17 great movies that are inexplicably not available for streaming anywhere
From James Cameron and George A. Romero classics to hidden indie gems, these films are only available on physical media
Film Features Liza Minnelli
For all you digital disciples: do you ever wonder why some friends still collect physical media? After all, why have any clutter when everything’s available on streaming? Maybe it’s because not every movie you want to watch is actually available via streaming services. While some titles come and go from those platforms, others still haven’t gotten there yet. We’re not sure why this happens. Is it a bitter rights war? A purposeful lag to rebuild interest? Spiteful negligence? We’re often in the dark about these things.
Absence may make the heart grow fonder, but when that hiatus feels permanent it just leads to frustration. Here’s a collection of mainstream hits, respected indies, and cult curios from esteemed directors like James Cameron, David Lynch, George A. Romero, and Alan Rudolph that somehow have fallen off the streaming radar. Hopefully someone will pay attention and they’ll be back soon.
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Samantha Mathis in Pump Up The Volume was a 90’s crush
Samantha Mathis in Pump Up The Volume was a 90’s crush FTFY
Take your star!
I just watched Strange Days on HBO Max.
Strange Days in on HBOMax
Strange Days is currently streaming on HBO Max.https://kotaku.com/strange-days-streaming-cyberpunk-2077-braindance-1849945692
Yeah. Just got added. People have been making a big deal about it.
Ya ever JACK IN?The trailers for that movie were the worst. And then the movie was released after all this build up and it landed like a hot shart.
Hahaha…for as long as HBOmax is still alive, at least. /shrugs
I still can’t believe Wild at Heart is not available.
You’d think they would know that Bobby Peru is the most exciting item to hit Big Tuna and would be the most exciting item to hit their streaming service since that cyclone sheered the roof off of the Netflix building.
Bobby Peru remains probably the most thoroughly vile character I’ve ever seen on screen. Went out with a flourish, though.
That movie is great. Only David Lynch could make a movie where Nicolas Cage is the least crazy person on screen most of the time.
For sure. Even Dern, sweet as she comes off, gets hot and bothered hearing Cage tell stories about banging other women. Diane Ladd was probably the craziest among then whole crowd.
My dog barks some.
I you have an Android tv box and get Filmplus+ you will find Wild at Heart on it.
Thankfully I have my own (DVD…sigh) copy of The Wall. It’s the movie I’ve watched the most as I tend to put it on for background noise then end up watching it.
In college I saw the wall and clockwork orange on the same night in an altered state. I am surprised I survived.
Should have capped it off with actually watching “Altered State” to really give you a case of the mindfucks
Isn’t Altered States another film in streaming Limbo?
Nah, you can rent it from a few different places these days
I feel like, legally speaking, once cannabis is legalized in a state every citizen should be allowed to stream “The Wall” for free. Also included is a pre-sync Wizard of Oz/Dark side of the Moon. It would be like college all over again
In Rogers and Gilmour’s newest legal kerfuffle, Gilmour wants the rights to the Floyd catalogue to pass into a more liberal state of availability – so bands can more fully cover their music – or even become like a Greatful Dead with new touring members. (If I understood it right.) Plus they argued over the Animals re-release. And Waters wants mentions on The Official Pink Floyd website.All this to say… The Wall is probably tangentially tied up in some of this.
My copy’s on VHS, and though I haven’t watched it in awhile, it used to make a great double feature with Live at Pompeii, which I also have on VHS.
I have a copy too, last time I put it on, I said I was just going to watch the beginning sequence (because the opening sequence is mastefull filmmaking) but I ended up watching the whole thing. As an aside, I watched Angel Heart recently for the first time in decades and I notice like 3 scenes were lifted right out if The Wall.
I love Pump Up the Volume. The soundtrack introduced a young me to Concrete Blonde and my life hasn’t been the same.
Kick out the Jams with Henry Rollins and Bad Brains introduced me to Bad Brains and MC5. Great soundtrack!
You’re not wrong. ‘Why Can’t I Fall in Love’ is frickin iconic, and I have it on many a writing playlist.
Seriously, one of the best soundtracks for me growing up. If you don’t fall in love with Johnette Napolitano doing Everybody Knows with Concrete Blonde, you are tone deaf. It’s also where I got my first taste of the Pixies (I still love Wave of Mutilation and consider it the preeminent Rainy Day Song) and the Cowboy Junkies and started me down a long path of being permanent fans.The interesting thing about the movie is they used several songs that didn’t appear in the soundtrack but were so good, I actively sought them out after looking in the credits. Love Comes in Spurts by Richard Hell, WeinerSchnitzel by the Decedents, FastLane by Urban Dance Squad, even the wildly nuts Hello Dad….I’m in Jail by Was Not Was were among other notables.
Huh. I’ve only ever heard Everybody Knows a couple of times, and until right now, I thought it was 4 Non Blondes. Wrong fricking blonde.
Talking about soundtracks that rocked my world: “Singles” (1992) and the eight-and-a-half-minute *epic*, “Drown”,
(Which…what the fuck? All music platforms only have the radio edit? I gotta slum over to Youtube for the full cut? Damn.)Here:
It’s my favorite SP song.
I don’t know if it’s my all-out favorite Smashing Pumpkins songs, but it’s one of my favorite songs, period (if that makes sense).
“State of Love and Trust” is one of my favorite Pearl Jam songs to this day. That soundtrack is all killer, no filler.
