To me, this movie is perfection.

terrible... so disappointed.

A Masterpiece!

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

This is a very intriguing serial - gets quite interesting. Fun - most definitely fun. All the characters, including the supporting ones, are good. Of course the best are our leading and rival men, Ralph Byrd as Lt. Terry Kent and Bela Lugosi as Boroff.As you can easily guess this is mainly a sea adventure - one that takes a few surprise twists and turns - good cliff hangers - and a fun but far fetched story of disintegrating gas and mass destruction. Lt. Kent stays hot on the trail of Boroff so there is never a dull moment.This one is good for a few giggles but is a refreshing change to see Lugosi outside of the horror genre that he is well known for. Recommended for Lugosi fans - he gets lots of screen time.8/10

The main reason this serial is popular with the fans is the casting of Bela Lugosi as the chief villain. Unfortunately, although he appears in every episode, his role is comparatively small until chapter 8 when he really becomes the dominant villain. It's Lugosi's man, Richard Alexander, who provides most of the action, and even continues to prove a rousingly unworthy, stop-at-nothing opponent for super-natty hero, Ralph Byrd, even when Lugosi finally has more than a few fleeting scenes. Mind you, Lugosi doesn't do much in the way of acting. He does little more than say his lines. The same goes for hero Byrd. It's the rather boring Lee Ford as an incompetent photographer who seems to get all the attention from directors Alan James and William Witney. Ford even does his best (or worst!) to push our lovely heroine, Maxine Doyle, out of the picture. Miss Doyle started in movies as an extra in 1933 but quickly graduated to feature player (Babbitt 1934) and feminine lead (The Mystery Man 1935). She left movies after making this serial. When she returned in 1943, her roles were so small, she was usually uncredited. Another lovely girl that Hollywood wasted or didn't know what to do with! This was Republic's seventh serial and was brought in at $128,530. The original budget was $107,217. Costs and delays while shooting on location in the Los Angeles area were responsible for the increase. Barry Shipman, Franklin Adreon, Winston Miller and Edward Lynn were responsible for the screenplay, which was based on a story outlined by Morgan Cox, Ronald Davidson and Lester Scott. U.S. release: 28 August 1937. Available on two DVD discs from Alpha.

SOS COAST GUARD (1937) never flags throughout its entire run of twelve chapters. Nearly every episode offers something new and different, be it a chase involving two cars and a motorcycle in one episode or one involving speedboats and tommy guns in the next. Most of it is filmed on location in all sorts of picturesque Southern California coastal sites. As the hero, Ralph Byrd (Republic's own Dick Tracy) seems to do a lot of his own stunts-on land and at sea. He clambers around rocks, flies a plane, goes out in boats, rides a motorcycle, runs around rooftops, jumps off of them and when he has to fight, he plunges right in, getting into furious scraps with a host of different henchmen. And it's never the typical movie fight in which opponents trade telegraphed punches. It's pummeling, tussling, shoving, grabbing, rolling, kicking-messy, like a real fight.The hero and villain (Bela Lugosi) are well matched. They're both smart and proactive. The villain's always one step ahead-as it's gotta be for a serial to last 12 chapters-but Byrd is no dope and he catches up pretty quickly. The villain uses lots of henchmen, divided into different teams for different tasks, so Byrd's not fighting the same bad guys in every episode. Also, unlike most serial heroes, Byrd's not afraid to call in police or Coast Guard backup. One great scene has the henchmen staking out a lab where a scientist is trying to analyze the villain's disintegrating gas so he can find a method to counteract it. Byrd's got several policemen protecting the lab. The lead henchman comes up with a clever plan to get Byrd out of the way, find a ruse to get past the police, get into the lab, kidnap the scientist and get him out without arousing the cops' suspicions. Usually, scenes like this rely on wild coincidences or highly improbable circumstances, but the plan used here actually makes sense and one has to give the bad guys credit for using their heads. It makes the whole thing so much more dramatically interesting when the hero faces genuine challenges.Bela Lugosi plays the villain, Boroff, a criminal mastermind trying to develop disintegrating gas to sell to foreign powers for use in the coming war. Lugosi plays it straight, without any of his usual over-the-top mannerisms, and he's very effective. He's well supported by the actors playing his men, who look and move like actual thugs and not pretty boys from Central Casting.If I have any complaint it's that the idiot comic relief, inept photographer "Snapper" McGee, gets way too much screen time and is the only element that actually slows the serial down. Also, some of the cliffhanger endings are a little on the cheating side. In one ending, Byrd ducks into the cockpit of his plane as a water tower falls on top of him. At the beginning of the next episode, it shows that he escaped injury---by ducking into the cockpit of his plane! Not exactly worth waiting a week for. This actually doesn't bother me because the rest of the story is so filled with action and thrills that the cliffhanger endings really don't matter much.

In Republic's third year of existence they certainly hit their action serial stride in this very well made exciting coast guard serial thriller. Still following the format well designed by Mascot Pictures from 1930-34 until Republic bought them, the opening recalls of each chapter are entertaining and brief and concise. The titles are exciting and the sturdy sets and model work exciting and good to look at. Also of extra interest is the amount of vacant suburban and seaside Los Angeles on show and viewers familiar with locales around LA will enjoy the sight of bare streets, dilapidated buildings and empty beaches no doubt crammed with modern buildings today. Each chapter has an extraordinary amount of location shooting in LA streets and ocean/beach locales. The DVD I have does not have a Republic logo and the chapter endings have original plain text which may have been the style for the time, but I believe from seeing serials from about 1940 there was a more stylised look for the in and out titles. The ocean model work is very well done and a treat to follow, given the Lydecker reputation.