Classic Horrors Club

If you’re keeping track at home, you might expect today’s review to be The Ticket of Leave Man (1937.) I’m sorry to disappoint, but it’s virtually the same film as It’s Never Too Late to Mend (1937), and while I could barely stand watching the two so closely together, I certainly can’t fathom thinking of enough new things to say about it. (I will, however, say I liked it a skosh better.) 

Sexton Blake & the Hooded Terror (1938) is at least, on the surface, a different movie. Nevertheless, it shares a subplot that’s more prominent in the other Tod Slaughter films I’ve seen. The man who at first you think might be the villain, Michael Barron, then before long you know is the villain because he’s played by Slaughter, sets his eyes on a lovely woman…

…Mademoiselle Julie (Greta Gynt) and moves the chess pieces to become closer to her. He is “most anxious” for his associate, Max Fleming (Charles Oliver), to “present” him to her at an auction where he places the winning bid for a stamp that will later be the evidence to convict him. He then encourages her to join him at secret meetings of a criminal gang…

…led by the mysterious “Snake.” The Snake wears a black robe with a cool image of a coiled cobra on it. As the title of the movie indicates, it’s also a hooded robe, but I wouldn’t call the man who wears it a terror. His identity is meant to be a surprise, but… it’s a Tod Slaughter movie. Maybe at the time it would have at best caught you off guard.

Who is this Sexton Blake whose name is in the title? My uneducated answer is a poor man’s Sherlock Holmes (who even lives on Baker Street) who, instead of a doctor, has a bumbling scientist as his sidekick. To the internet I go, and learn that he was a popular character that was modeled on Holmes in the late 1890s, but became more distinctive in 1919.

Blake became more “action-oriented,” but you’d hardly know it in this film. After the story’s first conclusion, it goes on and on for what seems interminably longer than 70 minutes. Especially in the second half, Hooded Terror is like a handful of chapter serials smooshed together. You’d think it would be a little more exciting.

The Snake throws Julia in his “death chamber,” a cell with pipes from which snakes slither to kill her. Tinker (Tony Simpson), Blake’s sidekick, tries to rescue her, but is also trapped in the death chamber with Julia and the snakes. When Sexton does finally appear to save the day, he falls through a trap door and lands in a net before being bound.

Sexton Blake & the Hooded Terror has some legitimately humorous moments. Before he falls through the trap door, when Blake bursts in to confront his nemesis, he cries, “You’re the Snake!” The Snake responds, “Another example of your brilliant powers of deduction.” It’s good-natured and I can see why Blake was such a popular character… for his time.