Best Opium Movies & TV Shows

A former Prohibition-era Jewish gangster returns to the Lower East Side of Manhattan over thirty years later, where he once again must confront the ghosts and regrets of his old life.

At the height of the Vietnam war, Captain Benjamin Willard is sent on a dangerous mission that, officially, "does not exist, nor will it ever exist." His goal is to locate - and eliminate - a mysterious Green Beret Colonel named Walter Kurtz, who has been leading his personal army on illegal guerrilla missions into enemy territory.

The story of the early days of Deadwood, South Dakota; woven around actual historic events with most of the main characters based on real people. Deadwood starts as a gold mining camp and gradually turns from a lawless wild-west community into an organized wild-west civilized town. The story focuses on the real-life characters Seth Bullock and Al Swearengen.

A mysterious comedy about love, lust, art and the power of the "charged image", Dark Arc follows the eccentric love triangle between an artist, a graphic designer and their inspiring muse

Set in downtown New York in 1900, 'The Knick' is centered on the Knickerbocker Hospital and its staff, notably Dr. John Thackery, the hospital's brilliant chief surgeon who pushes medicine's boundaries, pioneering new procedures despite a severe drug addiction.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson find themselves in 1890s London in this holiday special.

In six films, Adam Curtis traces the different forces across the world that have led to now. It covers a wide range—including the strange roots of modern conspiracy theories, the history of China, opium and opioids, the history of Artificial Intelligence, melancholy over the loss of empire and, love and power. And explores whether modern culture, despite its radicalism, is really just part of the new system of power.

A dramatic history of Puyi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People's Republic.

Legendary marshal Wyatt Earp, now a weary gunfighter, joins his brothers Morgan and Virgil to pursue their collective fortune in the thriving mining town of Tombstone. But Earp is forced to don a badge again and get help from his notorious pal Doc Holliday when a gang of renegade brigands and rustlers begins terrorizing the town.

Henry Drax is a harpooner and brutish killer whose amorality has been shaped to fit the harshness of his world, who will set sail on a whaling expedition to the Arctic with Patrick Sumner, a disgraced ex-army surgeon who signs up as the ship’s doctor. Hoping to escape the horrors of his past, Sumner finds himself on an ill-fated journey with a murderous psychopath. In search of redemption, his story becomes a harsh struggle for survival in the Arctic wasteland.

Upon receiving his draft notice and leaving his family ranch in Oklahoma, Claude heads to New York and befriends a tribe of long-haired hippies on his way to boot camp.

A gambler and a prostitute become business partners in a remote Old West mining town, and their enterprise thrives until a large corporation arrives on the scene.

A cross-country trip to sell drugs puts two hippie bikers on a collision course with small-town prejudices.

In San Francisco, a villainous landowner with underworld connections seeks to steal the property of an old Spanish family.

Tsar Nicholas II, the inept last monarch of Russia, insensitive to the needs of his people, is overthrown and exiled to Siberia with his family.

Semi-autobiographical story of Conrad Rooks, who travels to France to undergo a drug-withdrawal cure. Flashbacks to the beginings of psychedelia in San Fran. Though initially confusing, as Rooks blends drug-illusion with reality, and cuts color with black-and-white and monochrome tinted shots, "Chappaqua" is conventionally constructed with a beginning, middle, and end.

The love story of an abused English girl and a Chinese Buddhist in a time when London was a brutal and harsh place to live.

The 19th-century tale of love, murder and revenge as men and women travel across the world to make their fortunes on the wild West Coast of New Zealand's South Island.

When a prominent official is murdered at a banquet honoring Charle Chan, the detective and son Lee team up to expose an opium-smuggling ring.

Female American tourists are being kidnapped by a crime ring headed by a beautiful Asian woman. They're drugged and then sent to an island where they are kept as sex slaves to be used by wealthy tourists. Two agents are dispatched to rescue the women and put an end to this operation.

Frederick Abberline is an opium-huffing inspector from Scotland Yard who falls for one of Jack the Ripper's prostitute targets in this Hughes brothers adaption of a graphic novel that posits the Ripper's true identity.

A beautiful young woman asks Holmes to help her father, a former army captain and hopeless opium addict break free of the curse surrounding a stolen treasure.

Kate is secretly betrothed to a struggling journalist, Merton Densher. But she knows her Aunt Maude will never approve of the match, since Kate's deceased mother has lost all her money in a marriage to a degenerate opium addict. When Kate meets a terminally ill American heiress named Millie traveling through Europe, she comes up with a conniving plan to have both love and wealth.

A Greek-Irish sailor becomes friends with a 10-year-old sampan girl while his freighter is docked in Hong Kong.

The corpse of a shabbily dressed young woman has been discovered in the mud flats of the Thames at low tide. Police assume she's a prostitute, but Dr. Watson suspects something more and goes to his old friend Holmes, now retired and at very loose ends.

