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hyped garbage

Absolutely Fantastic

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

Plot-heavy detective programmer. Among the many characters, you may need a scorecard to keep up with who's impersonating whom. Nonetheless, Arlen's got the needed edge as PI Simon Lash-- (with a name like that, the creators may have hoped a movie series would emerge). Too bad that great vixen Veda Ann Borg can't seem to get motivated in what amounts to a crucial spider woman role. It's one of the few times I've seen her walk through a part. Though the many traveling shots along California's post-war highways and byways are well staged, filming lacks appropriate mood and atmosphere. Still, whose inspiration was it to film around that castle in the desert, a real one, not a studio creation. Those are memorable scenes and perhaps the movie's high point. At the same time, casting comes up with a number of colorful characters to spice things up-- Twitchell's cagey sheriff, Hodgins' assertive caretaker and Ford's craggy old man, for instance. A few period years later and a pretty good noir might have emerged to flavor up the turgid storyline. Anyway, for folks interested in vintage street scenes and isolated castles, this is a good flick to check out. Otherwise, the 60-minutes remains a flawed programmer that still manages a few compensations.

You could say the same thing for convoluted scripts, rushed out by the dozens after the popularity of film noir sprang up in the 1940's. This poverty row thriller offers some second string leads and sidekick character actors in the leads-former A star Richard Arlen and hard-boiled Veda Ann Borg headlining a puzzling story involving a private eye, a dame, a supposed missing husband and a fraud scheme.There's some decent dialog, a great car chase in the middle of nowhere and some interesting characterizations, but the plot and action are so all over the map, you need a compass to figure it all out. The supporting cast is entirely made up of unknowns, taking away from the sense of familiarity that you get from most old B movies. When they start showing the map of Arlen's trip and end up in Mesa, Arizona, I had to remind myself of my tag-line for the wretched horror film "Mesa of Lost Women", which like this, I referred to as a "Mess of a bad movie". That plot twist alone makes this seem like a separate film than the first half. The only accomplice to this is two thumbs down.

Richard Arlen steps into Humphrey Bogart's shoes as a hardboiled private detective who gets hired by his former flame Veda Ann Borg to find her missing husband Edward Earle. Some years earlier Borg left Arlen flat at the altar as she traded upward to marry a man with money. Earle's got it all right and may have a love nest going with Marjorie Manners.He also has a mink farm and a body with his head blown off with a shotgun is identified by Borg. The local sheriff Archie Twitchell thinks that Arlen might well be an Accomplice to Earle's murder.Several homicides later we learn the solution. Richard Arlen's Simon Lash has a lot in common with Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade.This PRC film has the usual cheapness associated with Poverty Row. But they have an intriguing film. And you'll love as much as I did two desert rats in Francis Ford and Earle Hodgins and the racket they've got going.

There are a couple of B-noir movies--Shack Out on 101 comes to mind--that sometimes entertain with their low-budgetness. Sometimes, like in Detour, they absoltely shine.Accomplice has a good, writerly story in there somewhere. I gather from the credits it's from some serial novel about a private detective. But the writerly touches are so buried in the low budget and crummy acting that it's hard to find it. Still--it flashes through sometimes. An eccentric desert castle for the denouement. A detective who loves old books and Jesse James mythology. Some cool location shots in Lancaster. Chase scenes along Route 66. Some potentially interesting flirtation between old lovers and new lovers.But it never comes together as the movie races along (only 60 minutes!) and the actors try to find the camera. There's also a great blooper where the lead PI ends a scene forgetting his line: "Better take your sleeping pills, it's a long way to....(pause) uh...." CUT.Guess they missed that one in the editing room. Nonetheless, some lowbudget guilty fun, highlighting the thing line between bad/good and just bad/bad.