Cheap Manhunt of Mystery Island / Movie (Video) (Spencer Gordon Bennet, Yakima Canutt, Wallace Grissell) Price

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Customer Reviews of Manhunt of Mystery Island / Movie

Out, Out, Damn Jacket!
Why Richard Bailey? Maybe all the good leading men hadn't come back from World War Two yet. And why that ugly checked jacket? After spending the wardrobe budget on Captain Mephisto's bellbottoms, they probably had to get Bailey's jacket at Goodwill. Heck, in most of his fights his jacket doesn't even become unbuttoned and his hat doesn't fall off! <
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>The undistinguished Bailey plays distinguished criminologist Lance Reardon, who helps Claire Forrest, played by serial queen Linda Stirling, search the island for her scientist father. Professor Forrest is a prisoner of Captain Mephisto, an 18th century pirate who has invented a machine which turns him into one of his four descendants who inhabit an island--or maybe it's the other way around. Anyway, Mephisto is played by one of the all-time popular baddies, Roy Barcroft. Barcroft is much better in this role than he was as the title character in "The Purple Monster Strikes," which he made in the same year (maybe the bellbottoms helped). When he was a Martian occupying another man's body, I bought it; though the process is similar, here I don't. I don't know why they needed the metamorphosis, it would have been a perfectly okay serial without it, but there it is, and it doesn't work for me. Here's hoping you enjoy watching the change, because the same exact scene occurs in every chapter. <
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>Lind Stirling ("The Crimson Ghost," Zorro's Black Whip") is her usual competent self, which is a good thing because without her Reardon is dead meat. Perhaps his most common line is, "Thank you, Claire!" every time she rescues him. In a remarkable case of "you'd-never-recognize-him," Kenne Duncan plays Mephisto's chief henchman Brand, quite a turnaround after playing the calm, almost otherworldly Ram Singh is "The Spider's Web." Yakima Canutt, the world's most honored stuntman, retired to second-unit directing after being injured in 1943, his most famous example of which was directing the chariot race in "Ben Hur" (1959); he directs the second unit in this picture as well, so you know the stunt work is good. <
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>The final cliffhanger has a bad cheat. Claire's plane dips below the rocks and we clearly hear the plane crashing, but when the final chapter begins there is no crash, and the plane simply rises from behind the rocks. And the ending is rather weak, as if they ran out of time and had to wrap up everything in two minutes. This one was well beyond Republic's so-called golden era.

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Introduction to Serials
My husband has introduced me to the serials of his youth and this is the one that I liked the best. He met Roy Barcroft years ago and Roy told him that this was the role that he enjoyed the best. It kept me guessing right up to the end. Imagine what they did with a film budget in 1945 and what astronomical figures it would take today to even come close! The action was fun (somewhat predictable with the fight scenes) but suspenseful, who was Mafesto?

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Turning into Roy Barcroft
Richard Bailey didn't cut the most heroic figure among Republic's serial heroes, and his voice sounds a tad on the sissy side. But he was built like stuntman Tom Steele which is what counts, because Steele made his character look like quite a battler. Even so, heroine Linda Stirling saves the life of Bailey's criminologist character about as many times as vice versa in this exciting chapter-play, about one of a group of suspects on an island who has developed a Frankenstein-like spark-throwing transformation machine which can literally turn him into another person, the physical personification of his pirate ancestor, played by Roy Barcroft. It is said that this was one of Barcroft's favorite roles, because it was something different from western heavies. Indeed it was, and Barcroft revels in it.