SHOOTOUT AT BIG SAG (1962) Walter Brennan, Don Robinson, Luana Patten, Leif Erickson, Les Tremayne.  An engaging action-western drama.  Brennan is the pawn of his bossy wife, who wants a range war with Erickson.  It doesn’t help that Walter’s daughter and Leif’s son have fallen in love. Tremayne, is great as the sleazy saloon owner hired to “seal the deal” in favor of Walter’s family... 

THE GREAT WALL—Widescreen Edition (1962) Shintarô Katsu, Fujiko Yamamoto, Ken Utsui, Hiroshi Kawaguchi.  The time is 221 BC. The place is ancient China.  Warlord Qin Shihuangdi becomes emperor and rules over most of China. This lavish epic depicts the history of Qin's exploits, including the building of the Great Wall.  It’s filled with action and intrigue in the best traditions of epic filmmaking...

THE KASHMIRI RUN (1969) Pernell Roberts, Alexandra Bastido, Julián Mateos, Gloria Cámara, Leonard Bell.  Post-Bonanza Roberts plays a former mountaineer hiding out in the wilds of Tibet.  Ahead of an onslaught by Chinese troops, who have occupied most of Tibet, Roberts tries to smuggle a noted scientist and a good-looking girl (of course) across the border to safety...

(1940) Basil Radford, Naunton Wayne, Greta Gynt, Charles Oliver, Gordon McLeod.  Radford and Wayne reprise their Lady Vanishes roles as Charters and Caldicott, a couple of well-seasoned yet naïve British world travelers.  By the random act of ordering certain items off a menu, they find themselves the unwitting carriers of a phonograph record filled secret Nazi info.  Of course the Nazis try everything possible to eliminate them...  

(1952) Mesiha Yelda, Turan Seyfioglu, Cahit Irgat.  This epic Turkish action thriller starts off with the main hero (Seyfioglu) meeting up with  Genghis Khan, whom he helps in his battle against an adversarial warlord.   The Khan is grateful for this (he saves the Khan’s life) and wants Seyfioglu’s allegiance, offering him a spot as one of his top lieutenants.  But Seyfioglu refuses and wanders through a series of swashbuckling adventures...

(1958) Boris Buzancic, Djurdja Ivezic, Antun Vrdoljak, Vanja Drach.  This highly unique thriller centers around two vehicles—a bus and a truck—that are speeding towards each other along a wet, narrow two-lane highway on a stormy night.  Right from the start we learn that the two vehicles will eventually collide because of the actions of a reckless driver.  It’s even pointed out which seats will spell death for their occupants...

(1964) Jim Davis, Don 'Red' Barry, Margo Woode, R. Wayland Williams, Tris Coffin.  An inexperienced army lieutenant grabs five volunteers for a dangerous mission from which they may not return.  Their task is simple:  take out the North Korean mortar position that's been pounding U.S. supply convoys and preventing them from reaching the troops at the front line...

(1930) Louis Wolheim, Jean Arthur, Robert Armstrong, Hugh Herbert.  Wolheim plays a hard-nosed boss of a railroad yard who befriends a young drifter, who previously was a railroad man himself.  Soon things get dicey when the boss’ girl starts to fall for the handsome newcomer.  The high speed train sequences are pretty amazing for the time... 

(1949) Dorothea Paul, Betty Williams, Georgie Carey, Cedric Staples.  This obscure British sea-faring docu-drama is all about a lost infant found in a boat near a fishing village.  Having no way to trace his roots, he grows up in the village with his destiny seemingly out in the rolling waves of the ocean...

(1960) Noëlle Adam, Christian Marquand, Paul Guers.  Marquand plays a drifter with a huge gambling debt to pay.  To square things with his lenders he’s sent off on a dangerous journey.  Sadly, his sweetheart thinks he has deserted her and marries another!  After hearing of this he does the logical thing and joins the foreign legion...

(1960) Daliah Lavi, Gert Günther Hoffmann, Abraham Eisenberg, Uri Zohar.  A band of five adventurers get together on a treasure hunt.  Their quest is for a cache of priceless biblical scrolls, which—according to the legends—is supposed to be lying in the lost city Petra, located somewhere in ancient Jordan.  The challenge is that no man has supposedly ever survived the quest for this treasure...

(1945) Ewart G. Morrison, John Hoy, Ray Reagan, Luisa Rossi, Romano Calo.  After busting out of a Nazi prison train, an American and a British soldier set out across Italy, heading for the Swiss border.  Lots of action, adventure, and intrigue follows as they eventually find themselves leading a group of war refugees toward the border and freedom...  

(1955) Paul Meurisse, Pedro Armendariz, Folco Lulli, Fernand Ledoux, Leopoldo Frances.  This is a filmed adaptation of an adventure from the 1930s.  The story involves an escaped prisoner from a Middle East conflict who sneaks onto a French craft loaded with weapons for sale. Mucho action and adventure follows, including a great storm sequence...

(1958) Jean Négroni, Mokhi, Uroz. Narrated by George Sanders.  Wow!  What we’ve got here is essentially a LOST George Sanders film (he did the narration for this, the AIP American edition), now on video for the first time.  It’s not listed in any of his film listings anywhere we could find—and it’s a pretty good film, too (6.2 on IMDB). This rollicking tale concerns a young adventurer’s exciting, difficult journey to Kabul, all the while being accompanied by a strange horseman...

(1958) Bill Cord, Don Durant, Lisa Montell, Jeanne Gerson.  This AIP drive-in quickie is about a couple of brothers who are stranded on an island populated by pearl-diving women.  To their horror, they discover that one of the regular practices is to sacrifice young maidens to a great stone god.  In the mix there’s also a hidden cache of valuable pearls...

(1935) Fritz Kortner, Nils Asther, John Stuart, Adrienne Ames Walter Rilla, Patric Knowles, Eric Portman, George Zucco.  Kortner is great as the Sultan Abdul Hamid, who rules precariously over the Turkish Empire.  He lives in constant fear of assassination, but his chief of security (Asther) does a good job making his enemies “disappear.”  But he is swept off his feet when a beautiful British stage star comes into his life...

(1937) Paul Robeson, Cedric Hardwicke, John Loder, Anna Lee, Roland Young, Arthur Sinclair, Sydney Fairbrother, Robert Adams. In our opinion this is the best of the many filmed versions of the H. Rider Hagard classic. Some truly spectacular lost world-lost race thrills as Hardwicke (as Allan Quartermain) leads an expedition in search of Lee's father who has wandered across the desert to the far mountains where no one returns from...alive...

(1959) J Radovan Lukavský, Jirí Vala, Jirina Svorcová, Stanislav Remunda.  Being that this is a communist film from Czechoslovakia, it’s quite well done and genuinely exciting at times—a little grim, too, in places.  The story concerns the Czech border guards of the late 1940s and their constant challenges in keeping the smuggler and refugee problem in check (pun intended)...