Kelly of the Secret Service

The Secret Service protects the President and combats the forgery of money. Only that. It does not protect military secrets.

I love these stories where there is a new weapon critical for national defense but the government leaves it badly (or not at all) protected for hours on end, until the bad guys do their bad deeds. The secret being "protected" appears here as a bunch of wrinkled papers left carelessly on a desk. (Invariably in these Z quality films, the plans never look like large rolls of engineering papers but just A4 sheets.) Even after those plans were stolen more valuable data was just kept in a desk drawer. Still no safe.

The acting, the slow delivery of lines, the exaggerated grimaces combine with ridiculous lines to make this disaster of a movie. I am giving it a second point just in case this was intended as a total comedy. But the two good-for-nothing guards the doctor hired are the only element to suggest that the makers of this catastrophe were aware of how ridiculous everything is.

Boxer Fuzzy Knight and his manager, Syd Saylor, don't have a dime, so they answer an advertisement for guards from inventor Forrest Taylor. After he's hired them, assistant Jack Mulhall explains Taylor's invention to him; apparently it's something that can explode bombs at a distance. No sooner is this done, than a figure wearing a cloak and gas mask -- yes, looking like Darth Vader -- enters, gases them, and steals the plans. Taylor and Mulhall rush to secretary Sheila Bromley's office, where she has entered seconds before and begun typing. No, she hasn't noticed anything. The men tell her to call the Secret Service, then rush outside, to find Knight and Saylor more unconscious than usual. A cab pulls up, and out steps Lloyd Hughes, the titular fed of the movie.

There are few words better calculated to strike fear into the heart of movie lovers than "Directed by Robert Hill; Supervised by Sam Katzman" and these have already appeared. Only slightly daunted, I continued to watch, sustained, if that's the word I want, by relative amusement at the interplay between Knight and Saylor. Soon I was confronted with a creepy house riddled with secret passages, John Elliot wearing glasses with lenses so thick light couldn't get through them, a madman wandering around, hypnotizing people into shooting others, and a sinister-looking Oriental in Miki Morita. After 70 minutes of these slowly-revealed and lazily executed cliches, it was over and I was closer to death.