Scared To Death has the unfortunate distinction of being my least favorite Bela Lugosi movie. To say the movie is bad is an understatement. It features a plot so lame that you don't care that you don't understand it. If you don't want this horrible film ruined for you, don't read any further! In a nutshell someone is scaring a woman to death and it turns out not to be any of the characters in the movie. It features the absolute worst character acting I have ever seen including a half-witted rentacop and a sadistic male chauvinist reporter and his dingy girlfriend.

Of course, when Bela Lugosi is on camera the movie becomes interesting. Bela is in good form as a hypnotist/magician and of course he gives it his all in this dismal movie that is too long at 59 minutes. Some of the problem lies in the fact that as a Bela Lugosi movie, Lugosi gets far too little screen time. The script gives too much stage time to these very egregious and tedious characters and seems to feature the Lugosi character only because they *had* to fit him in somewhere.

Bela Lugosi gives a great performance as always, I am not sure if even that is capable of redeeming this movie -- especially when the nagging thought kept running through my head that surely someone could have found something better for this great actor to do than this drek. Bela is healthy and strong and powerful and I daresay still sexy here -- why was he being wasted? What great talents are being wasted in such a fashion today? But I digress.

I don't recommend this film to any but the die-hard Lugosi fan or the connoisseur of truly bad cinema. It is almost painful to watch Bela Lugosi a skilled artist playing on such a taudry canvas.

As a side note Scared to Death was Bela Lugosi's only movie filmed in color. (Which actually gives one a reason to watch it, I suppose). I'm going to have to look again more closely, but apparently Bela Lugosi had . . . green eyes! Or are they blue?