After leaving Warner Bros. in the late 1940s, Humphrey Bogart effectively became his own producer, able to pick and choose his own film projects. Ironically, his batting average was about the same as it had been during his starring career at Warner Bros., when he was at the mercy of that company's whims. For every African Queen (1951), The Caine Mutiny (1954), and The Harder They Fall (1956), Bogie appeared in movies that would be totally forgotten if not for him, pictures like Chain Lightning (1950), Sirocco (1951), and Battle Circus (1953).

Because these later Bogie movies were made by a variety of companies for an equal variety of distributors, they weren't as easily packaged for television and home video distribution as is the case of Bogie's Warner Bros. films, hence some of these pictures have been a lot harder to see than others. The Enforcer (...Read the entire review

The more Hollywood turns to comic books, board games, and Disneyland rides for story material, the more we need filmmakers like Henry Jaglom. Beginning with A Safe Face (1971), Jaglom carved a niche making smallish independent movies uniquely his. He's probably best known for his ensemble, female-dominated films revolving around a particular subject: women's relationship with food in Eating (1990), biological clock-ticking in Babyfever (1995), being single in Someone to Love (1987), recognizing a turning point and moving on with New Year's Day (1989). His movies famously allow actors the freedom to improvise, drawing from their own lives and emotions, sometimes intensely personal raw material buried deep. Yes, they're still working from scripts that define character arcs and move their fictional characters from one place to another, but most of Jaglom's actors find wo...Read the entire review

Riverboat, ring your bell,
Fare thee well, Annabel.
Luck is the lady that he loves the best.
Natchez to New Orleans
Livin' on jacks and queens
Maverick is a legend of the West.

Inexplicably late to the party, the popular, even cult Western seriocomic series Maverick (1957-62) seemed to take forever to get released to DVD. Warner Home Video issued a piddly three-episode "Best of" set in 2005, but didn't get around to The Complete First Season until just last year. Now comes Maverick - The Complete Second Season, the best and most interesting of the program's extraordinarily bumpy five-years.

I must preface this review by stating up front that James Garner's other hit/cult TV series, The Rockford Files (1974-80, plus later TV movies) remains one of my all-time personal favorites. That series crystalized Garner's unique, irreplaceable charm as...Read the entire review

The first surprise one finds with War of the Wildcats, with John Wayne as a cowboy overseeing an oil-drilling operation on Indian land, is that War of the Wildcats is not its original title. The movie, in fact, was first released as In Old Oklahoma in December 1943. When Republic Pictures reissued it in June 1950 they opted to rename it War of the Wildcats, which may also have been its working title while it was in production. From here it gets a bit murky, but it appears the movie was also usually shown on television under the Wildcats title, as was its only previous home video release, a 1998 VHS tape.

Still, nowhere on the packaging is In Old Oklahoma ever mentioned, creating unnecessary confusion. I'd never heard of War of the Wildcats before but through various John Wayne biographies knew of In Old Oklahoma. Olive Films' high-def transfer,...Read the entire review

Republic Pictures was rarely associated with high-caliber, prestige pictures, though during the late 1940s and early 50s they made several, notably Orson Welles's Macbeth, Frank Borzage's Moonrise (both 1948), John Ford's The Quiet Man (1952), and they co-produced this, a classy adaptation of John Steinbeck's novella (originally published in short story form) The Red Pony (1949), adapted for the screen by Steinbeck himself.

Everything about it was first-rate. It was one of Republic's few films in three-strip Technicolor. (When they made color films at all, it was usually in the inferior, cheaper Trucolor process, a technology more or less controlled by Republic. Thank you, Barry Lane.) Lewis Milestone (All Quiet on the Western Front), who'd previously helmed the fine adaptation of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men in 1939*, again directed. (Robert Aldrich was a...Read the entire review

The third of eight "Three Mesquiteers" movies that John Wayne starred in before, during, and after John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) put his career into high gear, Santa Fe Stampede (1938) is a decent enough entry in that admittedly juvenile B-Western series. It may be historically significant in depicting a violent act supposedly never before shown in American movies at least, though that claim might not be completely accurate. Either way, if you don't want to find out what happens, you might want to stop reading right here.

