Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

The first must-see film of the year.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

This was another one of Vincent Price's movies that I just only now have had the fortune chance of watching."The Tomb of Ligeia" was a very slow paced story that seemed somewhat incoherent. Granted, I haven't read the Poe story, so how true the movie was to the book I have no idea.The characters were somewhat devoid of characteristics, personalities and appeal, and most were ones that you hardly took a liking to."The Tomb of Ligeia" is definitely not the best of movies that rose in the horror genre in the mid 1960s, and it is hardly one of the more outstanding of Vincent Price movies.

I have no interest in classic literature so I don't know much about Edgar Allan Poe.After watching this, I can confidently say he wasn't much of a writer.I remember reading The Tell Tale Heart and this story is weirdly similar.So some people are on a fox hunt and of course the only female gets separated from the group.She falls off her horse onto a grave and then screams and faints when she sees Vincent Price.One of the men hears her scream and comes to see what happened and it turns out that he knows Price and thought the property he lived on was long abandoned(even though Price has several employees and a constant stream of visitors).The woman wakes up and while Price carries her inside he tells her that he "lives at night" even though it is currently day time and he is up during the day for the rest of the movie.Less than five minutes after fainting at the site of Price, the woman wants to marry him.Ugh.There's a black cat that you will quickly realize is not just a cat.It's in the castle all the time and minutes after telling a servant to kill it, Price calls it a stray.The woman says Price is morose and he later says it too but I think they meant to say verbose because this guy will not shut up.To top it all off, the end was extremely predictable.Three stars.

The Tomb of Ligeia was yet another in the long line of Corman horror flicks with Vincent Price. This one aimed for a sumptuous Gothic romance look despite a low budget and mostly pulled it off. The production design work was surprisingly sharp for a B-picture. Everything has a nice murky gloom to it, nice and creepy, very goth. All of the usual story tropes appear here: Price as a brooding widower, unable to let go of his dead wife, and unwilling to believe wife #2 when she claims wife #1 has returned as something... unnatural! Dusty, unused staircases, locked rooms never to be opened, screams in the dead of night etc. abound and it all seems terribly clichéd forty years later, but the atmosphere of gloom and dread carries through to the modern viewer and the results are fairly entertaining. The script tends a bit toward the hysterical, and some of the performances get overcooked, but this is nothing too unusual for the time and genre. Worth a look.

I suppose this is as much psychological thriller as horror by modern standards, given that there is no real horror - either physical or mental - to speak of. Price is the husband of Ligeia, the woman who loved life so much she refused to accept her own death when it became inevitable and swore she would always be his wife. Given baggage like this, the fact that he wanders around in shades that would be cool today but that are decidedly odd for Victorian England and lives in a cobwebby old abbey it's a bit of a surprise that Lady Rowena falls for him so quickly. Mind you, he does attempt to kill the cat that has clawed her with a cabbage, so he obviously has some good points (I know that sentence doesn't read correctly but it's late and I can't be bothered to re-write. Just take it as read that Tiddles didn't claw her with a cabbage, OK? Thanks).Frivolity aside - and the more films I see the more inclined I am to be frivolous about them - Roger Corman's final Poe adaptation is quite handsomely mounted considering its modest budget. It's plot unfolds at a stately pace typical of the era in which it was filmed (which means the majority of people under 25 will find it too difficult to stick with). Price is about 15 years too old for his role but gives a pretty good account of himself, while Elisabeth Shepherd manages to keep the annoyance quotient of her character down to a manageable level.One point I was curious about was what was going on in that opulently furnished hall behind the mirror. Ligeia lying on that bed in her black nightgown, her arms extended as if to greet a lover - or to beseech his return. Was Corman really suggesting necrophilia?