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The joke title is a feint toward Gun Crazy, the object of the boy's temptation lurks inside a hollow book with six bullets. Mixed-up hothead (Clancy Malone) in jail, son of "world famous" doctor (Herbert Rawlinson), his sister (Dolores Fuller) comes to pay the bail and spar with officers: "Carrying a gun can be a dangerous business." "So can building a skyscraper" The filming is a severe tour of squalid spaces, seedy bungalows and clammy offices and a theater complete with a blackface number—the last provides the backdrop for a payroll robbery that leads to murder, the two-bit gangster (Timothy Farrell) has the protagonist under his sway. "Bad business, cop-killing," on the other hand the "very, very complicated" matter of plastic surgery, the Law in between boasts Steve Reeves as a detective prone to shirtlessness. "Let's get these Christmas wrappings off and see the present you gave me." Edward D. Wood Jr.'s mimesis of film noir, a bare gloss on Daves' Dark Passage down to the thrift-shop Bacall of the villain's moll (Tedi Thurman). The corpse behind the kitchen curtain, the sofa as operating table, le visage du vengeur for the climactic switcheroo. (The continuous score of Spanish guitar and piano is an experiment later taken up by Robbe-Grillet.) A closer approximation of "normal" filmmaking from Wood and therefore a shorter supply of poetry, though a moment late in the story (Farrell sits bandaged like the Invisible Man while behind him Thurman turns and exits the frame as if in a trance) is worthy of Ulmer. Bride of the Monster the next year admirably unlearns its lucidity. With Lyle Talbot, Bud Osborne, and Mona McKinnon. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |