The meticulously incompetent director: CLIFFORD SANFORTH. Muddled, impossible-to-follow screenplay: Joseph O'Donnell. Based on hare-brained ideas by Clarence Hennecke and Carl Coolidge. Photographed on a dishcloth by James S. Brown and Arthur Reed. Amazingly non-edited by Leslie F. Wilder (hardly a single shot matches).SYNOPSIS: Well, let's see now. Bela Lugosi evidently plays some sort of corporate spy who is willing to sell television secrets to a rival firm. Unbeknownst to us, he has a twin brother. This creates no end of confusion, both for the characters on the screen and the hapless audience. Although there is a hint that Bela might have a twin brother early on in the action, the movie is so scrappily edited that few viewers will take much notice of what seems an irrelevant close-up of a newspaper headline.COMMENT: Last night, on an excellent Grapevine DVD,I saw a really dreadful film called "Murder By Television". It was so badly directed and ineptly put together, I actually found it quite entertaining. But few other people would share my enjoyment. Most people would say, "Why are we watching this terrible film? It's absolutely the most incomprehensible, time-wasting movie I've ever seen. Everything about it is bad. There's not one single redeeming feature in the whole production. Even the photography rates as incredibly awful. The movie looks like it was photographed on a dirty dishcloth instead of a roll of film. And Bela Lugosi is so unattractively lit, he looks positively senile!" But of course to me, the atrocious photography, the hammy acting, the impossibly muddled plot with its ridiculous dialogue, and the downright incompetent direction, rate as an almost endless source of constant amusement. I always wondered what would happen if a director decided to use constant close-ups of the backs of people's heads instead of shots of their faces. Now I know. Yes, a fascinating exercise in creative misjudgments on a grand scale.

When one watches an old B movie from one of the poverty row studios, you should go in cutting a little slack. This picture, even with that mea culpa, does not fare well. Bela Lugosi does an excellent job in the acting department, but up against the passionless talking automatons in this turkey, Huntz Hall would come off as Laurence Olivier.The story is simple. Watching a TV broadcast, a man suddenly chokes and dies on camera. (He probably wanted to get out of this waste of celluloid as soon as possible.) Now, the room full of people are all suspects, and the cops close up the house until the crime is solved.Besides moving along so slowly that the hour length seems interminable, this isn't the only sin the producers made on this curio. The usual banter with racial stereotypes is embarrassing to say the least. From the Chinese houseboy who rattles off Charlie Chan and Confucious sayings so badly you can't understand his words half the time, to Hattie McDaniell slipping up and even using proper English for a moment when the writing for her character has the usual "negro" speech patterns, it is a textbook example of how racist a time the 1930s were.It is probably because of bad movies like this that Mr, Lugosi's career went into such a tailspin that eventually took his life. Yet, he does acquit himself nicely in the acting department here playing not only a scientist but his own twin (though the two Belas never share a scene due, I suspect, to a dismally low budget) The fact that the film is so horrendous and wastes a great opportunity to utilize the budding medium of television And even the solution to the mystery is the pits. I won't give a spoiler here, but there IS no way to spoil this ending. It was pitiful - along with the rest of this script.On top of all this, the copies that exist are so bad and have many jump-cuts throughout. A true shame and waste of the legendary Bela Lugosi.Finally, I wonder if this director had much of a career beyond this joke of a studio that most likely was owned by some theater chain (as many such studios did prior to the anti-trust laws.) He probably went into accounting or some other less creative field.

I seem to recall being warned about this one in advance to count it among Bela Lugosi's worst films! Anyhow, my viewing pleasure with this film (if there was any to be had in the first place) was seriously hampered by the atrocious video/audio quality of the print I watched (which seems to come off of a TV recording), replete with missing frames (shortening its running time by about 6 minutes!) and practically looking as if it was shot in the 1900s or something! Still, I suppose with the proper script and performers this could have made for a decent Thin Man/Charlie Chan outing; as it is, it's merely dull with a capital D and fatally cliché-ridden. Lugosi fared much better in the similarly-themed INTERNATIONAL HOUSE (1933) which was a most pleasant surprise for me when I caught up with it late last year via Universal's W.C. Fields DVD set.

This could have and should have been a hell of a lot more fun than it is, but instead we're stuck watching a bunch of people standing around talking for an hour about some sort of "death ray" emitted by a new contraption called a television set. Not much happens here, it's just a lot of talk and standing around, and more standing around and more talking. Even Bela Lugosi (playing two characters!) doesn't have anything to work with here, nothing can save this mess. It might hold slight appeal for those who are interested in an early look at both cinema and television, but horror fans and Lugosi fans will be bored to tears with this one. It's static and slow moving.