Another Stakeout (1993) + Big Business (1988) + Gross Anatomy (1989) + Money For Nothing (1993) + My Father The Hero (1994) + V.I. Warshawski (1991/Mill Creek Blu-rays/Touchstone Pictures/Hollywood Pictures)

 

Picture: C+     Sound: C+     Extras: D     Films: C-/C+/C/C/C-/D

 

 

Once upon a time, The Walt Disney Company was in big trouble and decided to rebuild when new management took over.  Animation was so expensive, so they secretly set up a new live-action division called Touchstone and it was a secret for a while (until Michael Eisner was interviewed in a famous 60 Minutes segment) and they started having hits that were not too expensive to make.  The result was a new division that was very profitable and made what we here at the site refer to as “mall movies” which are just entertaining enough and safe (read not challenging) so you’ll be happy enough to spend money at the mall when your film is over.  It was the studio actors, writers and directors went to when they needed to make a comeback.

 

The films were sometimes big hits and other times, moderate moneymakers, though a few were bombs or disappointments and Disney launched a sister division, boldly called Hollywood Pictures.  They started with a disappointment (The Medicine Man) their best film was a point of controversy (Oliver Stone’s Nixon) and it eventually became a division with few hits.  However, both did well enough for the studio that after many decades, they were now a major studio.

 

Disney has decided to license some of those titles to Mill Creek for their Blu-ray debut and we now look at six of them.

 

 

John Badham (Dracula with Frank Langella, Blue Thunder, Saturday Night Fever) may have waited too long to helm Another Stakeout (1993), a sequel to the hit Stakeout with Richard Dreyfus and Emilio Estevez.  Joined by a then-unknown Rosie O’Donnell, the film was all over the place, not knowing what to do or understanding why the first film worked to begin with.  A costly disappointment, it is a curio and helped wind down Badham’s career.  Cathy Moriarty, Dennis Farina and Marcia Strassman also star.

 

Jim Abrahams’ Big Business (1988) is the best of the six films here and near the end of a contract Disney had with Bette Midler, the first time the studio ever put a major star under contract as they did with her.  The comedy has Midler and the great Lily Tomlin as a set of twins who were mixed up at birth due to a hospital mistake.  One duo is rich and runs a “rob & pillage” corporation called Moramax, while the other sisters live in a small country town the corporation intends to strip mine after driving everyone away.

 

Though not the funniest film ever, the effects of having the actresses on screen as two people was groundbreaking at the time and there are some laughs here, though its ideas about class division and bad corporate behavior made it an early casualty of films targeted for even hinting at such things in a sort of corporate version of political correctness and the resulting campaign hurt the film at the box office.

 

However, Tomlin is great, Midler is also very funny and the supporting performances are not bad either. 

 

Thom Eberhardt’s Gross Anatomy (1989) is an average drama overall that has some overly melodramatic moments, but the tale of a slick medical student (Matthew Modine) romancing a fellow student (Daphne Zuniga, who is not bad here) and clashing with his professor (the underappreciated Christine Lahti) has more good moments than I recalled.  It also reminds me that outside of Full Metal Jacket, Modine could still act and if he were a star at a different time with better films, would have easily become a bigger star.  In the wake of several hit medical dramas, the film holds up well enough for what it is.

 

Ramon Menendez’s Money For Nothing (1993) takes place in Philadelphia, but was actually shot in sister Pennsylvania city Pittsburgh (sloppy shots include seeing the Cathedral Of Learning among others) and is based on a true story of a young man (John Cusack) who finds over a million dollars of money lost from a delivery truck.  The problem is that it is too much of a comedy and the screenplay misses some great opportunities in telling what is a very interesting story.

 

However, this is a film that has a great cast of actors before they had great success including James Gandolfini, Benicio Del Toro, Michael Madsen, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Debi Mazur, Michael Rapaport, Maury Chaykin, Fionnula Flanagan and Frankie Faison.  Too bad it has awful continuity and misses the boat.

 

At the time Steve Miner’s My Father The Hero (1994) arrived, he had not turned into a half-baked Horror film director and the idea that Gérard Depardieu (then known for so many French hits, big box office to go with it and even art films) would do any Hollywood film was a wacky novelty in itself.  Not that the film was very good, but it not only offers a cameo by Emma Thompson, but has Lauren Hutton and a then-unknown Katherine Heigl as his daughter who we see more of than you might expect.  Too bad the comedy is one note and the film falls flat.

 

The poorest film here is based on a series of detective/private eye books that threw them out and resulted in a bad film.  Jeff Kanew’s V.I. Warshawski (1991) has Kathleen Turner as the title character, solving murder cases in Chicago.  What could have been an interesting series is undermined by bad move after bad move after bad decision after big mistake.  A hockey star is killed and his 13-year-old daughter hires her to help and protect her, but this becomes a ridiculous exercise in child in jeopardy moments.  The dialogue is dumb, the plotting inept, the action weak and even Turner’s attempts at martial arts only work so well.  Even Charles Durning cannot save the film.  At least the trailer (featuring the Robert Palmer hit “Simply Irresistible”) is not included here.

 

 

All have 1080p digital High Definition transfers, but most look like older HD masters.  We get the best performance from Another Stakeout, which despite some soft shots is the only film here in 2.35 X 1 and was shot in real anamorphic Panavision.  The best shots are of Las Vegas, with demo quality worthy of the Viva Las Vegas Blu-ray, but the image is nice overall with few problems except some weak color in day shots and the age of the print in places.  The 1.78 X 1 image on Business and Anatomy show their age much more, but still have some good shots, yet there is grain, though not as bad as Warshawski, which would rate lower if it were any worse.  Money is the second worst, starting in its original 2.35 X 1, then turning into 1.78 X 1 for the rest of the film, which looks bad and it too was shot in real anamorphic Panavision.  That leaves a 1.85 X 1 Father which also has some nice shots, yet also shows its age more often than it should, though it should be said they all look better than their DVD counterparts, if narrowly in some cases.

 

The DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) lossless 2.0 Stereo mixes on all six films are about as good as can be expected, with all of them being issued in the older Dolby analog A-type noise reduction system, save Another Stakeout, which was a Dolby Digital 5.1 theatrical release that should have had that kind of soundtrack instead.  As for the rest, I cannot imagine them sounding much better than they do here, sad as that may be.  There are no extras on any of them.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo