16. DON’T WORRY, WE’LL THINK OF A TITLE (1966) ^ Borscht Belt shtickmeister Morey Amsterdam had a rare chance at a starring role in a feature film with this Cold War comedy in which he plays a bumbler inexplicably mistaken for a defecting cosmonaut. Typical of many comedies of the era, the film was packed with an all-star line-up in cameo appearances–in this case, Danny Thomas, Milton Berle, Nick Adams, Steve Allen, Irene Ryan in character as Granny from “The Beverly Hillbillies” and Moe Howard (minus the other two Stooges) in a completely straight part as a lawyer. Amsterdam’s cohorts from “The Dick Van D**e Show” (Rose Marie, Richard Deacon and Carl Reiner) also put in appearances. ^ WHY IS THIS FILM NOT ON VIDEO? United Artists picked up the film but had little faith in it. The theatrical run was brief and barely noted and the film quickly slipped into obscurity. It occasionally pops up at odd late hours on TV, but no one has ever gone out of the way to secure it for home video release.
17. THE BIG CUBE (1969) ^ In the late 1960s, several Hollywood productions attempted to cash in on the youth-oriented drug culture while maintaining old-time Tinseltown talent on-screen to placate older audiences. The results were usually ghastly and “The Big Cube” was typical of this kind of hybrid approach. Lana Turner, at the tail end of her long and glamourous career, plays a wealthy woman who is being slowly killed by a fortune-hunting heir (one-time Oscar winner George Chakiris) through surreptitious samplings of LSD. Lana’s freak-out P.O.V. trips on acid elicited groans and/or laughter when the film was first released, although later audiences looked back on “The Big Cube” as an unexpected triumph of campy entertainment. ^ WHY IS THIS FILM NOT ON VIDEO? The initial embarrassment of the film’s theatrical failure haunted in through the years and the commercial viability of releasing three-decade-old camp is not enticing enough to resurrect the film for a new wider audience.
Get the complete list in the next part of NEVER ON VIDEO II: THE NEXT TOP 20 “MISSING” MOVIES>>>
