The Tomb (2009)Yes, I spent the whole day watching (a lot in fast forward) some truly awful movies that no one should ever have to sit through, so please don't. I did have a pleasant experience with the very last movie but unfortunately for me (and for you) that is several movies away.
The only reason I even watched this thing was because it was a treatment of the Edgar Allen Poe story Ligeia - a bad one, but an attempt nonetheless. Even as a short story it was messed with before it even became a movie, first in The Tomb Of Ligeia (1964) starring Vincent Price (which I would much rather have watched) but instead I had this drivel. It sort of follows the story in that the woman's name is Ligeia and there's death involved but past that nothing much follows anything except an extremely boring and protracted movie. To call this a horror film is laughable. The original story, in a nutshell is this: Ligeia, a beautiful woman, is emaciated. She marries an unnamed narrator, and impresses her husband with her immense knowledge of physical and mathematical science. Ligeia becomes ill, struggles internally with human mortality, and ultimately dies. The narrator, grief-stricken, buys and refurbishes an abbey in England. He soon enters into a loveless marriage with another woman, Rowena. Rowena becomes ill (people never lasted long back then) and dies. As she is prepared for burial, he notices she starts to 'revive' and this goes on all night until she finally comes back to life - as Ligeia. She has conquered death I suppose.
Not a bad story, but a horrible movie (this version anyway). First we have Johnathan Merrick (I was thinking Elephant Man but that was Joseph) as a writer about, of course, poetry and death and everything macabre. An inside joke (not a good one) is that he cites Poe as his main influence (duh). He's engaged to a beautiful woman whose father is pretty glad the guy is stinking rich (the dad played by an underused Michael Madsen) and doesn't hesitate to point it out at every opportunity. Johnathan meets Ligeia when she attends a lecture about one of his books. She immediately puts her 'wiles' on him (inferred as a spell of some kind) and he practically leaps from his fiancee's bed to hers within a couple of hours. Ick. He then marries her. He finds she is sick, and she wants to go home to Romania but her family's castle no longer belongs to the family so he buys it. They move and he finally notices she's a bit strange. 
We have the typical experimentation in 'capturing' a human soul in a glass tube (who thought of that weird idea first I wonder 'cause a whole lot of writers have used that) and we're left to guess that her goal is to capture her own 'soul' to put in a healthy body. I started not to care pretty early in this film. Johnathan is a jerk, his fiancee' had no personality of her own, her father was a lush, and Ligeia, well, she's just an over the top formulaic evil temptress. Massive duh.
So... Ligeia does die, but manages to inhabit the body of the niece of their caretaker (Eric Roberts in one of his many sad, small roles and horrible accent). That niece murders Eric (no loss there) and then inhabits the blonde's body, who Johnathan has hooked up and married almost immediately after Ligeia's death (real scumbag this one is). Somehow, and we really don't care how, the blonde manages to hold her soul in the niece's body too (poor little girl, she's badly used in this thing) and poof - she takes her body back. They leave with the niece (oh yeah, Michael Madsen gets killed too) to go back to America. As they drive off the camera focuses on the niece's eyes (What the hell was her name - did they even say?) as they turn black like Ligeia's and we know the story isn't over but the movie is and for that we thank them.
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