Radar Secret Service

Maybe I've gotten to the point where I've seen so many movies I have a hard time telling them apart, but this movie was extremely dull. It was about a bunch of people who were committing crimes like murder and I guess radar was being used to find them. This film mostly suffers from being boring. It's sad to see a film so old that's so dull. I guess these times weren't necessarily the golden age of movies. At least this one didn't have giant animals or killer animals like every other bad movie released in the 1950's.

The worst part is how I simply didn't care about what was going on. The characters had no depth at all. When you have a story where everyone looks the same, that's a huge problem. I understand why people had a hard time telling the good guys apart from the bad guys. This whole thing is pointless and adds absolutely nothing unique to the wide variety of movies in existence. It was hard to tell what was going on and I didn't care. *1/2

Radar Secret Service is a service to nobody unless watched with MST. Wow what a film, slightly more action than Starfighters but not by much. More script than action here, men in gray suits and hats stand around and talk about what they are A: Going to do, and B: What they plan to do. In between there's a couple of gals who look exactly alike yet are different characters who are somehow involved and a boss who talks to the main radar operations guy on how wonderful radar is. Nothing really is accomplished even though the movie claims something did happen. Mike and the bots make this film enjoyable. Oh yes, Sid Melton is thrown in for comedy relief, but this is not apparent. Enjoy!!

My rating would be zero as a movie, but ten as an MST3K show. It's so dull that your attention wanders, and you can sort of get the plot after you watch the bots go after it a couple of times. These movies do have have a certain fascination, and I'd like to know more about the bland, bland cinematic world of Robert Lippert. The lives of people who went to Lippert films must have tasted like stale wheat. You can't help but wonder if the relationship of Blackie and his gal had a least some spark. While the damned "Pillbox" (Melton, dear God, it's Melton) is in a hell of his own partaking. Note the cameo of Ed Wood actor at the end. I could look up his name, but, ah... it's just too boring.

Not that anything in Radar Secret Service will tell you this is a futuristic drama because everybody drives cars and dresses in fashions of the present day of 1950, but the fact is even the movie-going public was aware that radar did not have the capabilities so described in that time. It still doesn't. But the premise around the film that radar was an all purpose crime fighting and detecting tool was way in the future.

Two futuristic cops, John Howard and Ralph Byrd, ride around in a car equipped with radar detection and they're on a case involving some stolen uranium. The gang has all kinds of layers within it with your typical gangster's moll Adele Jergens supposedly gunman Tom Neal's woman, but really two timing him with mastermind Tris Coffin. In fact this whole film is proof positive of the premise there is definitely no honor among thieves.

Something tells me that the Radar Secret Service was not used in tracking down two bit stickup men and that the public was supposed to feel good about radar keeping us safe. This film really plays to Cold War paranoia.

On the plus side Adele Jergens and Myrna Dell playing a waitress are always good to look at and perennial Lippert Pictures regular Sid Melton is once again in this for comic relief. Sid was really needed here.

Please, before being harsh with this Lippert production, don't forget that the director is no one else than Sam Newfield, the pope of the grade Z movie, a chain film maker, as many others of this era, forties and fifties, before the raging wave of TV industry, the tsunami that occured on the big screen business. For me, this is a pretty good, agreeable little thriller, fun and enjoyable to watch. And for fifty-seven minutes, you can't argue to have lost much time. Espionage Z flick, it is fast paced, pulled by a rather good directing, at the level of an Edward L Cahn's movie, the equivalent of a Sam Newfield.