bozopolis

Some of the reviewers here need to lighten up a bit. The negative comments on this film are evidently by those who cannot appreciate how hard it is to make a movie for $2500 and have it gross a half million because of it's cult status. Are the jokes bad? Absolutely. Is the acting awful? Some of it, yes. But to me this is what cult cinema is about. It doesn't take itself seriously and viewers shouldn't either. It's 84 minutes of fun with more than a few laughs. Eddie Deezen calls this his worst movie he ever appeared in and even he misses the point while making the film a joy for those who love bad movies. He's brilliant! Is Mark Pirro going to be the next Alfred Hitchcock? No but he's done something major studios only dream of. Make a film for nearly nothing and 40 years later people are still discovering it and smiling. I did. Find it. Watch it. And please write a review that will absorb the bad ones that don't get it. They'll never get it.

I'm shocked at so many of the reviews giving redeeming value to this serial. Above average production values? Really. So bad it's worth seeing? Yes, there are films so ridiculously bad they're good but I beg to differ that this is one of them. Not giving anything away by telling you that the villain is a hand. The story features the character called America's Sherlock Holmes, Craig Kennedy who is also called a Scientific Detective. Played here by 2nd fiddle actor Jack Mulhall with Rex Lease as his newspaper reporter friend Walter Jameson. Today's LED bulbs are brighter than the two of them put together and all I could do for 15 Chapters to entertain myself was to sing Help Gironda, help help Gironda who is the missing scientist who supposedly has developed a formula for synthetic gold. He hasn't and he's not even really missing which isn't giving away a spoiler. You know almost right away that he's the dreaded clutching hand. It's laughable but you won't laugh. I like serials and can usually find something to like about all of them. I'll get back to you.

...how I ever got through this serial. It's a mystery why the main character is in it less less than half the time. There are worse serials but this one's really long and boring. I love the genre but even the cliffhangers aren't that exciting (maybe one good one in the whole lot) there's just not a lot of motivation to keep watching. There's too much repetition even for a Katzman flick. The cast isn't terrible but they do very little to even justify their being a part of the story. Stretching out a 55 minute movie to 15 Chapters without some good fight scenes or suspenseful moments is like having a root canal that lasts 3 hours too long. I'm not one of those who dislikes Columbia's serials but it's ones like this that gets most of them stamped as garbage. It would have been more fun to watch Talbot, King, Fowley, and Acuff pass around a whiskey bottle and tell anecdotes about the crap films they had been in. At least there would have been laughs.