The Death Kiss is the name of the fictional gangster movie being filmed here when its lead actor is gunned down for real on the set in front of the camera and the crew and God and Herbert Hoover and The Lindbergh Baby and everybody. It happens right away in this vintage B-movie quickie. The guns were supposed to be loaded with blanks, but things didn’t work out that way. It could be an accident, but who wants to see a Bela Lugosi movie about that? It’s MURDER, don’t ya know. As in most movies like this, the police can barely find their dicks to piss, so screenwriter David Manners takes it upon himself to sleuth out the killer. This could be the most charming that Manners has ever been on screen. For once, he gets to be the smartest guy in the movie. Meanwhile, his old Dracula co-stars Lugosi and Edward Van Sloan glare in the background as, respectively, the head of the studio and the director of the film within this film. It’s a standard old detective yarn with a little too much comic relief (a forbear of the Monogram Pictures formula), but the setting makes it slightly offbeat. It also makes one wonder whom specifically the makers might be parodying in their depictions of dysfunctional movie industry bean-counters and shifty creeps.