GamerTab That was an excellent one.

Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

ChanFamous I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Ariella Broughton It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Scelestus-1 The 2006 House Of Usher film (as opposed to the countless other versions, most recently in 2008) is dull as all hell.Plainly put. Not much else to say. It's far too bland to even bother typing a review. It's a shoddy little piece. Relatively faithful to the original story, but a bland and tiresome film regardless.Move on. Buy something interesting. Like, I dunno, Blood Monkey- which I might review some time in the next few weeks.Since an IMDb review requires 10 or more lines, I suppose I really must elaborate: The film is tosh. It's trash. It's garbage. It takes the dry classical texts of Poe and vacuum seals them, taking out what little life remained from the distinctly dated original works. It borrows only the most obvious aspects of the story, ignores subtlety, and pisses on the livelier bits of the original story. I'm hard pressed to care about it, and even more pressed to write a review for a film so utterly pointless.Curse it. Curse it back to the burned out pit it most inevitably came from.For other reviews, ramblings, music, pictures, and stuff: http://chaos-inc.tumblr.com/

Robert J. Maxwell It's not worth going on too long about this semi-supernatural thriller. The young, cute, predatory-looking blond Izabella Miko attends the funeral of her erstwhile best friend at a remote New England estate ruled by Miko's ex lover, Austin Nichols as Roderick Usher.The two of them are rather gloomy. I mean, what with the suicide of the best friend and all. The atmosphere isn't helped by the presence of the housekeeper, Beth Grant, made up like a vampire, so much so that Madonna would look like a fresh-faced virgin beside her.The general air of dread doesn't keep Miko from spending a lot of time wandering about the mansion in her underwear. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that. I do it all the time myself. The problem is that these scenes are the highlights of the film! This is worse than Edgar Allan Poe's worst hang over. The photography is atmospheric enough and the location aptly chosen but everything else seems slapped together. It resembles a carefully conceived feature film the way a child's rolled-together limbs and torso made of clay, topped by a tiny ball of a head, resembles a human being.Nobody in it can act, but -- that aside -- the story itself makes no sense. Edgar wouldn't have cared too much about that, but he had other things going for him, whereas this has only Miko's buns. Of the three principles, Miko is least bad, Nichols is well into negative territory, and Grant's every utterance reminds us that she's trying to act in a movie.At first, after doing her grief work, Miko comes on the Nichols, smooching him up, her wide-open lips revealing glistening incisors of frightening dimensions. He demurs. His neurasthenia prevents him from responding. Later, when she arranges matters less formally and straddles his lap, he apologies because he still can't perform. There is another murky scene in which she toys with the belt of his robe. Next thing -- pow! -- she's pregnant with twins. What is this, coitus interruptus without the coitus? The least the director could do is throw us an explicit and climactic scene of strenuous coupling."Neurasthenia," the mysterious disease from which Roderick Usher suffers, is an old-fashioned term, current enough in Freud's period of disorganized nomenclature. It was used to refer to what we might call chronic fatigue today, combined with a little attention-getting irritability.But why am I going on about neurasthenia, you ask? Because I think I caught it from this movie. I notice it particularly in regard to my black cat, Pluto, a fiend from hell. I keep telling him, "Just keep it up, that's all." But does he listen?

lastliberal There really isn't much story here, so it is hard to imagine how this film can be retold. However, there is a twist in this retelling that makes for some interesting imaginings.It is a Gothic tale with a very wooden Austin Nichols as Roderick Usher, a man who is dying, and dying to continue the family linage, and the curse as well. Izabella Miko, a really hot choice, is his old girlfriend brought back to complete his mission. She is caught in his web, although one has to wonder why, as he has no charm whatsoever.She tries to escape once she discovers the awful family secret, but it is to no avail. It is only through the intervention of the creepy housekeeper, Mrs. Thatcher (Beth Grant), that she has a chance. Mrs Thatcher hates her, so it's hard to see how she will escape.That's pretty much it. Like I said, there is not a of of story in this creepy Gothic by Edgar Allen Poe. It would probably be better to see Roger Corman's version.Or, you could wait later this year for the gay version.

oldwivestales In this very serviceable thriller, a young woman named Jill hears from her former lover Roderick. He and his sister Maddie, her best friend when the three of them were at college together, disappeared suddenly from her life several years ago and she had not heard from either of them since. Roderick tells her that Maddie has died, and asks Jill to come for the funeral.Roderick suffers from an illness that makes him sensitive to light and touch. He is a novelist and writes at night, wearing gloves and headphones to drown out sensation. He frequently communicates through typewritten notes that bear the Usher seal, weighty symbol of the burden of the Usher legacy. The novel he is writing parallels the happenings in the house, and he won't let Jill read it, saying that he isn't sure yet how it is going to turn out.Roderick asks Jill to stay because he needs her, but she only gradually discovers his full intent. Austin Nichols is the restrained Roderick to Izabella Miko's translucent but determined Jill. Both are well cast in their roles.The opening music and the repeated warnings of the housekeeper are a bit heavy-handed and the film might have done better to let the story unfold without them. The second half of the film has lots of plot twists that make for great after-viewing discussion. The artistry of the filming earned this film the best cinematography award at the Boston Film Festival where it premiered.I recommend seeing this movie (but not alone!)