Truly a smelly swamp of a movie, this presents corpulent Noah Beery as a villainous lothario, one dimensionally evil and certainly no example of a great screen lover. He makes a career as a first mate, arranging for ships to sink obviously so he can claim the cargo. Someone overhears and is promptly tossed overboard. His latest captain, Montagu Love, has a pretty daughter aboard (Miriam Seegar) whom Beery desires, brutally dumping the fiery Dorothy Burgess who's ridiculously in love with him, but she slips aboard the ship and plots revenge.
A hysterically bad performance by Beery is the highlight, so mustache twirling and cartoonish that he reminded me of England's master of the macabre, Tod Slaughter who disgraced many young innocent women and turned them into "brides of death". The set is the best aspect of this Z grade melodrama, and the delightfully bad dialog had me laughing at all the offensive bits. Fred Toones plays the stereotypical bumbling black cook, and his dialog gets nothing but groans. Made by a grade F studio that was never heard from again, it's an example of pre-code cinema at its most absurd, but once you start it, it's difficult to put down. It's only one wasted hour so I suffered through it, then promptly tossed it in the brig. No slow tortuous death too desirable for Beery's horrid character.
A hysterically bad performance by Beery is the highlight, so mustache twirling and cartoonish that he reminded me of England's master of the macabre, Tod Slaughter who disgraced many young innocent women and turned them into "brides of death". The set is the best aspect of this Z grade melodrama, and the delightfully bad dialog had me laughing at all the offensive bits. Fred Toones plays the stereotypical bumbling black cook, and his dialog gets nothing but groans. Made by a grade F studio that was never heard from again, it's an example of pre-code cinema at its most absurd, but once you start it, it's difficult to put down. It's only one wasted hour so I suffered through it, then promptly tossed it in the brig. No slow tortuous death too desirable for Beery's horrid character.