A good (albeit loose) adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic story, this Tell-Tale Heart finds a foppish nerd named Edgar (Laurence Payne, Vampire Circus) obsessing over Betty (Adrienne Corri, A Clockwork Orange), the hot babe who works at the flower shop. An utter loser, he asks his friend Carl (Dermot Walsh, TV’s Richard the Lionheart) how to land such a foxy chick. He takes Carl’s advice and asks Betty out to dinner, which goes well until he attempts a full-throat French kiss afterward.
From then on, she turns her affections (and ultimately, her pelvis) toward Carl, leading the hopeless and heartbroken Edgar to kill his pal and bury him in the floorboards. Soon, he’s haunted by the sound of Carl’s beating heart, so Edgar cuts it out of the corpse. But even after that, the sound plagues him, and it’s neither a dripping faucet nor ticking clock.
Whether you’ve read the original story or not, you know how it goes from there, and that’s why the movie holds no suspense. But it’s made well, in a crisp, buttoned-up, British style, co-written by Brian Clemens, who brought equal class to so many Avengers episodes. More thrillered up than Poe intended, director Ernest Morris’ film comes with a “surprise” ending. —Rod Lott