Edgar Allan Poe: Annabel Lee (Michael Rissi, 2010): USA

Reviewed by Charles Hedrick. Viewed at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.

Now I was so excited when I saw that an adaptation of a poem by Edgar Allan Poe was going to be featured at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. It was difficult for me to find a seat because the theater was packed, however with a little perseverance I was able to find a nice seat right in the center of the theater, I wish now that I had just given up looking for a seat and just left. Every single aspect of this film adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee, was absolutely terrible. Now I know that this film was extremely low budget and cannot be compared to a film from Hollywood, but the things that the budget was spent on was absolutely ridiculous and silly.

The first aspect that should be discussed is the special effects that this film employed……they were all terrible. For instance there was a scene where the main character is having a nightmare, he looks up and there is someone standing on a cliff looking down at him, then there is a sudden epileptic burst of flashing camera filters of the colors red and blue. This type of thing reminds me of the 1950’s film “House of Wax”, those kinds of effects were terrible back then and they are still abhorrent now. Now instead of wasting time on things like that someone could have been hired to hold a fan near the lens of the camera to keep the flies off of it, because it seemed that during ever scene which was outside and in the sun there was a fly crawling around on the lens of the camera, this became very distracting (however I cannot decide whether or not this is a good or bad thing.

Another aspect which must be discussed is the awful acting. The only way I can convey just how bad the acting was is by declaring that my favorite actor was the fly that kept reappearing on the lens. That fly had more depth than the main character did, or any of the characters for that matter. An example of this terrible acting is that there were several instance when the actors would look directly at the camera and then say their lines, and would then hastily look away from the camera. So the actors in this film did not portray their characters very well, at least the fly properly portrayed itself as a fly.

So while this film held some promise in theory, it was a massive disappointment, and I wish I could take back ever seeing it, this film does not do the poem justice. I believe that the only way this film could have been saved was if it was a short, instead of a full length film. So if you do ever have the option of going to see this film, take my advice and go the other way.