Seth Perkins, a prospector, has two daughters. Mabel and Vedah. Vedah is a cripple, and the town doctor writes her father it will be necessary to operate to cure her and the expense will be one hundred dollars. Perkins has no such sum and is in despair.

May Barclay, returning from the east, is met at the station by her father, a wealthy cattle king. On passing the town saloon, two members of Buck Brady's gang, known and feared throughout the country for lawless depredations, see May and determine to steal her and hold her for ransom.

When New York City police officer O'Malley learns of a young man who is about to embark on a life of crime by taking part in a robbery, he takes the boy aside and tells him the story of Boomerang Bill, another wanna-be gangster who wanted to be a big shot in the New York crime scene. It seems that Bill fell for a pretty young dance-hall girl, and went up against local gang boss Tony the Wop when he insulted her. Tony, who never forgot a slight, found a way to make things very, very tough for Boomerang Bill, in a way that he never saw coming.

When a stack of valuable bonds go missing from the Grant household, suspicion falls on little Carmen Grant's playmate Georgie, whose father is a poor ex-convict trying to go straight.

Renee is a French artist's model who uses morphine as an escape from the dull reality of her life. She recommends it to a neurotic artist because "it kindles the fires of genius." The artist quickly becomes addicted to the drug and the quality of his work begins to disintegrate. He takes on a new model, marries her, and starts her on the same path of moral degradation, until a guilt-ridden Renee decides to intervene in order to save them both. According to silent film historian Kevin Brownlow, THE DEVIL'S NEEDLE was banned by the state of Ohio, but the censor board reversed its decision after recognizing the positive message beneath the film's scandalous surface. This special edition was mastered from a 35mm preservation print of the 1923 re-release version. The only known surviving copy, the element suffers significant nitrate decomposition during some scenes.

In this action-packed serial, government agent Quentin Locke infiltrates a corrupt patents company, only to run into the gleaming terror of its robot protector, the Automaton. In order to save the beautiful Eva Brent and find a cure for the dreaded Madagascar Madness, Locke suffers an inhuman array of tortures and physical restraints. He is chained, tied with barbed wire, padlocked in a crate and thrown in the water, tied beneath a descending elevator, strapped to an electric chair, and bound in an elaborate Oriental torture chamber.