The Tomb of Ligeia

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Henry M 08/30/2023 Eastman color film is put to full affect in this campy but cool Poe adaptation. The outfits are brilliant reds and blues. The green grass is vivid and nice to look at. I enjoyed the ruined church they filmed at. In general the locations and sets were very pleasant and well done. Vincent Price played a good melancholy, reclusive lord. See more 04/13/2022 Unfunny and unoriginal!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! See more dave s 11/09/2021 Roger Corman's Tomb of Legeia, his last entry in the entertaining but inconsistent Edgar Allen Poe series, turns out to be a bit of a disappointment. Vincent Price plays Verden Fell, a distraught widower who bounces back quite nicely when he marries the alluring Lady Rowena. Unfortunately for Rowena, her new husband is not quite over the death of his first wife, who seems to linger about the abbey they inhabit. It's a nonsensical and somewhat confusing plot that seems to get lost in its own absurdities. Despite that, it's not all bad – Price is entertaining, as always, and the sets are great, but there are just too many shoulder- shrugging, eyebrow-raising moments of confusion to recommend it. See more 07/08/2021 Based on Edgar Allan Poe's "Ligeia" and adapted by Robert Towne, this is the last of the Roger Corman Poe films. Because Poe's story was so short, Towne expanded on the themes of mesmerism and necrophilia. The result? "Literally being controlled by someone who was dead, which is gruesome notion but perfectly consistent with Poe." said Towne to John Brady in The Craft of the Screenwriter. In that same book, Towne confessed he thought that "…it would have been better if it had been with a man who didn't look like a necrophiliac to begin with. I love Vincent. He's very sweet. But, going in, you suspect that Vincent could bang cats, chickens, girls, dogs, everything. You just feel that necrophilia might be one of his Basic Things." Corman agreed, as he was thinking Richard Chamberlain would be perfect. Yet American-International Pictures wanted Price and Corman had to break the news to Towne. The film starts with a casket on display with a young woman's face visible through a window in the pine box. A black cat jumps on the coffin and takes her soul, which belonged to Ligeia, the wife of Verden Fell (Vincent Price). He's troubled by her death, as she refused to die and was blasphemous about God to the end of her life. Despite his strange appearance — he must wear special glasses as he is allergic to sunlight* — he meets another woman at the grave, Rowena (Elizabeth Shepherd, The Kidnapping of the President, The Omen II). They fall instantly in love and he moves her into his home which is haunted by the spirit of his wife in the form of that black cat. By the end of the film, we learn that he's been mesmerized by his dead wife and can only love her, yet he battles the cat that has her soul until her tomb burns around them. As for his new wife, well, she goes back to the man she left at the start of the movie and has a happy future, which is pretty sad for poor Vincent Price. *Poe invented being goth. See more 12/22/2020 The last of the Corman-Poe-Price collaborations has Vincent Price incarcerating his second wife (Elizabeth Shepherd) in his cavernous Abbey while he absconds upstairs for some light necrophilia with his first wife (also played by Elizabeth Shepherd). Rather slow and pedestrian to begin with - and the bright Norfolk exteriors don't help - this develops into quite a creepy piece. Corman is always good at suggestion and is aided as always by the snarling camp of Price, who plays every moment with a seriousness that borders on comedy. See more 08/20/2017 A moody and stylish atmosphere keep this one moving. While Price is morose and driven, it is not quite as good as the best Poe adaptations he did with Roger Corman. It's still a very good movie. It's just no Masque of the Red Death or House of Usher. See more Read all reviews

The Tomb of Ligeia

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