(1933) Conrad Veidt, Marie Ney, Basil Gill, Anne Grey, Dennis Hoey.  A big, sprawling epic fantasy.  Veidt plays a Jew who goes to Christ, asking him to cure his mistress’s illness.  Christ tells him that when she returns to her real husband she will be cured.  Refusing to let her, Veidt essentially condemns her to death.  Then, when Christ is staggering toward his crucifixion, Veidt spits on him in contempt...

(1940) Vlasta Burian, Antonin Mikulic, Meda Valentová.  A fine fantasy-comedy (7.1 on IMDB) with a tiny touch of horror.  There are many plot elements: clandestine marriages, secret children, castle ghosts, hush-hush love affairs, etc.—all woven together by great script-writing, resulting in many uproarious moments.  The scene where the town doctor visits the Baron’s castle...

When Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories in 1926, he included the works of the great H. G. Wells.  Gernsback reprinted many of Wells’ best science fiction short stories.  So in this collection, in the exact chronological order in which they appeared, is the complete run of the Amazing Stories-H. G. Wells science fiction short story legacy, all with their wonderful original illustrations...

THE STUDENT OF PRAGUE (1935) Anton Walbrook, Dorothea Wieck, Theodor Loos, Erich Fiedler. A magnificent horror-fantasy film!  The setting is Prague in the 1860s.  Walbrook plays Balduin, a handsome young student.  Into his life walks a beautiful singer named Julia. But hovering over her life is the sinister Dr. Carpis, a Satan-like figure who’s more of a human shadow than a flesh-and-blood being...

ONCE IN A NEW MOON (1934) Eliot Makeham, Rene Ray, Morton Selten.  A dead star approaches Earth.  As it passes by, some kind of gravitational pull breaks off a small chunk of the Earth and hurls it into space, where it becomes a new small moon of sorts.  There’s a little coastal town on that chunk, but it takes a while for the villagers to figure out what the hell’s going on...

(1967) Ryôhei Uchida, Kôtarô Satomi, Kyoko Mikage, Hiroshi Nawa, Tatsuo Matsumura.  In ancient Japan, a treasonous underling overthrows his master.  He buries his former boss, alive, inside a wall.  When he takes after the wife, she drowns herself in a nearby swamp along with her cat, thus cursing the swamp for all time...

THE STOLEN AIRSHIP (1967, Widescreen Edition) Hanus Bor, Jan Cizek, Cestmír Randa, Jan Malat, Michal Pospisil.  A marvelous science fiction epic and a group of children who make off with a futuristic airship from a county fair.  They then set out on a series of amazing exploits, all set against some of the most amazing stop-motion animation you will ever see...

The first disc of this Special Two-DVD Edition contains The Dream Doctor (1936) Julie Suedo Sidney Monckton.  This odd film tells tales of many different characters’ dream experiences and tries to explain them in a paranormal yet scientific way by a woman with strange powers.  The second disc includes A Trip to the Moon (1902) Georges Méliès, Victor André.  This is a short sci-fi classic from early cinema pioneer Méliès.  We've also thrown in trailers and two other short subjects, including Fall of the House of Usher and The Devil's Ball...

RIP VAN WYK (1960, aka RIP VAN WINKLE) Jamie Uys, Wynona Cheyney, Willem Loots.  This movie has little to do with the Rip Van Winkle story.  It’s actually a time travel movie. Set in 1859, Uys hurtles 100 years into the future.  He awakens, un-aged, in 1959—a strange, modern world.  The film gives a very interesting perspective about how someone from the past would react to all things modern—automobiles, radios, TVs, clothing, etc...

(1952) Gennaro Pisano, Marilyn Buferd, William Tubbs, Giovanni Amato, Helen Tubbs.  A devil comes to Earth and bestows upon a photographer's camera the power to destroy any and all evildoers.  The photographer uses this “machine” selectively at first, but the more he uses it the more evil seems to pour out of people until at last he decides to destroy almost everyone in his village... 

(1957, aka Ninjutsu Gozen-Jiai) Koji Arima, Sentarô Fushimi, Masao Hori. This supernatural thriller is about two feuding clans in ancient Japan.  Complicating things is a child who is taken hostage by one of the families.  In the film’s exciting climax, both families are represented by their top Ninja warriors.  The Ninja’s have a wide variety of uncanny powers, including invisibility and teleportation.  Also on hand are numerous horrific creatures...

Armchair Fiction features the best in classic horror and fantasy short story collections.  "Allison V. Harding, the Forgotten Queen of Horror” features some of the best horror tales of the 1940s and 1950s.  Who was Allison V. Harding?  Not much is known about her personal life, but the one thing we do know is that you almost couldn’t pick up an issue of Weird Tales from 1943 through 1950 and not come across one of her stories...

(1935) Claude Rains, Fay Wray, Ben Field, Mary Clare, Jane Baxter, Felix Aylmer.  Rains is brilliant as a sideshow mind reader whose powers turn out to be real. Soon he is making a plethora of accurate predictions—deaths, accidents, horse racing results, etc.  However, he is unable to control his prophecies until he...

(1956) Boris Andreyev, Shukur Burkhanov, Andrei Abrikosov, Natalya Medvedeva, Nelli Myshkova, Sergey Martinson.  A wonderful Russian fantasy about a legendary warrior who fights to save his people from an assortment of horrible monsters including a dragon, a wind demon, and other legendary creatures.  There are many great scenes and the special effects, for the time, were very well done...

(1967) Hae Hwang, Ae-ran Jeong, Mi-ae Kang, Do Kum-Bong, No-shik Park.  This Asian chiller has all kinds of grisly stuff:  Acid thrown in the face, eyes being gouged out, the horror of drug addition, vengeful ghosts, etc.  The plot is pretty simple, a former geisha girl takes her life because she’s essentially lost her husband to the wanton lure of a servant girl.  But like in any good Asian ghost story, revenge is a must!  So...

(1963, Upgraded 12/29/20) Zdenek Stepanek, Dana Medricka, Radovan Lukavsky. This special edition two-disc set contains the anamorphic widescreen foreign language version with English subtitles, and the flat screen American release version dubbed in English.  A spaceship full of explorers shoots across the galaxy toward a distant star. One of the film’s highlights is when they encounter...

(1942, Upgraded 10/14,21) Arthur Askey, Evelyn Dall, Al Burnett, Max Bacon, Peter Graves. This top comedy fantasy has a meek soldier saving his pals with a sword he believes to be Excalibur. Is it real?  The final scene has a real...