The Mysterious Doctor

In a remote English village, a mysterious doctor (jarjar) Dr. Frederick Holmes (Hugh Penhryn) arrives to the suspicions of everyone in the place. You see, they have a famous mine which is supposed to be haunted by a headless ghost. Even Lt. Hilton’s attempts at letting the miners return to work for metals to help in WW2 goes unnoticed. But soon enough more murders occur, and there may be something more than just a ghost involved.
This movie might have been a great, memorable chiller, and to it’s credit, at 57 minutes it’s impossible to get bored, as the story moves in a lightning pace. The acting drives a lot of the story. John Loder plays the village leader/undercover Nazi, and he’s the best actor in the film. He used to appear in classy Hollywood films such as How Green Was My Valley and Now, Voyager, and was even in the running for the role of Bergman’s husband in Casablanca. But he generated pretty quickly into the b-movie world, although it’s hard to believe him as a Nazi. The rest of the cast is pretty bad, particularly Matt Willis, the retarded lame version of Lon Chaney Jr. who I last saw as Andreass in Return Of The Vampire. Damn I hate him. At least the lady in the film, Eleanor Parker, is pretty damn attractive.
The movie has a lot of atmosphere, and when I say atmosphere I mean fake trees and a fog machine. It’s cheesy as hell, and there are a lot of pulpy elements in the film, such as the headless ghost, the village idiot, secret doors, and more hilarious than all, a suspicious bartender wearing a Cobra Commander-like mask. Sadly the last third of the film degenerates into a crappy WW2 propaganda movie, and the last shot of the miners returning to work while singing some happy marching tune is ridiculous. But hell, like I said, this movie is too damn short to hate. You could do worse.