Interesteg What makes it different from others?

Lancoor A very feeble attempt at affirmatie action

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Stephan Hammond It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

utgard14 Poverty row cheapie starring Lionel Atwill as a criminologist who tries to stop an innocent girl from being executed in the electric chair. Told through flashback, the story begins with Atwill befriending Doug Fowley's character, a scientist who's going to do big things someday but until then he has to make ends meet as the executioner at the state pen! He wants to marry Jean Parker but she refuses, having pretty strong opinions on capital punishment on account of her dearly departed dad being a criminal. Things get even more melodramatic when a guy who was blackmailing Jean winds up murdered and she's tried and convicted for the crime. If you guess that Fowley's job as executioner figures back into things, congratulations. On top of all this, Jean's sister is acting shady and doesn't seem all that broken up about Jean being fried extra crispy. Leave it to Lionel Atwill to solve everything, albeit taking his sweet time to do so. It's not a bad little B movie. Very cheap as you would expect from something made by PRC. But it's perfectly watchable and even curiously entertaining at points. Bonus points for excessive "wipes." A sure sign of a top-notch production.

mark.waltz The short-lived P.R.C. movie production company had a history of making junk in a really short period of time, and other than the classic film noir "Detour", most of their films are quickly forgettable. Like the slightly more well known Monogram, they produced a ton of Z grade westerns, some action films that took clichéd looks at the enemies of World War II, and a smaller amount of horror, dramas and comedies. This is a sort of exploitation drama about a young lady (Jean Parker) who faces the electric chair where her own boyfriend is the one who will pull the switch. Kindly psychiatrist Lionel Atwill rushes to prove her innocence of murder with the help of Parker's younger sister Marcia Mae Jones who truly believed her to be guilty. This is a very tense streamlined drama where nail biting must have replaced popcorn munching. The performances are all very good with Atwill being particularly outstanding. Nice to see him playing a good guy. Also nice to see Jones playing a not so annoying teen for a change! This is one of those times where I give two thumbs up to what was once considered the one movie studio where serious actors did not want to work.

gridoon2018 "Lady In The Death House" is an interesting crime tale, largely told in flashbacks. Although the script has some hard-to-believe points, it does work up some suspense by the end. Although the production is very low budget, director Steve Sekely employs some creative "swipes" and other transition techniques from scene to scene. And although some of the supporting performances (particularly from the police inspector and the wide-eyed little sister) are a bit amateurish, Jean Parker gives an affecting performance as the doomed-to-die heroine (a 180 degrees different role for her from Kitty O'Day, whom she played the same year), and Lionel Atwill gives a solid center to the film in a rare, for him, good-guy role. The existing prints of this movie are pretty damaged, but I doubt we're going to get a remastered version anytime soon.

ergot29 An interesting whodunit that suffers mainly from flaws in motivational logic for the characters, as well as unbelievable legal procedures, but that is part of the sense of disbelief that has to be suspended for many B-movie crime dramas of the era.Lionel Atwill is the state executioner, who needs his job to finance his research which is ironically, brining the dead back to life. He gives a brief explanation of his process theory, though it isn't important to the story. He feels he has to keep his job though because of the importance of it to his work, particularly financing it, despite the fact that his fiancée finds the job abhorrent and refuses to marry him when she finds out what he does.In the opening scene you have seen her walking to the death chamber, with the story told in flashbacks by the detective played by Cy Kendall. Lionel Atwill's character you figure out early is in the unenviable position of being required to pull the switch on his girlfriend. As time is running out, Kendall tries to gather evidence to clear her.Since it is told in flashbacks, some things that are to happen you learn early on, but the film telegraphs too much that it doesn't intend you to know, at least not for sure. There is never even the slightest doubt about who is innocent or hiding something, and the movie would have benefited from a little more ambiguity in the beginning, which could have been easily accomplished. With a little work on the script, this could have been a much better movie.All in all not bad, and with a runtime of 56 minutes doesn't have time for you to grow weary waiting for the solution.One aspect that seems amusingly dated today though is the crime Mary's father was convicted of when she was a child: Pinball racketeering. Largely forgotten now, but there was a time when pinball machines were a dreaded, evil scourge that many cities tried to stamp out with bans. Her father was railroaded by an aggressive district attorney, and for the purposes of the movie, it provided a "criminal" father who actually wasn't too bad, and was perhaps unfairly persecuted.