THE ADVENTURES OF FU MANCHU (1956)

THE ADVENTURES OF FU MANCHU (1956) begins with Fu Manchu (Glen Gordon) and his archrival Nayland Smith playing a game of chess with the narrator telling us, “Black and white. Life and death. Good and evil. Two sides of a chess game. Two forces of the universe, one magnificent, the other sinister. It is said the Devil plays for men's souls. So does Dr. Fu Manchu, Satan himself, evil incarnate.” The ruthless Fu Manchu commits murder in the search for gold and then helps Adolf Hitler get plastic surgery so that together they can conquer the world.

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LOST CONTINENT (1951)

In LOST CONTINENT (1951) with Cesar Romero we have Major Joe Nolan (Cesar Romero) as the head of a mission to an uncharted part of the South Pacific to retrieve an atomic rocket that went off course and vanished. Their search plane then crashes on a remote tropical island with towering cliffs and volcanoes. They find a lone native girl, Acquanetta (Tarzan and the Leopard Woman, 1946), who indicates something fell from the sky onto a forbidding plateau that dominates part of the island. The party reaches the top despite numerous obstacles and deaths. At the top, they discover a lush jungle inhabited by dinosaurs. They have found a lost world of prehistoric dinosaurs and vast radioactive uranium fields, so powerful that they cause rockets and planes to go off course.

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THE LOST WORLD (1925)

THE LOST WORLD (1925) starring Wallace Beery with Bessie Love and Lloyd Hughes starts with Professor Challenger facing a skeptical press corps when he asserts that giant dinosaurs are alive and flourishing in the farthest depths of the Amazon. Newspaper reporter Edward Malone learns that this claim originates from a diary given to him by fellow explorer Maple White’s daughter, Paula. Malone’s paper funds an expedition to South America to rescue Maple White, who has been marooned at the top of a high plateau. Joined by renowned hunter John Roxton, the group goes to South America, where they do indeed find a plateau inhabited by prehistoric creatures. This is a great silent feature, with enhanced musical soundtrack and other enhanced digital features, including the rich sepia-tone color.

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UNKNOWN ISLAND (1948)

UNKNOWN ISLAND is an early color crypto-feature that starts in a bar in Singapore (as all good South Seas adventures should) where a group makes a pact to go to an isolated island rumored to be full of prehistoric animals. When they arrive at the island, they discover that the stories they have heard are all true. Will they survive the many dangers to tell anyone what they've found?

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THE FLYING SERPENT (1946)

In THE FLYING SERPENT, veteran 40s horror actor George Zucco plays mad archaeologist Andrew Forbes, who stumbles upon the nest of a monstrous winged serpent—the apparent source for the myth of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl—while on a dig in Mexico. After the creature seeks out and kills his wife to recover one of its missing feathers, Forbes realizes that he can use the serpent to protect an ancient Aztec treasure he has located in ancient ruins near Aztec, New Mexico, and also eliminate his enemies by planting a plume on their persons and letting the flying serpent Quetzalcoatl do the rest.

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