Product Details

• Actors: Richard Bailey, Linda Stirling, Roy Barcroft, Kenne Duncan, Forrest Taylor
• Format: Black & White, NTSC
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 2
• Studio: Republic Pictures
• VHS Release Date: May 30, 1995
• Run Time: 219 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6302610605
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #254,132 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Serial to enjoy..., December 2, 1998

By 

CSO 34 (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Manhunt of Mystery Island [VHS] (VHS Tape)

This serial is a good one in that it stars the great Roy Barcoft as the villian. Followers of serials know that he was one of the best and gives a first rate performance here.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Out, Out, Damn Jacket!, January 7, 2006

By 

Scott Lothrop "Great Scott" (Tampa, FL, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Manhunt of Mystery Island [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Why Richard Bailey? Maybe all the good leading men hadn't come back from World War Two yet. And why that ugly checked jacket? After spending the wardrobe budget on Captain Mephisto's bellbottoms, they probably had to get Bailey's jacket at Goodwill. Heck, in most of his fights his jacket doesn't even become unbuttoned and his hat doesn't fall off!

The undistinguished Bailey plays distinguished criminologist Lance Reardon, who helps Claire Forrest, played by serial queen Linda Stirling, search the island for her scientist father. Professor Forrest is a prisoner of Captain Mephisto, an 18th century pirate who has invented a machine which turns him into one of his four descendants who inhabit an island--or maybe it's the other way around. Anyway, Mephisto is played by one of the all-time popular baddies, Roy Barcroft. Barcroft is much better in this role than he was as the title character in "The Purple Monster Strikes," which he made in the same year (maybe the bellbottoms helped). When he was a Martian occupying another man's body, I bought it; though the process is similar, here I don't. I don't know why they needed the metamorphosis, it would have been a perfectly okay serial without it, but there it is, and it doesn't work for me. Here's hoping you enjoy watching the change, because the same exact scene occurs in every chapter.

Lind Stirling ("The Crimson Ghost," Zorro's Black Whip") is her usual competent self, which is a good thing because without her Reardon is dead meat. Perhaps his most common line is, "Thank you, Claire!" every time she rescues him. In a remarkable case of "you'd-never-recognize-him," Kenne Duncan plays Mephisto's chief henchman Brand, quite a turnaround after playing the calm, almost otherworldly Ram Singh is "The Spider's Web." Yakima Canutt, the world's most honored stuntman, retired to second-unit directing after being injured in 1943, his most famous example of which was directing the chariot race in "Ben Hur" (1959); he directs the second unit in this picture as well, so you know the stunt work is good.

The final cliffhanger has a bad cheat. Claire's plane dips below the rocks and we clearly hear the plane crashing, but when the final chapter begins there is no crash, and the plane simply rises from behind the rocks. And the ending is rather weak, as if they ran out of time and had to wrap up everything in two minutes. This one was well beyond Republic's so-called golden era.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Turning into Roy Barcroft, September 4, 2000

By 

Paul M. Dellinger (Wytheville, VA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Manhunt of Mystery Island [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Richard Bailey didn't cut the most heroic figure among Republic's serial heroes, and his voice sounds a tad on the sissy side. But he was built like stuntman Tom Steele which is what counts, because Steele made his character look like quite a battler. Even so, heroine Linda Stirling saves the life of Bailey's criminologist character about as many times as vice versa in this exciting chapter-play, about one of a group of suspects on an island who has developed a Frankenstein-like spark-throwing transformation machine which can literally turn him into another person, the physical personification of his pirate ancestor, played by Roy Barcroft. It is said that this was one of Barcroft's favorite roles, because it was something different from western heavies. Indeed it was, and Barcroft revels in it.