Return of the Frog

There's a criminal mastermind running a desperate gang in London. He communicates with his henchmen via a porcelain frog with blinking eyes, and he punishes the disloyal and those who threaten him by blowing them up. Inspector Gordon Harker is on his trail.

It's a sequel to The Frog, and may strike you as similar to the trio of "Inspector Hornleigh" movies that Harker also starred in, albeit without Alastair Sim for comic relief. There's a simple reason for that relationship: they're all based on works by Edgar Wallace. If you're familiar with the Edgar Wallace series from the 1960s, you'll find this one a bit cozier, with fewer of the gothic elements from the German film makers later on. Director Maurice Elvey reuses sequences from his Sherlock Holmes movies from the 1920s, most obviously in a long sequence set on the Thames.

The copy I saw has a slightly compromised soundtrack that made a lot of the chitchat difficult to follow.