For eons various Republic Three Mesquiteers films were released to VHS and DVD by fringe home video labels specializing in public domain movies. Those video transfers always looked terrible; I'd all but given up hope that better-looking editions would ever see the light of day. But, once again, Olive Films dazzles with a spectacularly pristine high-definition t...Read the entire review

Major Dundee (1965) is famous, even legendary as the movie director Sam Peckinpah made prior to The Wild Bunch (1969), a potential masterpiece had the film not been taken out of his hands and ruined by others in a ham-fisted effort to salvage it. Charlton Heston and Richard Harris star as Civil War soldiers pursuing Apache Indians responsible for a massacre and who've kidnapped three young boys.

Over the years the myth of a "Peckinpah version" of Major Dundee has stubbornly persisted. The fact is his version is irretrievable, partly because even back then Peckinpah was a firebrand and a mean, self-destructive alcoholic (the career-ruining cocaine came later), and that the lost opportunity that was Major Dundee was as much self-inflicted. Peckinpah, for instance, never completely finished writing it (resulting in an outstanding first act and a weak third one) and he squande...Read the entire review

Despite a hoary romantic triangle trite even when it new, The Fighting Seabees (1944) is an undeniably effective and entertaining wartime propaganda picture, an iconic example of such films even. A highly fictionalized account of the U.S. Navy's formation of its Construction Battalion (CB), it was an unusually lavish, large-scale production for B-movie studio Republic Pictures, with a budget hovering somewhere between $700,000 and $1.5 million (sources vary). Whatever it's exact cost it was a far cry from the company's usual fare, with most of Republic's features budgeted between $50,000-$150,000.

The Fighting Seabees was John Wayne's third war movie (not counting Pittsburgh, in which the war figures only slightly), following the Only Angels Have Wings-inspired Fighting Tigers and Reunion in France, both 1942. Although Wayne would eventually become closely ti...Read the entire review

I was drawn to Late Bloomers (2011) a drama with humor starring William Hurt and Isabella Rossellini, by the caliber of its two stars. I've been a fan of Hurt's film work since the early 1980s, and Rossellini, well, I admire her as an actress, too, but also consider her one of the great beauties of recent decades, arguably even more beautiful than her famous mother, Ingrid Bergman, who wasn't exactly chopped liver herself.

Rossellini was pushing 60 when she made Late Bloomers, and though a bit heavier, a lot more wrinkled but mercifully showing no signs of plastic surgery, she's aging with incredible grace and, in once sense, is no less beautiful at 60 than she was at 25. In the movie Hurt and Rossellini play a couple coming to grips with growing older. It's a struggle, just as it's a struggle for not-much-younger moviegoers like myself who've followed these actors for decades come to ...Read the entire review

Copacabana (1947) was comedian Groucho Marx's first solo feature, made without brothers Chico and Harpo. His co-starring role, opposite Brazilian bombshell Carmen Miranda, is virtually the only reason people still watch it today and, put into context, his part and his performance are rather fascinating. Needless to say the movie isn't in the same league as Duck Soup (1933) or A Night at the Opera (1935) but then again, it was never a Marx Brother movie to begin with. Rather, Copacabana is a kind of screwball comedy-musical variety extravaganza typical of the 1940s, and on that wavelength it's very enjoyable, if overlong. It's also worth noting that the film marks the final movie appearance of the "Groucho character," who with his funny walk and greasepaint mustache, makes something of a surprise appearance toward the end of the film. For most of the film, however, Groucho mo...Read the entire review

The magnificent Richard III (1955) was the third of director-producer-star Laurence Olivier's three Shakespeare films. All are excellent and each is unique. The Cronicle History of King Henry the Fift with His Battell Fought at Agincourt in France, better known as Henry V (1944), is presented as a recreation of a 16th century Globe Theatre performance (complete with men in the women's roles), a performance that gradually sheds its theatricality, becoming vibrantly cinematic and in "movie real" Technicolor. Made during the war, it was also specifically intended as a morale booster, with many obvious parallels between the play and Britain's war with the Axis powers, most obviously in Henry's famous St. Crispin's Day speech.

Hamlet (1948), contrastingly photographed in moody black-and-white, is almost a film noir. Though Olivier controversially cut the four-hour play down to...Read the entire review

Brimming with political incorrectness (by today's standards), The Big Gusher (1951) is a pretty entertaining if obviously cheap second feature running little more than an hour. Wayne Morris and Preston Foster star as pair of roughnecks hoping to strike oil while competing for the same blonde (Dorothy Patrick) working to con them out of any black gold they might find. The movie audience doesn't have to look far: the opening titles listing the cast and crew drips with oily black crude.

