Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on August 21st, 2009
Shortly before World War II, British officer Alan Thorndike (Walter Pidgeon), vacationing in Bavaria, puts his sterling hunting skills to use by framing Adolf Hitler in his gun sights. He pulls the trigger on an empty barrel, not really planning to perform an assassination. Then, after a moment's hesitation, he loads the gun, but is captured before anything history-changing occurs. The Gestapo leader Major Quive-Smith (George Sanders) wants him to confess to being an assassin working for the British government. Thondike refuses. He manages to escape, and Quive-Smith's forces (including the always sinister John Carradine) pursue Thorndike to England, where he falls in with innocent Cockney lass Jerry (Joan Bennett).
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 13th, 2009
Jack Webb invented the modern television police procedural with the creation of Dragnet, first as a radio play and eventually as a successful television series. The series told the tale of a pair of L.A. detectives. There wasn’t any flair or action sequences. No car chases and no gun fights. When Jack Webb turned his attention to the patrol officer, he realized that some of that formula would have to change. But he wouldn’t tweak it very much. There was the occasional gunfire, but it was rare and was never the focus of any given story. Instead Webb concentrated on the actual procedures and duties of the everyday patrol officers,
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on August 10th, 2009
The Super Friends as a cartoon show had a long and sketchy past. It started out in the 1970’s and ran in nearly a dozen different incantations and over a hundred episodes until 1986 when it was put down for the last time. In the 1983-84 season, the series had been cancelled officially for a second time. This was due to the fact that they did not wish to compete with the syndication run of the original episodes that was already on air. Hence, the new episodes were dropped and didn’t appear until many years later. Here, the people at WB have compiled these 8 episodes (24 shorts) into a 2-disc set and dubbed them the “Lost Episodes.”
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on August 10th, 2009
After an opening, fragmentary montage of a traffic accident, we encounter Melvin Devereux (John Savage), standing in front of his father's grave, making a few cynical remarks apparently in the wake of dad's funeral. Then, after a strange conversation with a mysterious woman (Sandi Schultz), Devereux begins to make his way home. But his route is blocked by one obstacle after another, and his journey becomes ever longer and ever more frustrating as he drives down the empty roads of the Louisiana countryside. He is then plagued by a hearse, which will not let him overtake, and that turns up wherever he goes. Soon he becomes obsessed with catching the hearse, after seeing his name on the coffin inside.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on August 9th, 2009
Dr. Stephen Arrowsmith is a haughty scientist who sees himself above such petty concerns as ethics. He has married his wife Muriel (Barbara Steele) for her money, and when he catches her in the arms of one of the servants (Rik Battaglia), he tortures and kills them both, cuts out their hearts, and uses their blood to create an elixir of youth for the maid/co-conspirator Solange (Helga Liné). He then marries the psychologically fragile Jenny (Steele again, now blonde), Muriel's heiress, planning to drive her insane and take control of the his dead wife's fortune. Sure enough, Jenny starts seeing things, but the ghosts she is seeing are real.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on July 28th, 2009
Once upon a time, there was an age of TV where hit shows where women in their 20s played high school students, and an entire episode could revolve around the burning crisis of whether the dog that followed one daughter home could stay. It is from this era that Petticoat Junction hails. This series about a widowed mother and her three daughters tending the Shady Rest Hotel ran for seven years, and begat both Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies, in that characters from all three series would interact with each other.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 22nd, 2009
I grew up on the Peanuts creations of Charles M. Schulz. Most of us have, in some way or another. His newspaper comic strip is one of the longest running and most successful strips of all time. The work has been translated into every language currently spoken on the planet. The images of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, and the rest of the Peanuts gang have appeared on just about any kind of product imaginable. Our pop culture contains too many references to the strip to mention briefly. For me, it was the television specials starting in the mid 1960’s that brought the gang into my life.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on July 22nd, 2009
This, the final season of the series, opens with Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) and Darrin (Dick Sargent) on a European tour. This means stock shots of various European landmarks before we return to rather unconvincingly dressed-up studio backlots. There are a few two-parters in the mix, including the opening episodes, where Samantha is zapped back to the court of Henry VIII, and a late-season adventure where the time travel goes the other way, and George Washington is brought forward to the present. Special note should be made of Episode 3, where the Loch Ness Monster shows up, in all his googly-eyed, man-in-a-costume glory.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on July 22nd, 2009
As a Henry Mancini score swells with unapologetic cheese, we are swept into the world of the luxurious St. Gregory Hotel in San Francisco. Owned by aging matriarch Bette Davis (replaced, when she had to pull out due to illness, by Anne Baxter, as her sister-in-law), the Hotel's General Manager is James Brolin, who has lots of time to wander around the lobby greeting the various guest stars. In other words, he's Mr. Roarke to the St. Gregory's Fantasy Island. What follows is pure fromage of the Aaron Spelling variety, with every other guest star a fading Familiar Face, no end of improbable crises, painful comic relief, unintentional comedy gold in the dramatic moments, and much of the feel of a 1970s disaster movie minus, sadly, the disaster itself (but you can always re-watch The Towering Inferno to make yourself feel better).
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 6th, 2009
In the 1930’s and 40’s MGM was trying to get in on the lucrative animation game. The field was dominated at the time by Warner Brothers with their Loony Tunes shorts, and of course, the iconic cast of animated characters coming out of the Walt Disney Studio. For years they had failed to find the right property to take advantage of the market. It wasn’t until the team of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera approached the studio with their first project that the times did change, at least a little, for the fledgling animation department at MGM. The project was far from an original one even for the time. It was a very basic cat and mouse adventure featuring a cat named Tom and a mouse named Jerry.
