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Writer's pictureKyle Bain

Doomed to Die (1940)

I’ve come to expect that the films included in Emson’s 50 Horror Classics: Collector's Edition will be less than average and most likely disappoint (with the exception of a few). However, I was excited to see Boris Karloff’s name listed in the credits when the film began and thought that it was possible this film would surprise me. This, unfortunately, was not entirely the case. I was particularly impressed with William Stelling and Boris Karloff’s acting performances in this film and believe that what enjoyment I got from the film was due to their acting. While I was much more impressed with the acting in this film than I had been with others, I felt that other aspects of the film fell flat and did not successfully reach the audience. Michael Jacoby, Ralph Gilbert Bettison and Hugh Wiley created characters and a script that was enjoyable. They created a story of great mystery and characters that lent themselves to successfully allowing the story to flow smoothly. I believe that the story itself was very interesting and that it had a lot of potential, however, director William Nigh took this script and managed to slow it down almost to a crawl. The film dragged and ultimately left me struggling to concentrate on what was taking place. Along with the pacing of the film, the transitions from scene to scene seemed poorly planned. There never appeared to be a definitive end to any of the scenes in the film and that made the transitions look quite sloppy. Overall, this film was better than most of the others that were a part of this anthology of films, but it fell flat in many regards. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032404/?ref_=nv_sr_2


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