The Oval Portrait (1973) Poster

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1/10
Truthfully the worst "film" I have EVER seen!
overseer-32 February 2024
Warning: Spoilers
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!
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10/10
Haunting love story
sarahps-5772412 February 2023
This is a beautiful re-telling of an Edgar Allan Poe story. I don't understand why it has such a low rating. Like many of Poe's stories it's a slow build and not your traditional horror, but i feel like it should be recognized as an amazing occult classic. It's a haunting love story and the ending is just as macabre and beautiful just as most of Poes stories are. It's definitely worth a watch if you like classic 70's horrors, but don't expect a repeat of the films you've seen before; remember this is based off Poe's work. It also shows as a nice period piece as well as the struggle of love in that era when your expected to marry the "neighbors son" to benefit the family or to be able to have an opinion and not just serve the family.
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