This Flick


is cheap and unintentionally funny. Stanley Clements is murdered off screen and Hatfield and Dekker are the real scoundrels. Also the story is more convoluted than "The Big Sleep" but much more ludicrous. And where did they get that actress playing the lead? She's terrible and the whole sorry mess is a bucket of slop guts. The director Edward L. Cahn always helmed rubbish and this, too, is awful. Good for laffs if you're in the right frame of mind!

Nothing is more beautiful than nothing.

reply

About Joyce MacKenzie's acting, the less said, the better.

reply

Yes, a very low-budget movie, but I enjoyed it. There were good plot twists and suspense.

reply

Yes, a very low-budget movie ...
Funny things:

1 Laura's "upset" at her dad's murder. Ho-hum!

2 A line-up of 5 messengers chosen off the street just happens to include the hit man. How convenient to move the story along!

3 The police station just seemed to consist of the line-up room and Brewster's office.

4 Niles's willingness to cooperate with the police, who continually gave him a hard time and difficult tasks. I hope they gave him a medal.

5 Bringing the chief witness into the same room with Niles, a suspect, at that point.

6 Armitage ... the playboy sophisticate and then the thick-headed sidekick thug. Duh!

7 Laura's romance with Stretch. Didn't his name sound alarms? The romantic beach scene really raised my blood pressure.

8 The police officers and Laura in the room overhear Stretch's admission of guilt and then allow Laura to confront the villain by herself and then the police officers arrive singularly themselves to allow the climactic fistfight.

9 The little "Stretch" beating up first the bigger Niles and then Brewster (though Brewster looked a bit long in the tooth to be getting involved in slugfests).

10 When all was said and done, I'm still not sure how the murdered Mansfield (and he looked pretty old) was supposed to be a thorn in the side of Armitage's nightclub rackets.🐭

reply

Im all for more of this kind of film. Its as good as any cheesy 60's, 70's or 80's Grindhouse film. I can appreciate the stuff thats taken seriously (Touch Of Evil for instance is a masterpiece). But I would rather watch stuff like Desination Murder, The Killer Is Loose, or The Threat, over Thin Man, Citizen Kane, or Sunset Blvd. any day. The shoestring budgets, and corny acting just provide a certain authenticity to 40'S & 50'S film making that I truly adore. Pitting stuff like Destination, against Where The Sidewalk Ends, Out Of The Past, or The Killing is apples to Oranges. Its an entirely different kind of film, but it provides more levels to Film noire in the overall, then just the Bogarts &' Lancaster films. Destination Murder is just pure fun...

reply

Confused, sloppy movie with awful dialogue, inept acting, and even worse direction. Funny thing is, I kind of enjoyed it . . . A remake, with real professionals involved, might find a way to make the story work.

reply

!!!SPOILERS IN THE FIRST PARAGRAPH!!!

The movie is very badly plotted. A number of stupid and uninteresting choices to this plot, some of which they try to patch over later in the film, not to terribly good effect. Ironically, tho, the one patch that might have worked for me was not attempted. The movie hits a probably irreversible snag when it asks us to believe that any character short of one of the Three Stooges would be stupid enough to just assume that a good blackmail plot would rest on assuming that confessing to a murder is a good idea. At least some kind of reason for him believing he'd get immunity for his testimony against Armitage would've maybe helped me stop rolling my eyes, but unless I missed something, it's not there.

There are actually some good performances in this one, tho, I think. Dekker and Dehner were fine, reliable actors and they do well here, altho I wish Dehner, who I particularly like, had more to do. Clements and Hatfield are enjoyably oily, and Myrna Dell is actually quite good as the scheming moll; she's my favorite thing in the movie.

I think Richard Emery may be very cute in this move, but I can't tell, as if he never got anything remotely like a close-up, I missed it.

James Flavin, tho, isn't so hot in the role of the chief investigator; he's particularly bad when, early in the film, he's attempting some rapid-fire hard-boiled "crime fiction/movie" talk.

Joyce Mackenzie was very, very pretty and amazingly bad at acting in this film. Much of her performance consisted of reaction shots that: 1) stood out prominently as "reaction shots"' 2) failed to convincingly portray the reactions they seemed to be attempting to convey; and, perhaps worst of all, 3) seemed to be attempting to convey reactions that were inappropriate for the thing to which they were reactions!!!

All this, and the working of the title into the script (via more of that failed tough-guy talk from Flavin, of course) is lame.

I love B-movies and I love bad movies. But I guess I just wanted this one to be a good (if very minor) little B-movie. I didn't want to enjoy it as a bad movie. I think it's because I've seen a number of good little crime B-movies lately and I've been in a particular mood for them. Which, of course, isn't this movie's fault. It can't predict what I'm feeling at any moment, especially since it was made over a decade and a half before I was born.

So, maybe I'll like it more sometime in the future.

Matthew

reply

One more thing that's actually pretty nice about the film: Steve Gibson's Redcaps. Wish we could have had more of them.

reply