The Whip Hand (1951)

A reporter on a fishing vacation stumbles into a town where all the local fish have mysteriously died and the population is either too afraid to talk or is downright hostile. After some digging, the reporter discovers that a secretive group of men has bought a local lodge and apparently turned it into some kind of mysterious scientific laboratory. The reporter and the sister of the local doctor set out to discover exactly what is going on up there.

Director: William Cameron Menzies
Cast: Carla Balenda, Elliott Reid, Edgar Barrier, Raymond Burr, Otto Waldis, Michael Steele, Lurene Tuttle, Peter Brocco, Lewis Martin, Frank Darien, Olive Carey, Bobby Watson, William Yetter Jr., William Yetter Sr., Stanley Blystone, Eddie Borden, William Challee, George Chandler, G. Pat Collins, Tom Daly, Art Dupuis, Douglas Evans, Elizabeth Flournoy, Robert Foulk, Gregory Gaye, Tom Greenway, Milton Kibbee, Billy Nelson, Jameson Shade, Brick Sullivan




Matt Corbin, a vacationing magazine writer, takes a fishing trip to Minnesota, and stumbles across a lake in which all the fish have mysteriously died. The locals are tight-lipped about it, but Corbin learns that a group of former-Nazis-turned-Communists have purchased a lodge on an island in the middle of the fish-killing lake, and have built some kind of laboratory. Never one to pass up a chance to sell a story to a magazine, Matt decides to investigate. His only ally is Janet Keller, the sister of the local doctor who has been caught up in whatever those nefarious Commie-Nazis are up to. What they are up to, with Soviet financing, is the development of diseases to use in bacteriological warfare against the United States, starting right there in Minnesota.
~ Les Adams

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