Does anyone know what happened after Charlie Chan was ambushed and dragged behind the secret panel in the wall? Also, who committed the murders and hypnotized the first victim's wife, and what was the significance of the 1935 date?
shareEverything was revealed again in "The Passion of the Christ" in the necktie party scene.
Nothing exists more beautifully than nothing.
Opening scene seance attendee "Paul Hamlin" (played by Frank Jaquet) turns out to actually be former London magician "Shardo the Great" (Scotland Yard answers Charlie Chan's cable), who fires a frozen blood bullet from his cigar case to kill seance medium "William Bonner" (played by Dick Gordon), who is actually Shardo's former London assistant magician, who eloped to America with Shardo's wife (now "Justine Bonner," played by Jacqueline DeWitt), on October 1, 1935 (the date mentioned three times by an unknown questioner just before "William Bonner" is shot). Shardo initially was in hot pursuit, but wrecked his jalopy, was horribly injured, and emerged after a year-long coma looking like Hardy instead of Laurel, which is why the Bonners don't recognize him when he starts attending their Los Angeles seances nine years later. When Shardo drugs and hypnotizes "Justine Bonner" and persuades her to jump off a high-rise, L.A. police Sgt. Matthews (played by Joseph Crehan) is ready to close the whole affair as a domestic murder-delayed suicide, but Charlie demurs. When Charlie is pulled behind the secret panel, he wakes up in a restraining chair, knowing he's about to be given the same drug he had police chemist Dawson (played by Edward Earle) isolate from "Justine's" splattered blood. Fortunately, he asked for and received a bottle of antidote pills from Dawson, which he has with him. So when Shardo says he has to answer some questions, he asks to take his "heart medicine" first, and he swallows the antidote with a glass of water which turns out to contain the mind control drug. After being hypnotized with blinking lights by Shardo's voice, Charlie walks in a trance to the skyscraper next door--just as Justine had done earlier--and is coached to the edge of the rooftop by Shardo's voice, just as Justine had been. The the antidote kicks in one second before he takes a fatal plunge, Shardo is apprehended at the end of a Charlie Chan "seance" in the room of the original killing--with all the surviving original participants present--shortly thereafter (just like the parlor endings of most of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot mysteries).
shareIf this put you to sleep, you obviously haven't seen Star Trek The Motion Picture.
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