Don't Believe the Hype

An absolute waste of money

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

This one is rather boring and could have been better if they left out the lame comedy (mainly from Clutch Tracy) and turned it into a pure mystery-thriller! This one really is "stagy" and seems to drag in lots of places. For me, the only parts that are somewhat good are with George Zucco and he's not in the film all that much it's mainly the other cast members that take center stage or should I say center "stagy"?! This one is a case of who has the corpse now and takes place mainly in a wax museum or Sue Gallagher's (Savage) upstairs apartment, which is above and within the wax museum.The film is "okay" I guess but definitely NOT Zucco's nor Savage's best film - this might be their worst film or pretty close to it.3/10

This was the only film Leo Gorcey made outside of the East Side Kids series which would soon become the Bowery Boys after a year or so. He plays a worker at a museum that displays dummies of gangsters. The stars are William Gargan and Ann Savage as a couple of reporters mixed up in the mystery which takes place during one late night a murder takes place. I'll just now say this was quite a compact thriller with plenty of good humor to liven the proceedings. Among the players is someone from my favorite movie-It's a Wonderful Life, a Charles Halton-who was Carter, the bank examiner in IAWL- who has quite a lot of screen time here as the easily tired owner of the place! So on that note, I recommend Midnight Manhunt.

Conventional Wisdom seems to indicate that this film retains some charm and entertainment value, in spite of its cheap jack budget, inconsistent tone, weak jokes and plot holes you could drive The Super Chief through (keeping with a 1940's reference).I'll have to go along. This low budget programmer was entertaining to watch in spite of itself. Everyone in the cast seems to be having a good time in their roles, and giving their all in spite of what was probably a one week long production schedule. The plot doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but that's part of the fun of the whole thing. Leo Gorcey does his usual thing with the street-wise attitude and a malaprop polysyllabary. My favorite Gorceyism involves Ann Savage's character, who lives in a "flea-bitten dump" of an apartment above the wax museum where most of the plot unfolds. The hero says that she's "gone upstairs for the night," to which the Gorcey character adds, "That's right. She is retarded for the evening." There are worse ways you could waste an hour, and Alpha Video sells many of them. This is one of the better flicks that they have scraped up from the bottom of the barrel. I would recommended it especially if you like Gorcey's malapropisms and the 1940's era "snappy" patois. You get plenty of "Why I oughta..." and "Say, what's the big idea?" You even get a character getting into a cab and spouting, "The Chronicle, Driver, AND STEP ON IT." I was waiting for one of the reporters to grab the telephone and holler, "Hold it chief, I've got an exclusive! STOP THE PRESSES!" or at least a paperboy hollering "EXTRY! EXTRY! READ ALL ABOUT IT!" Too bad I got cheated there, but this movie is a bit of fun, overall.

After Scared Stiff, Ann Savage played the feminine lead in Midnight Manhunt, in which she is relentlessly put down by charmless William Gargan – not one of my favorite leading men by a long chalk. David Lang's script is one of those affairs in which a collection of not overbright characters get themselves involved with murder and missing jewels on the flimsiest of pretexts. As a time filler, this little "B" is overladen with dialogue but still plays with reasonable celerity, thanks more to the sterling efforts of an A-1 support cast led by Leo Gorcey and Charles Halton than to any input from dull, relentlessly plodding, over-emphatic direction from co-producer William C. Thomas (of the Scared Stiff Two-Dollar Bills).