Stylish but barely mediocre overall

Brilliant and touching

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

I gave it 5 stars because I can't decide if it's too awful or too fun! Everything in the other reviews is true ... this is campy, overdone, and terrible. But it's so much fun! Bela Legosi is cartoonish, as usual. (I wonder if the people in the 40s really found him scary? It's hard for us to judge with today's sensibilities.) What would make it a perfect movie would be Abbot and Costello. If they were part of it, then the whole thing would be considered a classic. But sadly, I do think those involved were trying to make a serious movie, so I feel a bit sorry for them as we all laugh with delight at the sheer badness of it. Worth watching for the fun of it.

"Scared To Death" has a promising genre cast, but this is not a shining moment for any of the persons involved. Bela Lugosi and George Zucco do what they usually do, and they do it well, but not much of it, and not anything more. There is also a load of ineffectual comic relief by Nat Pendleton, Joyce Compton and Gladys Blake. The use of color helps the film camouflage its lack of budget (almost all of it takes place in one house) a little, but it is still relentlessly talky, pointless, and boring. And could this perhaps be the most spoiler-y movie title in the history of movie titles? There is a laughable epilogue where the truth is finally revealed: "She was....scared to death!" You don't say!!! * out of 4.

This reminded me a lot of Tex Avery's "Who Dunnit?".Admittedly, Lugosi comes across as campy even in his best roles. His sinister mien is just another red herring in this movie that looks an awful lot like a movie made from a partial movie with a dead woman's narration to tie everything together; oddly, sometimes the movie dissolves to the corpse who says nothing, then dissolves back to the flashback.There's a sinister doctor and a sinister midget. The plot seems almost improvised as does the ending. Kind of fun if you aren't expecting to be wowed.

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.