Poe retold without a net. This dark-humour retelling of Poe’s twisted classic about a man driven to commit murder most foul by causes most innocuous, contains a timely warning. College student, Ned, is afflicted with an unusual malady. He craves peace and quiet. Like Poe’s character in the original, he is saddled with a rare nervous disorder that causes him to hear every sound amplified ten-fold. Enter Thor, Ned’s head-banger room-mate, aptly named after the Norse god of thunder. Thor is fun: “PARTEE!” Thor is deep: “I see dude people!” Thor is noise personified; an all-American party dude on sonic steroids. Ned jams in ear plugs and dons ear muffs, but it’s like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Thor turns the cooking of a simple meal into a Motorhead mike test. Ned has to kill him. Less problematic alternatives, like moving, are out of the question. The world is awash with noise. Ned must create peace and quiet at home. He uses a chainsaw. Like Poe’s bipolar protagonist, Ned flips and attempts to clumsily dispose of Thorian chunks when interrupted by the police. The cops, self-absorbed guys who hate their job, completely miss the obvious while preoccupied with such irrelevancies as the effects of a high carb diet on bowel habits. A morality tale for duplicitous times, Tall Tale Heart echoes Poe’s tortured sentiment (rendered here in bumper-stickerese) “the more I hear from the world, the more I prefer silence.