If you have any reverence for the recordings of Billie Holiday, this film should strike you as outrageous in its exploitive use of her recording of 'Gloomy Sunday' as the triggering mechanism for mass suicide. But, truth to tell, I was absolutely enthralled by a pulp Science Fiction film that becomes more hilariously preposterous, scene by scene. Disjointed, illogical, derivative, boringly repetitive, here is a film that might have best been broken up into serial chapters and shown a chapter at a time, were it still the double feature / short subject 40s. Timothy Hutton plays the lead with complete command of all the nuances allowed to someone who operates out of the wooden Indian school of acting. This film should serve to nail the coffin lid securely down on the corpse of his cinematic acting career. The damsels in distress (there are two of them) are comely but always allowed to wander off and get into trouble, which necessitates rescue by our hero. There are those who have detected a Hitchcockian aroma wafting from this film, but that only brings into question Hitchcock's dubious and inflated reputation.
Review of The Kovak Box
