"The Raven" is Definitely Horrific, but for All of the Wrong Reasons

From director, Ulli Lommel, comes this 2007 debacle of a film based on Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven."

To say this movie is a stinker would be a major understatement. This movie is so bad that I actually would advocate the burning of this movie (along with the entire Saw trilogy).

The movie centers on a girl with the name Lenore. For some reason, the movie wants the audience to believe that just by having the name of Poe's legendary heroine, this girl is marked. Okay, what about the several thousand other Lenores in the world. Are they also haunted by the creepy poet? Are they also destined to die? The concept is stupid beyond all reason.

Little Lenore supposedly began reading Poe's poetry as a child and started having nightmares that show her killing a bald man. She tells here grandfather - - who, by the way, ought to be shot for reading Poe poetry to a child - - that her life is doomed. She goes on to say that she knows she will be forced to kill this bald man; she will have no option.

Advance 15 years and you see a sort of grown up Lenore. She is now a singer in a girl band. Say what? The movie never explains that leap nor what happened to the child during the 15 year period prior except for some vague indications that she might have been under the care of nuns.

Just as Lenore finishes the song she has spent years writing; the one that is somehow supposed to bridge the gap between life and death, she begins to have even more violent dreams. Except they are not dreams. Her friends, who are disappearing one by one, actually are being killed; by the raven turned psycho human killer nonetheless.

The film doesn't explain how the raven, once Leonore's protector, is now alive. Nor does it explain why he goes about killing people connected to her. In fact it takes a little while for the audience to understand that the killer actually is the raven. They accomplish this by showing dark shadows of the killer's eyes against that of a raven's cold, dark eyes and showing the killer's fingers becoming wing like.