It seems someone at Netflix has been reading FilmDrunk, because White Dog is now available on Netflix Instant.  In 1982, Paramount completed White Dog, a Samuel Fuller film about, you guessed it, a pure white Aryan canine who hated black people and their rambunctious jungle music.  Fearing negative press over accusations of racism, they showed it in France and the UK and on certain US cable outlets, but never released it in the US, until a Criterion version on DVD in 2008.  Which is a shame, because not only is the film not racist, it’s pretty harshly anti-racist:

Director Samuel Fuller uses the film as a platform to deliver an antiracist message as it examines the question of whether racism is a treatable problem or an incurable disease. Critics praised the film’s hard line look at racism and Fuller’s use of melodrama and metaphors to present his argument, and its somewhat disheartening ending that leaves the impression that while racism is learned, it cannot be cured. [Wiki]

I just love the trailer, because while it’s a little edgy, it’s pretty much exactly like Unstoppable.

“That’s a WHITE DOG!”
“Of course he’s a white dog.”
“I don’t mean his color! I mean he’s taught to attack and kill black people!”
[...]
“Come on, Julie, you’ve got a four-legged time bomb!”

You’re telling me I’ve got an UNLEASHED DOG running loose through a POPULATED AREA?!?! …That’s not just a DOG, it’s a MISSILE the size of the CHRYSLER BUILDING!  And IT HATES BLACKS!

I hope you all have a good excuse for not bringing this film to my attention sooner, because watching this trailer was a truly transcendent moment. It’s like a koala bear crapped a double rainbow inside my brain.  Luckily GreatWhiteSnark was around to bring it to my attention.  Anyway, it’s called Little Hercules 3D, and let me see if I can imagine the pitch:

• Start with Little Hercules, aka Richard Sandrak, now 17 years old and not really that buff anymore, and give him a dollar-store Hercules outfit
• Add Hulk Hogan, and the entire Hogan clan, including the stupid one sporting a stupid mohawk
• Give him a black sidekick.  Wait, no.  Move him in with a black family (call Robin Givens) so he can learn how to dance hip hop and talk street
• Throw in a pinch of WWE’s Big Show
• JUDD NELSON.
• ???
• Profit.

Perhaps I’m being a little too harsh. We all did some things we aren’t proud of back in the early 2000s… Wait, what’s that?  This movie was filmed in 2009 and went straight to DVD three months ago? (Though it does appear to have theatrical distribution in the Czech Republic). That is… trippy.  Now, I know what you’re probably thinking: isn’t a little strange to be shooting a direct-to-DVD film in 3D?  Not necessarily.  3D televisions do exist, and who would own them if not members of the same socioeconomic class that would be renting Little Hercules, starring Judd Nelson and Big Show?  The audience for this probably has one in every room.

This one’s called “My Baby is Black” and comes from 1961.  It’s actually available on DVD.  “Conceived In Love… Delivered into HATE!”  “The story of ‘All the Way’ May and the apple truck worker, the black buck whose seed was dropped deep in her womb only to conceive a mongrel!”

Apparently it was supposed to be about the horrors of bigotry, but erudite satire and b-movie exploitation flicks don’t always make for the happiest marriage, much like mixing between the races. Wait, what?  Anyway, they sure don’t make them like they used to. (*sigh*)

Someday we should do a double feature of this and White Dog, the most awesomely politically incorrect double feature of all time.

(I guess this was on Opie & Anthony a while back — they’ve got even more delightful sound clips):

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Today’s forgotten classic, 1996′s Theodore Rex, must’ve had a dynamite pitch. I think it could even be a haiku:

Stars Whoopi Goldberg
Futuristic buddy-cops
Dinosaur partner.

Clearly an attempt to cash in on the mid-90s anthropomorphic dinosaur comedy craze, you’d think a film with such a simple, winning formula would be destined for success.  Instead, Whoopi Goldberg tried to get out of her verbal contract to star in the film, then got sued for $20 million.  They eventually settled on her starring in the film for $2 million more than she was originally promised, but the first test screenings were such a disaster that New Line decided to release it direct-to-video.  Making it, at $33.5 million dollars, the most expensive direct-to-video film ever.  Director Jonathan Betuel hasn’t made a film since. In any case, critics regard it as one of the finest examples of Jewish stereotypes in dinosaur form in the history of cinema, influencing such later works as Jar Jar Binks and Mudflap and Skids from the Transformers movies.  Some say the film still projects in continuously loop on the inside of Jerry Bruckheimer’s eyelids whenever he falls asleep.  How else to explain Kangaroo Jack?

Cocaine is a hell of a drug.  -Thanks to Patrick for the tip

Few people today know that before Ronald Reagan won the Cold War by arm wrestling Mikhail Gorbechev and personally conquered Granada on horseback (as I learned in this history book I bought in Texas), he was an actor.  That’s right, he delivered lines on cue and faked emotions on command like a trained monkey.  How this could possibly have prepared him for a career in politics is anyone’s guess.  In any case, in 1954, he starred in this long lost episode of General Electric Theater, “The Dark, Dark Hours,” opposite up and comer James Dean, who I embarrassingly learned last week is not the sausage guy.  Writes The Atlantic‘s John Moroney:

No one has seen this episode in the decades since; the kinescope has been locked away, until now. My friend Wayne Federman, a writer for NBC’s Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, unearthed the broadcast, condensing it from its original 23 minutes (without commercials) into the six-minute version you see below. (Federman is planning a retrospective of Reagan’s television career for next year’s Reagan centennial.) [via HuffPo]

The above video is a condensed, six-minute version of the 23-minute original.  James Dean plays a dangerous, jazz-lovin’ hepcat who brings his wounded buddy into Dr. Reagan’s house to get him fixed up at gun point.  But he’s all threats and jive talk and finger snaps, and soon it all goes to pieces.  He wasn’t a bad kid, he just got seduced by the beat of that rambunctious, negro jungle music and it got him all mixed up inside.  But in doing, he taught as all a valuable lesson.  Things were so much simpler then.

-Thanks, Erswi