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[mst3kproject]

Black Dragons

 This is a bizarre and thoroughly mismanaged WWII yellow peril movie.  It features Bela Lugosi and Joan Barclay, both of whom we’ve seen before in The Corpse Vanishes, and was produced by Sam Katzman, who brought us both The Corpse Vanishes and Teenage Crime Wave (also The Giant Claw).  I liked The Corpse Vanishes.  It was fun, fast-paced, and in some ways surprisingly feminist.  Black Dragons is none of those things.

It’s 1942, and Japan has just bombed Pearl Harbour, forcing Americans to stop ignoring World War II.  Stock footage of stuff burning and blowing up is implied to be the work of a bunch of indistinguishable suited men who are sabotaging the allied war effort.  They’re standing around one evening congratulating themselves on how evil they are, when a mysterious Monsieur Coulombe arrives and talks privately with one of them, a Dr. Saunders  Coulombe hypnotizes or drugs Saunders somehow – and in the days that follow, the conspirators start turning up dead, each with a souvenir from the renaissance faire… oh, excuse me, a Japanese dagger… in one hand.  What the hell is going on?

Well, the ending is supposed to be a surprise, but I’m gonna spoil it for you to save you having to watch the stupid movie.  All the victims, plus Dr. Saunders, are actually Japanese operatives from the Order of Black Dragons who had plastic surgery to turn them into the doubles of American businessmen!  The originals were killed, and the duplicates took their places… and the surgeon?  He was a Nazi who did it as a favour from the Fuhrer, but afterwards the Order tried to kill him so that he could never reveal the plan to anyone.  He escaped, and went to the States to murder them in revenge for their betrayal!

As ideas for an espionage movie go, this one reaches near golden-age comics levels of absurdity and as such it’s almost kind of brilliant.  A movie that used this plot to its full ridiculous potential could be great fun – I especially like that it pits two sets of villains against each other, while the supposed good guys spend most of the film completely clueless.  Black Dragons, however, was rushed onto theatre screens within four months of the bombing of Pearl Harbour, and it’s an utter mess with no idea what to do with its premise.

For being made in 1942, Black Dragons mostly doesn’t look bad.  There are no scenes so dark you can’t see what’s happening, and we get an idea of things like the layout of Dr. Saunders’ house. The characters all kind of look alike but I’ve just had to accept the idea that all white men had the same face until about 1965.  The steps of the Japanese Embassy are obviously somebody’s house with a sign on the door, but I can forgive them that, and the voices sound a little brassy and indistinct but no more so than in The Corpse Vanishes.  The main technical flaw in the film is that most of it has a constant crackling noise in the background, sounding kind of like heavy rain. This is obviously a problem with the print itself, since it continues as we switch scenes from Washington to Philadelphia, and it is very annoying and confusing.

No, almost all of Black Dragons’ many problems are in the writing.  Just based on the premise you can guess that the movie is racist – we’ve got the ‘Japanese dagger’ that doesn’t look even remotely Japanese, and Japanese characters (even some of those who are supposed to look Japanese) played by white guys in costumes and makeup, speaking in fake accents.  And as for the racial issues inherent in the plastic surgery plot point... I don’t actually feel qualified to address those.

What is slightly more surprising is that it’s also egregiously sexist.  There’s a woman living with Dr. Saunders who’s supposed to be his niece Alice, worried about all the weird things happening around her.  She turns out to be a policewoman who’s there to spy on the fake Dr. Saunders, and she gets shouted at for being entirely incompetent when she fails to solve anything (it must be admitted that she didn’t try very hard).

Everything that surrounds this character is just terrible. She’s there to be one (1) pretty girl, like the film is trying to fill some kind of quota.  Alice is introduced when the chief of police suggests that detective Dick Martin might get somewhere by questioning her.  Martin responds, “let me guess, she’s fifty and flat-footed, and wears glasses.”  Oh my god, you poor thing, you might have to talk to an unattractive woman!  She flirts with Dr. Coulombe throughout the film, even as he hangs around being ridiculously off-putting and creepy.  The revelation that she’s a spy herself explains this, I guess, since she must have been doing it in the hope of learning something from him, but it never avails her anything and is, in the end, useless, much like Alice herself.

