Histoires Extraordinaires (Federico Fellini, Louis Malle & Roger Vadim, 1968)

7.5/10
A triptych of 40-minute films directed individually by Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini, all based on Edgar Allen Poe stories. Vadim's Metzengerstein starts out promising enough with Jane Fonda starring as the young Countess Metzengerstein who falls in love with a rival Baron (played by brother Peter) and accidentally kills him in an act of revenge, leaving her to cling to a mysterious black horse that seems to embody his spirit. The first half of the movie is weird and entertaining enough, with the Countess entertaining guests and holding (very mundane looking) orgies and festivities and whatnot, but the action screeches to a halt halfway through and the last half of the film is mostly Jane Fonda frolicking around with a horse until she decides to kill herself to reunite with the dead Baron. Okay then.
Malle's William Wilson involves the man of the title constantly haunted by a doppelganger of the same name, who usurps and prevents his evil deeds until Wilson (the original) fatally wounds the other. Told as he's dying that the original can't live without the double, and with no one believing his story, Wilson kills himself by jumping off a church bell tower. Brigitte Bardot shows up as Wilson's opponent in a decisive card duel that's far more entertaining than it should be, but overall this segment is pretty flat and uninteresting.
Fellini's Toby Dammit was long hyped to be the star of the show and it did not disappoint. Clearly sourced more from Fellini's brain than from any Poe work (it's based on his story Never Bet the Devil Your Head but it's hard to imagine it shares anything more in common than the title), this one centres around a celebrity film star named Toby Dammit who has indeed sold his soul, or at least his head, to the devil (magnificently cast as a young, attractive blonde girl) in exchange for the grotesque excesses of stardom. Visually stunning - I would be shocked if Terry Gilliam wasn't influenced by this when making Fear & Loathing - and constantly impaling the film culture as he did in 8 1/2, there is a lot to enjoy in this segment. Terence Stamp embodies the worn-out, drugged-out, apathetic Toby Dammit perfectly and the film manages to be genuinely creepy, something the other two never come close to achieving. Definitely worth seeking out in its own right.