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You won't be disappointed!

To me, this movie is perfection.

Sorry, this movie sucks

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Wonderful! One of Lugosi's best films, but not oddly enough because of either his presence or his performance. True, he handles his role capably and exudes a fair amount of charisma, but his part is not all that large and most of his thunder is stolen by other players, particularly Alexander Carr as the penny-pinching, would-be Romeo of a studio head, Harold Minjir as his put-upon yet uppity assistant, John Wray as an argumentative detective, and last, but by no means last, David Manners as a charmingly resourceful buttinsky who is only too happy to help our siren of a heroine, Adrienne Ames, avert any and all pitfalls. For a while there it looks like even Jimmy Donlin is going to garner more attention than Bela, but his role fades away as the film progresses.Mind you, for silent movie fans, The Death Kiss is something of a windfall. Barbara Bedford, our lovely heroine of Tumbleweeds and The Notorious Lady, can be spotted early on as a script girl (she has no dialog, alas), while her director, King Baggot, has a sizable scene as a helpful electrician. Frank O'Connor, the director of Devil's Island and The Block Signal, can be spotted in a number of sequences as a uniformed policeman, while Neely Edwards who had an extensive silent career (over 140 films) enjoys a key scene with David Manners. Atmospherically directed in an admirably fluid style by Edwin L. Marin (in his directorial debut), The Death Kiss emerges as a fascinatingly true-to-life, ingeniously suspenseful murder mystery. Not the least of its attractions, of course, are the many behind-the-scenes glimpses of long-vanished Tiffany Studios. (I always thought it was a hole-in-the-wall outfit. I was dead wrong. It's huge!)

"Death Kiss" has a clever film-within-a-film opening sequence and a memorable high-fall ending, but in the middle it gets plodding. The script has some surprises, but the direction is mostly pedestrian. David Manners is a personable leading man, but Bela Lugosi is largely wasted (the old posters for this film prove that false advertising is NOT a recent practice; they try to make this look like a sequel to "Dracula"!). Warning: the print most commonly found of this public-domain movie, although of generally acceptable quality, contains lots of audio dropouts and missing frames. **1/2 out of 4.

Myles Brent is actually killed on the set while filming "The Death Kiss". Almost everyone is suspected but Marcia Lane is arrested for the murder. Franklyn Drew will do what he can to prove Marcia innocent of murder but can he find out who the real murderer is? This is one of the better crime-mysteries I've seen from the 1930s. It has atmosphere, a good cast, interesting story, and really fun to guess "whodunit" while following the film. The movie is actually better than I was guessing it would be.This movie would be great to watch with another Lugosi crime-mystery The Whispering Shadow (1933) for a double dose of Lugosi.8/10

These 1930s murder mysteries are generally pretty tedious. They introduce a cast of characters and then slap you with red herrings until the final denouement. This film is no different. But being low budget, as well as a film about life on a film set in 1932, "The Death Kiss" has its fascinating moments. Though most of Hollywood's golden-age moguls and studio executives were Jewish, it's hard to find distinctive Jewish characters in their movies, so it was interesting to see the studio head, Mr. Grossmith (Alexander Carr), speaking with what passed, at first, as an Eastern European accent and on two occasions grabbing his head as he kvetched an "Oy!" But then, as the film progresses, his accent seems to wander all over the place. There's also a gay character, Grossmith's male secretary ("sissie" specialist Harold Minjir), who shamelessly minces through his scenes and even, at one point, lets out a shriek when he accidentally sits down in the studio guard's lap. (I won't comment on leading man David Manners' fairly prominent lisp, other than to say that during his conversation at a rendezvous inn with a bellhop (Harold Waldridge) who has a comic lisp, you have to wonder what the filmmakers were thinking. Unfortunately, we lost those little gems when the 1934 Hays Office Code kicked in and, in the name of decency, ended the careers of actors like Minjir.) The story also lets us watch the film-within-a film's technicians, especially the sound and boom men, do their jobs during the set-ups. Overall, not a bad movie as long as you don't expect much from the plot. As an addendum, "The Death Kiss" was one of the last films shot at the Tiffany Studios at the corner of Sunset and Virgil, which is now a supermarket parking lot. The Tiffany Studios should not be confused with the Monogram Studios just two blocks east, on the north side of Sunset, where the KCET-TV Studios are now located.