NekoHomey Purely Joyful Movie!

Borgarkeri A bit overrated, but still an amazing film

Ketrivie It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Lidia Draper Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

mark.waltz Weak comedy involving murder, criminals and missing corpses, all with a newspaper and a wax museum setting. George Zucco, the British Erich Von Stroheim, is in the first scene shooting an alleged crime figure and for the rest of the movie, he's hunting down the corpse which walked while still alive into the museum and ends up being lost. The comedy comes in the form of reporter Ann Savage and museum worker Leo Gorcey (of the Bowery Boys series) and their efforts to find the corpse and get it to the police so the murder can be solved. It's all pretty confusing and silly and ultimately it really makes absolutely no sense. For a movie made from the Pine Thomas division of Paramount studios, this proves after "One Body Too Many" and "Scared Stuff" that comedy was not their forte. They did mostly war movies, so it seems out of their element. Savage better the same year when she starred in the film noir "Detour". Zucco comes off unscathed as the villain. Leo Gorcey is, while playing Slip Mahoney, although with a different character name. It's adequate for an hour long time filler with a few amusing lines, but the plot is absurd behind belief.

wes-connors "A dead body is discovered in a wax museum and two rival reporters compete to break the story in this fast-paced, tough-talking crime caper. Renowned criminal Joe Wells is shot in his hotel room and stumbles into a wax museum, where office boy Clutch (Leo Gorcey) sweeps the floor and butchers the English language," according to the DVD sleeve's synopsis, like he does in the "East Side Kid" movies ("I figgered this whole thing out by a process of mental reduction")."Feisty reporter Sue Gallagher (Ann Savage) discovers Wells' body and rushes to file the scoop, but is interrupted when her part-time lover and news colleague Pete Willis (William Gargan) learns of the story. Tensions flare up even more when Wells' killer (George Zucco) corners Sue in search of the corpse, unaware that Clutch has found it and moved it out of the museum!" "Midnight Manhunt" wastes an interesting cast and setting in a careless execution.*** Midnight Manhunt (7/27/45) William C. Thomas ~ William Gargan, Ann Savage, Leo Gorcey

Terrell-4 When a man called Jelke, aging and with wild eyes, turns a resident of the fleabag Empress Hotel into a corpse, he causes a major problem. The resident was Joe Wells, the biggest noise in the rackets who had a five grand reward on his head. And the biggest problem is that Joe Wells has been dead for quite a while. The second biggest is that the corpse keeps moving around, especially within the dark, creepy Last Gangster Wax Museum. It's hard to tell who is a waxy, dead-eyed manikin and who is a waxy, dead-eyed Joe Wells. But before long two smart-mouthed, competing reporters who used to be an item are going to get the truth. It only takes 63 minutes for this low-budget B programmer to race through the plot, find a killer, discover the mystery of the mobile body, uncover just why Joe Wells was so mobile, and bring two competing wiseacres to the realization that some forms of cooperation can be pleasurable. Except for the actors, that's all there is to this brief and dull excursion into low budget comedy mystery. If you're old enough, some of the names, or at least the faces, might bring a smile of recognition. Leo Gorcey plays Clutch, a language-mangling fixer-upper who works in the museum. George E. Stone plays the corpse. Don Beddoe is a detective and Charles Halton is the tired, tired, tired owner of the museum. Halton specialized in roles where looking like a small, aging accountant was a plus. Just to remind us that most B movie actors were capable of something more, watch Gorcey in Dead End (1939), Beddoe in The Narrow Margin (1951) and Stone in Some Like It Hot (1959) or any of the Boston Blackie movies. Most especially if you're fond of nostalgia are the three leads whose careers were almost exclusively confined to tons of programmers. There's George Zucco as Jelke. Zucco was a fine actor in some good movies in the Thirties, but who, as he aged, settled for steady work in B movies. Occasionally he scored something that could use his talent. Just watch him as a cop in Lured (1947), mysterious and threatening and then a very nice guy, or in The Pirate (1948), perfectly at home in an outlandish costume as the Viceroy. William Gargan is one of my favorites. He almost always played tough, good-natured, energetic guys who always had an angle and a comeback. He plays reporter Pete Willis, a guy who always has an angle and a comeback. And, of course, there's Bernice Lyon as Sue Gallagher, the reporter who lives above the wax museum and who finds the body on the stairway to her apartment. She made 21 movies between 1943 (her first) and 1945 when she made the cheese B classic that put her in the books. She'd be long forgotten except for her memorable film name -- Ann Savage -- and the movie Detour (1945). So I guess Midnight Manhunt qualifies as at least a kinda- noir out of respect for Ann Savage and her over-the-top portrayal of that classic femme fatale named Vera, a woman with sharp nails.

Hitchcoc There isn't much to say about this one. It involves a body (which should be decomposing) being dragged around by a series of people. There are a couple of reporters who use absolutely no common sense in the process of trying to use the body to get a scoop. There's Leo Gorcey, playing the Bowery Boys character, with the malapropisms and the general insensitivity. George Zucco is running around, trying to get his hands on the body. Keeping a low profile probably would have protected him, but this doesn't occur to him. Everything is silly and far fetched and probably played well in a theatre on Saturday afternoon as a bit of escapist drivel in the forties.