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

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A mixed-bag movie franchise comes to a disappointing end (or at least one assumes) with Hannibal Rising, a prequel tale of literature and film’s most beloved cannibal. The movie follows Thomas Harris’ book so closely, once wonders if he didn’t write them simultaneously. But it just goes to show that a writer who excels in one medium isn’t necessarily going to excel in another; what worked there falls flat as a day-old Coke here.

The oddly named and miscast Gaspard Ulliel plays the young Hannibal, orphaned after Nazis kill his parents and out for the blood of the soldiers who slaughtered and ate his little sister eight years prior. Stepping into a role made famous by Anthony Hopkins is no easy feat, but Ulliel doesn’t have anything going for him but the ability to cop an evil sneer. He neither sounds nor looks like Hopkins’ take on the character. In fact, if we’re going to play dopplegänger, he most resembles Saturday Night Live alum Ana Gasteyer.

The only scenes that resonate are those in which Hannibal exacts his revenge, and we’re made to cheer him along. Yet they’re not built with any shocks; they simply go through the motions. And what to make of his third-act transformation into Action Hero, leaping atop ships to save Gong Li? At least on the page, scenes like this can’t look silly.

Director Peter Webber’s film at times looks beautiful, almost classier than a genre exercise like this should. I’m sure when Jonathan Demme lensed The Silence of the Lambs, he had no idea it would nominated for an Academy Award, much less take home the top five, but Webber and company act as though they’re intending on a sweep. In going so serious, Rising lacks any sense of diabolical fun that so endeared us to Lecter before, no matter the medium. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.