Scared to Death

1947
4.1| 1h8m| NA| en| More Info
Released: 01 February 1947 Released
Producted By: Golden Gate Pictures
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Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
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A woman is married to the son of a doctor, the proprietor of a private sanatorium, where she is under unwilling treatment. Both the son and the doctor indicate they want the marriage dissolved. Arriving at the scene is a mysterious personage identified as the doctor's brother who formerly was a stage magician in Europe. He is accompanied by a threatening dwarf...

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Director

Christy Cabanne

Production Companies

Golden Gate Pictures

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Scared to Death Audience Reviews

Rijndri Load of rubbish!!
Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.
BallWubba Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.
StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.
Chase_Witherspoon Comedy-rendered crime thriller with Lugosi as a sinister cousin to surgeon Zucco, an unwelcome guest after being estranged for many years following an altercation. Zucco's son (Varno) is unhappily wed to former theatre performer (Lamont), who's haunted by Lugosi's presence and that of a mysterious man in a green mask. Told from the minds-eye perspective of a corpse (!), this compact thriller is quick and quirky but unlikely to scare anyone to death anytime soon.Camp performances by Lugosi, Fowley and especially Pendleton as the private detective hoping for a homicide so he can return to the force are generally well executed against Zucco's relatively straight performance, while Lamont (whose native South African accent is occasionally detectable) teeters on the edge of insanity as those around her seek to take advantage of her fragile emotional state.There's a convoluted plot involving a mysterious figure in a green mask and a previous marriage that threatens to de-rail Lamont's hope for a financially lucrative divorce, but the plot strands are so quickly resolved that I had to reverse engineer the explanation a day or two later. Still, it's only 65 minutes of your life, and you do get to see Lugosi in a rare, "natural" colour appearance.
oscar-35 *Spoiler/plot- 1947, A story told in retrospective with life flashbacks of a morgue slab female's victim to how she was badly treated during her life. She is involved in some family drama while in an old creepy family rural estate. Her husband, her father-in-law (Zucco) and the unfriendly housekeeper are all suspect in seeking her demise and along comes her husband's visiting foreign uncle (Lugosi) with his weird dwarf assistant (Rossito). All these elements make for some mystery and drama on screen.*Special Stars- Douglas Fowley, George Zucco, Bela Lugosi, Nat Pendleton, Angel Rossito *Theme- Being rich and living in an rural mansion can be suicidal for you.*Based on- Pulp paperback murder mysteries *Trivia/location/goofs- The dwarf actor, Angelo Rossito and Nat Pendleton had long and varied acting careers with many feature films and worked until their deaths. Their careers are an interesting study in two different character actors versatility and longevity in modern Hollywood. Their careers are worth some investigation by real film buffs.*Emotion- An interesting film for it's plot use of retrospective, script writing work and character studies.
Zbigniew_Krycsiwiki Hilarious Lugosi "horror", his only filmed in colour, begins at Central City Morgue with the two pathologists pompously philosophising about the dead girl's last thoughts before death. This segues into the main story, narrated by the corpse herself(!), about the events leading up to her demise, including some events that she was clearly not present for, so how could she narrate them to the audience? And, if she's at the morgue, dead, at the start of the film, needless to say the outcome holds no surprises.Various different film stocks were used, as well as various different lighting techniques (sometimes soft lighting; sometimes more harsh overhead lighting, which is occasionally visible at the top of the frame) Pure hilarity involving almost everything one can want from an old B-movie: corpses, severed "heads", midgets, and enough purple dialogue to rival Ed Wood's entire oeuvre (my favourite of Lugosi's lines has to be: "There is an air of inquiry about you that immediately offends my deepest nature! Something suggesting Scotland Yard, the French Sécurité, the Italian Carabinieri, the Turkish Polizi, and other minions of the law!") this is a sure bet for Lugosi fans and fans of old B-movies.
pery-1 Much like an "Abbott and Costello meet ...Lugosi" type movie. Nat Pendleton's bizarre and irritating yet somehow endearing slapstick is a major part of the film. The reporter and maid are also rather irritating characters like you find in the old screwball comedies. The midget crawling all over is one of many zany touches, and false leads. Legosi is earnest in playing it straight, as always, and he gets some good lines off. It's a treat to see Lugosi in color.One thing that's irritating today is the (Theramin?) sound every time it flashes back from the body to what happened, because that sound was later appropriated as the "UFO" sound and is now so identified with them that it feels very wrong here.