Review of The Mysterious Doctor

This was a truly bizarre little British propaganda film made during the Second World War. It's so odd because it looks initially like a B-movie horror film (with talk about ghosts and headless ghouls walking about), but then unexpectedly becomes an anti-Nazi film about German attempts to destroy tin production in Britain!! Talk about strange plot-twists! However, despite the creativity of the plot, the film has quite a few problems that prevent it from being anything more than a silly time-passer. One problem, and it is relatively minor, is that the whole gimmick of the guy with a hood over his head is just silly. He didn't look all that bad without it and it's frightfully easy to guess what they would do with that character. A much bigger problem is that there really isn't much mystery about the film because it is just way too rushed. The suspense is never given a chance to build and the film makers were obviously too constrained by the unwritten rule that B-movies should be 50-70 minutes long,...period! And in this case, this meant ill-developed plot elements and a way too quickly solved mystery. As a result, the film never really jells into a coherent or memorable film. Nice try, though, but a film that is very skip-able.