Exposed (1947)

An uneven but still enjoyable crime B-movie.

Private investigator Belinda (Adele Mara) is hired by a businessman to check on his step-son (Mark Roberts) who is acting suspiciously including making a number of large money withdrawals. 

However, when Belinda arrives at the businessman's home she finds the businessman dead! Belinda begins to investigate the case, much to the annoyance of her police inspector Dad (Robert Armstrong)!

This is not a bad film though maybe a bit generic. A lot of plot is squeezed in as well as plenty of suspects and red herrings. The leads do not have much chemistry together though and Belinda herself can be a bit too annoying at times. Still, this is a decent watch.

The Monkey Hu$tle (1976)

A rather chaotic blaxploitation film, a bit of fun and charisma keeps things going but only just.

Daddy Foxx (Yaphet Kotto) is a successful hustler in Chicago, he takes some young wannabe players under his wing and they hustle and jive their way to some success in their local neighbourhood. However, developers plan to demolish the neighbourhood to bring a new highway through...

This isn't a great film, the jive and poor dialogue is so poor it is almost beyond parody. Characters are incredibly one-dimensional and the plot is so vague as to be pretty much non-existent at times. The film can be very confusing, you wonder if the editor was maybe a little too keen and left some important plot driving scenes on the cutting room floor.

However, the film can be fun to watch with some good comedy scenes (though also some which really miss the mark).

Suddenly! (1954)

The highest of stakes as a sleepy small town becomes the scene of a planned assassination of the President of the United States!

Not a lot happens in Suddenly but all that changes when the President is due to leave his train there. Federal agents swarm over the place including one team which goes to a house overlooking the railway station owned by former agent Pop Benson (James Gleason) and his daughter Ellen (Nancy Gates). 

However, the team led by Baron (Frank Sinatra) are not federal agents after all but assassins who want to use the house to commit their crime!

This is a great film, tense and gripping as the ruthless and brutal Baron will stop at nothing to commit their mission, being willing to hurt or even kill anyone, men, women and children! 

Kindergarten Ninja (1994)

A very strange film, made very cheaply as an anti-drugs film. Somehow it works, kind of.

In heaven, Bruce Lee (Anthony Chan) has been told he will only become an angel if he does a good deed on Earth. That good deed is to rehabilitate the bad boy football player Blade Steel (Dwight Clarke). 

Blade introduces him to a blind martial arts instructor (George Chung) to teach him karate, together they must battle a drug dealer (Juan Chapa) who is targeting kids at the school Blade is teaching at as part of his punishment for drink driving!

So, that is the crazy storyline. Do not expect much sense or depth from the plot as the film is played largely for laughs (which are not always generated intentionally) and can be pretty witty at times. The film is fun, frequently zany and with a lot of fight scenes, some of which are not that bad in a 1970s kung fu style. 

Strange People (1933)

The premise of this murder mystery is good but unfortunately the execution lets it down.

Twelve people turn up at a dark house on a stormy night one by one, let in by a butler (who has tied up the real one!) We discover that these twelve people know each other, they were the jurors on a trial which apparently sent an innocent man to the gallows. They have been gathered together by Hale Hamilton to demonstrate how someone can be wrongly convicted on circumstantial evidence, a murder is staged but is everything actually fake?

The idea of this film is good but it can be a hard going watch at times. Most of the characters have less dimensions than a piece of string and the dialogue is pretty weak at times. However, this does have all the tropes of a Golden Age dark house mystery including hidden passages and female screams on cue! Not the worst film but it could have been a lot better.