My son and I were talking about foolproof movie subjects - for me it’s submarines, prison and time travel. I will watch movies on these subjects that I suspect I won’t like. We got to talking about specific movies and I mentioned The Final Countdown featuring Kirk Douglas and Martin Sheen and the USS Nimitz. I realised I had seen this at a theatre and never saw it again. It wasn’t ever on TV and I don’t recall ever seeing a video at a video store. I now crave to see it again and can’t find it.
I may have to get a DVD player just so I can buy that disc set. I loved that movie, as “What ifs?” and alternate history are some of my favorite speculative fiction.
Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, the movie that supposedly changed the way Hollywood works, is very difficult to find. Then again, it wasn’t a very good movie…
Tapeheads, a slight but very amusing comedy starring Tim Robbins and John Cusack that IIRC was released in the fall of 1988 and dropped off the face of the earth in a week. I saw it when it came out and laughed my head off, was baffled to find shortly after that it had disappeared from theaters when some friends couldn’t find it playing anywhere. Eventually it was released on video. Great music, including appearances by Junior Walker and Sam Moore and worth the price just for the video starring King Cotton as the owner of a chicken and waffles restaurant.
What a great call. I have never heard of this and look at it - A Mike Nesmith production with roles for people like Junior Walker, King Cotton, Stiv Bators as Dick Slammer, Bob Goldthwait, Jello Biafra as an FBI agent (obviously), ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic, Ted Nugent, Michael Nesmith.
Inchon. An epic detailing the amphibious invasion of Korea. With the bewildering casting of Laurence Olivier as Gen. MacArthur.
Another one that had disappeared until recently was Boom, which was based on a Tennessee Williams play. I remember seeing a few minutes of it on late-night weekend TV in the late 70s. The main thing I remember was at the beginning Liz Taylor and Noel Coward doing this awful yoo-hooing at one another.
The High and the Mighty is owned by the estate of John Wayne, and they’re just a-sittin’ on it, for reasons they won’t even discuss. Ted Turner has offered them lots of money to show it, but they’ve turned it down.
And two more, that I’ve only read about, that were both UN-sponsored movies that aired only once on TV, and disappeared into someone’s vault.
Who Has Seen the Wind I know absolutely nothing about the plot of this movie, but a cast list that includes Theodore Bikel, Edward G. Robinson, and Gypsy Rose Lee!
This is getting far wierder than I had expected. Have a look at Earl Snake-Hips Tucker’s pick Who Has Seen the Wind?. It has no reviews, no votes and apart from the names Earl Snake-Hips Tucker recognised, has prominent British actor Stanley Baker and Maria Schell, Glenn Ford’s co-star in Cimarron.
Arzner and Lubitsch were among the directors, Joseph Mankiewicz wrote it, Jean Arthur, Mischa Auer, Clara Bow, Maurice Chevalier, Kay Francis, Frederic March, William Powell, and Charles “Buddy” Rogers are in the cast.
However, it has never been released on DVD, video, or laserdisc, and appears to have not been aired on TV since the late 1980’s, probably due to the fact that 25 min. of the film is missing.
I remember Blood of Heroes from its one-week stay in movie theaters. I’m not saying it’s a good movie (though I don’t recall it being memorably bad, either), but it’s definitely a vanished movie that even Rutger Hauer fans I’ve met have never heard of. I do see lots of votes for it at IMDB, so maybe it was subsequently rediscovered.
It’s about a kid growing up in Crocus, Saskatchewan (really my home town, Weyburn) in the '30s. He spends quite a bit of time out on the prairie just watching all that space, hence the title. (Although the author always denied basing any characters on real life, some of those people were still around when I was growing up.) It’s slow-moving at times, but not a bad movie. As usual, the book is better. There’s also a CBC mini-series based on Mitchell’s Jake and the Kid stories, set in the same era on a farm out of town, though I don’t know if it’s out on video or DVD.
I think it’s called Sole Survivor … ? a movie about a band of pilots who crashland in the desert or something. I saw it on TV years ago, never seen it again since. Loads of people ask about it when this sort of thread appears on MBs
Shinbone Alley, an animated movie which I caught on cable when I was a wee lad and I didn’t really understand it because it’s really more of an adult story and has a pretty bleak mood about it, but it fascinated me. I have never seen it since then, and I had to do a google search to remember the title. Here is the IMDB entry.
How about the miniseries Amerika? This has never been shown since the original 1987 showing. Never released on VHS. With all the cable stations, I am still amazed that no station has ever shown it again. Never released on VHS or DVD.
*Shinbone Alley * was amazing, incorporating huge chunks of Don Marquis’ book into an oddball animated film that owed much more to Krazy Kat than to Disney. NOT for children. Great movie, though. It was released on VHS years ago, but I don’t know by whom.
Light Years, another oddball animated feature, supposedly written by Isaac Asimov, and featured the voices of Glenn Close and Penn & Teller (yes, Teller’s voice). Saw it ages ago. Haven’t been able to find it since.
Was Inchon ever released on video? Been lookin’ for that one for years. I hear it’s bad beyond bad.
I was delighted to see that Something Weird recently released *Blood Freak * on DVD. Any anti-drug horror movie featuring a *wereturkey * deserves some form of immortality…
Johnny Got His Gun, starring Jason Robards, Timothy Bottoms, and others. Written/directed by Dalton Trumbo. Tim stars as a terrified WWI recruit who is shredded in an artillery hit. The doctors decide he’s a veggie, and amputate his arms and legs to see how long he’ll live on the primitive life support of the time. Tim isn’t a veggie, and wakes up to realize he has no limbs… and no face. He can’t communicate with the hospital staff, who sedate him every time he begins thrashing around. The movie therefore slides into weird segues between the black-and-white “real” world of the hospital, and the colorful “dream” world of flashbacks to Tim’s earlier life… which begin to get weirder and weirder as he gets crazier. With Donald Sutherland as Jesus Christ. I’d LOVE to find this one on DVD – it may be the most powerful antiwar movie I’ve ever seen…
As a member of generation X, I’m familiar with this movie through Metallica’s song One. The video for the song features numerous clips from Johnny. I later bought a copy of the novel at a thrift store. I stopped some fifty pages in. The protagonist has spent perhaps four pages on the realization that he is deaf and has no arms. An equal amount of pages were spent on the Bermuda onions his mother used to grow. It was possible that the realization he was blind, mute, and legless came soon and that things got interesting at that point. I lost the will to keep reading and find out.
I would love to see the film though.
Re Blood Of Heroes
Back when I had cable this film popped up at least every few months. It’s the only sports film I actually like.