Whatever lack of gadgetry ad odd science fiction traps there were in the two previous episodes have far been compensated for by “The Nigt of the Tottering Torture.” that had to be done to distract from the absurd plot and resolution.Jim an Artie are assigned to escort a member of a investment group to its annual business meeting. The group is unusual in that they have arranged for the fortune amassed by each member’s small investment will go exclusively to the sole survivor. If you figure that arrangement is just begging for the members to be murdered off, you would be correct. Four have already been killed. Six remain.
Our heroes, their assigned investor, and the five others wind up trapped in a room in a professor’s seaside mansion where the house itself appears to have been rigged to murder everyone. There is a menagerie of investors, most all with unlikable personalities and/or a compelling motivation to wat the fortune now.
Turns out the first investor, who was killed in the teaser, was actually the twin brother of an investor named Dexter. Dexter is also the architect who designed the mansion with various medieval torture devices set to kill off everyone else. Jim himself has to deal with a rocket sled that falls into the ocean, a moving, spiked wall, a line of rifles which fire automatically, ad a rotating blade lowering from the ceiling in a locked room. Dexter winds up killed on the last one, leaving his accomplice--the pretty girl--to take the rap for murder alone.
Murdering a twin brother in order to fake your own death so you have a fantastic alibi for murdering everyone else while your girlfriend inherits the fortune and you both run of together. Well, okay. I will buy it. It is an exciting episode outside of the oly o television could this possibly happen plot. “The Night of the Tottering Torture” is also notable for featuring Henry Darrow, the first Hispanic to play Zorro, as a deposed and ow penniless dictator.
Rating: *** (out of 5)
