Third Dimensional Murder (1941)
A 3-D short subject in which the narrator goes to a creepy old house in search of his missing aunt. There he encounters the Frankenstein monster, a witch, a wooden Indian who comes to life, and assorted other monsters and frightening characters, all of whom manage to throw something toward the camera.
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How sad is this?
good back-story, and good acting
An Exercise In Nonsense
It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.
"Third Dimensional Murder" (aka "Murder in 3-D") is one of the shorts that Hollywood used to make to precede movies back in the day. This one is about a man who gets summoned to a castle which turns out to be the domain of all manner of scary things. I just saw it on TV and didn't have anaglyph glasses, so it looked a little odd, but that doesn't matter. It's a fun short, and the perfect movie to watch in October. I suspect that the witch with the spider looked pretty freaky in 3D, and the log must have made people jump.The only movie that I saw in 3D in the theater was Steven Spielberg's "Adventures of Tintin". I wonder if any commercial movie will do it again.
Exploitational short is aimed purely at showing how 3D looked in 1941 via a Pete Smith Specialty short from MGM. Without the necessary glasses, it looks terrible.Showing it on a cable channel like TCM and forcing a viewer to watch it without 3D glasses is more of an insult than anything else. It's an utter waste of time.The thin plot has the narrator beckoned to a haunted house by his Aunt Tilly, and what follows is a series of typical happenings aimed at demonstrating how things look when they're tossed at the camera--namely, spiders, broomsticks, cauldrons of boiling water, wooden planks, etc., all while the narrator is telling us what to expect. We even get a couple of things tossed at us by the Frankenstein monster.I would imagine that even with 3D glasses, this is a silly exercise in demonstrating the fascination with dimensional images. Today, it's a gimmick that is being given new life by current films and not likely to last unless the scripts themselves are a big improvement with substance over schlock and gimmicks.
I Also have a super 8 copy of this film. There is a 16mm copy on e-bay now as I type... Yes I thought the 3-D was a little off or something, but I see by these other comments, you have to hold the glasses farther from your face. I just had to get back from the screen really far before it looked right, then it was pretty cool. Yes the film is not that good, but the 3-D is fun and it is very early for 3-D so it's historic. I hope some one will put out a sequential DVD of this and some of the other short subjects that were made. How bought you guys who ran the 3-D fest in California a couple years ago? Get some of these new prints you had made on Seq DVD!
I own a super 8mm film of this movie and its in 3-D..Very cool movie for 3-D. The open frames are flat, but as u go along the 3D kicks in.."The opening shot of "Third Dimensional Murder" is a photo-realistic painting, in 2-D colour, showing a female moviegoer holding the cardboard gizmo properly. Now the movie starts. Pete Smith does his usual narration, in his sarcastic nasal tones. The plot makes no sense: something about the (unseen) narrator going to investigate a murder at a haunted house. The unconvincing monsters keep chucking objects at us. The 3-D cameras were set up with a very narrow parallax; if you watch this thing with standard 3-D eyeglasses you'll end up cross-eyed. The "gags" aren't funny, and the flying objects are too predictable ... at least from our modern standpoint. Let's give this movie some slack for being an early experiment ... not only in 3-D technology but in 3-D storytelling." Hard to believe some one else saw this.