Valerie Vaughn

Charlie Chan: At the Wax Museum [VHS]
$19.98
After first seeing Warner Oland play Charlie Chan in a half-dozen or more pictures, this was my first look at Sidney Toler playing the famous detective. At first I thought he was a distant second to Oland but I have grown to like his version almost as much.

Sen Yung was almost as good as Keye Luke, too, as one of Chan's sons and helpers. Yung plays son "Jimmy" and adds a lot of humor to the movie.

What was really fun about this movie were all the varied characters. There were all kinds of suspects at the wax museum and many pretending to be statutes. The film was humorous and fascinating. Toler's films tended to have more humor in them. I enjoyed ogling Marguerite Chapman in this film.

This is now out on DVD as part of the Charlie Chan Volume 5 set of four films.

Cast Away
$9.99
I'm a big, big fan of this movie, so I was excited to get the blu-ray version, thinking it would be beautiful given the subject and location of the film.

Sadly, this is a blu-ray in technical format only. The transfer looks WORSE than the DVD version I have. That's right, worse. Skip this and wait for some "remastered" (and probably more expensive version).

Again, love the movie, loath the blu-ray transfer.

Stroker Ace
$9.98
This is not an academy winning film. It is a fun look back at one of Burt Reynolds films. Nothing more nothing less.

Stroker Ace
$2.99
If you want average TV quality, these three movies-in-one are okay. But some reviewers claimed that the "Sharky" supplied is widescreen. IT IS NOT. It also suffers from excessive compression, just like the older single disc Sharky DVD. They compressed it deeply to fit onto a single-layer cheapo DVD media. The ONLY ORIGINAL uncensored version of Sharky's Machine is still - sadly - only available (to the best of my knowledge) on LASERDISC.