FOG ISLAND (1945) ** The title suggests Scooby-Doo, but sadly it's a film adaptation of some play called "Angel Island", which critics assure us is a shameless rip-off of Agatha Christie's novel And Then There Were None. Yeah, well, I dunno, I think the whole thing may be a simplified inversion of Kierkegaard's Symposium, with different characters doing different things and in a different setting, of course. I would go even further out on the limb and suggest that it's possible that neither Kierkegaard nor Christie, nor Scooby for that matter, invented dinner, murder, revenge, clues, or islands. Clues abound, it's easy enough to create a superior plot just by engaging in a standard round of trying to figure out what's going on. I mean, c'mon, with pirates, secretaries, boats, an organ, and secret passages surely they should have done better than this. I don't remember for sure, but I don't think Kierkegaard's had the pirates... George Zucco has moments of sheer cinematic splendour, but Veda Ann Borg is the kind of actor that you have to have in a film like this. Who ever heard of a decent (or indecent) murder mystery without a dye-blond Brooklyn broad?
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