The Horror!? 54: Scared to Death (1947)

I am not entirely dumb when it comes to understanding movies. I can comprehend Primer without the use of a diagram and hate too much exposition, because it shows the arrogant disdain of a movie for its audience. But this film got me beat. It's about...well, who the hell knows? What I know is only the following: Scared to Death is narrated by a dead woman, Laura van Ee (but don't get hot and bothered just now, she is a very boring dead narrator - so boring that soon you'll wish her death had just shut her up), who tells us the convoluted and illogical happenings surrounding her death. You see, Laura was married to a man of wealth by accident. He got drunk at a party and made a bet to ask the singer on stage to marry him, obviously not believing she would say yes. So they marry and soon hate each other with great passion. Still, Laura denies her husband a divorce. Perhaps her nearly paranoid state of mind, her fear of green masks and blindfolds plus the fact that her father-in-law is a doctor with a shady past played by George Zucco will help her husband get rid of her in a different way? Or will Zucco's visiting estranged cousin Bela Lugosi, a stage magician with a professorial degree and a sidekick dwarf do something terrible? What about the guy in the green mask who sneaks around the house? Or the noisy reporter with the most grating voice I have ever heard? His dumb girlfriend? The rent-a-cop "comedic relief" who needs a murder to get reinstated in the police force (don't ask)?
Who knows? The scriptwriter certainly didn't and so kept himself entertained by throwing every piece of crap that came to his mind into the script, with a complete disregard for logic or even the most basic bit of sense. But the strangest thing is the inability of the movie to be entertaining. It's just boring and dumb and seems to run on and on to its equally senseless conclusion.
That the only color picture with Bela Lugosi (here completely off his game - the drugs, I suppose), has to be not only such a mess but also such a bore is another reason to stay an atheist.

If I don't seem to make much sense today, blame the movie. I certainly do.