The Dope's NOT On DVD Roundup Returns!

Back at it again - as long as we have a few more movies that should (conceivably) never see the laser light of a DVD player, there will be lists like my brand-new one.

For those who don't know, this is a list of 10-or-so marginally well-known movies that are, as of this publishing, not on Region 1 U.S. DVD.

Let's start with some obvious ones here, then move on to some pretty obscure choices....





10) Buddy Buddy (1981)

As hard as it is to believe, Billy Wilder's last movie isn't yet on DVD here in the States (it does have an Italian release that is pretty dark and badly framed, but anyway...). Not without its faults, this re-teaming of Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon is a re-do of Francis Veber's play and later movie L'Emmerdeur (A Pain in the A** - yes, I edited for you - you're welcome) and it has funny moments as any pairing of Lemmon and Matthau would. While Wilder has films like Sunset Boulevard, Love in the Afternoon, Stalag 17 and The Lost Weekend on DVD, his swan song is not? Come on, suits: get on the ball....





9) Superdad (1974)

I remember back in the day when the local theater was still up-and-running, they showed live-action Disney films every week, it seemed. This was one of the 800 billion Disney released in the '70s, and one of the several that starred Bob "He Was In KIDDIE Movies?!!" Crane. Herein, he was an over-protective dad who, rather than watch his cherished daughter waste her life hanging out with her loser beach bum friends (and boyfriend Kurt Russell!) gets as involved in her life as (uncomfortably) possible. Sure, Disney has the gall to put The Million Dollar Duck on DVD, but don't expect this one at your local Disney Store. Maybe Walt caught wind of Crane's home movies?



8) I Come In Peace (1990)

Odd as it is to believe, even Dolph Lundgren makes a movie that is so ungainly that it never sees life outside of a video tape. This Predator ripoff has an alien hunting humans with his fancy disc gun in beautiful downtown Houston, Texas - but not if loose cannon cop Lundgren has anything to say about it. Which he will, believe me. They even care enough about the cliches of such movies to saddle him with a by-the-book schnook government agent, but not to make anything else in the movie work any better. I mean, this is not better nor worse than any other Lundgren effort like Red Scorpion, Universal Soldier or Showdown in Little Tokyo, so what gives?




7) Neighbors (1981)

Anyone who's followed the career of John Belushi is familiar with what would end up being his final filmic effort, with longtime comedy partner-in-crime Dan Aykroyd. Based on a novel by Thomas Berger, with a screenplay written by Larry ("M*A*S*H") Gelbart (and re-written on the fly by several others) and directed by John G. (Rocky) Avildsen, everyone fought with everybody else and the troubled enterprise only made money because it was released so heavily during the holidays. Still, there is the allure of John Belushi. At least it wasn't as bad as if Belushi had survived long enough to be cast wearing a diaper in 1983's The Joy of Sex. Thank god.




6) Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn (1983)

You remember the movie where the robotic guy gets his robot arm ripped off and hydraulic fluid spurts at the screen in slow motion? THIS is that film!

This one makes no sense to me, not being on DVD, since its companion piece in '83 (Spacehunter: Adventures in the Fiorbidden Zone) already had its day on the disc, so to speak. But here we have a made-to-order film for the 3-D era of film-making (as was Spacehunter): items are thrust at the viewer on a regular basis, people and spaceships float in the center of the screen (pretty badly blue-screened, but anyway...) and science fiction is pretty much the perfect venue for this kind of film, admittedly. And not only is Kelly Preston (Mrs. John Travolta) part of the cast but so is Richard (Bull from "Night Court") Moll - now if those aren't drawing cards - not to mention great reasons to put them on DVD - I don't know what is!


5) Sincerely Yours (1955)

For anyone who's ever read that indispensable reference "The Hollywood Hall of Shame" from Harry and Michael Medved, this is a familiar title. It is, in fact, a dramatic film written by no less than Irving Wallace and is a remake of the chestnut The Man Who Played God, wherein a famed concert pianist battles a debilitating loss of hearing and a need to help the needy around him. Of course, this version had the added benefit (?) of having Liberace as their romantic star. Hmm. It did badly, lost money and Liberace was never the leading man in another film after this. But many other films committed greater sins and have had multiple pressings to plastic. Should that make it any less of a choice for pressing into the DVD fold? I think not.


