Stevecorp Don't listen to the negative reviews

Casey Duggan It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Roman Sampson One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Kamila Bell This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

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.

Spuzzlightyear Atrociously acted, and quite amusing at times, Black Dragons features Mr Yes-I-Can, Bela Lugosi as a suspicious character killing off Jap sympathizers, but why? Lugosi is playing a rather curious Anti-Hero here, More anti then hero, and we're never too sure why he's doing this until the film's most-hilarious final minutes. Until then, Less-Then-B actors take turns emoting with the great one until the film's AMAZING final "twist" which had my mouth on the floor on it's pure preposterousness. Totally cheap, bizarre (why and how DID Lugosi keep vanishing?) and stupid (Hey, let's get some Dracula references in when we can (or maybe that was in Bela's contract?)) This was a fun time-waster.

wes-connors ** Black Dragons (1942) William Nigh ~ Bela Lugosi, Joan Barclay, Clayton Moore "Just prior to the start of World War II, Dr. Melcher (Bela Lugosi), a world-famous surgeon, is brought in by Japan's Black Dragon Society as part of a secret plan. Dr. Melcher operates on six Black Dragon Society operatives and transforms them into exact duplicates of 6 high ranking American businessmen who are replaced by these look-alikes. With their operatives in place, the Black Dragon Society's plan to sabotage the American war effort appears to be set but, the F.B.I. Chief and an agent begin to piece together the clues that hopefully uncover this sinister plot," according to the DVD sleeve's synopsis.That synopsis gives away the entire ending; which, in this case, might be a good thing. "Black Dragons" is an incredible, wildly inconsistent muddle. A wiser course of action would have been to stay with the teasing supernatural angle. In early scenes, Mr. Lugosi (as Monsieur Colomb) is effectively creepy. Confusing Joan Barclay (as Alice Saunders), future "Lone Ranger" Clayton Moore (as Dick Martin), along with a cast of old stage and silent veterans do the best they can with a story that looks as if filmmakers were making it up as they went along.

MartinHafer Bela Lugosi is a real enigma. In the early 1930s, he was on top of the world after appearing in Dracula. Yet, again and again, he made lousy decisions regarding his career. Perhaps he had a bad agent, perhaps his drinking and drug use had a part in it or maybe he was just crazy. Regardless, he ruined his reputation by appearing in pretty much any film--ranging from excellent horror films (such as THE RAVEN) to big-budget flicks (like NINOTCHKA) to grade-Z flicks for the cheapest and shoddiest of studios. Interestingly enough, although he agreed to do this terrible film, he actually turned down the role that later went to Boris Karloff in FRANKENSTEIN! As for this movie, it is a very silly an horridly produced WWII propaganda film that featured a dumb plot and wretched editing. Lugosi spends much of the movie murdering saboteurs--not a bad thing at all. But at the end, we find out that he is himself a Nazi plastic surgeon and all the American-looking men he killed were actually Japanese!!!! The funniest part of this is during a flashback. You see Lugosi talking to a group of Japanese men before he changes them to American-like men. When the camera scans them, the men are clearly Asian. But, on all the other non-close-up shots, they are all VERY Western looking--many with bald heads!! They looked absolutely NOTHING like Japanese men. I suspect the plot must have undergone a re-write and this might account for the obvious mistake. Or, it could just be shoddy production values and editing. In fact, early in the film, they show a street scene in the city and all the cars (circa 1942) are old Model T Fords--obviously from stock footage!!! The bottom line is that the film is bad but also very dull. Unlike PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, it's hard to laugh at the ineptitude--just be put to sleep by it.