It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

So far I've seen 6 movies directed by David DeCoteau and I'm starting to sense a pattern here... The movies that were loosely based on Edgar Allan Poe's novels are pretty much soft-core porn and two out of three Puppet Master movies are an insult to the franchise. So the pattern here is that David DeCoteau sucks! His later works, "The Pit and the Pendulum" & "The House of Usher" were soft-core port too, but at least *those* movies had a somewhat good story. Sure, these movies are based on Edgar Allen Poe's novels, so the story was already provided, but "The Raven" has something that the other two movies do not: bad execution! I mean... come on! The acting was weird, the plot holes were many, the story overall was full of clichés and the editing of the so called "sex-scenes" was a joke! Looping footage over and over again to make the scene last longer, doesn't mean it'll make the scene better! And as for the ending... You know... a quote comes to mind: "There's plot convenience, there's Deus Ex Machina, and then there's just pulling stuff right out of your ass!" "The Pit and the Pendulum" & "The House of Usher" were not good movies! Nowhere, at any point, were they good movies. They too had pretty much the same flaws as "The Raven", but at least they weren't as boring! I have never been so bored watching a movie before! Never! Final thoughts: If you want the usual soft-core porn that David DeCoteau does so "well", got watch "The Pit and the Pendulum" instead!

There was so much affectation in the acting and accents, I honestly couldn't wait for 'The Raven' to dispatch each of the characters. Why were these South African actors given an Australian dialogue coach to help them deliver English 'toff' accents? And I swear I heard a Welsh accent early on, why was it needed? It all kept me asking 'who are these people, why do they all seem to hate each other, and why are they having a party together? Were the disparate accents part of a master plan for a major international incident (with an end shot of The Raven stroking a fluffy white cat)?' The movie kept getting in the way of its story, and I lost interest pretty quickly. It wasn't fair to Poe's original story, but then there really wasn't much of the original Poe's 'The Raven' actually in this story, only nods and suggestions -- actually it may be closer to 'Mask of the Red Death', if anything. Oh, why was it called 'The Raven' then? I'll end with the sound of my toe tap, tap, tapping and think of this movie NEVERMORE.