Synopsis:  The feature begins with a really strange-looking scientist explaining his paranormal research and how he thinks he can talk to the spirits of the recently dead (okay, whatever, weird scientist guy).  He then goes into a story to illustrate what he means.  This story starts in a home where a lot of people are living in rented rooms (its a big place), including the strange-looking scientist.  He narrates and tells us about this woman who is about to die, counting down the minutes.  Now, whoever made this movie obviously didn’t understand the first thing about suspense, because telling us someone is about to die in 20 minutes really takes any excitement out of a scene.  Anyway, back to the story.  The woman is killed on her front porch by a crossbow, which the killer, handling it without gloves, carefully hides under a newspaper (boy, no one will find it there!)   The police soon find it, but they never bother dusting for fingerprints, so instead they question everyone in the house.  They do find the broken off heel of a shoe and eventually track down the owner, a photographer who acts really, really guilty – which, of course, means he’s completely innocent.  So the police turn to the weird scientist to help them and he has a séance to talk to the dead woman through a stereo speaker and a glass of water.  But the séance is broken up by a really religious guy, so the weird scientist invites everyone to his lab the following night to try again.  The next night in his lab, everything is different this time – he has a body in a see-through coffin and he turns on a lot of impressive looking scientific machines.  He seems to be talking to the dead woman, but the whole thing is just a ruse to elicit the real murderer to jump up and confess, Perry Mason style.

Don’s Review:  This really wasn’t that fun of an episode to watch.  M&tBs riff it well, but the movie itself bored me almost to tears.  The host segments were also weak because they all basically consisted of a running joke on the fact that the now-defunct band The Grateful Dead stretched out their songs with endless guitar solos (I got the joke after the first host break... and then it continued all the way through the rest of the host segments... and through the end credits too).  So a weak short and a weak movie and weak host segments make for a fairly weak episode, despite some game riffing by M&TBs.
Trivia Note: This movie had been shelved and never released for over 35 years until it appeared on MST3K.

Don’s Rating:     [ S:   F: ]