The Price of Poe

Roy Rogers isn’t the only luminary who’s getting a day-long tribute this month on Turner Classic Movies. This Friday, Aug. 10, Vincent Price will be remembered with a mini-retrospective that includes five – count ‘em, five! – of the stylish, small-budget Edgar Allan Poe adaptations Price famously filmed in the ‘60s with director Roger Corman: House of Usher (6:30 pm EDT), The Pit and the Pendulum (8 pm EDT), Tales of Terror (9:30 pm EDT), Masque of the Red Death (11:15 pm EDT) and the Tomb of Ligeia (1 am EDT).

Pit arguably is the spookiest of the lot, but I must confess to my preference for Masque, if only because it features the va-va-voom Hazel Court, whose heaving decolletage loomed large in my adolescent fantasies. Tales of Terror, a three-part anthology, contains an episode that's a splendidly seriocomic gem, a tongue-in-cheeky mash-up of Poe’s The Black Cat and The Cask of Amontillado featuring a roly-poly Peter Lorre as an alcoholic ne’er-do-well who gets medieval on a wine connoisseur (a self-parodying Price) when the latter makes moves on the ne’er-do-well’s improbably voluptuous wife (Joyce Jameson).

Also worth TiVoing: The Last Man on Earth (3:30 pm EDT), a budget-challenged version of the Richard Matheson story that recently inspired a rather more lavish sci-fi flick starring Will Smith.