Michael_Elliott Black Dragons (1942)** (out of 4) Low-budget propaganda piece from Monogram has Japanese men getting plastic surgery so that they look like Americans and can spy on us. Dr. Melcher (Bela Lugosi) shows up in the United States and starts to unleash his plot to help the Nazi party.BLACK DRAGONS was produced right after Pearl Harbor was attacked and it was released in March so it was one of the first films to deal with WWII in a different way. There were many films that talked about or hinted about the ongoing war but this one here gave audiences something different in the fact that America was now in the war and this here was obviously meant to try and scare people.With that being said, the plot itself is quite silly but I'm sure a much better director and a much bigger budget could have done something better with it. A lot of films deal with plastic surgery but to have it used to change the appearance of someone so that they could spy on America was hard to believe and especially in a film like this. Clocking in at just over a hour, the film is poorly edited, poorly acted by some and the direction is pretty lackluster as well.Obviously films like this just needed to come in on budget and that was good enough for the studio. Lugosi turns in a decent performance in his role but he isn't given much support. The film moves well enough and ends quickly but there's no doubt that it's pretty shallow from start to finish.

meaninglessname 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.

Terry B Admittedly, it's tough to follow the plot unless you cheat. So...read the liner notes! Something no one seems to have noticed though is that herein is incontrovertible proof that Homer Simpson's family goes Waaay back... and his speech patterns do have a source. And this movie proves it. Well, maybe.Note the (elapsed) time while watching and pay especial attention at around 19:30 into the film. A Mr Wallace makes a call on Dr Saunders, unsuccessfully rummaging through drawers in search of *what*, we don't know.. (a better script?) Stevens, the butler, comes back downstairs and informs him that he cannot see the doc. Wallace's classic reply, recognizable by most of the civilized world today, is"D'oh!"What more can one say? Anyone know of other instances? Thanks,TB

gavin6942 When I purchased this movie, I was lied to by the case. Twice. It listed the movie as "horror" (it's not) and the case said it had Boris Karloff in it (it has Bela Lugosi, who is better anyway). But that's the case, not the movie itself.I enjoyed this film. It's a spy tale of Japanese men (played by Chinese) infiltrating American businesses during World War II. And then Bela Lugosi tries to hunt them down one by one.Not much to say. Low budget, old film, but if you don't mind these things check it out. You'll love the white guy they hired to play the ancient Japanese master... he's on drugs, or at least should be.