Philo Vance's Gamble (1947)

A Philo Vance story with Noir-ish elements (i.e. people get bumped off at regular intervals). An emerald has been stolen but before the fence (Dan Seymour) can double cross his syndicate of backers and his mistress he is bumped off.

Unfortunately for Philo Vance (played by Alan Curtis this time) he is present due to an association with Laurien March (Vivian Austin) and thus the police include him as a suspect.

Vance conducts his own investigation assisted/hindered by his rather dopey detective Ernie (Frank Jenks) who provides a bit of comic relief. The film is fast paced with some decent lines and nicely dark in the right areas. The ending also has a really nice twist.

American Ninja (1985)

Ninja films were all the rage for a time in the 1980s, this might be considered the high point of the genre. At least it looks like it had a budget of more than 20p.

The story is fairly basic: it starts a boy who has grown up on the wrong side of the tracks (Michael Dudikoff) but is now in the US Army gets tangled up with ninjas but has their skills himself. He is later found to have been bought up by a Japanese soldier/ninja but has forgotten his past due to amnesia (of course).

Meanwhile a black marketeer is stealing US Army weapons and hiring ninjas. Now it falls to our hero to save the day of course. So that's the story, naturally it is just a flimsy framework for a good deal of martial arts action. The action is often pretty decent and the film seldom has chance to get boring.

Naturally it is also pretty cheesy, especially when viewed nowadays. I particularly liked the evil ninja who had laser guns and mini rocket launchers.

Troublesome Night 4 (1998)

The Troublesome Night series of horror films amazingly went up to nineteen but let's stick with one of the earlier efforts.

A group from HK go to the Philippines for a tour, and here are three ghost stories set around their tour. One guy is transporting an urn containing the ashes of a Filipina who died in HK. As he heads to deliver his pack he keeps seeing a girl in the mirror and even in the shower. She looks exactly like the girl whos ashes he's now carrying!

So that is the kind of fare on show here. The frights are more the Carry On Screaming type than the Driller Killer kind of horror. Plenty of ghosts appearing suddenly and people screaming. And it's all quite funny, sometimes intentionally too.

The film is a typical late 90s silly HK slapstick packed with contemporary pop culture and HK life references. If you like that kind of thing you'll like this film, though some of the references are dated now. The honeymoon couple story (starring Louis Koo and Pauline Suen) and the urn story are reasonably good ghost stories, the third story about three horny guys is a bit of a zombiefest yawn but you can't win them all.

Grief Street (1931)

A theatre actor Alvin Merle (Crauford Kent) is found murdered in his dressing room, and thus an average murder mystery is set off. The dressing room was locked and apparently no one entered the room so how was he killed?

There are plenty of suspects, the victim was a womaniser and rather rude to all and sundry. The police investigation proceeds apace though a rather stupid Sergeant tries to do his best to stink out every scene he is in by overdoing the aggression. The focus of the film though is reporter Jim Ryan (John Holland) who is on the story (and given remarkable access to the police investigation) and young actress Jean Royce (Barbara Kent) who is in the possession of a rather incriminating note...

The film is fine, just rather unexceptional. It plods along, the dialogue is oddly stilted at times (with the odd funny line) but the film has great production values. A neat feature of the film is that you think the murder takes place right in the first scene but its really on stage... the real crime follows soon after.

Bombay Waterfront (1952)

The Marquis is a serial killer terrorising London. While the police have no leads the amateur detective Paul Temple (John Bentley) is on the case - this is the last in a short series of Paul Temple films - indeed it's alternative title is Paul Temple Returns. In fact Temple is warned off by The Marquis even before he is on the case which is a bit of an odd move to be honest.

Temple and his wife Steve (Patricia Dainton) obviously arn't put off by these warnings and begin investigating the case even though the police led by Ross (Ronald Leigh-Hunt) are not keen for the help...

Everyone is frightfully posh (apart from a rather dated stereotype Burmese servant) and the film proceeds at a decent tempo with an interesting view of early 1950s London. Paul Temple is a bit bland as a detective and somewhat smug but the film has a good supporting cast including Christopher Lee as a rather creepy Egyptologist and Robert Urquhart.