4) Slapstick (Of Another Kind) (1982)

Wow. This one, directed by writer/director/auteur Steven Paul, based on a novel by the inestimable Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and starring such comic luminaries as Jerry Lewis and Madeline Kahn not only failed but crashed and burned bad enough to harm future generations. It was the next-to-last film for Marty Feldman, took two years to re-edit and re-release and was so badly-staged and poorly performed that not even Orson Welles' cameo as an alien voice could save things. However, things as bad as this are not always regulated to the land of obscurity; just look at the general output of Doris Wishman. Not the same realm as Kurt Vonnegut, true, but the principle is still the same.




3) The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper (1981)

Talk about a troubled production - multiple director changes, multiple screenplay changes, a story pieced together more or less from hearsay and third-person recollections, Treat Williams doing his best to play a character that practically no one knew anything about (and if they did they weren't telling) and more continuity problems than credibility. There's probably more than one reason D.B. Cooper hasn't been put on DVD (let alone barely seen on VHS) but if continuity and crew problems were a factor, then Hollywood would have little to no output. Come on, Universal; give us a DVD, already!






2) Treasure Island (1990)

This isn't the original Disney one with Robert Newton or even the '72 remake with Orson Welles as Long John Silver. THIS one was made for TV, directed by Fraser Clarke Heston and stars his dad - the legendary Charlton Heston - as Long John Silver. But also featured Christian Bale as Jim Hawkins, Christopher Lee as Blind Pew and Oliver Reed as Billy Bones! Yeah! That's right! Impressive cast, huge scale and as impressive as any other of Fraser Clarke's and Charlton's writing and/or directing collaborations (The Mountain Men, Mother Lode, Alaska)...so why no DVD release? It's hard to say; could be that either Fraser or Turner Home Entertainment are waiting for the right time to turn a profit on the whole enterprise. It's all money, you know. But we're a patient lot, we collectors are. We can wait....





1) Ben (1972)

And here we are at a sequel, of all things. Of a killer rat movie, to boot. When Willard came out in 1971, who knew it would be successful enough to warrant a sequel the very next year? The producers, that's who, and a sequel they produced, with child actor Lee Harcourt Montgomery as the sickly boy (named David Garrison, little trivia for you) who takes in refugee killing rat Ben as a friend/pet. The '70s were good to Montgomery, who got a lot of work as the put-upon little boy in movies like Pete 'N Tillie, Burnt Offerings and The Savage is Loose, but he really came into his own here - too bad he was upstaged by Michael Jackson's end theme of love to...the rat. Yep. A love song to a rat. And this was before he turned into Wacko Jacko. Still, this is far weirder and sicker than even Willard was. So, there is enough cheese to feed all the rats here (sorry; cheap rodent joke there). DVD, where are you?

So there you have a good selection of movies that should be on disc, ones that probably never will be and some that were even more surprisingly put on VHS.

Dope ou....

OH! I almost forgot one!

Ready?

...


1a) The Extraordinary Seaman (1969)

And no, it's not a porno.

It's a World War II comedy from John Frankenheimer (yes, that John Frankenheimer) about misfits, disgraced captains, spirits and more stock footage than Myra Breckenridge that asked us to "Laugh away...love away...fun away...with Dunaway!" - and that was Faye Dunaway. She starred in this one along with David Niven, Mickey Rooney, Alan Alda and Jack Carter in a comedy that wasn't funny, action that had no activity and drama that was less than dramatic in a film that was less than film-able. This kind of puts one in the same mind as when Otto Preminger made Skidoo a year before; there was just something missing - that something was competence... all the way around. But incompetence is nothing that's kept a movie off of DVD before. It may have been held back to wait and pay for all the rights to all the stock footage they used to pad out the running time of The Extraordinary Seaman to 80 minutes. Mmm-hmm; even less time than your average Police Academy movie, just to put that in perspective.

So NOW you have a vast selection of non-disc films to put on your want list. Gotta wonder what's in the heads of some of these studio suits; no DVD release for these films, while *Dunston Checks In gets a 2-Disc Millennium Platinum Director-Autographed release. Grrr...

Dope out.

-TGWD

* = okay, I may have exaggerated about Dunston Checks In, but you knew what I was getting at. Just clarifying.