cdm's - Rented List
-
Charlie Chan In The Secret Service The World War II years, filled with espionage and spies of all sorts, were perfect for the foibles of Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler). And in this 1944 venture, America's Number One Chinese detective is enlisted by the Secret Service to find the person who murdered the inventor of a top-secret device.
Charlie takes his time as he investigates the case of a scientist murdered for devising a way to protect US forces from German U-boats. Bedeviled by a gaggle of eccentrics, his nervous assistant (Mantan Moreland) and his exuberantly in-the-way offspring (Benson Fong and Marianne Quon), Charlie must decide which of a houseful of guests is actually the plan-purloining Master Spy!
The Chinese Cat
Number Three Son Tommy comes to the aid of a damsel is distress - by offering Charlie Chan's services - in this top-notch whodunnit fare starring Sidney Toler and Benson Fong.
Leah Manning (Joan Woodbury) has never stopped searching for her father's murderer, although the police and the DA gave up long ago. And now, to add insult to injury, an expert criminologist has written a novel accusing her mother of the crime! Charlie's investigation leads him to a cutthroat gang of gem thieves out to steal a wealth of diamonds hidden in a porcelain Chinese cat!
The Jade Mask
Some families have reunions - this one has alibis! In this thrilling 1945 endeavour, Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler) finds himself at odds with an entire family, any one of whom could be a killer!
Helped by his pseudo-intellectual Number Four Son (Edwin Luke) and his panicky assistant Birmingham Brown (Mantan Moreland), Charlie investigates the recent murder of a brilliant but much-loathed scientist (Frank Reicher) who invented a gas that makes wood as strong as steel. But the investigation is anything but elementary, as Charlie sleuths his way through suspicious scientists, sultry sisters, a silent cousin and a butler with a very stiff upper lip!
Meeting At Midnight
Released in 1944 as Black Magic, this unusually absorbing mystery was celebrated on the revival circuit, making it one of the best-known films of the series! Filled with fun spiritualist gags, like levitating hankies and gamboling skeletons, Meeting at Midnight is a rendezvous you'll want to experience again and again!
When Birmingham (Mantan Moreland) gets a job as a butler for the Bonner family, he doesn't know that they're con artists who specialize in trick seances. But things get really spooky when a murder occurs... and Charlie Chans daughter Frances becomes a suspect! Charlie (Sidney Toler)
surmises that nearly everybody has a motive - but even he doesn't yet realize how dangerous these ghoulish swindlers really are!
The Scarlet Clue
The unflappable Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler) takes on a group of fast-track media types in this forties send-up of bad radio drama, snarling sponsors and tense thespians that also features Mantan Moreland and partner Ben Carter doing their classic nightclub routine - a Chan movie first!
A fatal mistake made by an impatient detective in Chans employ leads the master sleuth to a radio studio that is somehow connected to a radar operation in the same building. A bloody heel print, lethal cigarettes and an icy wind tunnel all provide Charlie with clues to a dastardly scheme to steal top-secret radar plans - out these suspects are experts at deceit. After all, it's their business!
The Shanghai Cobra
From the director of Kansas City Confidential and The Silencers comes this unusual Chan mystery. Containing a number of film noir elements unique to the series (such as a weary young detective, stark urban sets and a grown-up romance), The Shanghai Cobra is one of the most striking Chans of all!
Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler) is called in to investigate a strange and complicated series of mysterious murders by cobra venom. Soon Charlie, Number Three Son Tommy (Benson Fong) and ever-present assistan- Director:
- Phil Karlson
- Cast:
- Sidney Toler, Manton Moreland, Joan Barclay
- Formats:
-
-
When the Falcon (Tom Conway) and his sidekick Goldie Locke (Edward Brophy) rescue an exotic Brazilian beauty (Madge Meredith) from kidnappers, they find themselves caught up in a deadly international conspiracy! The girl's uncle has perfected a formula for creating industrial diamonds - a priceless secret that ruthless gangsters are well prepared to kill for. In a desperate race against time, the Falcon and Goldie must jump a train from New York to Miami and deliver the formula to a friendly scientist. The gangsters are closing in fast and the Falcon is in for one of the greatest adventures of his crime-busting career! - Director:
- William Berke
- Cast:
- Tom Conway, Madge Meredith, Edward Brophy
- Formats:
-
-
When a worker at Gartley's Blue Ribbon Laundry is pulled into the titular laundry press and folded like a sheet, police officer John Hunton (Ted Levine) is called to investigate. Was it an accident, or is something more sinister going on? As more deaths and injuries occur under the watchful eye of owner Bill Gartley (Robert Englund), Hunton, with his demonologist brother-in-law Mark Jackson (Daniel Matmor) come to believe the machine might be possessed, and the town itself to be hiding a much deeper secret. - Director:
- Tobe Hooper
- Cast:
- Robert Englund, Ted Levine, Daniel Matmor
- Formats:
-
-
Kibby Womack (Gene Hackman) and Walker Ellis (Burt Reynolds) are two best friends, riding high during Prohibition as the overseers or a major underground liquor distributor. When the men meet singer Claire (Liza Minnelli), who tells them she can get their product into hundreds of establishments, they go into business with her. Things hit a snag, though, when a love triangle develops between the three, complicating matters as they all try to stay one step ahead of the law. - Director:
- Stanley Donen
- Cast:
- Gene Hackman, Ron Masak, Liza Minnelli
- Formats:
-
-
Kiss of the Vampire (1963)Kiss of Evil
Honeymooning in Bavaria, Gerald and Marianne Harcourt experience car trouble and are forced to spend a few days in a small, remote village. Soon Doctor Ravna, owner of the impressive chateau that sits imposingly above the village, invites them to dinner and the couple are persuaded to go. Their association with Ravna and his charming, beautiful family is to prove disastrous as they become unwittingly embroiled with this company of vampires who seek to initiate them into their diabolical creed. When the pair attend a masked ball at the chateau a few days later things start to go eerily wrong when Gerald begins to feel faint and Marianne disappears only to later return in front of a ceremony of gowned vampires and announced as their new disciple. - Director:
- Don Sharp
- Cast:
- Clifford Evans, Edward de Souza, Noel Willman
- Formats:
-
-
Blood Suckers (1970)Incense for the Damned
Whilst on vacation in Greece, Richard Fountain (Patrick Mower), an Oxford don and the Foreign Secretary's son, falls into the evil clutches of Chriseis (Imogen Hassall), leader of a coven of perverted socialites who number innocent victims in pursuit of their blood. Richard's long absence from Oxford prompts his close friends Tony Seymour, fiancee Penelope and Bob Kirby to instigate a search for him. The clues they find take them across the Aegan Sea to Hydra, a small island where the two men find Richard drugged and unconscious in an old castle. A Pagan orgy is building to a climax as Chriseis is preparing herself for her next victim... After a horrific struggle Chriseis flees, her mouth dropping with blood, and in a tussle with Kirby falls to her death. Richard is saved and returns to the sheltered life at Oxford, but the nightmare is just beginning... the spirit of Chriseis is not yet dead! - Director:
- Robert Hartford-Davis
- Cast:
- Patrick MacNee, Peter Cushing, Alexander Davion
- Formats:
-
-
Escape to Athena (1979)Flucht nach Athena
Hitler's plan to loot a treasure-laden island off Greece is underway. A prison camp is built where inmates dig up priceless art under the eye of the Austrian commandant Major Otto Hecht (Roger Moore). Zeno (Telly Savalas), the island's resistance leader and Eleana (Claudia Cardinale) scheme to defeat the occupiers. Leading a group of freedom fighters, they clash with the Nazis as they try to save the lives of condemned prisoners and to save the treasure hidden in the mountaintop monastery - Director:
- George P. Cosmatos
- Cast:
- Roger Moore, Telly Savalas, David Niven
- Formats:
-