Edgar Allan Poe, father of the detective story, plays detective in The Raven, neither based on the iconic poem nor a remake of the 1963 Roger Corman adaptation. Instead, the box-office bomb from V for Vendetta director James McTeigue draws on a handful of the master of horror’s work to weave a “what if?” tale depicting his final days.

In 1849 Baltimore, a double homicide is discovered bearing uncanny similarities to the locked-room puzzle of Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” At first, Poe himself (John Cusack) is suspected — then another deadly crime occurs, this one to the razor-sharp tune of “The Pit and the Pendulum.” With Poe helping lead detective (Luke Evans, Immortals) to crack the clues, the case gets awfully personal when Poe’s beloved (Alice Eve, She’s Out of My League) is kidnapped by the killer.

For Poe fans especially (provided they aren’t purists so picky about many liberties taken), the premise is irresistible, also incorporating elements of “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Premature Burial,” “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Cusack portrays Poe as a man whose raging ego is matched only by his alcoholism — a bit over-the-top, but more lively than the expected timid take.

The Raven‘s overall effectiveness is clouded by an elongated second act, but production design and costuming are all appropriately Gothic and, therefore, tops. McTeigue appears to have recycled all the obviously CGI blood directly from his equally misunderstood Ninja Assassin. —Rod Lott

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My dad always told me that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. What he failed to mention is that a rapist may be hanging out somewhere around the middle. That’s the case for the pink-skirted schoolgirls who, while on their way home, take a shortcut In the Devil’s Garden.

A young Lesley-Anne Down (The Great Train Robbery) is the first girl to be attacked; she survives, but is rendered virtually catatonic from the shock. After a second girl goes missing, hot art teacher Julie West (Suzy Kendall, Torso) goes hunting for her student. Julie finds the girl — dead, unfortunately, but also gets a glimpse of the likely killer, who she testifies looks “exactly like the devil.”

Well, except he had no horns. Admittedly, that’s a pretty stupid thing to say in such a public forum. Way to go, Teach.

Ms. West makes up for it by hatching a plan to draw out the killer. It involves convincing a journalist to run her drawings of Satan on his newspaper’s front page. Don’t question it — just know it’s crazy. In fact, we’re told, “It’s so crazy, it might work.” Really!

Alternately known under many titles that include Assault, Tower of Terror and Satan’s Playthings, the movie sprouts a big, brassy score that grows so loud, it suggests “THRILLS!” in places where there aren’t any. That’s not to say the film is bad — just very, very British, in that it exudes a different sensibility than an American film would. In our hands, it’d be a pulse-pounding thriller; in those of director Sidney Havers (Circus of Horrors), it’s more a standard, mild-mannered whodunit, painted with just a streak of the perverse. Casting someone as lovely and lively as Kendall makes following the trail more pleasurable than otherwise. —Rod Lott

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Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor is an unconventional mystery unlike any other, and not just because it opens with a quote from that ancient playwright Euripides. Newspaper reporter Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck, The Crawling Hand) narrates the whacked-out, envelope-pushing drama, about his feigning a sexual fetish to enter mental hospital to solve a murder. It’s easier to do behind the door rather than peeking through the keyhole.

Johnny’s girlfriend, Cathy (a knockout and excellent Constance Towers, who reteamed with Fuller for 1964’s The Naked Kiss) is against the idea, but he sees infiltrating Ward B’s hall as the “magic highway to the Pulitzer Prize.” She’s also pretending in a way, spending her nights as a singing stripper, playing upon her audience’s lurid desires.

Inside the snake pit, Johnny has no shortage of suspects, because every patient is seriously unhinged, from the man who believes he’s a Confederate general (James Best, TV’s Dukes of Hazzard) to Trent (Hari Rhodes, Detroit 9000), who steals pillowcases and, despite being black, espouses white-supremacist rhetoric.

Predictable is one of the last adjectives anyone could affix to Shock Corridor — one moment, Johnny’s being attacked by women at dance therapy; another, Cathy taunts him sexually while appearing as a slumberland specter. This black-and-white exercise in abnormality about the abnormal is a fever-dream masterpiece, and its sterling reputation as a before-its-time classic more than deserved. —Rod Lott

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In Italy, a serial killer leaves a calling card alongside his victim’s corpses: vintage illustrations from a book of fairy tales. What a plot! A Plot of Fear, one might say. Our intrepid investigator is the horny Lomenzo (Michele Placido, The Divine Nymph), who learns that the dead have something in common: being founders of a wildlife organization called the Fauna Club, which collects endangered species and smokes a lot of hash, although not necessarily simultaneously.

The fur flies big-time after a cop discussing the case on live TV is shot in the head. Lomenzo gains an ally and a bed partner in Jeanne (Corinne Cléry, The Story of O), a pro whore who tells him of a Fauna Club shindig she recently attended, where rich men, Phyllis Diller-esque hookers and one chimpanzee got drunk, watched a pornographic cartoon, played an X-rated party game at the dinner table, then nearly fed a call girl to a tiger. But she died of fright first, the party pooper.

Directed by Mondo Cane creator Paolo Cavara, Plot of Fear is so narratively muddled, I didn’t initially realize the above flashback was a flashback, but I also didn’t care. I was too distracted by the plentiful nudity, pig carcasses, hammer attacks, Tom Skerritt’s haircut, and racist dialogue like, “You’re worse than a black man!”

Questionable lines prove to be a theme, with a cuckolded hubby reacting to pics of his cheating wife thusly: “Look at that ass! And her tits, they’re so slutty!” Better is this exchange between Lomenzo and a fellow cop while rifling through LPs at a late-night record shop:

Lomenzo: “Do you like classical music or not?”
Fellow Cop: “No.”
Lomenzo: “Just fuck off.”

Speaking of, Lomenzo and Jeanne engage in a sex scene with so much aggressive, wide-open French kissing, one wonders if their taste buds were forever wonky afterward. —Rod Lott

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Ladies and gentlemen, introducing Academy Award winner Ray Milland in one of his final features … giving the universal hand gesture for masturbation. Based loosely on a 1934 true crime in Australia, the Italian-made The Pyjama Girl Case is a methodical mystery cast in a quasi-giallo style by director/co-writer Flavio Mogherini, who puts his art and production design experience to fine use.

On the beach, a woman’s body is found charred, violated, shot and with her head bashed in. The uncharacteristic brutality of the case prompts retired inspector Thompson (Milland, Dial M for Murder) to come out of retirement on a volunteer basis to help local police sort this puzzler out.

Meanwhile, we meet Linda (the striking Dalila Di Lazzaro, Phenomena), whose sexual partners always hide her panties, and believe me, she has many — partners, that is. Despite being married, she’s still sleeping with past lovers, who include a physician sugar daddy and a lovely woman with a pair of yellow PJs.

Linda’s several conquests are poorly introduced, but not in a way that clouds the narrative. Besides, like a skilled police procedural should, the focus is on Milland, pursuing leads such as grains of white rice. Mogherini pulls off a near-masterful turn in the final third, but even if you see it coming, you’re bound to genuinely be disturbed by the public gawking at the body on display, and even more at Linda throwing all reason away in a moment of self-destruction. —Rod Lott

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