TOMB OF LIGIEA
Vincent Price is my god

  Man, that Vincent Price was like the James Bond of horror, man.  He always got the job done and never looked like he was ever in danger of breaking a sweat doing it.

Based of course upon Poe's "Ligiea" (which also inspired the ass-kicking Annihilator song of the same title), Price stars as Verden Fell (no apparent relation to Norman Fell), an isolated Englishman whose raven-locked, beguiling, and quite heretical wife Ligiea dies.  Hey, these things happen, especially that "heretical" part. It takes him a while to get over her, and his eyes have inexplicably become super-sensitive to light and he has to walk around with bulky sunglasses all the time.  Then one day he meets the lovely Lady Rowena (Elizabeth Shepherd), who looks uncannily like a blonde Ligiea.  They wed, and, well, you figure it out.

This is one of Price's best performances - and he's actually in fairly serious danger of having the movie stolen out from under him by Shepherd, who puts in a marvelously assured performance.  How often do we see this in a Price film?  (I can think only of Tales Of Terror, in which I didn't think Price was really all that good)  The plot is pretty predictable, but the players and the dialogue carry it all through effortlessly.

Awesome use of location shooting, with decaying stonework everywhere, the country vegetation creeping up on it.  There's even one scene at Stonehenge.  Great music by Kenneth V. Jones, too.

Directed by Roger Corman; written by future script doctor Robert Towne.  Also known as Ligiea, Last Tomb Of Ligiea, and Tomb Of The Cat.

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