So much wasted potential!

This movie could have been so much better! If just they had tried harder.

It saddens me that such a promising concept was not exploited to nearly a fraction of the possibilities.

Poe was such a fascinating man and his imagination was so rich... yet only a very small portion of his ideas are included in the plot of this movie.

The whole idea of Poe solving a real crime would have work great, considering he wrote the first detective story and he even solved a real murder case under the guise of a fictional tale. Poe's deductive mind could have been better used in the movie. After all, he penned the prototype of the eccentric detective savant long before Sherlock Holmes was put into print.

Poe's fascination with cryptography is totally wasted here. Showing him solving an encrypted message from the murderer would have been a nice touch.

Of all the dark and macabre scenarios Poe imagined, only a handful are used here, and those used are not even fully exploited for suspense effect. The killer pendulum just slices the victim quickly, discarding all the agony and suspense that the original story had. The corpse locked in the box was a perfect opportunity to reenact the "Thou art the man" climax, where the dead body sits up propelled by a spring.

Even good chances of references to his work are wasted. That should have been a one-eyed cat saved from the burning house, instead of a raccoon.

Pulling the teeth from the mouth of a victim would be closer to Poe than the silly tongue cutting.

Where is the pit filled with unmentionable abominations? The slow decapitation by a clockwork mechanism? Where is the room with burning walls that slowly shrink around the helpless victim? The hungry rats tormenting the bounded prisoner? So many bloodcurdling death scenes that could have made this movie more interesting. Instead they went for bland predictable.

So many possible twists that were left unused because of uninspired writing.


http://www.futurepig.com