Hollywood fix-it expert Rick Holman is hired to discreetly track down a German starlet who has disappeared right after signing a big contract: if she doesn’t show, it’s likely to break the agency that is promoting her. Holman’s investigation takes him to Europe and back and nearly costs him his life as he digs up …
Read the full post →“<em>The Girl from Outer Space</em>, by Carter Brown”
Sherlock Holmes is hired to protect the famous gem the Star of Rhodesia, and he and Watson travel with its owner on a Scotland-bound train. When a murderer strikes and the stone disappears, Holmes must sort through a car-full of suspects to unravel the mystery. The pacing is good on this one, and there’s a …
Read the full post →“<em>Terror by Night</em> (Universal, 1946)”
A visit to the “Flash Model Train Meet” in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, on March 27 netted me this well-built Ambroid passenger car kit for an open-platform coach of late-nineteenth-century vintage. If I recall correctly, the Ambroid kit is based on a Boston & Maine prototype. The built-up car will need a few adjustments: new couplers, a …
This movie is a bit different from the Johnny Mack Brown movies from Monogram that I’ve been watching. Here he is not U.S. Marshal Nevada Jack McKenzie. Rather, he is a doctor, a man who used to wield his guns but did so in error once and put them aside. He tries to steer clear …
Read the full post →“<em>Flame of the West</em> (Monogram, 1945)”
Spooky doings at a lighthouse whose lamp mysteriously goes out from time to time, even as another ghostly light appears to lead vessels to their doom. It’s all a bit of a jumble, with a few bits unclear even at the end, but Gordon Harker is good as the new lighthouse keeper, dealing with irregular …
Odd little wartime thriller from Republic, in which a young woman (Mary McLeod), bombed out of her home in London, gets a room in the building where a tobacconist (John Abbott) lives and has his shop. This tobacconist, however kindly he may seem, has a secret: on some nights of air raids, he stalks and …
Read the full post →“<em>London Blackout Murders</em> (Republic, 1943)”
Hero of the Time (original title: Ku yue liu xing zhan) is a fairly standard historical martial arts movie, with a villain who uses Golden Kung-Fu style, in which his very skin turns golden, who can only be defeated by a combination of techniques. The fights are OK but nothing special, and the rest of …
After the death of her kindly husband, a vicious woman torments her tenants — in part by raising rent to erase the benefit her spouse had provided by his will, and eventually by poisoning one’s cat — and her stepdaughter, not least by planting suspicions with her boyfriend’s employer that lead to his sacking. So …
Expect loads of action, along with some lighthearted romance, when an heiress is menaced by villains with a base at a weird sanitarium. Her only hope of rescue lies in a new acquaintance who himself is suspected of wrongdoing. As usual, Richard Talmadge, who produced, delivers on the stunts and battles, even if the plot …
Read the full post →“<em>Get That Girl</em> (Richard Talmadge Productions / Mercury, 1932)”