Seriously. /nods head appreciatively
Paul Westerberg put together the soundtrack for that movie, including a couple of new originals (Dyslexic Heart most notably). Talk about tabbing the bands that would be the soundtrack for most of the next decade; PJ, AiC, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, just incredible. State of Love and Trust, Drown, Would and Birth Ritual remain some of my favorites from their respective bands even now.
Haha, I remember sending my gf mixtapes loaded with Concrete Blonde stuff and she’d send back tapes with songs off of this.
Pump Up the Volume is an awesome movie with one of the great 90s soundtracks. It was available for streaming up until a few months ago – can’t remember which platform, but I watched it last summer.
I want to say I saw it on Prime, which was my first time ever seeing it. Was around the time before the pandemic, I want to say 2018-19.
I guess I just can’t stand Slater and his poor attempt at trying to sound like Jack Nicholson, so I hated the movie now and then.
I’m glad he got over that phase. The arched eyebrows and vocal inflections were practically an impersonation in Heathers and PUTV. Granted that’s also what sort of put him on the map, critics pointing out the similarities. So I guess he got what he wanted out of it at the time.
Go watch Winning Time on HBO about the Lakers. Slater plays Nicholson (not much screen time though).
I can get behind that, now that he hasn’t based his career on looking and sounding like him for a couple of decades. Good call on their part.
Fair assessment.
That movie was directly responsible for getting me into radio broadcasting and its soundtrack opened my world up to a slew of great talents in music. At the time, I related to Christian Slater’s character big time as a nerdy social pariah who just wanted my true voice heard and to not judged by my looks alone. It gave me hope in a very dark time in my life. 1990 was the worst year of my life, and his speech about suicide in that film played no small part in keeping me from taking my own life.
It’s strange that this even made the list. The first time I actually even saw this film was on streaming. Don’t feel like I missed a ton with it. Music clearance does seem to be the defining factor here though, which I find strange given that music copyright on YouTube is a thing, but apparently on streaming too?
My impression is this movie is vitally important to many of us who were 16-18 when it came out and wholly inconsequential to everyone else.
I have this on DVD, fortunately, and I still love it. As others have said, the soundtrack was hugely influential on me, introducing me to a lot of bands I hadn’t heard of before, and I still prefer the slowed-down, gorgeous, moody UK Surf version of Wave of Mutilation on the soundtrack to the original one off of Doolittle, which I heard after I saw the movie.
Isn’t the explanation why many of these movies aren’t on streaming is that getting the music clearances for the films on streaming would cost more than the revenue they would generate?
In the case of Strange Days, that’s interesting. I can’t find the soundtrack anywhere anymore. I used to have it on CD.
That was my first thought.
Music clearance is a big one. I know in Dawn of the Dead’s case, it’s because the producer sank a lot of money into a 3D conversion of the film, right as 3D had peaked, and in order to recoup the sunk cost from that largely fruitless endeavor, his asking price to license has been very high. Criterion, for example, has reportedly made several enquiries and would love to add this to their lineup, but the asking price has been too high. As a result, the movie is not only unavailable to stream, but in the U.S. it’s out of print on physical media, meaning you have to buy old copies, or copies from overseas (where it is available).
Really? Do some people still be trying to recoup money spent for a film released in 1978?
According to Sony they’re still trying to recoup the money they spent making Men in Black.
yeah but sometimes they say that because they agreed to pay profits so they are lying to steal from the artists using magical accounting
People are trying to recoup money from movies made in 1928. As of Jan 1st, movies made in 1927 or before are public domain, including the first talkie, “The Jazz Singer” (warning, blackface). Copyright is weird.
Good thing I still have my old VHS copy. Nothing to play it on mind you…
One reason I kept my DVHS unit long past its obsolescence in playing D-Theater and recording High Def stuff the better part of 20 years ago now is that I doubt there are more than a handful of other VHS capable decks out there with an HDMI output. I’ll have people over who when for fun I put a tape in are outright shocked. Now if I could just figure out how to get a firewire connection going on modern computer to convert VHS to digital…
Or: you could just watch any version of it you want on YouTube any time you want.
For free.
(I honestly believe it’s what Romero would’ve wanted…)
With 1990s movies, a common problem is that films were often partially funded by production companies that no longer exist, so some rights holders can be tricky to identify.
AKA the Wonder Years effect.
My mind went to WKRP in Cincinnati
I remember it took forever for The State to be released on DVD because it had been on MTV and used TONS of music that was now not able to be cleared. I think they went through the whole process of recording soundalikes and redoing some of the audio…which is better than nothing but give me a fucking break why couldn’t all of the publishing houses just accept the free advertising 20 years later?
I HAVE to think that’s the case with Pump Up the Volume.
I unabashedly love The Abyss, and yes— director’s cut makes more sense. I wish everyone could see it.However, Cameron made life so miserable for his newcomers that Ed Harris punched him on-set and has said he’ll never work with him again, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio has said the same thing and basically refuses to discuss the film when asked about it. Yeesh…
Funny how Cameron has a lot of actors willing to work with him multiple times, but everybody on that one movie was like, hell no, never again. (Biehn excepted, came back for a deleted scene in T2) I remember hearing Paxton was cast in The Abyss and he must’ve been glad later that he didn’t stay on.
That would be an interesting one to have a “hearts of darkness” style documentary done about it, as the story from everyone is it was like being in a very wet hell. Plus, more information about the really cool ‘rat scene’ is always welcome.
