Thursday, August 8, 2024

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 582: BARON BLOOD

(Detective Eye 001, 1940)

Not the first knockoff of Count "the Most Dangerous Game" Zaroff we've met, and certainly not the last. Baron Blood incorporates quite a lot of elements that you'll find in various adaptations of the story: the island castle with built-in lighthouse to draw victims in via shipwreck, the monocle and prominent facial scar and the pack of hunting dogs and huge hunting guide/servant.

What sets the Baron apart from the rest of the bored island-dwelling human-hunting aristocratic crowd is that for one he is not actually a baron but an escaped maniac. For two, he both dresses like a super-villain (orange chain mail!) and employs a staff composed of guys dressed as Vikings and armed with machine guns. Really great stuff, top score on the henchman front. Like the original and a lot of knockoff Zaroffs he also gives himself a bit of a hunting handicap, in his case using poisoned darts fired from a sling - some real eccentric villain behaviour.

He of course (of course) meets his end at the point of his own darts after Dean Denton tackles him from out of a tree. Just carrying around a fistful of them like that is a Health and Safety nightmare in a regular workplace, let alone a jungle island where man hunts man.


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