In the 1930s and 40s, there were a bunch of ultra-low budget filmmaking outfits which were collectively referred to as 'Poverty Row'...mostly because of the cheapness of the films. Of all of them, perhaps the most consistently poor was the output of Grand National...though like all the Poverty Row studios, they occasionally came out with a winner. Unfortunately, "Captain Calamity" isn't a particularly good film...though for Grand National, it's actually pretty good.
Bill (also known as 'Captain Calamity' because of his propensity to fight) has a boat and he agrees to take an Australian back home. The passenger pays him with his good luck piece...a gold doubloon. When Bill returns home himself, the story about this one lone doubloon soon morphs into stories about Bill returning with cases full of gold! As a result, all the scum of the earth living there want to beat the supposed secret about the treasure from him or his crew...but again, there is no treasure! So what's next? Well, you can assume from his nickname there will be a lot of fighting!
The main problem with this movie is that instead of character development, there's a lot of action and fighting. This means the characters have about as much depth as movie serial characters...which means, not much. The acting is also only okay at best...and having Vince Barnett in the film didn't help. How Barnett got to appear in so many movies is perplexing to me. He was a mostly one-note comic relief sort of guy.
So is the film terrible? No. The location shooting on Catalina Island (on the California coast) isn't bad and although the story isn't great, it's an acceptable time-passer....not that this is a glowing endorsement.
