Dorathen
Better Late Then Never
Marva-nova
Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.
Jerrie
It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...
gridoon2018
"Death Kiss" has a clever film-within-a-film opening sequence and a memorable high-fall ending, but in the middle it gets plodding. The script has some surprises, but the direction is mostly pedestrian. David Manners is a personable leading man, but Bela Lugosi is largely wasted (the old posters for this film prove that false advertising is NOT a recent practice; they try to make this look like a sequel to "Dracula"!). Warning: the print most commonly found of this public-domain movie, although of generally acceptable quality, contains lots of audio dropouts and missing frames. **1/2 out of 4.
Leofwine_draca
THE DEATH KISS is an acceptable murder mystery from the early days of sound cinema. The whole movie takes place on a movie set, which makes for quite a fun and atypical viewing experience, and the opening sequence is a cracker: a character is murdered by a mystery assassin in film, only for the cast to discover that the actor has been killed for real. Which of them did it? This film has a short running time like many of its ilk, which means that it runs through the various police procedural bits at speed. The comic relief is quite laboured but I enjoyed it, especially the efforts of the bumbling security guard. Horror fans will enjoy seeing Bela Lugosi in support, as he's given something a little different to do here, and there's even a role for Edward Van Sloan, teaming up with Lugosi again after Dracula. THE DEATH KISS isn't an amazing film or anything, but it's an effective time-waster and I particularly enjoyed the reveal at the climax.
Zbigniew_Krycsiwiki
First, we're tricked into thinking this is a vampire movie by its title, then we're tricked into thinking this is a Bela Lugosi movie................. with no big payoff. The fake-out ending: an actor is killed on-camera, while filming a scene in which his character is shot and killed. When footage is played back, in an attempt to spot the killer, the footage burned by an unknown person before the key moment. Since the dead man was very much disliked on the set, there is no shortage of suspects in the killing. A motor-mouthed, wisecracking mystery writer is determined to find the killer, and clear the dead man's ex-wife, his own current love interest. Despite its misleading title, this was a potentially good 1930s murder mystery, but drenched in one-liners and wisecracks. About one quarter of them are amusing, the rest are just tiresome and distracting. Overall the film ends up being confusing and anticlimactic, with dramatic changes in the tone throughout, and it wastes Bela Lugosi in a nothing background role, while giving David Manners seemingly endless opportunities to hog the spotlight.A few effective scenes scattered throughout, and it is interesting as a pseudo-"behind the scenes" look at the making of a movie in 1930s Hollywood, also to catch a glimpse of the (now long out-dated) equipment and filming routines makes this worth watching, but it's a disappointment, because despite being top-billed, Bela Lugosi has perhaps 15 minutes of screen time, and few lines.The version that I watched was in black-and-white, but allegedly there is another version of this, with several colour-tinted scenes, which I would still like to watch.
zardoz-13
Freshman director Edwin L. Marin's murder mystery "The Death Kiss" qualifies as a good crime yarn about a shooting at a film studio during a scene in a gangster movie. Clocking in at 71 minutes, this whodunit is another one of those where an amateur finds all the clues and solves the murder because the authorities cannot. Marin doesn't squander a second, and scenarists Gordon Kahn of "X Marks the Spot" and Barry Barringer of "Murder at Dawn" keep you guessing up until the last few minutes as they contrive one red herring with another to throw you off the scent. A scenarist is the sleuth who clears the reputation of an ex-wife who had everything to gain with the death of her former husband. Interesting, Bela Lugosi plays a studio producer. Although the Lugosi character hovers over most of the scenes, he is not the culprit. Nevertheless, Marin and his writers use him as a red herring, too. Of course, the police don't appreciate our protagonist sticking his nose into their criminal investigation. Not only does the snooping Drew locate the bullet that killed actor Myles Brent during the lensing of one scene, but he also discovers the gun used in the murder. The cast is first-rate, with handsome David Manners playing a studio scribe. Once again, Vincent Barrett provides the comic relief as a studio cop named Officer Gulliver. The dialogue is pretty snappy, too. An interesting bit of trivia about "The Death Kiss" is that it reunites three actors who appeared in Todd Browning's "Dracula." David Manners, Bela Lugosi, and Edward Van Sloan co-starred in "Dracula." Efficiently made, "The Death Kiss" is a worthwhile whodunit with some occasionally scintillating dialogue. Furthermore, this opus furnishes audiences with an idea about how films are produced and the various roles that go into a film production.
