Sensation Hunters

Grim and sour, this well made Monogram noir from 1945 is almost their answer to PRC's bleak hit DETOUR. The three main women in this film are exceptionally beautiful, especially Constance Worth. Lead actress Doris Merrick is the sweet factory worker with the most hideous family who falls for the worst guy in town. She ends up in Club Paradise, which is sort of a casino nightclub brothel, and a crooked pathway to doom. What a sad tale of hard boiled despair. Even her charming and likable trumpeter pal Ray gets jailed for a month, in which she has enough time to go wrong. The sets and costumes are very good, as is the music score. There is an astonishing epileptic set of clumsy tap dance routines, so unexpected and badly presented, it is as if they were shoehorned in to flesh out the running time. They are genuinely 5 star terrible and do not even match the music on the soundtrack. There is undertones of DOUBLE INDEMNITY and well crafted occasional spookiness. The opening is a zinger. However the original title SENSATION HUNTERS is ridiculous. CLUB PARADISE is far better and more tawdry in an appropriate Monogram style. It's pretty good all round, and I would love to see an uncut DVD: the one available has terrible TV commercial hack marks with large bits of some scenes missing.