A Sony Pictures manufactured-on-demand DVD, The Big Gusher is presented in its original full-frame format and in black-and-white. The image appears a little grainier than similar Columbia titles from the early fifties, but it's still okay.

Longtime friends Kenny Blake ...Read the entire review

Most early 1950s Cold War movies emanating from Hollywood are dreary, fear-mongering polemics condemning Soviet-styled Communism unsubtly. Many of these histrionic films are unintentionally hilarious fun seen today. Perhaps because MGM produced Never Let Me Go (1953) through its British studio in Borehamwood, the film's politics don't overwhelm a compelling love story that's also got an extremely suspenseful third act.

Clark Gable stars as a foreign correspondent who falls for a Russian ballerina (Gene Tierney). After they're married the Russians kick him out of the country and force her to stay, leaving Gabe to take matters into his own hands. Directed by Delmer Daves and produced by Clarence Brown, Never Let Me Go also boasts an excellent supporting cast of British actors, notably Kenneth More, Bernard Miles, and Richard Haydn in revelatory "straight" performance.

Never Let Me ...Read the entire review

Despite its overly-familiar story about an ordinary dissatisfied man's meteoric rise and fall through the criminal underworld, 711 Ocean Drive (1950) otherwise is quite well done, with an especially authentic feel given its bookmaking setting. Indeed, the film begins with a silent, pre-title prologue stating, "Because of the disclosures made in this film, powerful underworld interests tried to halt production with threats of violence and reprisal. It was only through the armed protection provided by members of the Police Department in the locales where the picture was filmed that this story was able to reach the screen. To these men, and to the U.S. Rangers at Boulder Dam, we are deeply grateful."

Reportedly, Las Vegas gangsters pressured the filmmakers not to shoot on location in and around Las Vegas as well as in Palm Springs, California. The movie has almost no Las Vegas location footage bu...Read the entire review

Though filmed in just nine days on a small budget (probably less than $25,000), The California Trail (1933) is a highly effective B-Western starring Buck Jones and lovely Helen Mack, here cast against type - boy, howdy - as a tempestuous senorita.

A Sony Pictures Choice Collection, manufactured-on-demand DVD, The California Trail sources reissue film elements, when this Columbia Pictures production was rereleased by Gail Pictures in 1953. Beyond that, the movie looks great, with a bright, sharp picture throughout and virtually no signs of any damage.

In 1830s Spanish California, Mayor Don Alberto Piedra (George Humbert) and his brother, Commandante Emilio Quierra (Luis Alberni), are trying to starve the poor into surrendering their land, the mayor ...Read the entire review

As horror movies go, Nightwing fails spectacularly. Virtually everything about it is so thoroughly wrongheaded the picture almost defies the laws of chance, relentlessly making bad choices again and again with almost no redeeming qualities to justify its existence. Prompted, clearly, by the gargantuan success of Jaws (1975), instead of a Great White shark Nightwing concerns hoards of bubonic plague-carrying vampire bats.

Often confused with the similar (and similarly terrible) Prophecy, released just one week earlier in June 1979, Nightwing unwisely shoehorns ecological horror concepts and Native American issues to awesomely bad effect. The results are singularly boring and uninvolving. Reviewers at the time argued the film simply wasn't scary, but while the three set pieces involving the bats aren't too terrible, everything in-between sure is.

A manufactured-on-...Read the entire review

One wonders how the people at Sony's Choice Collection manufactured-on-demand DVD program select the titles they do. Death Goes North (1939) is an extremely obscure, filmed-in-Canada programmer running a bit more than an hour. Probably it was chosen because, third-billed in the credits, is Rin Tin Tin, Jr., the less-talented offspring of the huge silent era and early talkie canine star rescued from a World War I French battlefield. Rin Tin Tin, Sr. died in 1932 but Junior continued appearing in films, Death Goes North being one of his last. Rin Tin Tin Jr. really has only a supporting part but plays an active role in the lively climax.

The movie is routine, but an interesting relic. It starts out as a Northwestern, set as it is in British Columbia, but near the end resembles a Charlie Chan-type murder mystery with an unexpected plot twist that the IMDb regrettably gives away, so don't ...Read the entire review

A surprisingly sturdy low-budget Western, Arizona Raiders (1965) seems to have been cut from the same cloth as producer A.C. Lyles's cheap Westerns for Paramount. Lyles's Law of the Lawless (1963), produced in Technicolor's budget-saving Techniscope process, had been an unexpected hit, so much so that Paramount ordered a steady stream of these nostalgic, traditional oaters, which were usually stacked with familiar, once-popular Western actors and character players. Lyles ended up making 14 of these movies over the next five years.

