recommended

A Disappointing Continuation

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

and by that I mean that The Raven is the most insultingly bad adaptation I have ever seen and very worthy of being on my "worst movies ever made list" actually doing the remarkable thing and knocking a Coleman Francis movie off the list. The reason for that is that Coleman Francis is a name movie buffs like to make fun of and he has only directed what? three movies? Whereas this guy manages to have a long career of producing the most pretentious, nonsensical pieces of crap. It seriously PAINS me to see this guy was in cinema for 30 years.So what's the story? Well as opposed to being set in the 1800's it is now set in the modern day. Lenore is the lead singer of a goth pop group (and no, this is not an alias to make her sound more goth, this is her real name) and she often has flashbacks of her grandfather (or... not) reading to her Edgar Allen Poe stories (oh and this is minor but the young Lenore doesn't look ANYTHING like the older one) and she is confronted only just now for some reason by a murdering evil spirit which I think is The Raven, I say this because I still have no clue what this is and apparently for an evil spirit he certainly does drive a lot. Either way Lenore must become the Lenore Edgar Allen Poe wrote about (who is also a Guardian Angel type figure to her) and defeat The Raven.Okay, if you have read the poem then you know this has next to nothing to do with the actual Raven story so I'll skim over that (although I refuse to let this go) and talk about how incompetent a guy with 30 years "experience" and working with prominent German directors has fared out. The editing is so fast in this movie, it flashes bright white lights every 2 minutes, cuts back and forth between power lines (maybe it's symbolism to show that one scene is actually connected to another... I don't know, it's annoying) and the fact that this wasn't edited by just one guy is really surprising. Oh and there are also these flashes of some guy talking with text over it that I really don't know what this has to do with anything... I think I have made my point in saying this has even less significance abut somehow happens more frequently then the use of the line "flags on the moon" in Beast Of Yucca Flats. To talk more technical stuff, every element feels like either a YouTube video from when it first started or some kind of soft core porn.This movie is also very pretentious as you probably may have read above but where it loses me is that even in context nothing makes any sense. Why is it that The Raven only decided to kill everyone she comes into contact with now as opposed to when she was a child? How does The Raven turn invisible yet in the final 10 minutes he is somehow warded off by a karate girl Lenore just happens to be friends with? Why is Edgar Allen Poe writing gibberish watching Lenore sleep and speaking of Lenore sleeping why are there candles all around her bedroom and black roses even if you make the argument that Poe writing that crap was symbolic? What is the significance of the telegraph wires that take up most of this movie's shots? Why is the Raven heavily breathing when it is revealed he's the ghost of someone Lenore killed and if that is the case why is Lenore free to move about instead of... you know, in jail? Why does the Red Death appear in this movie because he contributes absolutely NOTHING to the plot? Why is nobody alarmed when people Lenore starts getting into contact with disappear? At the end why can the karate girl fend off The Raven when he's meant to be invisible? and finally why is Edgar Allen Poe in modern times and if this is art house then why is it a "love conquers all" message when it's basically told to us? All these questions and probably a whole lot more will arise when watching this movie.As I said this is probably the most insultingly pretentious movie I have ever seen in my life. How Ulli Lommel can make a career out of making movies spanning decades and be THIS bad is beyond my comprehension. I would advise if you're an Edgar Allen Poe fan... It would be better to avoid this movie like a toxic waste dump.

Someone makes a phone call: "Look, I appreciate Ulli Lommel has been making progress with his therapy, and has learnt how to use a knife and fork for the first time, but come on... Did you REALLY think he was ready to make a movie? I mean, it doesn't make one lick of sense, it repeats the same images over and over again, the murder scenes in it are the most laughable ever captured on film, and the music is all over the shop. Plus, was it a good idea to cast his fellow patients as actors in it?! Not to mention, as editor and make-up artist. Sorry, this will never do. We'll have to take him now and place him in a more secure wing, where he'll wear a straitjacket and be sedated 24 hours a day. Not as part of his treatment you understand, but to stop him making any more movies. Because this one sucked. It really, really sucked. Tell the boys we're moving him tonight. Goodbye."*CLICK* Line goes dead... 0/10

This movie is beyond awful! Plot, straight from Ulli Lommel's ripoff bookshelf. Oh, did I mention that the sound is awful? The casting is dreadful. There's one thing I've noticed about Lommel: he always uses someone else's ideas rather than his own. I guess he thinks it's all right if he uses real cases, right? Wrong.Perhaps if he'd actually based his movie on Poe's work, it would have been worth seeing. Unfortunately, he didn't. The only thing he used is the name. A capitalist attempt to steal a good writer's words;and then he doesn't use what's available. This movie is worse than "Borderline Cult." The stabbing sounds were more like a dribbling basketball than a stabbing; the blood looked like watered down Kool-aid. "The Raven" is probably one of the worst movies ever made.

I realize he's dead since quite some time now, but I sincerely hope that the spirit of Edgar Allen Poe still has enough strength and energy left to rise from the depths of eternal darkness and HAUNT Ulli Lommel (as well as everyone else involved in this blasphemous turkey) until he opts for premature burial. Yes, I do realize that sounds cruel, but … have you seen this movie?!? "The Raven" is the type of film of which you initially think: "Hey, how bad can it possibly be?" The film is inspired by the writings of the legendary Edgar Allen Poe, so as long as the script remains faithful to its source, very few things can go wrong. Clearly a lot of things can go wrong when Ulli Lommel is in charge! The plot is a seemingly endless bunch of retarded nonsense that has NOTHING to do with the original poem, the cast members are a gathering of insufferable losers that don't even deserve to star in an amateurish YouTube video, the digital camera-work and editing appear to be the work of toddlers and the arrogant wannabe-artistic atmosphere nearly causes you to vomit. Lenore is a twenty-something untalented singer whose mind is inexplicably linked to Poe's and he even appears to her in nightmares. There's a killer (the penis-munching freak from "Cannibal") on the loose and Edgar commands her to go after him. Or something like that, whatever, nobody cares anyway, because it's all pure rubbish. Lommel himself makes a brief appearance as the girl's grandfather when she's five. He wears a ridiculous eye-patch and a sea captain's hat, which pretty much states that he hasn't got the slightest bit of self-dignity left. Once upon a time the promising director of the video-nasty classic "The Bogey Man", Ulli Lommel now just appears to be on a mission to become the world's record holder of repugnant films linked to his name. The amount of crap this guy unleashed upon the world is literally incredible. "B.T.K Killer", "Zombie Nation", "Green River Killer" … You better just avoid everything he did.Enough about this piece of junk! Back in the 1960's, director/producer Roger Corman made a cycle of films based on the writings of Edgar Allen Poe; all starring the magnificent Vincent Price and all close to brilliant. Corman's reputation is questionable and his nickname is "King of the B's", but he surely had (and probably still has) more sense of class and finesse in his smallest toe than Ulli Lommel in his entire body.