Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

SeeQuant Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

JohnHowardReid You can't always judge a serial by its Columbia cover. In fact, in the years before director Derwin Abrahams and producer Sam Katzman introduced new eras of economy, Columbia's serials on the whole were well worth watching. The Green Archer is still one of the more entertaining efforts of these pre-Katzman years, made well before budgets were stripped to the bone, promising ideas unfulfilled, exciting scripts jettisoned and casts made up of fifth-raters and boring nonentities. Thanks to imaginative art direction and pleasing photography, plus splendid acting and an ingeniously thrilling script, The Green Archer retains its appeal in 2015.On the other hand, the condensed version issued by Columbia and now available on an excellent Alpha DVD (the condensed version of 1935's Lost City is on the same disc), is a somewhat mixed bag. True, just about all the nonsensical and other marking-time filler rubbish has been jettisoned, but so have a lot of the great action episodes. It's also a fact that the plot still manages to be a bit repetitive, and, in my opinion, focuses too much attention on Kit Guard, but on the whole, it's still a worthy entertainment investment.

MikeMagi Watching episodes of "The Green Archer" took me back some 70 years to the Yorktown Theater which had perhaps the most massive screen of Manhattan's neighborhood houses, where you were engulfed in the action and every close-up literally loomed over you. A Saturday matinée at the Yorktown invariably included a double feature, newsreel, cartoon, comedy short, trailers and the latest installment of a fifteen chapter serial (mostly from Columbia or Republic.) All for 12 cents and sometimes they threw in a free comic book. "The Green Archer" was among the better serials, largely because a genuinely talented actor, Victor Jory, had the lead. And he had just emerged from a screen career largely devoted to skullduggery to cloud mens' minds as "The Shadow" in another Columbia 15-parter. How does "The Green Archer" hold up? The most fun is still watching the hero emerge unscathed from the seemingly hopeless mess he was in at the end of the previous chapter, trapped in a warehouse explosion, driving his roadster off a cliff to crash in flames or stretched out under a ceiling of descending spikes. And there was some pretty good scenery chewing going on from grade B actors like James Craven as evil Abel Bellamy, running a ring of dim-witted jewel thieves out of an ancestral castle with more secret passages than a Poe manse. Only drawback to getting "Green Archer" from Netflix was watching several episodes in a clump --rather than week to week as intended -- which tended to make the bald spots in the plotting sorta' obvious.

horrorfilmx This is a pretty unusual serial. It took me two tries to get into it, but then I was hooked. The plot is no more than perfunctory and seems like it was stitched together out of random clichés as the writers went along, but a few episodes in things take a truly delightful turn into the bizarre. It feels as if the writer, director, and/or cast began to feel bored by the tripe they were enacting and decided to have some fun with it. The supposedly diabolical mastermind suddenly seems like the headmaster at a school for painfully inept crooks, constantly bemused but tolerant of his incompetent charges, and the cliffhangers and action sequences begin to feel like big jokes. My favorite shot: the hero is trapped in one of those rooms that slowly fill with water and the villain, after setting the trap in motion, turns to his cohort with a shrug and a wry grin that seems to say "The old flooded room trick again --- well, what're ya gonna do?" Unfortunately the serial runs out of steam towards the end and falls back on the usual tired hi-jinks, but for a while it's a delight.

wrbtu This is one of the better serials. There's a castle with secret doors & passageways everywhere, lots of fist fights, lots of bow & arrow work, bombs, shooting, poison gas, an underground hideaway for automobiles, & spirited acting in an action packed plot. On the down side is redundancy (a trademark of all serials), absurdity (by himself, the hero defeats 6-8 baddies at once in fist fights, even when the baddies have guns!). But overall, a neat serial with a good & satisfying ending. It's also weird watching Victor Jory play the hero, after seeing him play the bad guy in many Hopalong Cassidy movies; he's somewhat more convincing as a bad guy than as a good guy. Iris Meredith is beautiful, if nothing else, as the female lead. I rate it 8/10 for a serial.