A New York City detective goes to Europe to identify his daughter’s body and ends up involved in the investigation. As the search for the killer advances, he meets a journalist ready to help and makes peace with some of his feelings.
The Bootleg Files: 120 Music Masterpieces
BOOTLEG FILES 722: “120 Music Masterpieces” (long-running TV commercial for a mail-order set of classical music recordings).
LAST SEEN: On YouTube.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: TV commercials have no reissue value after they ran their course.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Unlikely.
If you were watching American television in the 1970s and the early 1980s, there is an excellent chance that you will recall a rather unusual commercial that popped up primarily on local independent stations. It featured a distinguished older British gentleman offering an erudite pitch for the purchase of a mail-order collection of classical music recordings.
Celebrating “House Party”: Thirty Years Old, and Still a Bash
For a movie that’s almost as old as I am and features many a flat tops and pastel vests, “House Party” is a movie that’s barely aged. In fact, it’s a movie that so many studios have tried to duplicate but never quite have captured the same magic and enthusiasm. There’s just something about “House Party” that’s kept it a vessel of pop culture, hip hop, and comedy that was shifting from the eighties and in to the nineties. Not even the sequels lived up to what is basically the perfect party movie when all is said and done. The movie advertises itself in the title, but while the movie is centered almost completely on a party, it’s also a pretty excellent coming of age comedy.
Two Little, Too Late: Five Awful Sequels Released Too Late
Most recently, the sequel to “The Big Lebowski” was released in theaters without much fanfare and much of a response, if we’re going to be honest. I wasn’t even aware there was a sequel in the works until I came across the trailer online by accident. “The Jesus Rolls” lacks just about everything “The Big Lebowski” brought to cult cinema, and John Turturro never makes much of an argument for why Jesus Quintana deserved a sequel/spin off during the entire film. It is pretty sad, considering I wouldn’t have minded if Jesus ended up sparking a cult classic in the same league as The Dude.
That said, here are five other sequels that came years (sometimes decades) later, and flopped big time.
The Charley Chase Talkies
Charley Chase was a reigning star of the silent comedy world, but he also carried on well into the sound film era as both an inventive performer and a versatile director. In this episode of “The Online Movie Show,” we explore Charley Chase’s sound films with James L. Neibaur, author of “The Charley Chase Talkies: 1929-1940.”
The Jesus Rolls (2020)
As a hardcore fan of “The Big Lebowski” I felt it was my duty to check out “The Jesus Rolls,” one of the most inexplicable movies of 2020 so far. For fans of the original 1998 Coen Brothers masterpiece, Jesus Quintana is a familiar name, an adversary of The Dude who is also a very small supporting player in “The Big Lebowski.” For reasons never quite clarified (or even justified), John Turturro who portrayed Jesus, brings the character back for a pseudo-sequel that is kind of a follow up to “The Big Lebowski,” but not quite. It’s a surprisingly saccharine and dramatic film and a pretty dull one at that.
Universal Horror Collection Volume 4 [Blu-Ray]
Shout Factory continues the growing of their library of Universal genre films, all of which expand to heavyweights like Boris Karloff, Lionel Atwill and the iconic Rondo Hatton. Although the selection isn’t all purely horror by definition, these are all fairly solid and entertaining genre pictures with appearances by various horror icons. This is another in the growing library for horror buffs anxious to add more depth to their collection, all now upgraded and restored.