Review of The Oval Portrait

I watched this terrible film The Oval Portrait on Amazon Prime and their print was awful, but even if I had seen a pristine print I still would have hated this "film". It was a hackneyed, painful, laughably bad interpretation of a Poe story, about a woman named Lisa possessed by the demonic dead spirit of a young woman named Rebecca who is displayed in a portrait in a gloomy house, a woman who lived during the Civil War and fell in love with an enemy soldier. That young woman became pregnant out of wedlock and her insane daddy attacked her because his wife had also deserted him with a lover. Insane daddy is committed to an asylum and when he dies the haunted house is about to be willed over to Lisa and her relative. Will Lisa inherit this "home"? Or will she be better off living elsewhere? Convoluted plot, to say the least! The way this film was edited was abysmal; not sure if better editing would have helped it, though, because the story was so distasteful. We are not even given a precise indication as to how Rebecca died. In childbirth, we assume, but it isn't made clear. Enter this turkey at your own mental risk!