Extraordinary Tales: It is an anthology, so I would normally break it down story by story in greater detail, but I do want to address what turned out to be shared weakeness among the segments: a surplus of artists combined with a deficit of animators and some very unfortunate truncation decisions. The director seemed like he had a pretty high opinion of himself, too, since there's a baffling decision to do credits for each of the segments and he shows up more often without the benefit of crediting more of the hardworking team members, outside of the composers, producers and whoever happens to be narrating that segment. It stops being short of being a full-on vanity project with some good visual realizations for a couple of the stories, so a little more about those:
The wraparounds: You know what they're going for with these bits, but man do these suck. The pop psychological banter between Poe (manifested as, what else, a raven) and Death as she takes the guise of the various women in Poe's life (real and fictional). There's only so many times you can hear a woman snore out her lines and hearing Poe whine about being remembered, and looking at all kinds of animation errors, like Poe's eyes clipping into the inside of his beak or about 500 different perspective errors whenever Poe moves to another object to perch upon. Bad bad stuff.
The Fall of the House of Usher: If you ever wanted a reason why you shouldn't try to tell this story in 15 minutes or less, here you go! Aside from that, there's a neat wooden aesthetic at play here that looks nice, but there's a directorial decision that plants the whole fissure symbolism all over the house and in places where I don't even think it makes any architectural sense, making you wonder if it just survived a kaiju attack than being sufficiently crept out by the ruined decor. In one of his final roles, Christopher Lee provides the narration with his trademark gravitas and authority, which makes me really want an entire reading made available, if such a thing exists.
The Tell-Tale Heart: Here's a neat trick: combining an art style drawing from the works of Alberto Breccia and sourcing a live radio reading of the story that Bela Lugosi, this story is the odd man out and all the better for it. The stark black and white visuals, often feeling reversed, are unsettling and there's a level of stillness to how the visuals are portrayed that avoids the animation issues of the other segments. The biggest shame was that there wasn't a higher fidelity recording available for Lugosi's reading, as it's noticeably beat up, but you can tell how much he's throwing himself into it, as it's the liveliest reading of the whole lot. I feel like this is the best overall depiction of the ones in this film, and the one that I think best overcame the issues with the truncation.
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar: Probably my favorite one of the stories here from a visual standpoint, thanks to the faithful recreation of an EC Comics aesthetic which fits this tale perfectly. That being said, it is strange that for as much as it tries to resemble an old horror comic that it winds up feeling really neutered with having as little gore as humanly possible, making me wonder if the filmmakers tried to sell this to a kids market initially. A strange fate for one of Poe's most graphic tales, compounded by it already being one of Poe's most seldom adapted works out there. Julian Sands does a fine job narrating this one, but this one felt really frustrating for me because of how much it gets right and how much it still had to go to be truly great.
The Pit and the Pendulum: This has always been one of if not the most difficult of Poe's tales to adapt faithfully, thanks to how deeply internal the narration plays out, and this adaptation fared no better than others. The most realistic one in terms of visual depiction, it winds up being a pretty poor decision as it's the one segment aside from the wraparound that exposes the budget deficiencies, which renders the film looking like a pitch video for a Dark Souls clone on Kickstarter. Even more disappointing is Guillermo Del Toro's reading, who sounds about as interested in reading it as he would a shopping list for groceries. I might be a bit kinder on this just because of how tough it is to do this tale right, and it's not even half as bad as the wraparounds, but it's a fairly poor effort all around.
The Masque of the Red Death: Change of plans! Outside of two lines of dialogue, one of which is delivered by a man with a more than passing familiarity with Poe's works as film adaptations, this silent take on the story boasts a rather effective art style and also is a bit braver in terms of on-screen depiction as it doesn't leave a whole lot to the imagination as to what actually happens during the revelry at Prospero's palace. It's a pretty gutsy gamble to strip the words out of one of Poe's most beautifully descriptive works, but it does work pretty well as it largely sticks to the party. Of course, without much dialogue, there's also not much context, and it's kind of a big deal that it's established early on as to what's happening outside the castle walls in order to make the story's big twist work at all, and the segment really doesn't try to handle that at all. It's unsatisfying from a narrative standpoint to anyone that's not already familiar with the story, so it's hard to recommend to anyone fresh to the story.
Overall: It's an anthology plagued by a lot of could have/would have/should have in the production and adaptation departments, but outside of the wraparounds, I don't think I could really bring myself to actively dislike it, as it was nice to see some interesting visual recreations of these tales. It might be a "bad Poe is better than no Poe" mentality at play here, but I do think there is a fair bit of merit to how these tales were approached, even as they didn't go as far as they could have. Why the brief runtime, I could only attribute to budget deficiencies, but I would not mind seeing the filmmakers get another crack at Poe with a different set of tales (plenty out there!) and not be as constrained as they were here.
