories (numbers two and three) and the two others are based on works of Thomas De Quincey; - the writer in whose books Dario Argento found inspiration for his "Three Mothers" trilogy. The De Quincey chapters are good, but I prefer the Poe ones. I always do. No matter how many versions and rehashes I watch of "The Tell-Tale Heart", I never grow tired of that one. "A Cask of Amontillado" is a much lesser-known Poe tale, but a very good one and it has a climax similar to "The Black Cat"
The first segment is merely an appetizer and revolves on a serial killer at large in an area where two female students are alone in a house with their landlady. The killer enters the house, but he's so confident and full of himself that he allows for one of the girls to escape and search for help. Tale #2 is honestly one of the better interpretations of "The Tell-Tale Heart" that I have seen already, as it marvelously captures the madness of the murderer, exactly - I reckon - like Poe intended it as well. The version of "A Cask of Amontillado" is fantastic gothic horror stuff, since it features a jester, an endless network of moist catacombs, and the longest immurement in history. The final tale, "Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts", unfolds more like a whodunit/murder mystery and the outcome is too easy to predict. The segment does build up towards a grim and eccentric climax, however, during which the culprit gets exposed and simultaneously killed by shock/fright!