I actually just…er…found a really nice copy of the extended version (amalgamated from several sources and done pretty well—good quality, but not quite full HD)—it’s not great, honestly. It’s an achievement in film-making for sure, since Cameron can’t seem to make a ‘regular’ movie. Honestly it’s a little amusing how little pull he had at the time, because the theatrical version of this film barely makes sense. The 3-hour version is definitely the better of the two (as the stakes are far more urgent).Buuuut….the story is, frankly, goofy (though heartfelt for sure) and while the effects were fantastic at the time, but don’t look nearly as good now. The ‘water tentacle’ is still the best effect in the film by a mile, but the rest is hurt by poor green screen work. The dialogue is honestly groan-inducing throughout most of the film. Still, I’d definitely buy a nice 4K, Cameron overseen remaster, mostly for it’s place in history.
I’m going to assume the director’s cut isn’t as whiplash-inducing as the the theatrical version? I’ve only see the latter and while it’s been ages, I mostly remember being undewhelmed by the alien ex machina ending.
That’s mostly what’s added—a longer explanation of the ending…though, admittedly, it does take a more “straighten up or we’ll fuck you up” approach typical of “aliens realizing that humans are screwing up the world” genre. It could entirely be that Cameron wanted to soften that and made the edits himself, but he could have stood for some reshoots (which I’m guessing if he even tried the cast refused) so it made more sense–and was less whiplash inducing.
I never have any trouble finding the movies I want…
in the back, through the special curtain.
Pirate Bay is not a streaming service
Pirate Bay? What decade are you in, old timer?If the writer of this article was using the streaming service I use, the title of the article would be “4 great movies that are inexplicably not available for streaming anywhere”Anyway, off to watch Pump Up the Volume – which I forgot was a thing.Pirate Bay. lol.
I still use Pirate Bay! downloading the latest Mythic Quest episode off it now. I’m open to a better suggestion, but it still seems to work.
I would never recommend someone use a streaming website to not have to download things like the latest episode of Mythic Quest and would tell anyone interested in streaming said show or movies or whatever to NEVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES visit a link that looked like this:https://primewire.id/series/mythic-quest-204r0/3-10Having said that I still pay for Apple TV, netflix, Disney+, HBO, Amazon Prime and Hulu – but if I want to watch something and can’t find it there then I’m going to find it somehow.
I know I’m still paying for Hulu, Netflix and Disney+. Just because other people use it though. Oh and prime for shipping. I don’t think I’d ever pay for Apple TV. I’m not sure what they’re even doing in the streaming business.
The only Apple TV exclusives I wanted to see were Wolfwalkers and The Velvet Underground, and I got them both on Blu-ray. Don’t tell Apple.
It’s also not where I get my torrents. Streaming is available on some of those sites BTW. Not that I said I needed to stream them to find them or watch them…
You’re right, it’s more like Redbox.
No but combine the files you download with Plex and you’ve got a nice personal streaming service.
And if you have a friend who put his whole, giant DVD collection on his PLEX and made it available to his friends – score!
Strange Days was added to HBO Max on Jan. 1.
A slideshow of things I can’t watch (except Strange Days apparently)? Neat.
Most of these are pretty common on DVD.
Go watch Gotcha!. There are scenes where people are running around with paintball guns and real guns on a college campus and nobody cares or reacts. It would be international news today. Also a cute movie.
It’s also got a very ‘80s theme song that I love. It also reminds me of the Gotcha dancers on Parks and Recreation.
I actually saw it in the theaters back in the 1980s.
Nice! I probably saw it on HBO back then while crashing my way through the horrors of puberty. I do think I saw Cocoon in theaters, though. One of my favorites back then..
I walked the 2 miles to the theater and saw it by myself before I had a drivers license.
i love Gotcha! It was on HBO for a loooong time and then it got pulled last year.
“Go watch Gotcha!”I think you missed the title of this article.
I don’t know about you, but my Blockbuster is a paint store now.Guess I’ll have to settle for Miracle Mile to get my A.E. fix.
$6 Amazon
Actually, I own it on VHS. I’ll rent it to you for $2.50 a night.
$4 if they don’t rewind the tape.
Mine is a coffee shop that seems to have banker’s hours.
Great movie–Linda Fiorentio rules.
The fact that people with real guns are able to hide among all the undergrads playing paintball assassin on campus is key to the plot is VERY 20th century.
For sure, That is why When I saw WW84 I was shocked at how bad the mall scene as I worked in a mall for the entire second 1/2 of the 1980s and KNOW for sure people would not have panicked at the sight of a gun in a mall.
You left out Surf Ninjas.
The fact that Three Ninjas and Surf Ninjas were made just a year apart is a testament to 90s film making and audiences.
The fact that one got a DVD release and Surf Ninjas will never see the light of day makes me weep as I play my Game Gear.
Dawn of the Dead is an unfortunate situation. Richard Rubinstein owns the rights, and back in the early 2010s when 3D was a big thing he paid to have a 3D conversion made. But he could never find distribution for it and so, now out a considerable sum of money, he’s been asking a LOT for the rights to distribute the film in any format (including Blu Ray, there was a good set put out in the UK a couple years back but in the US it’s still hard to find.) Apparently it’s more than anyone’s willing to pay. Damn shame, Dawn of the Dead is the best horror film ever and one of the best films of any kind and it’s in danger of falling into obscurity.
Hopefully his estate will be more reasonable. He’s got to be old as the hills. My family teased me when I spent so much money (which I didn’t really have) on the Anchor Bay DVD box set of Dawn of the Dead, but here we are. Ditto the crappy letterboxed editions of the original Star Wars movies.
