Release Date: November 16th, 1944 (first chapter)
Directed by: Spencer Gordon Bennet, Wallace Grissel
Written by: Basil Dickey, Jesse Duffy, Grant Nelson, Joseph Poland, Johnston McxCulley (original Zorro novel)
Cast: Linda Stirling, George J. Lewis, Lucien Littlefield, Francis McDonald
Republic Pictures, 182 Minutes (total over 12 chapters)
Review:
Zorro’s Black Whip is pretty unusual, as Republic Pictures didn’t have the rights to use the Zorro character in a film but they could still use the name. So with that, they created this serial where the Zorro-esque hero is named The Black Whip and is, in fact, a dame!
The story also takes place in Idaho, a far departure from southern California, even though that’s where this would’ve been filmed.
I like the heroine and thought that Linda Stirling did a pretty decent job as a female version of Zorro with a different name.
The rest of the cast was about as good as film serial casts go. No one really stood out other than the lead.
The story was a bit all over the place and I thought that the chapter cliffhangers were fairly weak and mundane. Honestly, in a lot of ways, the writing and the situations were incredibly derivative for the genre style.
Still, this did have some spirit for something that was a gender-swapped generic ripoff of a popular hero.
In the end, this is very far from being the best representation of “Zorro” but it’s also not dreadful. I doubt I’ll ever watch it again, though.
Rating: 4.5/10
Talking Pulp 