RAVE - The Raven

On October 7, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe was found, near death, on a park bench in Baltimore, Maryland. 

The last days of his life remain a mystery.

So goes the introduction to this rollicking thriller featuring John Cusack as poet and author Edgar Allan Poe.

I remember having a drink at the bar with John Cusack, at a show in a mostly derelict Chinese restaurant in East LA, turned for the night into a club called God Save The Queen. I forget the low-quality music being performed there, but I remember vividly the elegantly dressed guy dancing with a teddy bear, and of course a slightly tipsy Cusack.

Anyhow, it's good to see the classy Cusack in this role, as a part-time American Sherlock Holmes, although Holmes was of course fictional, and didn't appear until 1887, nearly forty years after Poe died.

At school I read Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue, and The Pit and The Pendulum, both of which are depicted in this film. The latter had plenty of impact on the imagination of a twelve-year old, and that story still comes to mind whenever I rig up a massive axe to swing from the ceiling.

Back to the plot: Poe is called in by the police when a series of brutal murders are discovered, each of which copies the methods depicted in Poe's writings.

The film is nowhere near as dry as a classic Sherlock Holmes story, nor as pop-video-ish as those horrible Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law versions. And those differences are what make this film.