Curt Siodmak
Lawrence Talbot, an American man on a visit to Victorian London to make amends with his estranged father, gets bitten by a werewolf and, after a moonlight transformation, leaves him with a savage hunger for flesh.
A documentary about Menschen am Sonntag [People on Sunday] interviewing the surviving members of the production. Featured as an extra on the special DVD.
Starting with The Wolf Man (in 1941), Universal Studios made five movies featuring The Wolf Man, a character portrayed by Lon Chaney, Jr. Monster by Moonlight! explores these movies. Rick Baker explains how the make-up was done on Chaney's character. Screenwriter Curtis Siodmak took very little from earlier werewolf legends, providing his own story for some of the films. This documentary displays clips from several other movies, including Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) and House of Dracula (1945).
Universal Horror is a documentary about the era of classic monster movies that were made at Universal Studios during the 1930's and 1940's.
A scientist is persuaded by the government to inject himself with the brain fluid of a dying colleague in order to preserve missile-defense secrets. However, he finds that he is now torn between his own wife and that of his dead colleague, who was a Nazi sympathizer.
An EIGHT minute excerpt from the 1944 feature, House of Frankenstein, released in the 1960's to the 16mm & 8mm home movie market.
Sherlock Holmes and Watson do battle with their nemesis, Professor Moriarity, over an ancient necklace attributed to Cleopatra.
13 Demon Street is a Swedish horror television series that aired between 1959 and 1960 in American syndication. Thirteen 25-minute episodes were produced. Lon Chaney Jr. was the host, introducing each episode from his 'home' at 13 Demon Street. Condemned for some shockingly atrocious crime, Chaney's purpose in relating the series' stories was to convince viewers that the crimes presented in them were worse than his, thus freeing him from his purgatory. This was hard for audiences to judge, however, because Chaney's original crime was never specified. The series was originated by Curt Siodmak, who also wrote some of the scripts and directed several episodes. He had previously written Chaney's 1941 film The Wolf Man. Three episodes of the series were edited together to make a theatrical feature called The Devil's Messenger, in which Chaney's character was reconfigured as Satan himself. Chaney filmed new wraparound segments to link the chosen episodes, which were 'The Photograph', 'The Girl in the Glacier' and 'Condemned in Crystal'. Several of the show's stories were derivative in nature. 'The Black Hand', for example, was modelled on The Hands of Orlac, while 'The Photograph' is an updated version of the M R James story The Mezzotint.
In this pilot for a series that was never picked up, Dr. Frankenstein has just finished rebuilding his creation, but the monster is unresponsive. He needs to try something different to make it work, perhaps some new parts. Enter a terminally ill sculptor and his assertive wife…
An archaeologist (Don Taylor) and his partner (Eduardo Ciannelli) meet up with greenish women warriors.
Rock and Dr. Andrea travel up the Amazon to find out why the plantation workers have left their work in panic, allegedly because of attacks from Curucu, a monster who is said to live up the river where no white man has ever been before...
Test space rockets exploding at liftoff and increased reporting of UFO sightings culminate in a direct attempt by alien survivors of a dead, extra-galactic civilization to invade Earth from impervious flying saucers, using ray-weapons of mass destruction.
Murders, with victims dying from spines broken by brute strength, erupt in the city and the killers, when encountered, walk away unharmed by police bullets which strike them. A police doctor's investigation of the deaths leads to the discovery of an army of dead criminal musclemen restored to life, remotely controlled by a vengeful former crime boss and a former Nazi scientist, from the latter's laboratory hidden in the suburbs.
Three men gamble their lives in space to change the history of the world
A young scientist's experiment goes awry when he creates a monster from a radioactive isotope and finds that the creature consumes energy to grow in size and terrorize the nearby town.
A scientist takes a the brain of dead man and revives it via electrodes as it lays suspended in a tank of liquid. Soon, the brain grows to possess enormous psychic powers and inflicts its personality upon the doctor who saved creating a "Jekyll and Hyde" paradigm.
The owner of a plantation in the jungle marries a beautiful woman. Shortly afterward, he is plagued by a strange voodoo curse which transforms him into a gorilla. But is his transformation real or is it all in his head?
An expedition tries to enlist Tarzan's help in finding the secret Blue Valley, which legend says is the location of a miraculous fountain of youth.
Robert Ryan leads a group of Allied agents fighting an underground Nazi group in post-war Europe.
Locals in an Italian village believe evil has taken over the estate of a recently deceased pianist where murder has taken place. The alleged killer: the pianist's severed hand.
Louis Hayward, star of 1940's Son of Monte Cristo, returns to Alexandre Dumas territory in Columbia's Return of Monte Cristo. This time, Hayward plays the grandson of his namesake Edmond Dantes, who, it will be recalled, was cheated out of his fortune and falsely imprisoned, only to escape and wreak vengeance on his betrayers by assuming the guise of the Count of Monte Cristo. Just like grandpa, the younger Dantes is framed by a trio of connivers and shipped off to Devil's Island. Escaping with a fellow convict, political radical Bombelles (Steven Geray), Dantes adopts the bearded guise of an elderly man in order to destroy his enemies and reclaim his birthright. One of his principal antagonists - at least during the first half of the film - is haughty aristocrat Angele Picard (Barbara Britton), who because she wasn't a part of the original conspiracy genuinely believes that Dantes is a criminal.
Sal comes to the Barbary Coast from New England to find out who murdered her brother. She gets a job signing in Dude's saloon, falls in love with Dude, then wonders if he might be involved in the murder.
A crook becomes the victim of a crafty card player who works for the District Attorney.
A millionaire's brain is preserved after his death by a scientist and his two assistants, only to create a telepathic monster.
