This is one of the most hackneyed and overdone pieces of trash ever to be put to film, and it is today - on this glorious April 1st, that I'm here to destroy it for your entertainment!
The film begins with the most stock set up. The "totally mysterious" Lionel Twain (Truman Capote) addresses letters to several different individuals, promising them "dinner and a murder". His letters are given then to his butler Jamessir Bensonmum (Alec Guiness) who...is blind and doesn't put the stamps onto the actual letters?
What the hell were they even thinking?
But the invitations somehow get out in spite of this clear violation of United States Postal Service regulations and it brings us a variety of stereotypes in a variety of detectives - Milo Perrier (James Coco), Sam Diamond (Peter Falk), Jessica Marbles (Elsa Lanchester), Dick and Dora Charleston (David Niven and Maggie Smith), and Sidney Wang (Peter Sellers). All of these characters are so stock and clichéd it's almost like they were lifted from some other source material with the names only slightly changed for the sake of parody or something!
Come they do, with all their horrific cultural appropriation (Can you believe that Peter Sellers isn't playing a white man? Shameful!) that comes with it. Not to mention Alec Guiness' entire character being one of the worst characters, simply to make fun of a disability! Man am I glad he didn't go on to do anything that was important or groundbreaking literally the year after this film was made!
What follows, as they arrive, are a variety of gags that I'm sure are supposed to be funny, but definitely do not flow organically or in any way are playing off of both the personalities of the characters or simply from the situation being completely outlandish. Why would you expect a hack writer like Neil Simon to know anything about writing funny dialogue?
At dinner, which has its own hijinks involved, Lionel Twain makes clear his intentions to his host - he will present them with a murder and, if they can solve it while trapped in his dilapidated manor, he'll pay them one million dollars. Then, he does literally the most predictable thing imaginable - he falls through the doors of the dining room, dead!
I know, right? It's an absolute hackneyed twist that was coming from a mile away! Don't even tell me you didn't see it!
But it is indeed up to this rag-tag bunch of misogynistic, racist stereotypes to solve the mystery through whacky hijinks! Because completely
So what if it's a loving parody of all the different stereotypes and of detective stories in general? The only thing funny about this film is that fact that it got greenlit to begin with! Absolutely awful in every sense! The worst part of it all is, to my disappointment, the film doesn't even bother to have an ending that makes any sense whatsoever!
I'm serious! There are at least four fake out solutions that are presented...and they're all completely wrong! And then even the real ending is apparently fake! What the hell were they thinking?! I'd almost expect this to be some sort of clever take on the sudden and unexplained twist ending that you see in a lot of whodunnit fiction, but I don't think that hack Neil Simon would ever be that clever!
In summation, you should definitely never see this movie! It is an absolute waste of your time and mine! You definitely should not get it on DVD if you are a fan of the whodunnit genre, and you should definitely not enjoy it immensely! Do something else on this glorious April 1st.
Seriously, anything else.
Maybe repair a rickety bridge down the road you've been neglecting.
Or do a little light roof repair.
Or pay that blind butler of yours a proper rate, you miserly jerk!
Murder by Death is brought to us by Columbia Pictures and producer Ray Stark.
For the latest from the MadCapMunchkin, be sure to follow him on Twitter @MadCapMunchkin.
APRIL FOOLS!!!
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