One Minute Before Death

Loosely based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, The Oval Portrait opens in classic Gothic horror mode with a horse-drawn carriage drawing up to a storm-lashed antebellum house, the passengers—Mrs. Buckingham (Doris Buckinham) and her daughter Lisa (Wanda Hendrix)—arriving for the reading of a will. As the women approach the front door, Lisa sees a ghostly apparition of a lady in white, which vanishes before she can show her mother, who understandably dismisses the vision as a product of her daughter's overactive imagination. Once inside the house, the women meet housekeeper Mrs. Warren (Gisele MacKenzie), who shows them to their room.

During the night, Lisa wakes to the sound of music and goes downstairs, where she sees a man—who we later learn is named Joseph (Barry Coe)—playing the piano and talking to a woman called Rebecca. The next day, Lisa puts on a dress that she finds in a wardrobe, the sight of which sends Joseph into a hysterical state. In a prolonged flashback, Mrs. Warren explains the tragic story behind Joseph's strange behaviour: he was once a Confederate soldier in love with Rebecca, the daughter of a Union major, but as the couple were about to be wed in a secret ceremony, Joseph was arrested and taken away. On returning from the war, Rebecca's father discovered the truth about his daughter, who was pregnant with Joseph's baby, and threw her out of the house. When the war was over, Joseph returned to the house to find Rebecca dead, the young woman having fallen victim to a fatal illness.

Thus far, The Oval Portrait has been a pretty unremarkable Gothic tragedy with a narrative hampered by weak direction and sloppy editing (including gimmicky 'flickering' scene transitions that really grate). From here-on in, however, things get much more interesting…

The flashback ends with a distraught Joseph digging up the corpse of his dead bride-to-be, after which the action switches to the present, with the reading of the will. Rebecca's spirit then possesses Lisa, and furniture and ornaments start to fly around the house. Lisa runs upstairs where she discovers Rebecca's corpse hidden in a wardrobe. And the craziness doesn't end there: the next evening, after most of the visitors have left, Joseph sneaks back into the house for one last dance with Rebecca. While he's waltzing round the room with his putrid partner, Mrs. Warren gets out of bed, investigates, and sees Joseph kissing the crumbly cadaver (which makes one wonder what else he's been doing with it). Clearly well off his rocker, the man approaches the housekeeper, who pulls a gun and fills him full of lead, finally allowing him to be united with Rebecca in death.

Director Rogelio A. González's handling of matters is just as shambolic as before, but the madness is far more entertaining—after all, there's nothing like a spot of necrophilia to pep up an otherwise mediocre movie.

4.5 out of 10, rounded up to 5 for IMDb.

This is a pretty shabby affair, although it was evidently produced with some energy and at least the camera work is good - and in focus.

The movie tells of a woman named Lisa who arrives at a country mansion with her mother and is haunted/terrorized by ghosts, strange people, and an eerie painting of a dead woman called Rebecca. After 20 minutes, the modern day story gets put on hold while a boring and gushy explanatory flashback plays out for nearly 45 minutes! One we come back to the main cast again, the story rattles to a sudden end, with at least some attempt at true horror involving a nasty corpse.

There is lots of unintentional humour throughout. The mansion is spotlessly clean and well decorated...clearly the movie was filmed in somebody's large private home. It's also mercilessly lit, so regardless of day or night, everything is showcased in a blaze of industrial arc lighting, even when the cast laughabley hold candles ( that do absolutely nothing). All the acting is poor, and the special effects are nothing more than double exposures and sudden cuts. Stock "terror music" is applied with a trowel over every sequence of drama. Despite all of this, the amazing thing is that the photographer who shot it actually knew how to handle a camera, and most scenes look well storyboarded and nicely framed. Shame the photography is scuppered by the ghastly lighting.

The actresses totter around in "period" dresses that look like party costumes bought from the nearest high street store, and sport enough hair for about 3 people on top of their heads. There are even 2 versions of the painting of Rebecca, that the director swaps between randomly for no apparent reason, and they are glaringly different enough to ruin the little verisimilitude that the movie actually has to start with.

Overall the effect is that of a well produced home movie, so approach accordingly.

The plot is AWESOME with that Gothic Haunted House vibe if the 70's that made that era of movies so good. The acting however was atrocious. How many people noticed that the portrait changed a few times from one woman to another? What could have been such a good movie of the 1970's turned out to be just another one of those leaving you saying WHY??

Short overview first: This is a film that starts off strong and creepy, bogs down in the middle for a long time, then picks up a bit at the end. If you've read elsewhere that the pacing in this film is a little off, then you've read right. That said, it is in no way a bad film and worth a watch at least, especially if you're into those Gothic style Haunted House films that were all the rage back then.

An old Major has died, and his family are turning up at his house for the will reading (I think). His niece immediately gets the creeps and starts seeing the spectre of a young girl around the place, and is also creeped out by the Oval Portrait of a lady on the wall. The niece starts wearing some old clothes she found in a cupboard which freaks out some guy called Joseph, and the housekeeper then goes into the backstory, which takes up the entire middle portion of the film! But not before the niece is possessed by the spirit inhabiting the portrait on the wall…

The backstory concerns the girl in the portrait, the guy called Joseph, and the major, and is more of a civil war era costume drama/romance than a horror film. That said, even my wife, who has no patience for these sorts of b-movies and would rather have some semblance of a real life, did enjoy the film for what it was.

While staying in an old house to hear the reading of a will, a woman becomes haunted by the spirit of the deceased girl whose room she is occupying. The kindly housekeeper advises her to leave the house quickly, and supports this warning with what is possibly the longest expository flashback sequence in film history.

This fly-ball ghost story is mostly a woebegone romance set during and shortly after the U. S. Civil War. Stir in some soap-suds melodrama and a fat pinch of horse-and-buggy chills of the "old dark house" variety, and there you have The Colonel's secret recipe for one peculiar little movie. It's a noticeably insouciant project filmed almost entirely within a neo-Victorian styled house, and features some laughably unconvincing period wardrobe and wigs. That said, it's a modestly watchable item which transcends slightly the usual expectations held for underprivileged cinema. The has-been female leads(Hendrix and Mackenzie) are commendable, if a bit outmoded in their old-school Hollywood histrionics, but come-off nearly Oscar-worthy in comparison to their less-distinguished support players. Truth is, there's actually little to gripe about where the rudiments of production are concerned...it's adequately overseen for the most part. It does suffer from directorial lassitude and yo-yo pacing, however, and the dearth of gratuitous sensationalism renders it a rather prudent entry to the delectus of horror cinema.

4.5/10...not exactly "bucket list" material.