Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror

Back in 2019, I reviewed the Tod Slaughter movie Crimes at the Dark House which is part of a DVD box set of British B movies that I have. I pointed out at the time that the DVD has a second Slaughter movie on it, (Sexton Blake and) the Hooded Terror. It's only recently that I finally got around to watching that one.

The opening title card is clearly one inserted later, for TV syndication back in the days when companies bought the rights to B movies to show on TV stations that needed programming outside the hours that networks weren't programming, and then has the title The Hooded Terror. Now, since this DVD has a second Tod Slaughter movie on it, that's not such a bad thing, as Slaughter is the Hooded Terror. But the movie belongs just as much if not more to Sexton Blake (George Curzon). However, we don't get to either of them for a bit.

The movie starts off with a scene in Shanghai, where a guy named Granite Grant (David Farrar some years before Black Narcissus is being chased before being able to escape to the lobby of his hotel; nobody is going to attack him in public like that, especially not at a hotel catering to westerners. Grant tells a Paul Duvall to meet him in his room in five minutes, but in those five minutes Grant gets stabbed within an inch of his life. However, he is able to tell Duvall about a nefarious crime syndicate called the Black Quorum that's going to be meeting in London, and Duvall will have to get that information to London.

Fast forward to London, which is where we get to meet Sexton Blake. He's a rip-off of Sherlock Holmes, even living on Baker Street and having a Watson-like assistant in the form of Tinker (Tony Sympson). However, he's no dummy as a detective. Duvall, not having been able to get the London police to listen to him, goes to see Blake, but gets killed by a poison blow-dart. However, he left a piece of paper with invisible ink (yeah, right) that would be a vital clue to the whereabouts of the meeting of the Black Quorum, which is headed by the aforementioned Hooded Terror.

Eventually, Blake finds where the meeting of the Black Quorum is, as does Julie, who seems to have the same interest in philately that the Terror does when he's not wearing his hood and going by the name Michael Larron. Michael, unsurprisingly, falls head over heels for Julie, but that's also going to be his downfall.

Larron decamps to France, so everybody else follows him to Paris to try to find him. Julie is given the opportunity to save herself by becoming his girlfriend, but she says no, which subjects her to the death chamber for which the Hooded Terror is known. What that entails, however, I'll leave as a surprise to the viewer.

IMDb, in addition to listing the US TV distributor from the 1950s, lists MGM's British arm as the original production company for this 1938 movie, which would indicate that it was produced as a "quota quickie" for them to be able to show the Hollywood prestige stuff in the UK. As such, it wasn't made with a big budget or anything other than a desire to finish production. Nominally a mystery, the story is a bit of a mess, but Curzon and even more so Slaughter are entertaining enough to make it worth a watch.

Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror is the sort of movie that would be perfect for TCM's Saturday matinee block, and the sort of movie that's perfect on a cheap box set. I'd never pay standalone prices for it, but as a representative of the quota quickie era and an example of what Tod Slaughter could do, I'm quite happy to have watched it.