NETFLIX AND KILL: EXTRAORDINARY TALES (2015) **

Director Raoul Garcia did a nifty feat in adapting five Edgar Allan Poe stories into animation form.  Many of the stories have been done to death, so the animation is a novel way to keep them feeling fresh.  He was also able to get a couple of genre all-stars to narrate the tales, some of them from beyond the grave.  While the results are uneven at best, it’s no worse than most anthology horror films. 

In The Wraparound Story (**), Edgar Allan Poe is reincarnated as a raven.  He flies to a graveyard to brood in solitude, but winds up conversing with the statue of Death.  These sequences are slight to say the least, and they don’t really make much of an impression.  They’re really nothing more than padding to get you from one story to the other. 

The Fall of the House of Usher (** ½), narrated by Christopher Lee, recounts the familiar tale of Roderick Usher.  The animation is well done, but the highpoint is easily Lee’s vocal performance.  The gravitas his voice lends to the proceedings is immeasurable and makes up for the skimpy story. 

The Tell-Tale Heart (***), narrated by Bela Lugosi, is about a guy who kills an old man and buries the body in the floorboards.  The cops arrive on scene and the sound of the dead man’s beating heart drives the murderer insane.  The abstract black and white animation in this segment is reminiscent of Sin City.  The narration by Lugosi is wonderful too.  While the recording itself is creaky and scratchy, it adds to the overall atmosphere.  Again, the story is a bit too short to get the full effect, but it’s worth it just for Lugosi. 

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (** ½) is narrated by the Warlock himself, Julian Sands.  It’s about a doctor who mesmerizes his dying friend.  This one has an old school E.C. Comics vibe to it that is a lot of fun.  As with the other tales, it is slight, and suffers from a long-winded set-up, but it isn’t bad. 

The next tale is The Pit and the Pendulum (**) and it was narrated by Guillermo del Toro.  A condemned man awaits his sentencing from the Inquisition.  The animation is a bit more polished than in previous stories, but it lacks the cool sheen of The Tell-Tale Heart.  The story is slow moving, the pacing dawdles, and the ending is a bit of a letdown.  Del Toro’s narration leaves something to be desired too. 

The Masque of the Red Death (**) is the final tale.  Although it contains no narration, it does feature dialogue that is recited by Roger Corman, who of course, directed the original film.  Corman’s involvement is welcome, but honestly, his version was a lot better.  I did enjoy the animation though as it looks like a water-color Disney movie.  While the animation is vibrant and abstract, the story itself a bit slow moving.  It doesn’t really pick up until the Red Death shows up, and even then, it’s too little, too late.