Robert E. Kent's Admiral Pictures produced Arizona Raiders for Columbia, but otherwise it closely resembles Lyles's Paramount Westerns. It was made for about the same amount of money ($400,000), was likewise shot in Techniscope with Technicolor prints, and stars Audie Murphy, Buster Crabbe, and Gloria Talbott, all on the career downslide but each a wel...Read the entire review

Though it taps a B-Western chestnut - the cowboy seeking to avenge the murder of parents killed when he was a child - Westward Ho (1935) is above average for its budget level and highly significant in terms of the career trajectory of its leading man, John Wayne. The actor had a fairly disastrous starring debut in The Big Trail (1930) and was blamed in part for its financial failure. Within a year he was reduced to playing a corpse in The Deceiver (1931), but gradually Wayne found his footing in incredibly cheap oaters. After supporting Buck Jones and Tim McCoy in their B-Westerns, Wayne got his own series of low-budget movies. Ride 'Em Cowboy (1932) was the first of six such films he made for Warner Bros. Most were remakes of silent Ken Maynard films and incorporated scads of stock footage from those earlier movies.

Wayne then made more than a dozen even cheaper "Lone St...Read the entire review

John Wayne made eight "Three Mesquiteers" movies for Republic Pictures during 1938-39, before, during, and after his game-changing role in John Ford's Stagecoach (1939). Wayne, who worked hard to reestablish himself following his disastrous starring debut in The Big Trail (1930), a financial flop for which Wayne unfairly received much of the blame, was not a happy Mesquiteer. Replacing actor Robert Livingston in what he regarded as a series of kiddie films, especially after Ford's acclaimed and popular success, was a career move he could have done without.

Oddly, though, the series was, like Republic generally, capable of a few startling surprises amidst these most formulaic of program pictures. Considering the last entry, the goofy Three Texas Steers (1939), had our three heroes (four, if you count Elmer, ventriloquist Max Terhune's dummy) helping out circus folk and their fris...Read the entire review

Of John Wayne's earliest starring films for Republic Pictures, The Lawless Nineties (1936), while adequate, is among his least memorable. The script and its execution are routine even by sausage factory Republic's standards, though it's a harmless enough way to spend 56 minutes.

The most, maybe only distinguishing feature of The Lawless Nineties is the prominent role given character actor George Hayes, who only months before created his iconic Western sidekick character, usually called Windy Halliday in the Hopalong Cassiday films, and then later "Gabby" Whittaker (or just "Gabby" Hayes) in his films for Republic and elsewhere. He was, as far as this reviewer goes, the greatest Western sidekick of them all, and his persona is famous even among those who've never seen a Western of any sort. In The Lawless Nineties he plays a distinguished citizen quite unlike that much more...Read the entire review

Blissfully unaware of its own extreme tastelessness, The Atomic Kid (1954) has a beguiling kind of na ve charm. A sci-fi comedy about a dumb schlub (Mickey Rooney) who miraculously survives an atomic bomb test at point-blank range, The Atomic Kid isn't exactly good and in fact much of it is mediocre, pointless, and meandering, but as a genuinely oddball relic of the Cold War it's quite mesmerizing. And, in its defense, some of the broad slapstick and intended satire isn't bad (if more frenetic than funny, like Rooney himself), particularly in early scenes that team the diminutive, hyperactive actor with hulking, sloth-like Robert Strauss (Stalag 17).

I hadn't seen the film since I was a child, when for no clear reason I stayed up to catch a 4:35 am showing on a local UHF station. Olive Films' high-def video transfer is full frame even though The Atomic Kid very clearly wa...Read the entire review

The very first cinema history book I ever bought, the book that started it all for me, so to speak, was Leonard Maltin's Movie Comedy Teams, first published in 1970. I bought it because it had chapters on The Marx Bros., The Three Stooges, and Laurel & Hardy, but I soon became fascinated with other, more obscure teams I'd never heard of: Clark & McCullough, Smith & Dale, and Wheeler & Woolsey. Although back then local television stations continuously ran old, black-and-white movies at all hours, movies starring these largely forgotten comedy teams rarely turned up.

