Lighthouse (1947)
From PRC studios comes a well worn but very well done tale. Girl loves assistant lighthouse keeper. He loves ALL the girls. When she finds out he's married she goes after his boss. When she moves on to the island to be with her new hubby the assistant is now suddenly interested. A triangle is formed until she decides she loves her husband...so the assistant tries to kill his boss.
More potboiler than anything, this is a decidedly B-movie drama that plays out its story in an hour and gets off. Not the greatest thing since sliced bread but a good way to kill an hour. I think this works because the setting keeps it apart from many other similar films. It's three people at a lighthouse and it helps to add to the tension while keeping the deja vu away. Worth seeing if you stumble across it.
Strange Voyage (1946)
Eddie Albert stars in a small scale little film about a treasure hunt. The story begins when a man tries to rent a boat. The old salt refuses to do it and then spins a long tale about what happened a year before when our hero rented his boat. The plan was supposed to be to do some fishing off the coast of Mexico; what was really afoot was the search for buried treasure in the desert. Everything goes swimmingly until greed rears its ugly head and it becomes dog eat dog. Running about an hour this is the sort of film that used to play at about 4 in the morning to fill an oddly timed slot between the regular Late Late Show movie and the morning news. Watching the film I had memories of when I grew up and would get up at odd hours and see strange films like this that I never saw again. A solid enjoyable little picture, it's too slight of its own accord to track down, but if you do like I did and get it as one of Sinister Cinema's Poverty Row collections you can't go wrong.
Golden Goddess Of Rio Beni (1964)
B-movie trash that is the sort of thing I used to watch at about 3am. The plot has a pilot and some friends going into the Amazon to try and find a friend who disappeared. Along the way they pick up some miscreants who become convinced that there is a temple filled with gold at the end of the trek. Running into various tribes one of the band becomes accidentally engaged to the blond haired daughter of one of the chiefs. Going further into the jungle they run across head hunters and treachery as the party turns on each other. It's a German jungle adventure that is very much related to the African films such as Trader Horn. I would describe it as a popcorn movie pure and simple. Worth a look. (Sinister Cinema's print seems to be of a black and white copy of a color film)
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