I still own a VCR/DVD combo exclusively so I can still watch the untampered original versions of the Star Wars trilogy. Complete with Leonard Maltin interviewing Lucas (cut across the three tapes), who comes off every bit as smug and arrogant as you’d expect. Anyone who’s seen that interview was completely unsurprised by how shitty the prequels were with him in full control of the production.
When I was growing up we had VHS tapes of the Star Wars trilogy recorded off of network TV. Getting the box set in 5th grade was a big deal. Years later, I noticed that the outer shell describes them being released “for the last time in their original form,” which didn’t seem ominous at the time. Anyway, George Lucas is smug as hell (and those Maltin interviews clearly informed the old “What If George Lucas Directed Lord of the Rings” cartoon from the Web 2.0 days). But in 2023 there are so many mediocre Star Wars movies/shows that I can’t even hold the prequels against him. The Phantom Menace isn’t a good movie, but at least it ends after two hours rather than being padded out to a miniseries.
Yeah I always thought the “one last time” thing was marketing bullshit like you always heard about special editions and the like. Who knew. Anyway, even that turtleneck couldn’t hold back his goiter-esque neck.
80s George Lucas had ILM and the Creature Shop design 90s George Lucas.
“You know whose management style I really admired? Jabba’s.”
It does pop up on YouTube every now and then—I watched a pretty good quality version there a year or two ago.
It was on Criterion Channel as part of their Halloween lineup, but only for a few months.
I’d add The Fall (2006). After going on a Lee Pace binge a year or two ago, I eventually had to shell out some bucks for a used European Blu-Ray to watch this movie.Similarly, I had to search out a used DVD of Dogma, but that was much cheaper.
The Fall is the other reason I bought my player last year! A friend had it on disc and I’d wanted to see it ever since it was first released, but never had.
Pump Up the Volume is top tier Slater. I have it on DVD. But I no longer have a DVD player. 🙁
Computer or game console can’t play it?
A computer with an optical tray? A lot of them don’t even have headphone jacks anymore.
I must have gotten lucky with my laptop then. But, as far as I know, you can still find dvd players.
I got a decent, basic little Sony Blu-Ray/DVD player from a thrift store for like eight dollars. I bought it after not having had a player for years, and then…the internet went out one night when a friend was coming over to watch a movie haha.
Get an external USB DVD drive for your laptop (or even Blue Ray for a few dollars more). I find them essential not only for movies but I still find the need to access data on optical storage. And PS3 and XBox emulators are finally (after years) becoming usable to play games and can work off actual physical games if you have them
Don’t worry, you’re preaching to the choir – I have an external DVD drive for my laptop, region-free blu-ray players attached to my TVs, and I still have an optical drive on my PC. Of them I use the external drive the least, since USB drives are so much easier for moving files to/from a laptop, but it’s still useful for installing my ancient copy of Office 2010 that I’ll be damned if I update.
My computer doesn’t have a DVD drive (though I suppose I could get an external one), and I don’t play games. We used to watch DVDs on my ex’s playstation, but he took them with him and that was years ago. But now that I think about it I might have my old DVD player in a box somewhere, so it’s just a question of finding it and seeing if a 20 year old DVD player works with a new TV.
Really? Huh weird. I guess I just assumed all computers still had them. Come to think, I’m not sure I ever even tried to play one in mine. Mind you it’s like 5+ years old.Regardless, I bet you could pick up a player at thrift or pawn shop for like 20 bucks.
Much less than twenty, actually. Even a new, basic Blu-Ray/DVD player at Best Buy is, I think, around twenty or twenty-five. Of course the LG player I bought new stopped working within a year (the tray motor went out), but I was able to find a comparable one at a thrift store for 8 dollars.
I think – THINK – even the newest TVs have analog AV ports (you remember, yellow for picture and the red and white audio). Also, if your old DVD player has a “HDMi out” port, you’re good.
Hooray!
Thrift store first! Just test the tray motor there. Apparently, that new low-end LG player often loses that capability in the first year…
I’m curious, did you find and try your old one? I bought a DVD player/burner in 2008, I just remembered, and it definitely had an HDMi out port.
Get yourself a blu ray player. It will also play dvds.
No Playstation 3 or 4?
Alas, the last video games I really enjoyed playing were on the Super Nintendo.I’m old.
While I can’t condone piracy, obviously, the zSNES emulator is very easy to use on your laptop or even your phone, assuming you can find ROMs to play on it.
Same, now I wish that I could find Gleaming the Cube somewhere…
You can get a USB one cheap.
Unfortunately the physical media for The Abyss is garbage, the last available version is a NON-ANAMORPHIC DVD (4:3 with black bars). There’s actually a good HD master out there which can easily be found via non-legit means. I think everything else on this list has a good physical media option. It’s odd with some of these that they’re not on streaming, like, Wild At Heart has a good, cheap easily available release on blu-ray.Strange Days only has a DVD, so again either streaming (now) or piracy is your best bet there.Of the other movies I know, some are in an unfortunate place. Like, Fox’s film library got bought out by Disney, so ALL their cheap blurays went out of print (plenty are still available cheaply on amazon, but they will not be replenished), and Disney has very little interest in physical media so it’s likely we’ll never see those movies again unless they decide to make a Disney-Fox+ streaming service or something. And stuff like Cocoon has already skyrocketed in value on disc despite costing about 10 bucks before that buy out. Hooray for capitalism.
Cameron claimed in a recent interview that a 4k transfer has been completed that he hopes to release in 2023. I’ll believe it when I see it.The Abyss has been playing on the Starz channels but I think it’s still the old pan’n’scan theatrical cut that’s circulated on pay tv for years now.
