INTRODUCTION: The Internet has become a home for thousands of public domain films; this will be a collection of the most fascinating, horrifying, and bewildering among them.
THE MYSTERY OF THE LEAPING FISH (1916): Silent film star Douglas Fairbanks stars in this very weird two-reel comedy about a detective who thrives on cocaine.
MACISTE IN HELL (1925): Italian strongman Maciste is tempted into Dante's Inferno, where he arrives in time for a civil war between demons.
SVENGALI (1931): John Barrymore plays a strange musician who hypnotizes a young girl to act as his professional slave, and put her to work singing throughout Europe.
THE MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM (1933): Bodies are disappearing from morgues as a strange new wax museum prepares to open.
MANIAC (1934), MARIHUANA (1936) & SEX MADNESS (1939), THREE FILMS BY DWAYN ESPER: The most notorious director of early exploitation movies looks at the worlds of sexual madness, drug addiction, and social diseases.
THINGS TO COME (1936): A screen adaptation of the Utopian novel by H.G. Wells that looks to the history of London after 20 years of air war, when a time of war lords gives way to a benevolent dictatorship of scientists.
THE AMAZING MR. X (1948): A fraud psychic finds himself in trouble when a séance seems to bring back an actual, and unexpectedly malevolent, ghost.
PANIC IN THE STREETS (1950): Richard Widmark and Jack Palance star in this Elia Kazan-directed potboiler about the manhunt for a criminal who has contracted pneumonic plague.
DEMENTIA aka DAUGHTER OF HORROR (1955): An experimental noir creation, filmed entirely without dialogue, following a murderous prostitute through a bleak cityscape of sexually predatory men.
THE BEAST OF HOLLOW MOUNTAIN (1956): Mexican cowboys in the middle of a range war suddenly find a common enemy: a dinosaur.
WARNING FROM SPACE (1956): Strange, starfish-like aliens try to warn earth of an impending collision with an asteroid.
THE CITY OF THE DEAD (1960): A girl's disappearance uncovers a coven of witches living in a hidden New England town.
MATANGO (1963): Survivors of a shipwreck must fight for their lives on an island of deadly, radioactive mushrooms.
BLOODY PIT OF HORROR (1965): A group of photographers and models fall prey to a murderous muscle man who is convinced he is the reincarnated spirit of a psychotic monk.
BLACK SAMURAI (1977): Jim Kelly stars as a superspy who must battle a warlock with an army of dwarfs and Zulus warriors.
BAD TASTE (1987): Peter Jackson's first film, an ultra-low budget gorefest about aliens invading a small New Zealand town.
0 Response to "PUBLIC DOMAINIA: THE WEIRDEST AND WILDEST FILMS IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN"