Le Sentier de la Pieuvre

I’m having a day off from the Film Festival, and so can you! We return you to our serial photoplay, TRAIL OF THE OCTOPUS. Chapter 11, The Red Death!

Last we saw, hapless criminologist Carter Holmes was battering down the door to rescue Ruth Stanhope, while she, thinking him to be a rapacious ape-man, poised to kill herself. Of course, we knew how that was going to turn out. Ruth doesn’t kill herself. And Carter isn’t an ape-man.

Now they have to escape from the fiendish lair of Wang Foo, which they manage with one of the series’ most gripping action sequences ~

Too violent for Jim Carrey?

It seems highly probable that Ruth will spend the rest of the serial falling out of her tattered dress, but Carter suggests a kinkier alternative — she should don a spare suit of his clothes. Thus dragged up, she is handily able to impersonate a scarecrow and elude pursuing stereotypes, before hopping on a convenient biplane with Carter.

Now everybody’s off to Paris to get a ceremonial dagger from a French professor. Realizing the average life expectancy of professors in this serial, he’s glad to part with it, but Carter has a better idea. And by better, I mean stupider. He proposes setting a trap.

Meanwhile, Wang Foo prepares a duplicate dagger, booby-trapped to induce sudden death in anyone unsheathing it. And he uses his hitherto unknown powers of long-range mental suggestion to draw Carter into his own trap ~

It works. Carter finishes his preparations, and then checks in case there is a dwarfish ape-man lurking in the dumb-waiter. There isn’t. Not anymore.

But there was.

Oh, and Wang Foo has a mad scientist who’s going use his special invention to tug a piece of Mars out of the sky and drop it on Montmartre. So there’s that to look forward to. It’s not clear why he’s going to do this, but Wang Foo apparently doesn’t believe him anyway. Let’s just not worry about it. Probably never happen.

I was expecting the Black Cat Cafe to be sleazier, but I guess it’ll do. The black musicians playing le jazz hot are perhaps intended as a clue that this place ain’t on the level. Carter shows up in heavy disguise with Ruth, handing her a “code sheet” for emergencies. I’m sure that’ll be useful when Mars falls on their heads.

Midnight! The ape-man jiggers the fuse box! The gendarmes outside Keystone about helplessly in the dark! Carter is seized under cover of blue filter — he wrestles his assailant into a deadlock only to have him vanish like a wraith! But he does manage to get Tunisian turncoat Raoul Bernay and vamp Zora Roularde under arrest. Except, wouldn’t you know it, Ruth has been kidnapped again. Well, she was doing well. She nearly made it through a whole episode sans abduction.

Zora gives Carter the booby-trapped blade. And a big chunk of Mars hurtles towards Paris.

Questions, questions…