DVD has done much to pluck these teams from obscurity and back into the spotlight, and now at long last comes Wheeler ★ Woolsey - RKO Comedy Classics Collection, a marathon of nine features stretching the team's career almost from beginning to end. The set consists of Half Shot at Sunrise, Read the entire review

I have very little to say about A Matter of Wife ... and Death, a TV-movie starring Rod Taylor that first aired on the NBC network the evening of April 10, 1976. Taylor plays private detective Shamus McCoy, the same character Burt Reynolds portrayed in Shamus (1973), a moderately popular theatrical film, though its $3.3 million in domestic rentals pales compared to that year's big hits, movies like The Sting ($159 million) and American Graffiti ($140 million). A Matter of Wife ... and Death was also a pilot film for an intended Shamus TV series.

That it didn't sell is hardly surprising. I requested this title primarily after seeing Rod Taylor (The Time Machine, The Birds) and Joe Santos (The Rockford Files) on the cover art, two actors I've always liked. Both are likeable here, too, but the material they have to work with is resolutely or...Read the entire review

"Anyone who doesn't enter into the spirit of free discussion will be severely punished!" - North Korean POW camp announcement

"Ya dirty cruds!" - Pvt. Pike (Leo Gordon)

It's no surprise that The Bamboo Prison (1954) had the working title I Was a Prisoner in Korea. The film is classically, hysterically anticommunist, though unlike most such pictures this one is fairly well made, its naivet and political extremism notwithstanding. The picture also boasts an exceptionally good cast of future stars and character actors, and it's the third of just four movies featuring young leading man Robert Francis (The Caine Mutiny), who died in a plane crash just seven months after this was released.

Part of Sony's manufactured-on-demand Choice Collection, The Bamboo Prison is a rare case of Sony mucking up the video transfer. The movie is clearly shot for 1.85:1 widesc...Read the entire review

A funny thing happened on the way to the DVD player: In response to a press release from Sony about upcoming Choice Collection titles, I requested a movie called Ambush at Tomahawk Gap (1953) while my colleague Paul Mavis requested one called Apache Ambush (1955). However, when Paul opened his shrink-wrapped copy of Apache Ambush, the disc inside was actually Ambush at Tomahawk Gap and, sure enough, a week or so later when my shrink-wrapped copy of Ambush at Tomahawk Gap arrived, the DVD inside it was Apache Ambush. The reason I point this out is to remark with some amazement that, apparently, such titles truly are manufactured-on-demand, one at a time. Clearly whoever packaged these screeners up saw the word "Ambush" in these similar titles and got them mixed-up.

It all worked out in the end anyway, as Apache Ambush turns out to be a nifty, action-pa...Read the entire review

Flight Into Nowhere (1938) is a strange little B-movie. Its story revolves around the actions of a singularly unpleasant character, whom others try to help to no good end. One wonders why it was made in the first place, or why Sony selected it for its manufactured-on-demand "Choice Collection." It does star Jack Holt, a popular leading man whose long association at Columbia peaked in a trio of early-talkie action films directed by Frank Capra, but he has little to do here.

The movie, partly about pilots in the tradition of movies like Night Flight (1933) and Flight from Glory (1937), a sub-genre climaxing with Only Angels Have Wings (1939), segues into a standard jungle movie plot: the search for a downed aircraft and its pilot.

Flight Into Nowhere's full-frame, black and white video transfer is excellent, and for its age also boasts exceptionally good audio. Read the entire review

One usually associates anticommunist melodramas and thrillers of the late 1940s and early '50s with such hysterical, paranoid examples such as Jet Pilot (1952, release delayed until 1957), Red Planet Mars (1952), and Big Jim McLain (1952), movies so cartoonish and politically na ve they've evolved into enormously entertaining high camp. Although Target Hong Kong (1953) has a similarly outrageous premise, by B picture standards it's simply too well made to be so easily dismissed. In recent years I've developed quite an appreciation of B movie actor-turned-B movie-director Fred F. Sears. While no great, unheralded auteur, Sears knew his way around such pictures and how to maximize their potential despite modest budgets and absurdly...Read the entire review

Ah, Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot! Back when this 1967-68 Japanese tokusatsu (live-action but special effects-heavy) television series hit American shores in 1969, airing on UHF stations across the country throughout the '70s, bemused but entertained youngsters like myself marveled at its goofy menagerie of giant monsters, outlandish villains, and obvious but colorful miniature effects. We'd joke that where the buildings in a Godzilla picture would crumble somewhat realistically, and those on Ultra Man would usually look at least okay, everything on Johnny Sokko appeared to be made out of cardboard and construction paper. Unlike the sleekly designed Ultra Man, Johnny Sokko's Flying Robot looked like something one would find in an elementary school pageant.

