Luch Smerti (1925)

Original title

Луч смерти

Directed by

Lev Kuleshov

Genre

drama film, action film, silent film, science fiction film

Country

Soviet Union

Runtime

2h 05m

Rated

0+

Rating

5.2 of 10 from 12 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A Soviet inventor creates a death ray weapon during the 1920s. The film follows efforts to use or stop this powerful new technology.

fast-pacedadventurousdatedpioneeringsuspensefulpropheticrough-edged

What happens

The Death Ray (Russian: Луч смерти, romanized: Luch smerti) is a 1925 Soviet science fiction film directed by Lev Kuleshov. The first and last reels of the film have been lost. This film ran at 2 hours, 5 minutes, making this one of the earliest full length science fiction films. Despite the fact that many sources claim the inspiration for the film to be the novel The Garin Death Ray by Aleksei Tolstoy, this is not the case. It is impossible, since the book was published two years after the film, in 1927. Furthermore, the film has many similarities with a book by Valentin Kataev, called Lord of Iron, published in 1924. Moreover, the theme of death rays was very popular at the time because of the 1923 claim of British inventor Harry Grindell Matthews to have created a "death ray". (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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