The Raven (2012) and Me and Orson Welles (2009)

Two famously eccentric American artists who burnt fast and hot get the fictional film treatment in “The Raven” –- with writer/poet Edgar Allan Poe playing super sleuth over a series of murders related to his writings –- and “Me and Orson Welles” -– with the actor/director as scoundrel muse to a plucky “High School Musical” hero. 

As Poe, John Cusack does that arched-eyebrow John Cusack thing he always does, and he’s flat out wrong in the role. The plot is a grisly rehash of “Se7en” stitched onto a carbon copy of Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes,” with a villain that’s dull as rag paper. Worse bit: Poe is shown playing with a pet raccoon. Director James McTeigue thinks he’s still filming “V for Vendetta.” Fawkes that. 

“Me” focuses on a teen drama protégé (Zac Efron) as he cons his way into a gig at the Mercury Theatre for the renowned staging of “Julius Caesar.” Christian McKay plays Welles as madman, genius, romantic, cad, screw-up, and artist, and brilliantly crushes every scene, but with “Tiger Beat” poster boy Efron in the lead pining for a smirking bored Claire Danes, the film sinks. 

Poe and Welles would torch these films. Raven: C- Welles: C+

The Woman in Black (2012)

Voldermort would shit his robe. In “The Woman in Black,” Harry Potter himself Daniel Radcliffe is an early 1900s widowed father/ greenish solicitor sent on a miserable errand: Close out the estate of an old woman who left behind a decrepit English mansion and “Hoarders”-worthy piles of papers. How very Jonathan Harker. Eel Marsh House (!) is built on high land regularly made an island during high-tide, set apart from a town where our hero learns much quickly: He is not welcomed, every parent has lost a child, and the manor is full of vile noises and visions. This is an old–school haunted-house yarn, based not on a book written by Poe, but one certainly written with the old master in mind. Radcliffe does well playing a young man raised to believe in God, but not ghosts, and stricken to see much of the latter, but never the former. Director James Watkins has washed out almost all color and light, so any bright signs must not be trusted. The house moans, shadows creep, and ghostly faces appear out of thin air, making the audience jump and scream, and then laugh. A-