Karry Best movie of this year hands down!

SoTrumpBelieve Must See Movie...

Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.

Maidexpl Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

Red-Barracuda This D. W. Griffith film is an early effort by the director and shows his developing skill on the lead up to epics such as Intolerance. It's about a young man who falls in love with a girl. This love drives a wedge between him and his uncle who has set a path for him that does not allow for such frivolous distractions. This situation drives the man to murder his overbearing uncle. This event leads to madness and psychological breakdown.The story is based on Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart' with elements of 'Annabel Lee' and 'The Black Cat' thrown in for good measure. It's a rare horror outing for Griffiths. Indeed it is one of the very first fully form horror films at all. As such it is of interest. It contains several eerie and macabre details like the ghostly spectre of the uncle back from the dead and thoughts of murder represented by a spider on web and ants attacking a larger insect en mass. It's very primitive stuff overall but that is to be expected considering its age. Worth a look if you are interested in the genesis of the horror film though.

MartinHafer By today's standards, "The Avenging Conscience" is a pretty poor movie, as it uses sledgehammer symbolism to make its point---subtle, it certainly isn't! While this is nominally a reworking of Poe's "A Tell-Tale Heart", director D.W. Griffith wants to make sure the audience knows this again and again and again. So much could have been done with less--and the way it's done here you keep wondering why it wasn't trimmed significantly and all the direct and indirect references to the original story removed. For example, early in the story, the guy who eventually commits the murder is shown sitting at his desk reading the Poe story as well as the poem "Annabelle Lee" (and the main character's girlfriend is named Annabelle)! Then, images of Poe are plastered across the screen! Later, when the young man (Henry Walthall) is getting the idea of killing his uncle, you see closeups of a spider killing a fly and then (repeatedly) footage of a swarm of ants devouring a larger bug!! Believe it or not, back in 1914, such amazingly UNSUBTLE work was the norm--so you can't fault Griffith too much for telegraphing EVERYTHING! But, as I said, by today's standards it's pretty poor--and ruins the suspense.Here's the story. An uncle really loves having his young nephew (Henry Walthall) working for him. But, when Walthall tells him he's interested in a nice young lady (Blanche Sweet), the old man forbids the union and basically calls her a skank. Walthall is naturally furious, but instead of just defying the uncle and marrying her anyway, he decides to kill him--then he can have the girl AND the fortune. Once the terrible deed is done, the murderer disposes of the body in a way reminiscent of the Poe story "The Black Cat" and things should be just fine....but there are two problems. First, there is a witness. Second, Walthall begins hallucinating--seeing the uncle again and again--like some sort of spirit that haunts him. At first, I was impressed by the photographic tricks...but then it all became frightfully overdone--with LOTS of overacting and Jesus coming for a visit--at which point the man repents! So, while re-imagining Poe might have been a great idea, the results were so heavy-handed it undid the impact--plus Poe never would have gone for the heavy religious elements but would have stuck to madness and evil. Now madness DID appear later in the film--but the idea of redemption just isn't something Poe cared for--his characters were just crazy or evil or both! It is really hard to imagine that only a year later, Griffith came out with a much more ground-breaking production ("A Birth of a Nation"--a very racist but technically brilliant film). So much progress in only one year is astounding. Within a couple years, his "Intolerance" would produce a film that is still astoundingly advanced in many ways even today....but no such brilliance is here in "The Avenging Conscience". Obvious, heavy-handed and dull...this should have been a lot better.

DLewis Henry Walthall plays a man whose love for a young girl, played by Blache Sweet, drives him to murder his doting and overprotective uncle. His guilt drives him insane, and in the climactic scene where the detective pushes him to confession, Walthall is so overcome with visions of demons driving him to hell he is on the verge of an apoplectic fit. The most notable things in The Avenging Conscience, in addition to the obvious horrific tableaux and weird scenes of Pan with nymphs at the end, is the way Griffith draws characters in different places together through intercutting and use of props and gestures, i.e. books, pictures, prayer and other things. Perhaps he already had Intolerance in the back of his head while making this oddball adaptation of several Poe works. Also the film appears to have had some influence on other filmmakers; Chaplin's Sunnyside for example, owes something to the bit with Pan at the conclusion. My copy, projected a bit fast, runs only 56 minutes, and clearly there are missing scenes which makes for a choppy continuity. There is a still from The Avenging Conscience in Iris Barry's 1940 bio of Griffith that is from a scene which is no longer in the film. A different still once thought to be from The Avenging Conscience of Griffith directing Walthall holding a pistol to his head was actually taken on the set of Griffith's lost 1914 effort The Escape. The set dressing in The Escape is basically the same as that for the Uncle's home in The Avenging Conscience with a few things switched around, which suggests the two films were shot very closely together, or even simultaneously.

psteier Inspired and vaguely based on Poe's The Telltale Heart and with the words of Poe's Annabel Lee on some of the titles.Some interesting shots of mad visions and of fiends from hell.For dance historians a short 'Greek/Roman' dance at a garden party.