Luch Smerti

The Death Ray
Directed by	Lev Kuleshov
Written by	Vsevolod Pudovkin
Starring	Porfiri Podobed Vsevolod Pudovkin Vladimir Fogel Aleksandra Khokhlova Leonid Obolensky
Cinematography	Aleksandr Levitsky
Production company	Goskino
Release date	1925 (1925)
Country	Soviet Union
Language	Silent film

The Death Ray (Russian: Луч смерти, translit. Luch smerti) is a 1925 Soviet science fiction film directed by Lev Kuleshov. The first and last reels of the film have been lost. 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".

The film takes place in an unspecified capitalist country and centers around a Soviet engineer Podobed who invents the "death ray" – a device which explodes fuel mixtures at a distance.

Enemy intelligence agents steal the invention and it becomes an instrument for suppressing labor strikes in their country. However, workers end up seizing the device and use it to blow up bombers in the air which are sent against them.

The film received negative reviews on its release and did not do well at the box-office. Kuleshov explained the film's failure as the result of it's experimental nature and that the main goal of the picture was to merely display that the director was capable of making professional films at a low budget.