Late 30's independent serial that feels like Poverty Row feature from several years earlier. This is a "yellow peril" tale of a half Chinese half western woman looking to take over Chinatown by destroying the Chinese merchants. Bela Lugosi stars as the scientific genius and main operative who uses his scientific skill to create havoc and to try and stop a detective played by Herman Brix from putting an end to the criminal endeavor. I'm of mixed emotions about this serial. To be certain it has all of the things you associate with a serial in spades, a great villain, great traps, and plot that just keeps going. However the serial is so poorly and evenly made and acted that you'll be sitting staring at the screen in utter disbelief. Not to put too fine a point on it this serial is a mess.<br /><br />First off the serial is constructed like one of the annoying horror mystery films from a few years earlier when sound was just coming in. Everyone talks and talks and talks as if sound was still a novelty. More often then not when that happens the motion of the film just stops as we watch the dialog scenes. (Yes its fine when the action happens but those dialog scenes are deadly). It doesn't help that much of the film is poorly shot. The sets often look cheap and as though they have been thrown together randomly, or worse as if they are just walls with nothing behind them.<br /><br />The cast is awful. Lugosi gives what is more often then not a nonperformance. Even in his drug addled later days he at least seemed to be connected to the action, here he seems to be in another film entirely. Its at its worst when Lugosi is alone on screen and he seems to be completely lost as if waiting for the director to tell him what to do. At times its probably his worst performance. The rest of the cast is a mixed bag but most of them seem to be either phoning it in or incapable of acting on screen. (The reporter comes off as an annoying chipmunk) When I watched the featurized version of this a few months back I stated that the only thing worse then that was the full version. Seeing the serial again for the first time in maybe two decades I have to revise that, the feature is worse. Granted this isn't a four star winner by an stretch of the imagination and maybe is only a 3 out of 10. However this scores over the feature simply because it has more chapter endings and serial like adventures then the feature.<br /><br />For Lugosi fanatics and serial nuts only