The worst moment is when Martin, who has been trying to get her to move out of this dangerous house, walks into the room and out of nowhere says, “Alice, will you marry me?”  She stares at him like he’s crazy and asks, “what for?”, and I swear to you he actually replies, “so I can beat you up.  It’s the only way I’ll get you out of here.”  I had to pause the movie and watch it again because I couldn’t believe I’d just heard that.  I have combed the internet for a gif that expresses a sufficient level of what the fuck for this line and I cannot find one.  I need Shikha again.

Black Dragons really has no hero.  The closest thing on offer is Detective Martin, who is honestly just as useless as Alice.  I usually enjoy movies that are just a bunch of bad guys trying to thwart each other, but this is actually Black Dragons’ biggest mistake.  If this were supposed to be a suspense film, then we really ought to be focused on Martin (and possibly Alice) trying to solve the mystery.  Martin sees the Japanese agents as upstanding citizens in danger, and he is doing his best to help them but has started to suspect that the victims aren’t as innocent as they appear.

That has the potential to be an interesting story with a surprising twist at the end, but Black Dragons is not told from Martin’s point of view.  Instead, the audience is privy to at least some of the secrets from the beginning.  We already know that the murder victims are the bad guys, because we watched them brag about it to each other.  We watch Coulombe killing them (though the way he behaves, it would be obvious he’s the murderer even if we didn’t) and hear him calling them by Japanese-sounding names before they die.  By the time we get to what should be the twist, we’ve already figured most of this out (while Martin hasn’t a clue), and the only surprise is that Coulombe’s motivation is personal revenge rather than being a government assassin, as I initially assumed.

A version of the movie that actually tried to keep its secrets secret could also have something I kind of hoped we would see but never did, which is the conspirators interacting with their families.  At least some of the men who were replaced ought to have had parents, siblings, wives, or children, unless they were chosen specifically for being orphaned bachelors with no friends – and that doesn’t seem likely when we know Dr. Saunders had a niece he was close to.  Watching the people around these men feeling like there’s something different but not sure what it is would have been nice and creepy, but Black Dragons is not that subtle.

It’s all doubly unfortunate because there is some cool stuff in this movie.  There’s a bit where rather than killing two of the conspirators himself, Coulombe tricks them into killing each other.  That was nicely done.  His creative methods of hiding bodies are fun, too.  The fact that he ultimately dumps them on the steps of the Japanese embassy with an unconvincing ‘cultural artefact’ in their hands seems like it ought to mean something, like he’s trying to either alert the Americans to the threat or the Japanese to his survival, but nothing is ever really made of this and we never see what the head of the Order of Black Dragons thinks of it at all, as he is seen only in flashback.

The biggest problem with the whole concept behind Black Dragons is the same one as in Hercules Unchained: they needed to make a movie really fast in order to capitalize on something, and just didn’t have time to figure out what they were actually doing.  Hercules Unchained was a movie that tried to have two storylines at one, neither connected to each other and one of them only barely connected to its main character.  Black Dragons isn’t even sure who its main character is. Dick Martin is the nearest thing to a hero, but an argument could equally be made that this story is about Coulombe as antihero.  The result is a film that’s trying to do too much and too little at the same time.  And of course, Black Dragons’ intentions are way less honourable than Hercules Unchained’s.  Hercules Unchained just wanted to capitalize on a popular film.  Black Dragons was capitalizing on a literal act of war!

A version of Black Dragons that tried to do justice to its silly premise would still have been a bad movie.  It would still be an old, grainy print with sound issues, and it would still be deeply racist (among many, many other things, there’s a particularly detestable bit where Coulombe insults the Japanese operatives by calling them ‘apes’) and probably still have that stunningly horrible line about how you have to marry a woman before you’re allowed to beat her.  But it would have been a much more interesting and entertaining bad movie than it ultimately ended up being.