The Girl Who Dared

"You can't convict a man of murder if you can't find the body"--from the film...and certainly NOT true!

In the 1930s and 40s, Hollywood made a ton of scary old house movies. They always involved some folks getting stuck in some home as a maniac slowly begins picking them off...one by one. "The Girl Who Dared" is one of these films...but it's also a bit better.

In this film, a group of people are invited to a mansion...but when they arrive the homeowner says he didn't invite them. Soon, a body turns up...and then another. And, naturally, the phones have been cut and their cars vandalized so they cannot escape!

The reason I liked this one is the ending...it was a clever way to catch the killer and their motivation was interesting. A decent time-passer.

"The Girl Who Dared" sounds more like a Western adventure instead of a B old-dark-house mystery, but the latter is what it is. This fast (under an hour), breezy film is something of a variation of "And Then There Were None," and actually beat the film version of the Agatha Christie novel to the screens by a year! It leaves no convention unexplored and no cliché unplumbed, and the identity of the killer is more random than motive-inspired. But it is competently done, with some interesting camera work for such a cheapie, and a couple decent plot twists. The trapping of the killer is unique, too. The cast performs competently, and some of the actors play against their usual types, particularly Roy Barcroft, normally a Western and Serial heavy who here plays the hotheaded, jealous ex-husband of one of the key characters, and Kirk "Superman" Alyn, as the equally hot-headed brother of the "Girl" of the title. John "Perry White" Hamilton also enjoys a larger and different kind of role than he was normally given. If only the filmmakers had been so generous with Willie Best, who once again shuffles around as a pop-eyed, comic relief servant who is afraid of his own shadow. All in all, it's worth an hour of a movie buff's time.

An assortment of relatives come to visit John Hamilton at his isolated house on an island, connected to the mainland by a causeway. The local legend is that a hundred years earlier a pirate ship had sunk there -- the remains can still be seen offshore -- and one night a year, this night, the ghost of the pirate captain can be seen from the shore. Then one of the houseguests is killed and the movie shifts gears.

It starts off as a lighthearted old-dark-house/mystery/comedy from Republic under the direction of Howard Bretherton, the studio's reliable jack-of-all-genres, and the B-list acting talent available for the studio's non-western programmers are up making the most of their roles and the spooky camerawork of Bud Thackery. It maintains its interest right to the end, although the mystery aspect of the movie is lazily handled; still, that fits right in with its multi-genre script, and more in keeping with its sense of being a mood piece, rather than a serious effort.

"Beau" (John Hamilton) and "Chattie" (Vivien Oakland) invite a rather eclectic mix of folks to join them for a party at their remote island home. Or do they? The arrival of their guests proves quite bemusing as they didn't actually ask anyone! Who has lured these people here and why? Well body number one arrives shortly afterwards (then disappears) and as others soon start to mount up, we have a mystery that it falls to mechanic "Blair" (Peter Cookson) and the suspicious "Ann" (Lorna Gray) to try and solve before they, too, go the way of the dodo at the hands of the famed ghost of this ramshackle pile. It's not very often we see a geiger counter feature in a murder mystery, but armed with it's glowing light and a bit of light-heartedness, we race through an hour amiably. Nobody will take any acting or writing plaudits from this, but as a standard Saturday afternoon feature, it does fine and probably have inspired countless editions of "Scooby Do"!

Girl Who Dared, The (1944)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Decent "B" flick from Republic has a group of people invited to a party at a creepy house where legend has it a ghost appears once a year. It turns out this group doesn't know who invited them and sure enough it doesn't take long before one by one they start dropping dead. The "old dark house" genre was more than fifteen-years-old by the time this one here was released to theaters so needless to say there's really nothing new or original here. The more of these films I watch the more I realize that they were all for the most part cheaply made and I'm really not sure what the point of so many of them were unless they simply made a lot of money on small budgets. This one here certainly isn't a masterpiece but at just 52-minutes the thing is short enough to be fairly entertaining. I think the best thing the film has going for it is the nice cast, which includes Peter Cookson as a mysterious mechanic, Lorna Gray as the main female, Willie Best as the nervous servant and Grant Withers as one of the many possible murderers. Each person turns in a fine performance with Best once again doing that scary-cat act like no other. The story itself isn't all that bad and I actually enjoyed the backstory dealing with a pirate ship that crashed a hundred years earlier and this is where the ghost comes from. We also have a subplot dealing with radiation and the impact it might have on the person who comes in contact with it. There's some fairly good atmosphere but there's no question that they weren't meaning for this to be anything other than cheap entertainment. Fans of the genre who must see everything will certainly want to check it out but others will probably be squirming in their seats. This certainly isn't the type of movie for everyone but fans of the genre should find it entertaining.