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Powerful

It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

This WW II film opens at a rather tame wild party. Some executive types with cuties on their knees are blabbing about troop movements. Cut to headlines about fifth columnists followed by stock footage of disasters. This takes up 5 of the film's 64 minutes and leads us to believe we're in for a cautionary tale about loose lips sinking ships. The film makers seem to have changed their minds, or maybe it was leftover footage ultra-low budget producer Sam Katzman didn't want to go to waste.Next thing we know, there are five captains of industry and, for some reason, one family doctor sitting around the doctor's Washington DC house gloating about how they're sabotaging the war effort.Soon the conspirators start getting murdered one by one. Since a mysterious stranger with a thick Hungarian accent showed up just before the murders and always seems to be around when they happen, the police are baffled.This stranger, played by Bela Lugosi, not only has superhuman strength and the ability to turn people into zombies. Twice he inexplicably disappears from moving taxis, once taking with him a man he murdered in the back seat without the driver noticing anything untoward. He's also good at making corpses disappear in a few seconds. He might even be responsible for the several occasions when someone leaves a house in the middle of the night to be greeted by bright sunlight on the outside.At the end, when Lugosi is fatally wounded and all the other bad guys have been killed, the doctor, who seemed to be a zombie but actually was turned into a monster by a serum injected by Lugosi, explains.It turns out the Japanese had murdered all these important people with no one noticing. Then they invited a Nazi plastic surgeon with a Hungarian accent to Japan to give Japanese agents the faces of the dead men, as well as their bodies and their voices, and sent them to America, where no one wondered where they'd been all that time.But where they went wrong was when they ungratefully decided to eliminate the plastic surgeon. Instead of simply shooting him, they threw him in a dungeon with another prisoner, scheduled to be released the next day, who happened to look just like him, and you know the rest. On such trivial miscalculations can the most foolproof plans go awry.

It's strange that three years before appearing in Monogram's Black Dragons, Bela Lugosi got some critical acclaim for his role in the classic Ninotchka where he supported Greta Garbo. That he was now doing this kind of propaganda claptrap shows you just how his career was on a toboggan slide.The strange Mr. Lugosi arrives at the house of a noted physician and interrupts a dinner party. The guests are five industrialists who are cheerfully talking of sabotaging America's war effort. But one by one they meet their dooms at Lugosi's hands as the film progresses.Now why is Bela who is clearly not a patriotic American doing this to help the war effort? For that you will have to sit through the slightly over an hour film for that.Even for a poverty row outfit like Monogram this film was over the top in terms of wartime propaganda. Black Dragons was released in March of 1942 and the attack on Pearl Harbor is referenced so this must have been one quick job by Monogram to inflict this on the movie-going public.Clayton Moore and Joan Barclay are the love interest and of course this is an opportunity to see the unmasked Lone Ranger who was a handsome devil, why did he want to hide that is a mystery that we'll never solve.As for the reason for all this homicide, let's just say there's no honor among the Axis.

This was a strange film. A bit horror and certainly film noir. Some fifth columnists meet and mysteriously start dying off with a Japanese dagger in their hands after Monsieur Colomb (Bela Lugosi) shows up.Soon the Lone Ranger arrives in the person of FBI Agent Richard 'Dick' Martin (Clayton Moore). Martin is ineffective in finding the killer as he is more interested in the niece (Joan Barclay) of a missing doctor, who is part of the gang.After the last man dies, and the doctor is horribly disfigured by some strange serum, the true story of the group comes out and that is where it gets interesting and weird. I won't spill it.Lugosi was marvelous as the skulking killer.

This is Lugosi's 3rd of 9 movies for Monogram, and the rating is in comparison to the other 8. ALL of the nine have wild, insane plots and leaps of logic you just have to LIVE with. But that's part of the fun..This one is docked a notch or so for the wooden dialogue between Bela and leading lady Joan Barclay. It sounds like pieces of the I Ching randomly stuck together. This time Bela is killing off a bunch of Japanese spies he fixed up to look JUST LIKE US with plastic surgery. The fun comes when Bela blows their cool and they figure out he's on to them just before he kills each of them. As an added bonus, you actually get to see HORROR makeup used at the end..Yes, it's racist to the hilt. Lugosi gets to call them 'apes', and the word 'Jap' is tossed around WAY too much. Ed Wood fans note: that's Standford Jolly (the judge in THE VIOLENT YEARS) as the head spy in the flash back. Also on hand is Clayton Moore, and he isn't BAD as a fed. A bit more work and he could have been a detective in movies very readily. As it was, he found his once in a lifetime role as the Lone Ranger and stuck with it..but you have to wonder what might have been. But what always fascinates me is Bela's mood and attitude in this one. There is a fatalistic gloom here, a sullen resentment I haven't seen from him anywhere else. At the time he was still bouncing back and forth between Universal and Monogram (BLACK DRAGONS was released between two of their classics..) did the inevitable comparison between the two studios make him think his 9 picture deal was a mistake? His Monogram movie before this one was with the East Side Kids. Lugosi was a classically trained actor who had LITTLE patience for ad libs or fooling around. Did Hall and the gang get to him? In the two movies he did with them he seems to be grinding his teeth, WAITING for someone to end the scene. I dislike reading too much like this into movies, but it's a question I can't get away from. There is SOMETHING about the way he sits in that living room..smoking on his cigar...waiting for the end of it all..