There’s high def versions of the Abyss and True Lies out there, mostly ripped from Starz and similar (Amazon also had HD Abyss briefly). They weren’t authorized transfers (and the color grading is all over the place, unsurprisingly), but various sources have claimed proper transfers have long been done and just need approval which has been on Cameron’s desk for 10 years or more. I know the True Lies off of Starz I’ve seen is the open matte, at least one of the Abyss copies is as well.
I know David Lynch has made a point of retaining tight control over releases of his films, I think as the result of the first “Twin Peaks” pilot DVD release having a seriously messed up soundtrack. It literally sounded like you were hearing the movie through a drainpipe.
I have a proper-ratio laser disc of the Abyss!
I don’t understand why studios wouldn’t put their entire catalogs on their streaming services. I’d find a whole lot more value in Disney+ if it included more of these one-off, adult-oriented movies.
Hot take:Seger > Springsteen
Joel >
Just about fucking anyone > Springsteen.
Fuck it I’ll bite… I admit I don’t know all that much about Seger other than the hits but I can’t imagine he ever made anything as good as Born to Run or Nebraska.
Funnily enough, over the last month, I’ve purchased both Sleuth and Mask on DVD for this very reason. Glad I’m not the only one to notice their absence!
Sleuth is a GIGANTIC missed opportunity right now considering mysteries are the new hotness with Knives Out/Glass Onion and Rian Johnson’s overt discussion of using that very movie as the basis for both and having a ton of homages in said movies to it. And it carries well with Laurence Olivier and a Michael Caine in a breakneck race to outdo one another in eating up the scenery. I enjoy the shit out it.
I think (somehow) the full movie is still on YouTube. It looks like people randomly keep uploading it every few years or so. I have no idea why it hasn’t been taken down, but it’s really the only way to watch the movie IIRC.
YouTube is one of the primary sources for a dizzying array of preservationists and completists, chief mong them cinephiles and videohounds. Full movies do get taken down regularly, but then someone else (or the same person with another account) just puts them back up again. I keep URLs of different unavailable elsewhere full movies on YT bookmarked not because I think they’ll always work – after six months to a year, they almost never do – but as a list of movies that are in the YT rotation.
I cannot possibly think of a more frustrating topic for a list. Lol.The movie “Near Dark” was like this too, but I just noticed it finally got added to Shudder!! I’m so excited, I’ve waited a really long time to see it. (Almost got desperate enough to buy it on dvd. Almost.)
Dear God, I thought Bill Paxton’s leather jacket in Near Dark was just about the coolest thing as a kid with the weird assortment of pins and such including a interesting couple of old time police badges that you just know Severen collected from bodies of cops that pissed him off.
Such a fun and weird movie. You can tell through those kinds of things they really thought of deep and interesting back-stories for every character in the film
I loved how it was basically an Aliens cast reunion. Bill Paxton, Lance Hendrickson, and Jennette Goldstein!
I have to admit I laughed pretty hard when the credits revealed that Vasquez was played by a woman named Goldstein.
She also plays a doomed Irishwoman in steerage in Titanic, although perhaps that’s less problematic by today’s casting ethics.
Holy shit you’re right! I NEVER made that connection. Don’t think I even recognized her.
Cameron likes to reuse a lot of his actors, Michael Biehn, Bill Paxton, Jennifer Goldstein, Lance Hendrickson, etc. And there may have been a connection to this for Near Dark, as its director Katheryn Bigelow was in an relationship (and was even briefly married afterwards) with Cameron.
I knew Goldstein was the foster mother in T2, but even then she was nearly unrecognizable compared to Vasquez.
great film
One thing that I realized years later about Pump Up the Volume is how it’s the last movie that shows a 1980s (-ish given its release date) high school. Almost immediately afterwards, you had two simultaneous, very brief flashes in the pan: grunge and the neo-African look made popular by Public Enemy and on In Living Color. I think it was I Love the 90s that not even a decade later had multiple people laughing at themselves that they’d ever worn either. Then 90s high school fashion stabilized a bit as it went a very different way. It’s just an interesting movie visually to mark the end of an era, even with a little less hairspray than the peak.The soundtrack holds up better than the movie, which on release I remember thinking this was the first movie that really captured the pressure cooker version of high school, but on rewatch years later was like…eh, they overdo it quite a bit. Slater was in full Jack mode in it too, which was fine at the time but is now a little distracting. You’re right about how it does still strike some chords on teenage issues, even if they’re a bit awkward in doing so.I’m surprised To Live and Die in LA has never made it to a streaming service; that soundtrack is definitely peak 80s, along with the movie (“The old man will join us for poker!” is peak 1984 Reagan-as-the-common-guy campaign PR.)
Even at the time Pump Up the Volume struck me as a bit too suburban-rebellious, something that foreshadowed the people a few years later who thought they were edgy for dying their hair red. But yes it may be the last glimpse at an 80-ish high school, one of the few that captures a post-new wave but pre-grunge moment. I’ve never noticed Live and Die In LA wasn’t on streaming; it airs (aired?) alot on Flix network channels. I always forget about that opening sequence–which, to your point, ends with a middle eastern suicide bomber.
