Laikals The greatest movie ever made..!

Freaktana A Major Disappointment

ChicDragon It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

Freeman This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

dieselfarina I gave it 5 stars because I can't decide if it's too awful or too fun! Everything in the other reviews is true ... this is campy, overdone, and terrible. But it's so much fun! Bela Legosi is cartoonish, as usual. (I wonder if the people in the 40s really found him scary? It's hard for us to judge with today's sensibilities.) What would make it a perfect movie would be Abbot and Costello. If they were part of it, then the whole thing would be considered a classic. But sadly, I do think those involved were trying to make a serious movie, so I feel a bit sorry for them as we all laugh with delight at the sheer badness of it. Worth watching for the fun of it.

utgard14 Bela Lugosi's only starring role in a color film is a curious thriller that's notable primarily for the novelty that it is narrated by a corpse! Yes, the movie starts out in a morgue where we see a dead woman lying on a slab. She then begins to narrate the story of how she came to meet her end, which we see through a series of flashbacks. Lugosi is having such a great time with this, for reasons we'll probably never understand. He's certainly played better parts. Fellow genre legend George Zucco plays the whole thing straight, which is to his credit as a professional but doesn't exactly help with the limited comedy value the film has. Leading lady Molly Lamont is pretty over the top. Sometimes it's fun, sometimes it's grating. The rest of the cast includes Nat Pendleton, Douglas Fowley, Gladys Blake, Roland Varno, and Angelo Rossitto (Lugosi's midget sidekick). It's not a good movie. The script is peppered with corny dialogue and the actors range from bored to mugging for the camera. The comic relief from Pendleton and Blake works better than the thriller elements. The sets are cheap and the color really just works against the film. Had it been in black & white, there might have been a little more atmosphere to work with. Also, the cuts between the flashbacks are choppy with obtrusive Theremin music that doesn't achieve what I think it was supposed to achieve. It's worth a look for fans of Lugosi and Zucco, or just those who enjoy bad B movies. Everyone else will be bored out of their minds.

rwagn This film doesn't know whether to take itself seriously as a low low budget skid row mystery or as a Three Stooges film short. The comedy is low brow, slow paced and gets old rather quickly. Be prepared to give more than the usual "willing suspension of disbelief" to get thru the Holland tunnel sized holes in the plot. The largest hole is the pivotal role of Rene. If you have a DVD reacquaint yourself with the "woman" who appears early on in the film in a mock attempt to "blackmail" George Zucco-then compare "her" to Rene when exposed at the end of the film. Are we really to believe that this actor was in drag in the earlier appearance? Heck no. And that is only one of the staggering bits of ineptness rampant in this film. The annoying reporter and his dimwit girlfriend only add more frustration to this mess. Notice how everybody talks about it but nobody ever calls the police-excepting when the reporter says, "In the morning when the police get here..." Don't know why the police don't come out at night-maybe they have banker's hours? A real turkey. Not even so-bad-it's good! Skip it.

Chase_Witherspoon Comedy-rendered crime thriller with Lugosi as a sinister cousin to surgeon Zucco, an unwelcome guest after being estranged for many years following an altercation. Zucco's son (Varno) is unhappily wed to former theatre performer (Lamont), who's haunted by Lugosi's presence and that of a mysterious man in a green mask. Told from the minds-eye perspective of a corpse (!), this compact thriller is quick and quirky but unlikely to scare anyone to death anytime soon.Camp performances by Lugosi, Fowley and especially Pendleton as the private detective hoping for a homicide so he can return to the force are generally well executed against Zucco's relatively straight performance, while Lamont (whose native South African accent is occasionally detectable) teeters on the edge of insanity as those around her seek to take advantage of her fragile emotional state.There's a convoluted plot involving a mysterious figure in a green mask and a previous marriage that threatens to de-rail Lamont's hope for a financially lucrative divorce, but the plot strands are so quickly resolved that I had to reverse engineer the explanation a day or two later. Still, it's only 65 minutes of your life, and you do get to see Lugosi in a rare, "natural" colour appearance.