The Phantom Creeps |
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USA • 1939 • 265m •
   • Directed by: Ford Beebe, Saul A. Goodkind. • Starring: Bela Lugosi, Robert Kent, Dorothy Arnold, Edwin Stanley, Regis Toomey, Jack C. Smith, Edward Van Sloan, Dora Clement, Anthony Averill, Hugh Huntley, Monte Vandergrift, Frank Mayo, Jim Farley. • Music by: Charles Previn.      Foreign spies, operating under the guise of a foreign language school are trying to buy or steal the meteorite element, while his former partner, Dr. Fred Mallory, miffed that Zorka will not turn his inventions over to the U.S. Government, blows the whistle on him to Captain Bob West of the Military Intelligence Department. Tired of answering the door and saying no to the spies and the government, Zorka moves his lab and when his beloved wife is killed, Zorka, puttering around for his own amusement up to this point, gets hacked off and swears eternal vengeance against society.
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Review:
The problem is that normally when the scientist tries to take over the world, he has one gimmick, which keeps the screenplay focused and unified as to the nature of the forces the Good Guys have to contend with. "PC" makes the mistake of giving Bela too many toys to play with, none of them especially convincing. Seriously, if you paraphrase the prolix introductory text to the 2nd episode, it essentially says that "Dr. Zarkoff perfects invisibility and the ability to induce suspended animation and decides to take over the world.". Um, that's a pretty unlikely (and unsynergistic) combination to conquer civilization with, even if you've got a giant, slow moving robot to back you up (as your third invention). They'd have done better to focus on the invisibility schtick and using it as a plot device to help the government agents race to prevent industrial sabotage. Instead we've got mock spiders making people go into a coma, we've got translucent blurs hitting people in the head with sticks, we've got robots moving fireplaces around...it just doesn't add up to anything with forward momentum. A dozen episodes of this kind of stuff (with the usual "hide the bacon" tomfoolery back and forth between Bela and the G-Men) is a lot to wade through to get to the end, and I really didn't feel the payoff was worth it.
Still, Bela is fun to watch in this as he declaims his greatness and rants at his henchman and vows vengeance against those who thwart him and in general carries on like the nut-case he plays so well. If someone else were playing the role, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't rate it even this highly. If you are a Lugosi fan, you should catch this, or at least skim through the high-lights.
Of the three serials I've seen I'd rate this lower than "Undersea Kingdom" (which tried to be exotic and had large crowd scenes full of costumed men on horses and a tyrant with a Jiffy-Pop popcorn hat) and better than "Radar Men From The Moon" (which only had its flying effects to recommend it and featured good guys who were dumber than hammers).
Review by lemon_magic from the Internet Movie Database.
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