Leslie Brooks could have been one of the great lady villains in movies if this low-budget noir didn’t step so lightly around her psychotic nature.
She killed her husband. We KNOW she killed her husband. Director Jack Bernhard highlights her predatory glares of guilt when the body is found and discussed. We also see from the start that she’s a nutjob when she’s lovey-dovey with another man on the day of her wedding. There’s no way that she DIDN’T kill her husband, found dead of a faked self-inflicted gunshot about nineteen minutes into this seventy-four minute wonder.
But this film still insists on treating the murder like a mystery. It keeps Brooks’s icy-veined blonde at arm’s length and, thus, misses a lot of the juiciest details of the story in favor of focusing on a bunch of forlorn men dying for a close-up sniff of her ass. Meanwhile, Leslie Brooks, a B-movie bit part player getting a rare shot at a major role, seems to have a great time playing one cunning cunt. Brooks is the saving grace of the movie as she puts up a good fight against filmmakers that try to cut her off from the showcase that’s rightfully hers. She should have killed the writers and the director, too.