This WW II film opens at a rather tame wild party. Some executive types with cuties on their knees are blabbing about troop movements. Cut to headlines about fifth columnists followed by stock footage of disasters. This takes up 5 of the film's 64 minutes and leads us to believe we're in for a cautionary tale about loose lips sinking ships. The film makers seem to have changed their minds, or maybe it was leftover footage ultra-low budget producer Sam Katzman didn't want to go to waste.Next thing we know, there are five captains of industry and, for some reason, one family doctor sitting around the doctor's Washington DC house gloating about how they're sabotaging the war effort.Soon the conspirators start getting murdered one by one. Since a mysterious stranger with a thick Hungarian accent showed up just before the murders and always seems to be around when they happen, the police are baffled.This stranger, played by Bela Lugosi, not only has superhuman strength and the ability to turn people into zombies. Twice he inexplicably disappears from moving taxis, once taking with him a man he murdered in the back seat without the driver noticing anything untoward. He's also good at making corpses disappear in a few seconds. He might even be responsible for the several occasions when someone leaves a house in the middle of the night to be greeted by bright sunlight on the outside.At the end, when Lugosi is fatally wounded and all the other bad guys have been killed, the doctor, who seemed to be a zombie but actually was turned into a monster by a serum injected by Lugosi, explains.It turns out the Japanese had murdered all these important people with no one noticing. Then they invited a Nazi plastic surgeon with a Hungarian accent to Japan to give Japanese agents the faces of the dead men, as well as their bodies and their voices, and sent them to America, where no one wondered where they'd been all that time.But where they went wrong was when they ungratefully decided to eliminate the plastic surgeon. Instead of simply shooting him, they threw him in a dungeon with another prisoner, scheduled to be released the next day, who happened to look just like him, and you know the rest. On such trivial miscalculations can the most foolproof plans go awry.

At first it seems that you've got your usual Bela-fest of your man creeping about, murdering people, then being charming to the ladies, then a bit of murder, then some more charming, but when you realise why Bela's doing this, how he is doing this, and well…I'll say it again, WHY he is doing this, you can help but be sucked in by the utter ridiculousness of it. Black Dragons is one of the daftest films I've ever watched. Six businessmen have a meeting to discuss how they are going to make money off then expanding World War 2. The Japanese have just attacked Pearl Harbour and these guys want to cash in on that. The sound was a bit dodgy but I caught the gist of it. Then, towards the end of one of their parties, Bela turns up at the front door and before you know it the host is acting a bit strange, Bela's been invited to stay, and one of the guests has been murdered (somehow, Bela manages to sneak into a cab and get the guy out without the driver noticing, and that's just the start of the head scratching antics here!) The host has now locked himself in his room and seems to talk in a stilted, weird manner. This is because Bela is using him like a ventriloquists dummy, in a way that wasn't explained (more head scratching). The other businessmen get suspicious, and start snooping around and turning on each other. Meanwhile, the host guy's niece turns up at the home to stay but doesn't have any luck getting the guy out of the room, the cops are snooping around, and Bela's sauntering about like he owns the place, dropping hints and charming everyone around him. More businessmen turn up dead, outside the Japanese embassy, and the cops are running out of leads (hey morons, what about the stranger in that guy's house that's going on about how dangerous he is?), but why is Bela doing all this? You'd know if you read the blurb at the top of the page anyway. *Spoilers here* Well, turns out Bela was a Nazi party member and renowned surgeon hired by the Japanese to perform surgery on six Japanese guys in order to make them resemble prominent businessmen who'd had gone missing some years earlier (it's okay, the Japanese had death masks made). Somehow, he manages to perform this surgical feat and the businessman have all travelled back to the US to take their places (complete with American accents). Height? Don't ask me how they did that, but they double crossed Bela and threw him into a jail with a guy who looks exactly like him, and…AND…left Bela with his surgical instruments so he can perform surgery on the guy who looks exactly like him, so he can look even more like him! What? Stop asking me questions! I don't know why! With this utterly brain damaged premise, the unexplained hypnotism, and the mutating of one of the guys, somehow, you've got a Lugosi film that's even more ridiculous than the other films from this era (although the Ape Man gives it a good running).

This was a strange film. A bit horror and certainly film noir. Some fifth columnists meet and mysteriously start dying off with a Japanese dagger in their hands after Monsieur Colomb (Bela Lugosi) shows up.Soon the Lone Ranger arrives in the person of FBI Agent Richard 'Dick' Martin (Clayton Moore). Martin is ineffective in finding the killer as he is more interested in the niece (Joan Barclay) of a missing doctor, who is part of the gang.After the last man dies, and the doctor is horribly disfigured by some strange serum, the true story of the group comes out and that is where it gets interesting and weird. I won't spill it.Lugosi was marvelous as the skulking killer.

Poor Bela Lugosi. Just another day at work. A group of saboteurs attempting to disrupt the American war effort from the inside. It's pretty hard to figure out at first because, while we know these guys are up to something, their method of operation just isn't very clear. I won't spoil it, but the ending in pretty amazing. There are a series of murders perpetrated by our hero. A police force that doesn't know what is going on. What a coincidence that all the victims seem to come and go from the same house. There are comments like, "A true patriot would do this or that." It's obvious while suspicion abounds most of the world wouldn't know a spy or a subversive if it jumped up and bit them. I also was surprised to see Clayton Moore (the Lone Ranger) in a romantic role. I never realized that he ever did anything other than sit on a horse. There is, of course, the smugness of the criminals as they think that they are immune from the killer's guest list. Anyway, Bela is sort of a good guy and a bad guy rolled into one. The best scene in the movie is at the end, but I won't spoil it. As a curiosity, and a period piece, it may be fun to watch for some people.