At the house of a famous Chinese botanist teacher his daughter and a female intern fall in love with each other - a forbidden love that must be kept secret.

Sally Lockhart has struck a man dead with just three words, sent to her in a message from her father just before he drowned in the South China Seas. But unfortunately, Sally has no idea what the words The Seven Blessings mean. Before long, she is drawn into a mystery filled with opium, secrets from her own past and, at the heart of it all, the Ruby of Agrapur.

An 1840s British surgeon, experiments with anesthetic gases in an effort to make surgery pain-free. While doing so, his demonstration before a panel of his peers ends in a horrific mishap with his patient awakening under the knife; he is forced to leave his position in disgrace. To complicate matters, he becomes addicted to the gases and gets involved with a gang of criminals, led by Black Ben and his henchman Resurrection Joe.

An American man returns to a corrupt, Japanese-occupied Shanghai four months before Pearl Harbor and discovers his friend has been killed. While he unravels the mysteries of the death, he falls in love and discovers a much larger secret that his own government is hiding.

Adaptation of the novel by Oscar Wilde.

Seduced into the decadent world of Lord Henry Wotton, handsome young aristocrat Dorian Gray becomes obsessed with maintaining his youthful appearance, and commissions a special portrait that will weather the winds of time while he remains forever young. When Gray's obsession spirals out of control, his desperate attempts to safeguard his secret turn his once-privileged life into a living hell.

When Major Susan Turner is arrested for treason, ex-investigator Jack Reacher undertakes the challenging task to prove her innocence and ends up exposing a shocking conspiracy.

Vincent Price stars in this early '60s adaptation of Thomas De Quincey's thriller about an opium addict trying to solve a mystery in San Francisco's Chinatown.

A choirmaster addicted to opium and obsessed with a beautiful young woman will stop at nothing to possess her.

In this anti-drug film narrated by Grace Kelly, a group of narcotics agents working for the United Nations inject a radioactive compound into a seized shipment of opium at the Afghanistan–Iran border, in the hopes that it will lead them to the main heroin distributor in Europe.

Shatter, an international contract killer, has been assigned to assassinate the President of a small African country and collect his fee from a bank in the Far East. On arrival in Hong Kong his life is threatened and when the bank denies all knowledge of payment arrangements, he realises he has been drawn into a dangerous game where there are no rules. Amongst the players are the Mafia and several foreign intelligence services and the stakes being played for are deadly.

Air America was the CIA's private airline operating in Laos during the Vietnam War, running anything and everything from soldiers to foodstuffs for local villagers. After losing his pilot's license, Billy Covington is recruited into it, and ends up in the middle of a bunch of lunatic pilots, gun-running by his friend Gene Ryack, and opium smuggling by his own superiors.

In 1910, Hong Kong, under the rule of the British Empire, is a prosperous and bustling city, but, hidden in the shadows of its many narrow streets, the hideous members of the Red Dragon gang, a branch of the evil Chinese secret society of the Tongs, lurk and murder those who oppose to their tyranny, which thrives on vice, crime and the fear of the weakest.

Living in an estate on the shores of Lake Geneva, Lord Byron is visited by Percy and Mary Shelley. Together with Byron's lover Claire Clairmont, and aided by hallucinogenic substances, they devise an evening of ghoulish tales. However, when confronted by horrors, ostensibly of their own creation, it becomes difficult to tell apparition from reality.

A treasury agent becomes obsessed with exposing an international drug ring.

Two professionals, Jeff and Marty, take a business trip to the Philippines. Their deep dissatisfaction with their lives leads them to forsake their friends and families for a return to the alcohol and drug-induced wanderings of their youth.

In Shanghai, an American girl who helps runs an opium ring meets an American agent disguised as a mining engineer. The two fall in love, and she has to determine where her loyalties lie.

An opium smuggler is marked for murder in this story of the Chinese Mafia.

An Englishman sought for murder, tries to escape fate to South Seas island.

The beautiful, brutal Olga procures prostitutes and pushes heroin for the syndicate, confining and torturing her pretty victims in a private dungeon located in New York City's sinister Chinatown.

The villainous Dr. Fu Manchu races against a team of Englishmen to find the tomb of Ghengis Khan, because he wants to use the relics to cause an uprising in the East to wipe out the white race.

When Henry Jekyll's experiments with cocaine have gotten out of control, he transforms into the hideous Jack Hyde. As Hyde he searches the London streets at night for his prey in whorehouses and opium dens. The police can't catch him, he has nothing to lose but his mind...

As the daring thief Arsène Lupin ransacks the homes of wealthy Parisians, the police, with a secret weapon in their arsenal, attempt to ferret him out.

A New York press agent must scramble when his major client becomes embroiled in a huge scandal.

When he's forced to kill his best friend, a Chinese hit man adopts the man's daughter.