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...

KILINK IN ISTANBUL (1967) Irfan Atasoy, Pervin Par, Suzan Avci, Muzaffer Tema.  Kilink is this sinister villain in a weird skeleton suit.  He’s brought back from the dead at the beginning of the movie so he can search for a secret formula that will allow him to basically destroy the world and rule over the tatters that are left behind...  

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...

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...

(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...

(1959, aka The Day the Earth Froze) Urho Somersalmi, Anna Orochko, Ivan Voronov, Andris Osins, Ada Voytsik. A superb Finnish fantasy epic about an evil witch who steals the sun and causes just about everything on the Earth to freeze. Also featured are magic harps, fields of snakes, a wizard, and a...

(1939) Aleksandr Shchagin, Sergey Martinson, Olga Shaganova-Obraztsova, Georgiy Uvarov, Mikhail Dagmarov.  This marvelous Russian fantasy is similar to Pinocchio.  It’s a combination of live action and animation and it’s filled with fantastic characters and magical moments...

(1944) Arthur Askey, Anne Shelton, Peter Graves, Ronald Shiner, Jean Kent, Antoinette Cellier, Max Bacon, Joy Shelton. This appears to be the only Lost World-Lost Race musical comedy ever made.  We find it amazing that this film has escaped the eye of sci-fi and fantasy film historians for decades, because in spite of its primary musical and comedy themes, there’s no doubt of the film’s fantastic cinema trappings...

(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...

(1961) Taina Elg, Pierre Brice, Alberto Lupo, Akim Tamiroff.  A Peplum classic, filled with many moments of magic and mysticism.  Thebes is suffering from a horrible drought.  To ward off this dry spell, the evil king is willing to sacrifice a young virgin to the god, Demeter. But the god Dionysus has different ideas, bringing to Thebes an onslaught of rain and sparing the girl’s life seconds before she is to be sacrificed...