This year marks the 50th anniversary of the release of “3 AM.” What, you never heard of “3 AM”? Well, if you’re an Orson Welles fan, you’ll recall that film was directed by Gary Graver, the cinematographer on Welles’ “The Other Side of the Wind” – Graver needed to take on the skin flick job to because he couldn’t cover his bills working on Welles’ on-again/off-again project. As a favor to Graver, the Big O did uncredited work in editing a steamy masturbatory shower in “3 AM.”
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BOOTLEG FILES 909: “Rabbit Stew and Rabbits Too!” (1969 animated short).
LAST SEEN: On DailyMotion.com and several other sites.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: A one-shot outing that came at the end of Warner Bros.’ animated theatrical run.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Maybe in a Warner Bros. anthology collection.
The last iteration of this column featured “Rabbit Habit,” an underground parody film that imagined a drug-hazed post-script for the Warner Bros. animated characters. In retrospect, “Rabbit Habit” would have been a better sign-off than “Rabbit Stew and Rabbits Too!”, a 1969 short that was completed just before the celebrated animation studio finally ended its theatrical output.
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Sahara Hare (1955)
Directed by Friz Freleng
Story by Warren Foster
Music by Milt Franklyn
Animation by Gerry Chiniquy, Ted Bonnicksen, Arthur Davis
“Sahara Hare” gets off to a great start when Bugs Bunny burrows his way into the middle of the Sahara Desert and mistakenly believes he is in Miami Beach. Bugs happily runs across the desert to take a dip in the Atlantic Ocean, but the endless hot sands confuse and exhaust him. “Man, dig this crazy beach,” he exhales before hitting upon a tiny oasis. Mistaking the oasis pond for the ocean, he dives in headfirst, but winds up with a headful of mud from the pond’s shallow bottom.
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You must admire the audacity of filmmakers who try to remake classic films – after all, it takes a lot of guts to attempt a production that exists solely to one-up its heralded predecessor. But that’s not to say that it cannot be done – after all, William Wyler’s “Ben-Hur” and Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed” were remakes that won the Best Picture Oscar, while John Huston’s “The Maltese Falcon” and “Moby Dick” and Franco Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet” were superior to earlier film adaptations of those beloved works.
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B-Western lovers are in for a treat with this release of two 1929 silent films starring Tom Tyler, a reigning cowboy movie star during the late 1920s and early 1930s.
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Beanstalk Bunny (1955)
Directed by Chuck Jones
Story by Michael Maltese
Animation by Ken Harris, Richard Thompson, Abe Levitow, Keith Darling
Music by Carl Stalling
A cute idea with a meh execution, “Beanstalk Bunny” reimagines the fairy tale with Daffy Duck as Jack, Elmer Fudd as the giant, and Bugs Bunny as an interloper who joins in the mayhem. Bugs went up the beanstalk before with “Jack-Wabbit and the Beanstalk” (1943) and found himself in a land of giants when he challenged Paul Bunyan’s dog in “Lumber Jack-Rabbit” (1953), so it was a bit strange to have him back for a third time in this type of a setting.
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My problem with “The Shining” is that it was made at the wrong time by the wrong people. It should have been made by the Columbia Pictures short subjects department in the mid-1940s with Shemp Howard as Jack Torrance, Vera Vague as Wendy Torrance, Dudley Dickerson as Dick Halloran, and (in a loan-out from Hal Roach) Billy “Froggy” Laughlin as Danny Torrance. And behind the camera, Jules White would direct the film by filling the Overlook Hotel with a gorilla throwing pies and skeletons operating on clearly visible wires.
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