(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...

(1969) Jürgen Jung, Paul Albert Krumm, Hans-Dieter Jendreyko, Ilona Grübel, Hertha von Walther.  Revising history, this film portrays a 19th century landscape where vampires have taken over the world.  Even worse, these vampires are immune to the rays of the sun and have become a twisted form of aristocracy.  But a brave group of humans plan a daring revolt...

(1968) Mauro Parenti, Lucretia Love, Gordon Mitchell, John Karlsen.   The title character is a masked superhero very much in the mold as Diabolik.  There’s a great pre-credit sequence where he takes on a shipload of drug dealers.  Our hero then pops in and out the rest of the way as he searches for a magical golden relic, all the while trying to keep the bad guys from looting King Tut’s treasures...  

(1955, aka THE HINDU) Boris Karloff, Victor Jory, Reginald Denny, Nino Marcel, June Foray, Lou Krugman, Peter Coe.  A lavish color adventure about a man who becomes involved with a strange cult that worships a weird fire demon.  In India, a young elephant trainer vows revenge against the cult that killed his family and, when the local Maharajah refuses to help, sets out alone to battle his enemy...

(1952) Tamer Balci, Hayri Esen, Necla Aygül, Cemil Demirel, Ismail Kara.  A must for bad movie lovers.  This is the first Turkish Tarzan movie. There’s no use being polite just because it was made in a country whose film industry “struggled”—this is a pretty horrible movie.  Awful acting, awful everything.  It’s likely this movie would make Burroughs roll over in his grave...

(1963) Vladimir Medar, Jean-François Poron, George Reich, Hugo Santana, Lorella De Luca. Cossack chief Taras Bulba plans to subdue Poland and its Tartar allies.  He sends his sons to study in the Polish city of Dubno to learn as much as possible about the Polish people and their military strength. One of the sons, however, falls for the daughter of a Polish governor. When the Cossacks lay siege to Dubno, the son is imprisoned...

(1963, Aka Blood of the Executioner) Lex Barker, Guy Madison, Alessandra Panaro, Mario Petri.  Toss those old full-screen versions of this Peplum classic, here at last is a beautiful widescreen copy of this early ‘60s classic from 35mm.  It’s Lex against Guy in this great epic set in the middle ages during the inquisition...  

(1961) Kirk Morris, Cathia Caro, Ljubica Otasevic, Cesare Fantoni.  Sword and sandal movies are kind of like B-westerns, there were a gazillion of them made, all using the same half dozen scripts.  In this one, an evil queen suppresses her subjects and steals young virgins to be sacrificed to an evil god of a volcano.  Naturally, Maciste intercedes.  However, he soon falls under the magic spell of the queen, who lusts for his finely chiseled body... 

(1976) Pauline Quirke, Geoffrey Bateman, Wensley Pithey, Ruth Goring, Shirley Cheriton.  Quirke is brilliant in her portrayal of a pitiful, frumpy, inhibited teenage checkout girl at a small supermarket.  She has a crush on her manager who despises her and lusts for another female employee.  Then strange things begin happening.  It begins with a can rolling across the market floor, seemingly under its own power...  

(1975) Kim Novak, Doug McClure, Alejandro Rey, Jim Davis.  McClure and his Coast Guard helicopter pal come upon a shipwreck in an area known as “the Devil’s Triangle.”  When McClure is lowered to the ship he finds dead bodies all over the place.  The only survivor is a beautiful blonde (Kim Novak), who’s in a confused state of mind.  Little does McClure suspect that the evil power that caused all the deaths will soon return... 

(1974) Rosanna Schiaffino, Chris Avram, Eva Czemerys, Lucretia Love.  In this chilling Giallo (similar in some ways to Christie’s Ten Little Indians) a millionaire invites a group of people to a creepy, abandoned theater.  It turns out the theater is the site where an entire family was slain long ago.  Within a short time, the guests realize that they are trapped and at the mercy of a bloodthirsty killer who begins...

(1973, WIDESCREEN) Paul Naschy, Silvia Solar, Olivier Mathot, Evelyn Scott, Claude Boisson.  This Naschy chiller features a mad scientist who decides to push the boundaries of science and perform a head transplant on an injured criminal.  The results, however, are not quite what the good doctor expects, as his creation becomes a far more deadly creature than the criminal ever was...

(1970, WIDESCREEN EDITION) Józef Duriasz, Edmund Fetting, Gustaw Lutkiewicz.  A pastor/professor comes to a remote estate in the forlorn mountains of 19^th Century Lithuania to study books on folklore and other ancient tomes.  The estate is owned by a mysterious young duke and his insane mother, the latter of whom was attacked by a wild bear nine months before the duke was born.  There are whispered rumors about the duke’s true bloodline...  

(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... 

(1967) Andre Reybaz, Georges Douking, Francois Vibert, Magali Noel, Francoise Winskill.  This is a fantastic film filled with a plethora of haunting Images.   It is almost too deep to describe in a simple synopsis.  Let it suffice to say that the story deals with a gem-carver in old Prague who becomes entangled in a web of murder plots and other strange supernatural happenings...

Armchair Fiction presents Mammoth Mystery Double Classics—featuring illustrated editions of two all-time mystery-crime standards, with 470 pages or more of whodunit thrills. “The Black Gang” is our first grisly tale of murder and mayhem, by H. C. “Sapper” McNeile. Bulldog Drummond Returns! This double novel’s second tale features another great fictional detective in Louis Joseph Vance’s “Alias the Lone Wolf.”

(1973) Keir Dullea, William Osler, Gay Rowan, Robin Ward, Ed Ames.  Dullea leads a trio of space adventurers who are on a desperate mission to save Earthship Ark—a massive spaceship that houses the remnants of mankind.  Unknown to most people in the Ark’s biospheres, the ship is on a collision course with a distant star...

(1959) Rushdi Abazah, Edmond Tuima. What you’ve got here is all you’d expect in a B&W ‘50s sci-fi film, similar to Missile to the Moon.  You’ve got a scientist who’s built a moon rocket.  He shoots off toward the moon with two stowaways.  There's a big spaceship and a cool robot.  They land on the moon and find a strange race of beautiful women.  After many horrifying and dangerous situations, they launch back toward Earth...