New Movies: Two Dead Spirits Out of Three

The credentials are impressive. Federico Fellini, Louis Malle and Roger Vadim, each directing a brace of international superstars in a loose adaptation of a Poe story, seem to promise one of the better anthology films.

But the ads have something else in mind. "Edgar Allan Poe's ultimate orgy of evil and unbearable horror!" they shriek, conjuring up images of a dawn-to-dusk scare show at the local drive-in. Obviously the distributors were afraid of something—probably the spooks that Spirits of the Dead promises but never actually delivers.

The first episode, Metzengerstein, is something...

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