I was very fortunate to catch a movie I'd always heard about but had never had a chance to see. It's called Obras Maestras del Terror (Masterworks of Horror) and it's one of the few memorable Argentine Horror films, from 1960, and starring a mythic Spanish Horror actor, Narciso Ibáñez Menta - whose son directed the awesome Who Can Kill a Child?. What makes this film even more unique is that it adapts three Edgar Allan Poe tales (The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar / The Cask of Amontillado / The Tell-Tale Heart) some years before those kind of portmanteau movies became an international staple.
Now, all this I knew before actually watching the movie, but what I didn't know was how good it actually was. For one thing, Ibáñez Menta is a much more serious actor than Vincent Price and he projects menace without overacting a bit, creating three completely different characters for this movie. The framing sequence is a bit silly - a maid waits for house guests in an old house during a storm, finds a book of Poe stories. From there on, the scripts for the three stories show not only respect for the source material but unexpected intelligence in creating a meaningful background for the short stories that actually adds unexpected layers to them.
For example, I thought it was brilliant how, in The Tell-Tale Heart, the victim of the crime is a watchmaker, so that when the murderer hears his heart beating, it mirrors the constant tic-tac sound that resonates throughout the house in the entire short. That famous literary sequence of suspense is heightened on screen by a delirious, in crescendo visual montage and by several jump cuts - a technique that, as far as I know, was "invented" by Godard in Breathless this very same year. The Corman Poe films are charming Gothic extravaganzas, but they never even aimed for that kind of visual poetry and innovation. Like those films, this one is clearly a low-budget movie, but with a lot more finesse involved and much better performances.
Really, I couldn't be more surprised and happy at how good this cult film actually is. It has become my favorite Poe adaptation, and it has made me want to see Ibáñez Menta in all his other Horror performances. It's a relatively famous film, yet the DVD is a recording of a projection of film that has seen better days. I'm not sure, but I don't think this film has ever gone through a proper restoration process, which is very sad and shows how sloppy Argentina's governments have been with its cultural riches. It should be restored and distributed worldwide so that it can claim a proper spot in the history of Horror cinema.
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