Stoutor It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

Senteur As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

Aubrey Hackett While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

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.

piratecannon Black Dragons was released in 1942 and was apparently designed to capitalize on the hysteria surrounding World War II. This, in and of itself, is interesting enough, as it affords modern audiences a glimpse into the collective mindset of Americans during the post-Pearl Harbor era. There are certainly parallels that can be drawn between some of the psychological implications embedded in Black Dragons with what contemporary U.S. citizens are struggling with in a society still recovering from the unexpected brutality of 9/11, but that's where anything remotely interesting contained in the film stops.What you really get with this Bela Lugosi vehicle is a dry, sleep- inducing murder mystery that's almost exclusively set in a large house. The story is as muddled as they come. It centers on people who are found dead with Japanese daggers clutched in one hand, and this (it seems) is the stimulus for some sort of massive Eastern conspiracy centered around mind control.Or something like that.It's incredibly difficult to make sense of anything that happens, and this isn't just the product of boring writing. The sound of the film ranges from acceptably clear to indeterminably static-filled. At points it sounds like someone is moon-walking across a twenty yard sheet of cellophane. With a film this old, I wouldn't usually linger on something as expected as lackluster sound, but here it really does detract from the overall understanding/appreciation of what's taking place. And that's a bad thing.Making it to the end of Black Dragons is akin to struggling through a school-assigned documentary: you're watching it because you don't have a choice. In that regard, the most terrifying thing about the film is how much effort it takes to stay awake for the duration of its 64-minute run-time.

lastliberal 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.