Four years after TOUCH OF DEATH, when British b-movie director directed British tough guy actor William Lucas in THE BREAK, he never reached the boat that would take him to freedom... which happens here after a somewhat rushed gas station safe heist, in which to blast the thing open, a poison's used...
Making DEATH a combination of several American film noirs (that inspired these kind of British kitchen-sink crime-fillers of the late-1950's/early-1960's), from CITY OF FEAR bringing in the poisoned crooks/race-against-time element; THE ASPHALT JUNGLE with a safe cracking heist backed by a troubled old rich man (a subplot that comes to nothing)...
And especially THE DESPERATE HOURS... but instead of three gangsters invading a suburban home, it's an intense Lucas with his polar opposite vulnerable young/handsome sidekick David Sumnar, taking over a houseboat... where the latter almost connects with token lovely ingenue Jan Waters, who steals the show being both assertive against the bullying Lucas and manipulatively vulnerable towards Sumner, who's injured, and, by the 11th hour, for reasons we know and he doesn't, extremely ill...
So the poisoning aspect, investigated by stock detectives like it's their own TV-series during the first act, is somewhat parenthetical... and even a kidnapped child doesn't add the kind of anything-can-happen tension to build necessary thriller-genre suspense... but with Lucas in his usual Bogart-esque menace, and for a 60-minute programmer, it's not too shabby... with a fantastic finale involving one step beyond the TOUCH OF DEATH and plenty of drowning cash that, like in all these kind of crime flicks, doesn't pay.
