JohnHowardReid 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.

JoeB131 Bela Lugosi saw himself as a leading man, and was pretty horrified to be typecast as a horror actor after Dracula.Yet on the rare occasion he got a non-horror role, he really didn't acquit himself very well. This Poverty Row movie was a good example. You can barely understand what he is saying because his accent was so thick. His delivery tended to be monotone.Now, true enough, a lot about this movie didn't help. You had some very bad stereotypes with the black maid and the Chinese houseboy. Most of the other actors were wooden as well.The plot, such as it is, a scientist announces a breakthrough in this new invention called "Television", which was in its infancy in the 1930's. He is killed during a live broadcast, and a police chief investigates through bad editing, disjointed narrative and characters who didn't seem to have a purpose. By the time it was over, you don't care who did it or why, or the odd plot twist of Bela playing a pair of twins.

MartinHafer I am always amazed when I find yet another ultra-low budget film starring Bela Lugosi. While I do generally enjoy his films, they certainly were not 'high art' or very deep--and so many of them had downright crappy production values. Often it looked as if Bela would appear in ANY film provided the check cleared! You don't believe me, then think back to such horrid films as PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, BELA LUGOSI MEETS A BROOKLYN GORILLA, ZOMBIES ON Broadway, GHOSTS ON THE LOOSE (with the East Side Kids) and MURDER BY TELEVISION!!! However, often despite the terrible budgets and overall cheesiness of the films, they were still often fun to watch--or at least to laugh at due to their ineptness. Unfortunately, MURDER BY TELEVISION is that rare low-budget Lugosi film that actually is kind of boring and static. Despite being a murder mystery, the film is amazingly static and uninvolving. Plus, the roles played by Bela just seemed terribly written and bizarre--and not in a great way. The only major plus this film has that raises it to almost-mediocrity is the idea of television being a topic of a film as early as 1930. From a purely historical standpoint, it is an interesting film.

Zbigniew_Krycsiwiki 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.