Secrets of Chinatown: A Low-Budget Fever Dream

Is it worth your time?

Look, if you’re into pristine cinema, skip this. This is for the folks who get a weird thrill out of watching 1930s B-movie experiments where the plot feels like it was scribbled on a napkin five minutes before filming. If you have no patience for grainy audio or acting that feels like it’s being read off a chalkboard, you will probably hate this.

It’s short, which is a mercy. But man, it’s a strange little ride.

The Vibes

Our detective, Donegal Dawn, spends most of his time looking annoyed. He’s the classic hard-boiled guy who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else in the room. He’s not wrong, mostly because everyone else seems to be sleepwalking through the sets.

The whole thing with the "Order of the Black Robe" is so bizarre. It’s supposed to be menacing, but it mostly just feels like a group of people trying not to trip over their own costumes in a dimly lit basement. There’s this one moment where they’re doing a ceremony—I think they’re trying to be scary? It just looks like they’re having a very intense, silent board meeting.

Weird Observations

• The music. Is it music? Or is it just someone vibrating a metal sheet?
• The curio shop cellar looks suspiciously like a corner of the same room they filmed everything else in.
• The dialogue is so stiff you could use it to build a deck.

I couldn't stop looking at the background props. There’s a vase that appears in like, four different scenes, even though the characters are supposed to be in totally different locations. It’s like the movie is taunting me.

If you like this sort of antique oddity, it sits somewhere on the shelf between the unintentional comedy of A Home-Made Man and the slightly more polished nonsense of Arizona Nights. It’s not better, just different.

The pacing is… well, it’s not really pacing. It’s more like a series of events that happen one after another until the credits finally decide to roll. It reminds me of the disjointed energy in Drifting, where you’re never quite sure why the characters are doing what they’re doing, but you stop asking questions because you’re tired.

Honestly? I’ve seen worse. I’ve seen better, too. But I’ll probably remember that weird cult chanting for a few days, even if I have no idea what they were actually trying to achieve.