One of the things that hit me on rewatch (and why older me views the movie as far weaker than when I watched it as a teen all those years back) is that they start with the tract housing shot – and then almost ignore the suburban setting besides the occasional happily disconnected adult having a glass of wine. It’s one of a number of a missed opportunities that are why it doesn’t compare to some of the Hughes movies in its timelessness. It’s a decent movie, but very definitely dated and large parts have now been done better, like with “Better Luck Tomorrow” just doing a far more vicious job skewering the high achiever set.I’d forgotten about the suicide bomber! “Wait” is one of the few tracks I ever outright bought on Amazon Music in its DRM protected hell days, though, and still shows up on my playlist from time to time.
Better Luck Tomorrow is great. The observation that “our grades were our alibis” is pretty spot-on. I know some incredibly bright kids in high school who got away with all kinds of shit because no one would ever suspect them. Things haven’t worked out great for most of them post-HS, because they always tried to cut corners.
I have a deep affection for “To Live and Die in L.A.”, mostly because that scene where Friedkin decided he was going to top his own car chase scene from French Connection…and damn if he didn’t come close. It wasn’t great, but it was good, and if you like a good car chase it has one of the best ever put on film….that feels like it lasts half the movie.
Also, I just randomly learned that Airheads isn’t available to stream. Which is particularly strange since there aren’t music rights to clear unless there’s something going on with Frasier and the ringers that did the instrumentals for Degenerated.“We start touring in 6 months! Well, 3 months if they behave themselves.”
I recommend another of Allan Moyle’s movies; New Waterford Girl, I think it’s streaming on Amazon Prime.
His timeless masterpiece just hit Hulu this month. By which I mean Empire Records.
Great movie. Billy Bob and Dwight Yoakum are amazing in that movie.
Midgets and antique furniture make me wanna puke.
mhmm. Almost like that more than them french fried potatos.
No you don’t, Oprah.
That was on Netflix for a long time (I had it in my watch list), but it disappeared awhile ago.
The Abyss was streaming for a while. I guess it got cutoff by whatever Cameron has a deal with his movies. Just really bizarre. I think even True Lies isn’t even streaming.
True Lies pops up on Hulu every few months.
It’s also on regular cable rotation, if you can deal with the commercials. Just a great action flick and some of Arnie’s best work. Even Tom Arnold is a blast.
I think it’s currently gone at the moment. One of these times I’ll have to get around to re-watching it.
True Lies is streaming, or at least it was a month or two ago when I watched it. FWIW Pump Up the Volume was also streaming last summer.
and that is why I still get Netflix DVDS
There are DOZENS of us!
You can see things that will NEVER stream! 🙂
I mentioned that I still get Netflix DVDs to friends over the holidays; you would have thought I said I still send telegrams to communicate…they couldn’t believe that service is still around. I also regularly buy discs for the very fact that titles come and go from streaming, sometimes after very short periods of time. I can’t force myself to watch anything on someone else’s schedule, so owning physical media is the only way around that.
There are also still a lot of wonderful extras on disc that are pretty hard to find on streaming.
Ha, my family was looking for a Christmas special to watch a few weeks ago and I finally pulled out a DVD of Rudolph. My wife was stunned – “you mean we still have a DVD player??” “Blu-ray, but yes.” It’s hidden in a cabinet among the router and cable box.
Shadow of the Vampire is on the top of the list for me. Willem Dafoe hamming it up as Nosferatu (and nominated for an Oscar)! The director who made Begotten!
man Suspect Zero was a bust…didn’t even make a My Year of Flops entry
The Lawrence Kasdan-written and -directed romantic comedy French Kiss with Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline. I remember really enjoying it when it came out in the mid 90’s. As far as I can tell, the only way to watch it now is a bare bones standard def dvd.
Speaking of stoner movies, Ive never seen ‘The Song Remains The Same” in streaming- only to rent or buy.
The Abyss is a weird one. Most likely regional distribution rights issue. Amazon.com lists it under prime streaming, but if you try to watch it in the US, it says “Currently unavailable to watch in your location”. Will have to try with a VPN.
Cameron swears the 4K remaster is coming out this spring.
Just saw Choose Me for the first time in decades (DVD, interlibrary loan). It holds up beautifully, and everyone in it is great. Well, it’s mostly Genvieve Bujold, Lesley Anne Warren and Rae Dawn Chong that had me interested, but heck, Keith Carradine is good too!
If you live outside the US , invariably you get used to movies and series just straight up being unavailable to you outside piracy, usually becuase the rights have gone to a streamer that hasnt bothered entering your countries market I mean I wanted to watch 30 Rock last week.. …last year it was on Primevideo , this year its just not available anywhere where I live.
Dawn of the Dead 78 you say….Dont want to link it but directly …just check youtube..
Since the 1972 Sleuth has been brought up, may as well mention the other two notable films currently being held hostage by Bristol Myers Squibb: the 1975 version of The Stepford Wives, and one of Elaine May’s earliest films, The Heartbreak Kid.
Heartbreak Kid also regularly appears on YouTube.
Reminds me how, if you want to watch the italian movie “the great beauty” in its extended version 40 minutes, quite the thing, you can’t just buy the special edition on amazon, you need to buy a whole director’s package and some movies are even missing subtitles. How messy.
For the longest time you couldn’t find North online. To me, it was one of those movies that just slipped under the radar. It’s silly and goofy and has quite a few big named stars for it’s time.
Easiest way to find North is with a compass or, failing that, orienting yourself with the path of the sun.
I know an easier way: I just shout “North! Your dinner’s ready!” But then I’m Kanye West.
Wait, North as in the 90’s movie with Elijah Wood? That didn’t “fly under the radar”, it bombed spectacularly with many critics calling it one of the worst movies ever made.I’m glad somebody liked it (and I’m sure Rob Reiner, who always defended it, does as well) but I’m confused at the characterization of it as a forgotten gem.
