FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1999. All Rights Reserved

Video Vulture by John Tebbutt • Spy Smasher (1942): Looking at my video collection recently, I noticed that I have about 15 cliffhanger serials (not counting a couple of partials that don’t feature every episode). I suppose that’s rather a lot. I’ve never seen one in the theatre, sadly, but on tape I find them wonderfully entertaining. Picking a favourite isn’t easy, with so many bizarre classics like G-Men Never Forget, Nyoka and the Tigermen, and The Phantom Empire around. Still, I’d have to give the nod to Spy Smasher. This energetic chapterplay is based on a character from Whiz comics. He’s a caped superhero who fights Nazis. Not aliens, not robots –Nazis. In the first episode, he gets captured and tortured in a "Gestapo dungeon" in occupied France. With the help of a heroic French captain, he escapes from the firing squad and goes off to foil a Nazi conspiracy in America. (He probably should have stayed in France – there were more Nazis there.) One of the things that elevates Spy Smasher above most serial fare is that the hero is constantly put in life-threatening situations, and not just at the end of an episode (the end-of-chapter crises are real doozies, though). As chapter three wraps up, Spy Smasher is unconscious and locked in the torpedo bay of a German U-boat. The bad guys flood the chamber with seawater in order to drown our hero. Captain Devanne, the guy who saved Spy Smasher in chapter one, is in the room with him, but he can neither revive the caped crusader, nor find a way out of the increasingly water-filled torpedo bay. The credits roll. When the next episode begins, Captain Devanne manages to find an aqualung... but only one. He straps it on the unconscious hero and... get this... fires him out of the torpedo tube! Then he dies with a smile on his face, knowing that he’s sacrificed himself for a greater cause. Wow! It’s this willingness to kill off heroic supporting characters and the avoidance of standard jump-out-of-exploding-car-in-the-nick-of-time clichés that give Spy Smasher its refreshing potency. Particularly astonishing is the end of the second-last episode: we see Spy Smasher get shot several times and fall off the top of a building! I won’t spoil the finalé, but I will say that it puts those lame "good thing I was wearing a bulletproof vest" cop-outs to shame. Classic stuff. • Stripteaser (1995): A lot of people are going to pass this one by because it looks like another disposable smut tape and the title unfortunately recalls that Demi Moore vehicle that nobody wants to admit they’ve seen. Well, surprise surprise, kids, it’s not like that at all. Pop in the tape and you’ll see the kind of bump-and-grind gyrating you’d expect from a title like this... for about 20 seconds. Then this "erotic thriller" immediately puts the focus firmly of the "thriller" part of the equation. As the dingy strip club prepares to close for the night, things take a grim turn when an obnoxious last-minute customer turns out to be a mentally disturbed man with a gun. As the evening wears on, the trapped staff and customers try to understand why they are being held hostage... what does this guy want? It becomes increasingly apparent that he doesn’t want anything – he’s not a thief or a jealous boyfriend, just a disturbed sociopath who decided to spend the evening watching strangers squirm at the end of his gun. The characters are recognizably human, from the lesbian stripper who protectively cradles her girlfriend in her arms, to the painfully shy, lovestruck customer who gets taunted mercilessly by the gunman. All of the action takes place in one set and it’s almost entirely in real time. The suspenseful script would make an excellent stage play with hardly any changes. All in all, a terrific little undiscovered gem, reminiscent of Arch Hall Jr.’s white-knuckle classic, The Sadist (1963).

| Back To This Issue Table of Contents | Back To Main Index |