Ask the Web Fu Master
by Tim Lehnerer
He'll find your rare movie on the Internet – or work up a good sweat trying.

August 21 2002

Hey! A second installment of Ask the Web Fu Master! You like me! YOU REALLY LIKE ME!

Thanks to the people who emailed me their questions, thus allowing me to continue searching for the odd, the obscure and the semi-hallucinatory on video and DVD.

Let's start with Gina Roberts, who asks if I can locate a romantic comedy called The Bachelor's Daughters. Romantic comedies make my teeth hurt, but the web fu master is nothing if not dedicated to his calling. You can find this one for twenty-five Yankee dollars at Robert's Hard to Find Videos; they're at http://www.robertsvideos.com and the direct link to this film is http://www.robertsvideos.com/product.php3?invid=17376&ref=/browse.php3?catid=100. I hope that you enjoy this one.

There's a message from "Smoove" that the Stomp Tokyo guys sent me asking if I can track down a grey-market copy of the director's cut of Hard Target, the Sam Raimi/John Woo/Lance Henriksen collaboration. Oh yeah, the Belgian cokehead is supposedly the star of this one although the DC supposedly focuses more on the villain, because bad guys are cool and because Lance Henriksen is just orders of magnitude better on screen than Van Damme. There's a guy selling copies at http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Lair/4036/hongkong.html and good luck to you. Twenty-two bucks for a Van Damme movie is insane; twenty-two bucks for John Woo and Lance Henriksen is a great idea though.

John Hilbert, a librarian on a mission, asks if I can help him find a copy of Attack of the Crab Monsters. Because all libraries need exploitation movies I'm happy to help. It hasn't been released on DVD yet but Amazon.com has it on VHS for a reasonable price. C'mon, John. Amazon. It's a pretty easy search. You have a Masters' Degree in LIS, dude.

"Sam" from AOL wants to know where you can get a copy of the Victor Mature/Hal Roach film One Million B.C. The dinosaur footage from this one got rented out to several different '50s and '60s science fiction movies; the only one I can remember that used it off the top of my head is King Dinosaur. That was also the first MST3K episode I'd ever seen. The circle of B-movie life comes around again. There are three copies on sale at http://www.half.com ; they unfortunately are a bit pricey (48 bucks for the cheap one). And this version doesn't even have Racquel Welch in a fur bikini.

SHAROSCB from America Online wants to know where to find the Disney-made kiddie suspense films Mr. Boogedy and Bride of Boogedy. They have never been released on VHS or DVD in the United States as far as I can tell. However, you might want to check the listings for the ABC Family Channel in October and see if they rerun these as features in their "13 Days of Halloween" spooky family movie marathon. They're owned by Disney so it's a possibility, if not actually a certainty. Other than that, there are a couple of Ebay auctions where people are selling copies taped off of TV or dubs of British video releases; it's not particularly clear from the auction descriptions. It might work out for you; you might get burned. Good luck though.

Second-to-lastly, there's a request from Luigi Pirello, an alert reader from Italy, who would like to know if there is any information about Stacie Randall out there on the web. The answer is no. Even the thorough and obsessive types at www.thespian.net don't have more than a photo and a "bio unavailable" tag. Sorry, man, but the Web Fu Master will keep searching in the hopes of finding something for you.

Lastly, here's one that I don't think I can answer but maybe a reader can:

Devoted badmovies.net reader Brian Parratt asks if I can identify a pair of kung fu movies based on some fragmentary information. So far, I can't. Here's his query:

1. Hong Kong kung-fu movie (Media Asia?) involving one of the main characters using a small wooden stool during the fight scene.

2. another Hong Kong kung-fu movie (Media Asia?) involving a final battle scene with the 2 guys fighting on ladders and pushing the ladders across the room from the 1st floor landing.

That's it for this installment of Ask the Web Fu Master. If you have a thing you'd like me to try and find please contact me at telstarman@yahoo.com or send your query to the Stomp Tokyo guys; they'll send it to me and ideally I can find it for you.

Read the previous installment of Ask the Web Fu Master.