What? The movie that got this from Roger Ebert, widely disliked?“I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.”
It’s the movie that Ebert famously wrote in his review that he “Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie” (which gave the title of a collection of his most savage reviews). It’s a terrible movie, mostly because it’s a “comedy” which has no humor and uses the sort of tired stereotypes of “Eskimos” and other groups that would have been seen as questionable even in the 1960s, let alone the 1990s. Hard to imagine that Reiner was the guy behind This is Spinal Tap, but probably Christopher Guest was the real talent there.
I suspect that Guest, McKeon and Shearer did a LOT of heavy lifting writing that one.
It’s always been on my list of legendary bombs (for it is definitely one of the most infamous) that I want to give a chance, like Cleopatra and Ishtar and Heaven’s Gate. But there’s so goddamn many good-to-great movies out there, I can never muster the energy. Though hearing someone likes this one does melt my heart a lil bit.
Possibly one of the worst movies ever made.
What the cool kids call “irony”: you are obviously familiar with YouTube— where you can watch any version of Dawn of the Dead (original) any time you want for free. (Does it just not count as “streaming”?) OTOH, thank you for championing To Live and Die in L.A., which simply cannot happen often enough.
Love (LOVE) Michael Caine, and I have enjoyed (nearly) everything he’s done.But.“…master thespian”? I think not.He is one of those actors that simply plays slight variations on themselves (which doesn’t always work: see Owen Wilson), but it doesn’t matter, because “some version of Michael Caine” as every one of those characters just fucking *works*.
I’d also generally associate the word with theatre acting, and he is very much a movie actor.
I see this criticism toward actors often. I used to think this way but I think we just grew up on too many Johnny Depp films where he was disguised head to toe. What is acting to you? A lot of human beings are similar. It would be far more entertaining watching a person play a variation on their own personality verses someone wildly miscast trying to do an approximation of the performance. I went to theatre school and the idea of being versatile is great but in terms of stardom etc. a lot of actors get one role maybe two that they are famous for and that’s it. You hear the phrase “born to play the role” so is that person not acting to you? Have you ever stood in front of a camera? It’s shocking how difficult it is for someone who isn’t a trained performer to look normal in front of a camera.
I think that’s true mostly of his work in the last couple of decades. Like Robert De Niro, Caine can sometimes phone it in playing “himself” But in his early work Caine played quite diverse roles. He’s hardly recognizable in Zulu, playing against type as a posh officer rather than his usual Cockney self.
*UGH*
Don’t even get me started on DeNiro and Pacino (for example); they’ve been phoning it in for fucking DECADES.But, yeah – you may be right about Caine’s early work; plus, that gives me a great excuse to go through his (early) CV… 😀
I think what “Michael Caine” means has evolved over time. He played convincing heavies early on before pivoting to cultured gentlemen.
As others have pointed out, Strange Days is on Max. As no one has pointed out, it’s in the wrong aspect ratio.
Maybe a Y2K issue?
Hey, I like Cocoon as much as the next Gen Xer, but is it really about “facing death?” I always thought it was about cheating death by literally leaving Earth to travel to another planet where you could be immortal.
I can’t think about Cocoon without being reminded I’m now older than Wilfred Brimley was when they filmed the movie. Granted I didn’t look like this at age 47:
The Abyss is supposedly set to be released on 4K this year.
Another one nowhere to stream is Dogma. Because of studio rights hell. Lotta companies folded and got bought up, and Smith has said no one even knows who owns the rights to even buy it from them.
I never saw “Silent Movie”, but it sure is brilliant to have the one spoken word in the whole film be from a famous mime.
“17 great movies that are inexplicably not available for streaming anywhere”That’s not entirely true. Just t0rrent them.
So many movies from the 90s I can’t find on streaming services or are $5 to rent
Rolling Thunder (William Devane, Tommy Lee Jones) is better than pretty much all of these, a gruesome revenge story about Vietnam vets returning to civilian life.
Off Limits, a Saigon-set cop thriller with Willem Defor and Gregory Hines, also belongs on this list.
Pump Up the Volume’s soundtrack was one of the best of its day. Rollins doing Kick Out the Jams and rare Sonic Youth and Soundgarden tracks.
Arrrgh! Could it be? It has been such a long time. I thought I hung up me buccaneer coat and leather hat for good. Time to sail the high seas!
The Abyss shows up on Prime Video from time to time. Though it’s a crapshoot whether you’ll get the 1080p cable master or the 480p broadcast master. The first time it showed up I started watching it and it was 4:3 and grainy as all hell and I gave up. Then I tried again a couple weeks later and it was 16×9 (which is still the wrong aspect ratio) and actually looked pretty good. It came back a few months ago and word was that it was the 4:3 version again.
Drop Dead Gorgeous was one of those movies that seemed destined to disappear into the ether, but somehow, like Palpatine, it returned and you can stream it on HBO Max, which I highly recommend anyone who has never seen it, to do. It’s a mockumentary kind of in the style of Best in Show, but the cast is stacked and the writing is just MUAH and Ellen Barkin with a beer can fused to her hand is never going to stop being funny to me.
DDG is really one of those movies that I really connected with the humor. Beauty queens… blowing chunks, everywhere. It was elusive for a while. I have a DVD copy for that reason, but these days SD resolution doesn’t cut it.
