I saw this film as an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 as I am sure most people did. What is interesting is that this film may have been made in the 50's, it was never officially released until 1993 by one of those video companies that released more obscure stuff back in the day. This film caught the eye of crew of MST3K for obvious reasons and this film probably became more well known and famous than anyone who worked on it ever thought it would be. It is bad, do not get me wrong, but I did find it very amusing and at times even interesting. As far as fodder for MST3K this is more watchable than more of few films they have done in the past. The movie contains horrid acting for the most part as the police officers were the best actors and that is not saying a lot. The scientist, Henry Krasker, put in an over the top performance that made him very amusing and the film was more awesome when he was in it! What is more interesting is the ways they try to illicit confessions in some of the scenes, the ones that did not just kind of stop suddenly.
The story, Renee, a woman who lives in a boarding house is going to be murdered. This is in no way a spoiler as a voice over is going to literally keep informing you of her diminishing time to live. He nearly calls it down to the second! Afterwards, the police try to figure out who could have killed this young lady with a crossbow and they suspect nearly every male in the boarding house, except Henry Krasker who is working on a way to talk to the dead. He will assist the police as they try and track down the killer and hold a wacky seance or two while they're at it. Who could the killer be and will Krasker's radio to communicate with the dead be used by Renee to identify her killer?
This made for an excellent episode of MST3K. The only weak part to this episode is the short that precedes the film about ice cream freezers. Never a really big fan of the shorts they did, though there were a couple of good ones. The jokes for the film itself were great as every time Krasker was on the screen they had plenty of fodder to riff on. Not only him, nearly every character was done in such a cartoon like way that there was not shortage of jokes they could make as you had the very suspicious German man with a dark past, the self proclaimed preacher man, the cool cat who wanted to work as a radio DJ and several more!
So this was not a good film by any means; however, they had an interesting enough story so that the thing made for a great MST3K episode throughout. The film also featured crossbow killings, models with secrets, record store clerks with secrets, everyone with secrets and did I mention the bongo players? In the film for maybe two minutes max and they get in the opening credits! So, if you want to see this film, watch the MST3K version and you will not be disappointed and remember, you too may only have 37 minutes left to live!