The series all but vanished by the early-1980s, though bootleg videos of Voyage Into Space (1970), a dizzy...Read the entire review

I'm late to this party, having seen only scattered episodes of route 66 (1960-64) prior to writing this review, and despite the fact that it's been trickling out onto DVD for the past six years or so. However, The Complete Fourth Season, previously available only as part of a 2012 release of the complete series, turned up in DVD Talk's unloved screener bin and I thought I'd take a chance. This set sticks all twenty-three 50-odd-minute episodes onto five single-sided discs with no extra features.

Not having seen any episodes of route 66 at all in many years, I was impressed by its stronger episodes (and found several others entertainingly silly) while the video transfers are solidly good.

For the uninitiated, Martin Milner and Glenn Corbett s...Read the entire review

An unremarkable World War II meller, Ghost of the China Sea (1958) is of interest more for the talent involved than for the movie itself. The film combines personnel culled from Columbia's B-picture unit with artists usually associated with producer-director Roger Corman, notably writer-producer Charles B. Griffith (It Conquered the World, Little Shop of Horrors) and actor Jonathan Haze. At the time Griffith was anxious to move on to bigger and better things, and Ghost of the China Sea was supposed to be the first of five movies he was to make for Columbia. However, Griffith ended up making just one more picture for Columbia, Forbidden Island (1959), before returning to the Corman fold. Like Ghost of the China Sea, it was filmed entirely on location in Hawaii and co-starred Haze. Fred F. Sears directed Ghost of the China Sea while Griffith directed F...Read the entire review

I'd always assumed Mister 880 (1950) was written specifically for British character actor Edmund Gwenn, whose signature performance as Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street (1947) won him an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor. In Mister 880 Gwenn plays another elderly eccentric beloved by children and adults alike, and it likewise revolves around a young couple's conflicted emotions about the best way to address their friend's behavior. And, like Miracle on 34th Street, there's a big trial at the end where the old man faces possible incarceration, a prospect everyone would just as soon avoid.

And yet, astoundingly, Gwenn got the part only after Walter Huston, the actor originally cast in the part, died suddenly of an aortic aneurism. Huston, who'd won the same Best Supporting Actor Oscar one year after Gwenn for Treasure of the Sierra Madre, might have been te...Read the entire review

Most B movies of the 1930s through '50s consist of undemanding program pictures, formula entertainment designed to do nothing more or less than fill out the bottom-half of a double bill. Occasionally, however, studios used B pictures as a testing ground for new talent, and rarer still these movies would sometimes rise far above their second-class status. Such is the case of Heaven with a Barbed Wire Fence (1939), a 62-minute wonder with a story and characters similar to Kings Row - there's even a life-changing leg amputation in the middle of it - though apparently these similarities are mere coincidence, as Harry Bellamann's novel wasn't published until 1940.

The movie is a jumble of fascinating talent one wouldn't normally expect to find in the same picture. Top-billed is Jean Rogers, best remembered today as Dale Arden in the first two Flash Gordon serials, Flash Gordon (1936)...Read the entire review

Okay, I get it now. About a year-and-a-half ago I wrote a mixed-to-negative review of New Tricks, the popular BBC series about retired police officers recruited to solve cold cases. In that review I likened New Tricks to earlier, American comfort food-type mystery shows such as Murder, She Wrote, Matlock and Diagnosis: Murder. That's a fair comparison, but now realize I was overly harsh in criticizing the series' formula scripts. Formula they may be, but they're better tailored to the personalities driving the show than I first realized, and there's a darker undercurrent absent from New Tricks' American counterparts. In short, New Tricks grows on one, albeit slowly. Ironically, three of the four stars have left or are leaving the series: James Bolan after the first episode of...Read the entire review

Justifiably obscure, Zeta One (1969) is an alleged spy spoof/sci-fi sex comedy, made for just 60,000, but which still managed to attract name talent very familiar to British audiences. Neither fish nor fowl, the film tries to be several things at once but fails miserably at absolutely everything and is nearly unwatchable. It is, however, a peculiar artifact of its time and place, and not completely without interest.

Kino's Blu-ray of Zeta One, released under its "Jezebel" label, offers a pretty good 1080p transfer of this 1.66:1 Tigon British Film production. A trailer is included.

British secret agent James Word (charisma-free Robin Hawdon, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth) returns home to his swingin' bachelor pad, resembling a college freshman...Read the entire review