An evil scientist and a hunchback escape from prison and encounter Dracula, the Wolf Man and Frankenstein's Monster.
Dr. Hohner (Karloff), theatre physician at the Vienna Royal Theatre, murders his mistress, the star soprano when his jealousy drives him to the point of mad obsession. Ten years later, another young singer (Foster) reminds Hohner of the late diva, and his old mania kicks in. Hohner wants to prevent her from singing for anyone but him, even if it means silencing her forever. The singer's fiancée (Bey) rushes to save her in the film's climax.
Carpathian Count Alucard is invited to the U.S. by a young heiress. Her boyfriend and local officials are suspicious of the newcomer, who is interested in the "virile" soil of the new world.
A nurse in the Caribbean turns to voodoo in hopes of curing her patient, an unusual woman whose husband she's fallen in love with.
German expatriate Fritz Kortner plays the largest role, as an anti-Nazi schoolmaster who helps a downed American flyer (John Archer) reached Allied lines with vital war information. As usual, the Nazis are incredibly stupid and lead-footed, enabling the flyer to accomplish his mission.
A district attorney sets out to vindicate his son who's been accused of murdering a nightclub singer.
Graverobbers open the grave of the Wolfman and awake him. He doesn't like the idea of being immortal and killing people when the moon is full, so he tries to find Dr. Frankenstein, in the hopes that the Dr. can cure him, but Frankenstein is dead and only his Monster is alive and this one wants to live, not to die like the Wolfman.
Henry Stephenson stars as a retired Scotland Yard detective. He is regarded as an icon because he has written volumes of books on the art of detection. While Stephenson is being honoured for his past successes, he senses modern detectives, particularly the current District Attorney, look at him and his methods as outdated. This spurs the old man out of retirement to prove himself to the know-it-all modern detectives.
A young girl, Mary Tillet, is forced to find a new place to live due to her London home being bombed during World War II. Her tobacconist landlord, Jack Rawling, tries to help her turn her new apartment into a home. Meanwhile the newspapers are reporting news of the "London Blackout Murders," a murder spree being committed against a ring of suspected Nazi spies, and Mary must determine if her kind landlord is an assassin.
The Invisible Man's grandson uses his secret formula to spy on Nazi Germany in this comedy-thriller.
Falsely convicted of murder, young Robert Draper (Robert Preston) escapes custody during a practice blackout drill. Under cover of darkness, Draper hopes to find the real killer, who turns out to be a member of a Nazi sabotage ring. Completed shortly before America entered WW2.
A young South Seas native boy is sent to the U.S. for his education and returns to his island after his father dies to try to stop a revolution.
After his brother's death, Larry Talbot returns home to his father and the family estate. Events soon take a turn for the worse when Larry is bitten by a werewolf.
Dr. Bernard Adrian is a kindly scientist who seeks to cure a young woman's polio. He needs human spinal fluid to complete the formula for his experimental serum. Meanwhile, a vicious circus ape has broken out of its cage, and is terrorizing the townspeople. Can there be a connection?
When his friend Professor Kingsely (Ridges) is at deaths door, brain surgeon Dr. Sovac (Karloff) saves his life by means of an illegal operation that transplants part of injured gangster Red Cannon's brain. Unfortunately, the operation has a disasterous Jeckll and Hyde side effect and under certain conditions the persona of Cannon emerges. Sovac soon learns of the duel personality and of half a million dollars the gangster has hidden away. He attempts to find the money through the manipulation of his friend, an attempt that brings Kingsley closer to madness as he alternates between a meek professor of english and a brutal gangster out for murderous revenge on those who tried to kill him.
Kitty Carroll, an attractive store model, volunteers to become a test subject for a machine that will make her invisible so that she can use her invisibility to exact revenge on her ex-boss.
The owner of a coal mining operation, falsely imprisoned for fratricide, takes a drug to make him invisible, despite its side effect: gradual madness.
A young woman finds herself as the intended victim of a murder plot on a transatlantic flight from London to New York.
An engineer (Richard Dix) leads the building of a trans-Atlantic tunnel linking Britain and the United States. A remake of the 1933 German film, DER TUNNEL.
F.P.1 is a huge airplane landing dock in the Atlantic where pilots making the transatlantic flight can stop. Yet a saboteur tries to sink the technical wonder in this classic German science fiction film from 1932. The film was also created with English and French speaking actors at the same time.
Robert Siodmak's second solo directorial effort was the breathless comedy-melodrama Der Mann, Der Seinen Moerder Sucht (Looking For His Murderer) In the face of ever-mounting debts, Heinz Ruhmann arranges for his own murder to be committed within the next 12 hours. During this period, Ruhmann falls in love and gains a whole new lease on life. Frantically, he seeks out the man whom he has hired to bump him off -- only to find out that the latter has sold his "contract" to another fellow -- who in turn has sold it to a third party. Eventually, the whole mess is wrapped up with a Keystone-like car chase. Famed composer Friedrich Hollander shows up in a minor role, complete with patently phony mustache. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
A semi-documentary experimental 1930 German silent film created by amateurs with a small budget. With authentic scenes of the metropolis city of Berlin, it's the first film from the later famous screenwriters/directors Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann.
During the shooting of a jealousy scene on a soundstage, one actress is murdered. Due to the fact that the male star of the movie had a relation with the victim and the female star is now his fiance, he is suspected by the police.
In a futuristic city sharply divided between the working class and the city planners, the son of the city's mastermind falls in love with a working class prophet who predicts the coming of a savior to mediate their differences.
An abbreviated 8 minute version of the 1941 Universal Monsters classic, released on 8mm film in the 1960s.