Drop Dead Gorgeous is one of my all-time favorite dark comedies. You have to love a movie that just pulls absolutely zero punches. Loved Amy Adams as the slutty cheerleader who turns stripper after graduation. The whole cast is spectactuar, TBH (RIP Kirstie Alley).
😋😛😍🤑Nude Beaches around the World💋👙
Oh the amount of movies that I find lost, like absolutely lost, because they are not part of the canon. The Alan Rudolph ones have not even been available digitally for a long while (not talking about Choose Me, but Welcome to L.A. for example) but if you want to check a movie from a legendary director that did not become part of the canon, you better abandon: “Two People” from Robert Wise, “HEALTH” from Robert Altman, “Escape” from Mankiewicz… you really depend on retrospectives or that no one threw away those VHS copies you had where you recorded the movie when it was shown on whatever channel.Btw, if someone finds Jiri Weiss’ “Martha and me”, please give a shout.
The one that makes me sad is a documentary from the 90s called “Wonderland” about the long-term residents of Levittown NY. It’s a low-key profile of people who decorate their homes with nothing but faux-wood or blame ghosts when they misplace their keys and reminisce about being swingers in the 70s. I rented it from the video store a bunch in high school, but both the movie and the video store have long since vanished. There’s another movie called “Wonderland” about John Holmes. I’m sure it’s fine.
Dawn of the Dead is owned by an absolute psychopath who is obsessed with only theatrically re-releasing it in 3D. Fuck that guy.
Honorable mention to Peter Medak’s The Krays (1990). Still the best version of the Kray brothers legend. A once in a lifetime performance by Martin and Gary Kemp, founding members of Spandau Ballet.
I have what I need on Laser Disc & DVD. Hell. Even VHS Tape.I don’t see all that much i want on the streaming bit.But that is just me!
Apparently, the rights for both Sleuth and The Heartbreak Kid are owned by, of all things, Bristol-Myers Squibb.
The one that bugged me recently was I couldn’t find the Jim Caviziel version of Count of Monte Cristo anywhere. Not a great movie by any means but a fun one and I mostly wanted to watch it because Luis Guzman always cracked me up in it.
The enduring problem of streaming is you are always at the mercy of what the streamer wants to present. It should eventually be like the Library of Congress where you can choose from every movie that exists so you are able to make your own playlist of classics. For profit corporate get rich schemes will never serve the film loving public.
I made a similar comment above – the sheer number of movies now controlled by Disney and the like says to me they should be putting their entire catalogs on streaming if they really want to sell more subscriptions.
Even when the streaming landscape was more consolidated, there wasn’t much effort to curate the selection. Nine or ten years ago Netflix had a whole trove of silent movies restored by Kino (including ones that had gone out of print on DVD), but they were buried in the “Drama” and “Comedy” lists.
Surprised Dogma didn’t make the list.
Dogma is not available due t0 disagreements with Kevin Smith and Weinstein — that always seems like a huge miss due to star power, alone.
Gotcha! just doesn’t play the same today given the frequency of mass shootings (at least in the US). For those who are Millennials or younger, people used to play these “assassination games” in public in the 1980s. We used to play it on our university campus and nobody objected. These days I’m sure it would start an “active shooter” panic and we’d probably get expelled if not face criminal charges.
On that note, I still have my copy of Steve Jackson’s Killer sourcebook…early LARP fun that would NOT fly today.
This is why people should pirate. Art should be preserved past the confines of capitalism.
Lots of these movies are available on YouTube or Vimeo and sometimes in excellent transfers…sometimes not. The sad part of that is you used to have to hunt Todd Haynes’ Superstar to the ends of the earth or Renaldo & Clara and now they are on YouTubePump Up the Volume introduced me to Samantha Mathis’s boobs, and for that young me will be forever grateful
I mean, all of these movies are available for streaming. Just not from………official sources.
Oh man, I thought I dreamed Gotcha!
Dogma is another one. I believe the rights to it are tied up in some Weinstein foolishness or something. I did catch it on YouTube recently but it’s not available anywhere else.
Hello — FRENCH KISS.And Dogma. Which you can watch on Youtube in terrible quality occasionally, before it gets taken down.So freaking frustrating.
Here’s the thing about this list: is anyone actually looking for some of these films in the first place?Chicago Joe and the Showgirl, Gotcha!, Ghost Brigade, not exactly hits or even cult classics to warrant making a list like this. Streaming is a lot like the word itself: movies ebb and flow on and off these services all the time. I’ve seen Cocoon plenty of times available on Prime, and Pump Up the Volume I saw for the first time ever on streaming about 5 years ago. They’ll all show up eventually. What a flighty fluff article; it’ll become largely pointless within the next year or two when most of these will likely re-emerge from studio package deals.
It’s only appropriate to watch a counterfeit copy of “To Live and Die in LA.”
In the grays here, so I doubt many will see this, but I’ve gotta speak up for The Fall. It came out in 2006, starring Lee Pace. I was able to rent it from Family Video, way back when, but it’s unavailable anywhere now. It was absolutely the most visually stunning movie I’d ever seen. Posting the trailer below, which will give a good sense of it. It’s really a great movie.
I am pretty sure I watched “Pump up the Volume” on YouTube a few months back (was surprisingly high quality, probably bluray rip). I think these “streaming nowhere” movies sometimes fly under the radar longer than usual on various anyone-can-upload streaming services.“…like a baby’s arm holding an apple…”
Pump up the volume is top tier.
The Abyss has been available for a couple months now.People have been asking Cameron for a 4K blu-ray for years, and that is finally out. I assume the two things are related.