THE RAVEN (2012): Quoth the raven, "Eat my shorts."

In a world where Abraham Lincoln fights vampires and Sherlock Holmes is a mixed martial artist, I suppose casting Edgar Allan Poe as an amateur homicide detective isn't such an egregious rewriting of history.  At least Poe no doubt had the fascination with the macabre to give him a familiar insight into the mind of a killer.  And his stories, helpfully in the public domain, make cheap fodder for Hollywood thrills.

John Cusack might seem like an odd choice to play Poe, but I actually can't think of anyone more perfect.  Who better to capture Poe's romantic frustration, his themes of outright abandonment by the opposite sex?  I'd like to see Cusack play Poe in an actual biopic.

That's not what The Raven is, nor is it a feature-length version of the classic poem.  Nor, in fact, is it expanded to a silly celebration of all of the things that Poe held dear, like Roger Corman's 1963 film of the same name.  In fact, aside from one or two quotes and a couple of wing-flappings, the movie has little to do with its namesake.  Cusack is Poe, broke and long suffering from writer's block.  People in his home town of Baltimore are being murdered in the style of Poe's stories, and the killer contacts him with clues.  The police, led by Detective Fields (Luke Evans), team up with him to solve the case.

The procedural plot of the film is as contrived as they come.  The murders are graphic and not very inventive; they even bear little resemblance to Poe's work.  Given Roger Ebert's Law of Economy of Characters, we know that the unidentified killer must be one of the characters we have met, unless the movie, like Se7en, has something else in mind.  This movie does not, and the surprise reveal comes with little fanfare.  The killer's motive is bland, and the confrontation between him and Poe is a yawn.

The one thing that anchors it is Cusack's performance, which is inspired.  If the script doesn't quite allow him to really get under Poe's skin, he at least gives us a genuine hero: a man who has loved and lost one too many times, and is fighting for his own last grasp on humanity, especially when his own girlfriend (Alice Eve) gets caught up in the mix.

Director James McTeigue, who made the very good V for Vendetta, manages to salvage a couple of good suspense sequences.  The first is borrowed from "The Premature Burial," in which a character awakens inside a coffin somewhere--McTeigue doesn't show us any outside point of view--and must find a way out.  The other comes toward the end, in which a character has been poisoned and must use what little life he has left to save someone else.  It's in these scenes that the real Poe seems to make a cameo appearance.

** out of ****

NOTE: One of the movie's screenwriters is named Hannah Shakespeare, which has given me an idea for the next movie of this type: William Shakespeare, Zombie Killer.

FREAK DANCE (2010): UCBeat Street

Made in 2010 but just hitting DVD now, Freak Dance may be a little bit late to the game with its skewering of the battle-dancing genre, especially since there's already been one goofy parody (the Wayans family's surprisingly decent Dance Flick).  But this film, written and directed by Upright Citizens Brigade co-founder Matt Besser and starring many staple actors of that theater in Los Angeles, still manages to find something fresh to savage.  Rather than take the anything-for-a-joke route of the Wayanses, Besser and crew apply a more subtle, straightfaced approach that embraces the outright silliness of the genre.  With the goofy factor toned down just a little, Freak Dance could have passed for an actual dance flick.

It has the obligatory plot line of any dance movie, borrowed from Footloose, Dirty Dancing, The Forbidden Dance, and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo equally.  When their community center is threatened with closing due to health violations, the dance crew Fantaseez and their leader Asteroid (Hal Rudnick) are left with no choice but to battle-dance in a local underground competition and use the prize money to pay their fees.  Their crew consists of the talented but cocky Funkybunch (Michael Daniel Cassady), the functioning illiterate Sassy (Angela Trimbur), the dorky Egghead (Benjamin Simeon), the aptly named Silent Girl (Peipei Yuan), and their newest recruit, the rich-girl-with-street-cred Cocolonia (Megan Heyn).

Though the many jabs at dance movie conventions grow tired pretty quickly, the movie works largely because the dancing is, well, not bad.  Rather than just goof on the genre, Besser and his co-director Neil Mahoney take the choreography seriously enough that the musical numbers are clever and often hilarious.  Though the cast is mostly made up of improv actors, they prove themselves (or in some cases, their doubles) to be pretty adept at movement.  An early scene in which the Fantaseez crew invades a hospital and infects the entire staff with dancing is laugh-out-loud funny, and the big battle climax against a rival crew led by a strip club owner (Drew Droege) is uproariously vulgar.  The song score, written by Cassady and Brian Fountain, is not tightly composed but is consistently clever and serves a series of charming numbers. (My favorite: the code violation list-song "The Bathroom's Too Dark to Pee.")

The four original Upright Citizens (Besser, Amy Poehler, Matt Walsh, and Ian Roberts) are very funny in small roles, and there are guest appearances by several UCB Theater regulars, including Horatio Sanz, Casey Wilson, Tim Meadows, and Andrew Daly (who has the film's funniest one-liner).

Humor-wise, Freak Dance comes with few surprises; those familiar with Besser's work and with the Del Close-style improv of the UCB Theater (including the terrific sketch show from the late '90s) will know what to expect.  What I was not expecting was for the dancing to be this good.  Freak Dance is funny because it was made by funny people, but what elevates it is that the dance numbers are cleverly conceived and professionally choreographed.

*** out of ****