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Wednesday, January 4, 2017

Scared To Death (1947)

Starring Bela Lugosi, George Zucco, Nat Pendleton, Molly Lamont, Joyce Compton
Directed by Christy Cabanne
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)

The dead body of a woman recalls the last hours of her life, trapped in an institution run by her husband and his father, and haunted by a fear of something hidden in her past.

The only color film of Bela Lugosi is possibly one of his worst movies, with a nonsensical script and poorly written characters.  Lugosi, Zucco, and Cabanne have all made much better movies, so I can only presume that they were desperate for work to sign on to this turkey.  It's not completely awful- Lugosi and Zucco take their parts seriously, such as they are, and it's good to see them together, but when they both vanish from the film for long sequences, we're left with Nat Pendleton's bumbling cop and Douglas Fowley's annoying reporter to carry the story, who both would have been far better in much smaller doses.

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