Fantastic!

Brilliant and touching

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

... you're expecting the Carole Lombard of those great mid-30's screwball comedies and beyond. However, she does give a great dual personality performance here. In order to make it believable that she is possessed by the more aggressive personality, she has to make the other personality extra demure and undistinguished so you can tell them apart. Believe me, you can.The film opens with Ruth Rogen being tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for strangling her three lovers with her bare hands for the fun of it all. Dr. Carl Houston (H.B. Warner) comes to visit Miss Rogen in jail and asks if he can perform some experiments on her once she is dead, since the good doctor is interested in the paranormal. She agrees only because she sees the possibility of the escape of her soul into another person's body - it seems there is one more person she wants to strangle before she closes her affairs in this world and she doesn't care whose body she uses to do it.At the same time, wealthy Roma Courtney (Carole Lombard) has just lost her twin brother, John, through death. There are some nice touches here showing the depth of Roma's grief and her close relationship with her brother including her playing some home recordings that the two had made together and their dog, confused by his master's absence, bringing John's slippers to a now all too empty chair. Slimy fake spiritualist Paul Bavian (Alan Dinehart) reads the newspapers and gets an idea. At night he slips into the mortuary where John's body is, makes a death mask of John's face, and then uses that mask to try and perpetrate a fraud on Roma, claiming that he can reach beyond the grave and contact John. Did I mention that Bavian is the one that informed on Ruth to the police when he couldn't get her to break off their affair? Did I also mention that Roma got a little too close to Ruth's body during one of Dr. Houston's experiments one night? I think you probably know where this is going.This one is very atmospheric and moves quite briskly at only 65 minutes in length. The séance scenes are not scary at all, since the audience can see how Bavian is doing his tricks, but the scene where Roma and her fiancé walk in unexpectedly to Houston's lab and see the body of Ruth Rogen sitting upright in a chair, dressed in some kind of evening gown, seeming to stare right at them - that is good precode horror stuff.

Supernatural (1933) ** 1/2 (out of 4) Decent horror/thriller from Paramount has a woman about to be executed for killing three of her lovers during an orgy. She asks for her forth lover to come visit her but when she refuses she swears revenge. After her death a doctor accidentally releases her spirit into the body of a good girl (Carole Lombard) who then tries to carry out the death wish. This here was directed by Victor Halperin who directed White Zombie the previous year and the biggest difference between the two films is that this one here actually moves at a rather fast pace unlike the Lugosi title. On the other hand the story is a bit too dry to be fully entertaining and both Lombard and Randolph Scott give pretty mediocre performances.

Supernatural is a slow moving pic about séance versus science as Carole Lombard is exposed to the dark side via a shady mystic and an overzealous doctor. A dull plot and even duller characters. As a Lombard fan, I like to see how she fared early in her career. Her acting in this film is just so-so and it brings to light how much she improved in the last nine years of her life. The big plus is Randolph Scott, not for his acting but for his physique. He's definitely easy on the eyes in a movie that otherwise put me to sleep.

I too have seen Supernatural very recently and I found it to be silly and trite. I kept telling myself that this wasn't Carole Lombard that I was watching as I couldn't believe she would do such a horrible movie. Alas, it was she and it was also Randolph Scott hamming it up in too many scenes. But, unlike another critic of this movie at this site I did not see Robert Montgomery anywhere in this movie.Give credit where credit is due and withold it when it isn't due. Robert Montgomery was nowhere near this abomination of a movie.Dave Holt