Jules White was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the greatest comedy director – but he might have been the resourceful. With the 1956 Three Stooges short “Scheming Schemers,” he created a new film by using stock footage from three different movies while putting forth a work where one of the stars had passed away six weeks earlier.
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BOOTLEG FILES 885: “Around the Beatles” (1964 British television special).
LAST SEEN: On YouTube.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: Bits and pieces of the show turned up on home entertainment release.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: The full show has been unavailable for years.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Not likely.
Sixty years ago today, ABC broadcast “Around the Beatles,” an hour-long musical special that was first broadcast on Britain’s ITV on May 6, 1964. This production was notable as the rare television variety special with the Beatles as the starring attraction – for the most part, the Fab Four only showed up as guests on someone else’s small-screen music and comedy revue.
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French Rarebit (1951)
Directed by Robert McKimson
Story by Tedd Pierce
Animation by Phil DeLara, Emery Hawkins, Charles McKimson, Rod Scribner
Music by Eugene Poddany; orchestrations by Milt Franklyn
A flatbed truck emerges out of the Arc de Triomphe carrying a large crate marked “Carrots from U.S.A.” The vehicle hits a pothole, causing the crate to fall off and crack open in the street. Bugs Bunny emerges, unaware of his surroundings, though a quick glimpse of the Eiffel Tower and a street sign for the Champs Elysees alerts him to his Parisian location. While strolling the city’s streets, he attracts the attention of rival restaurateurs Louis and Francois – each wants to capture and cook Bugs. Not surprisingly, Bugs quickly outwits his new foes and winds up cooking them.
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A man on the run finds himself next door to a known slasher killer who makes him his new prey.
Have you ever wondered what happens to those socks that go missing in the dryer? Well, Crust posits an answer, and if you get queasy easily, you may just want to stop reading right there.
I’ve watched a lot, and I do mean a LOT of bad movies in the last few years, and some of these movies are so much fun and were made with such love and sincerity that I will unironically never forget them for the rest of my life. They’re almost like happy memories. They bring joy, just thinking about them. Then there’s movies like Without Warning, where I watched it about a week ago and forgot every single solitary thing about it within a day and had to re-watch the whole stupid mess again just to write this review. Yeah, it’s that kind of movie. Continue reading
This 1971 feature from the American International Pictures fun factory is a work at odds with itself. It wants to be campy, but it is never that funny. It wants to be a horror film, but poor direction dilutes the effectiveness of the chills. And while it succeeds as a Vincent Price vehicle, it fails to bring along the rest of the cast for the ride.
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