A Quinn Martin Production. Starring Karl Malden. Also starring Richard Hatch.

With Guest Stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Desi Arnaz, Jr. Special Guest Star Pernell Roberts.

Tonight’s Episode: “End of the Line”

Act I　

By 1976, actor and budding feature film producer Michael Douglas had outgrown series television, especially after One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest premiered during the 1975-76 season of The Streets of San Francisco, and later won all five top Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay), a feat achieved only once before.

But to his credit Douglas remained grateful to the opportunities The Streets of San Francisco brought him, and though he decided to leave the series he agreed to stay on long enough to co-star in what originally was intended as the show’s feature-length fifth season premiere. That episode also introduced Douglas’s replacement, another up-and-coming talent named Richard Hatch.

The Streets of San Francisco might have continued indefinitely but the fifth season got off on the wrong foot. Originally Douglas’s departure was to have been a Big Deal. Instead, at the last minute the two-hour premiere, “The Thrill Killers,” was halved into a two-part story (broadcast a week apart), reportedly because ABC’s programming guru Fred Silverman wanted to use Part 2 to hopefully pummel CBS’s Barnaby Jones in the ratings. That strategy backfired, and Streets of San Francisco instead limped along and was finally cancelled at the end of the season.

A shame, really, because Hatch’s character had potential, and while the show’s writers don’t seize upon this nearly as much as they could have, the Season Five is really no worse than those that had proceeded it, with several intriguing episodes interspersed among more routine but still entertaining ones.

As with other recent CBS/Paramount releases, both volumes 1 and 2 arrived bundled together as a single unit. Retailers like Amazon are selling The Streets of San Francisco – Season Five as a complete season set and broken up into two volumes.

Act II

The season begins as before, following the investigations of plainclothes detectives Lt. Mike Stone (Karl Malden), an unpretentious, old school cop, and sophisticated, Berkeley-educated Inspector Steve Keller (Michael Douglas), whom Mike clearly loves like a son.

In the two-part (and inaptly titled) “The Thrill Killers,” all Hell breaks loose during the trial of Charles Manson-type figure when a group of his followers (led by Patty Duke Astin and including Susan Dey, Ron Glass, and Anthony Geary) kidnap the entire jury pool, threatening to execute them one-by-one until their leader is released. (The jurors include Tina Chen, Norman Fell, Jan Clayton, Dick Van Patten, Joseph Wiseman, Paula Kelly, James Hong, Barry Sullivan, and Doris Roberts).

Steve is critically wounded when Dey’s character, a single mother less dedicated to the cause, panics and shoots Steve when he spots her at a payphone. Dan Robbins (Hatch), a rising star at the SFPD, assists and consoles a distraught Mike through the remainder of the investigation and rescue of the surviving hostages.

(Mild Spoilers) It’s all an intriguing jumble of 12 Angry Men and Raid on Entebbe, with a dash of Helter Skelter tossed in for good measure, and with Steve’s wounding and ultimate decision to leave the force also similar to what happens to Reni Santoni’s character in Dirty Harry (1971). It’s also a well-written show, expressing one last time the father-son bond between Mike and Steve – their last scene together is actually quite touching – while at the same time serving as a strong introduction for Hatch’s character. Dan gets to interact with Steve quite a bit, the two discussing their mutual hesitations in possibly having to fire on a suspect, Dan mining Steve for information about Mike, etc.

Act III　

Dan is introduced as the department’s golden boy who immediately impresses Mike and Steve with his proactive style and investigator instincts. He lacks Mike’s and even Steve’s experience but the makings of a great cop are already present. Steve, having learned from the best, really no longer needs Mike’s fatherly supervision – he’s ready to leave the nest – so the transition to Steve moving on and Mike getting a new pupil is a natural and logical one. The teleplays often don’t take advantage of this unfortunately, with many playing very much like Dan’s part was written with the Steve Keller character in mind.

Although Hatch got his start in daytime drama, it was guesting on primetime policiers and detective melodramas, often playing clean-cut youths tangentially entangled in some crime, where producers first began noticing him. After this he co-starred on the heavily promoted but quickly cancelled Battlestar Galactica, which proved a ticket to nowhere – at first. Hatch stuck with it, appearing on one unmemorable TV show after another while spearheading a huge fan effort to revive “Galactica” in the 1990s. Around this time I was invited to speak at a Science Fiction Convention, and after my presentation wandered into a huge room where several thousand fans gave a positively thunderous standing ovation to Hatch. “Richard Hatch?!” I asked myself. But then the mostly dumb and unoriginal Battlestar Galactica was revived but completely revamped – without Hatch’s involvement – into the extraordinarily intelligent and creative 2004-2009 series. Hatch was by his own admission extremely bitter that all his hard-fought efforts had come to nothing, but eventually agreed to appear on the new series, as terrorist-turned-politician Tom Zarek. It was in many ways the best role of his career up to this point, an extremely complex, morally ambiguous figure quite unlike anything he’d played before.

Back on The Streets of San Francisco it was largely business as usual, but a few Season Five episodes stand out, none more than the fascinating “Dead Lift.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger, in his first of just two series television appearances, plays Josef Schmidt, an Austrian émigré and body builder hypersensitive about his looks. When a young college student, an amateur sociologist, laughs uncontrollably when he oils up and poses for her, he becomes so enraged that he literally shakes her to death. Later he becomes romantically involved with a wealthy socialite (Diana Muldaur), an odd couple match anticipating Schwarzenegger’s own marriage to Maria Shriver. Muldaur and Shriver even resemble one another.

Watching Arnold blow his top over insensitive snickering directed at his “art” (he likens bodybuilding to Greco-Roman sculpture) has the makings of a high-camp classic but the show, written by Larry Brody, instead plays as remarkably authentic and is genuinely disturbing. Brody may not have known Schwarzenegger personally, but the Josef’s background and unhappy, insecure childhood probably coincidentally mirrors Schwarzenegger in some respects.

More intriguingly the show captures the simultaneous fascination-revulsion of bodybuilding, with Josef and others adopting it as an all-consuming way of life while others laugh it off as grotesque narcissism. Though steroids are never mentioned, and Josef (as Schwarzenegger had) insists his body is simply the result of a good diet and exercise, Josef’s short fuse and paranoia certainly plays as if steroids were a factor, and only make the episode more real and timely in retrospect. A prescient show.

Guest stars this season include James Shigeta, Hari Rhodes, Marion Ross, Kenneth Tobey, Van Williams Caitlin Adams, Tom Bosley, Howard Duff, Lisa Eilbacher, Max Gail, Arlene Golonka, Dabbs Greer, John Zaremba, Dabney Coleman, James Griffith, Mary LaRoche, Eugene Roche, Parker Stevenson, James Olson, Maureen McCormick, Desi Arnaz, Jr., Conrad Janis, Jessica Walter, Harry Guardino, Booth Colman, Tom Drake, Dorothy Malone, Guy Stockwell, Don Johnson, Darleen Carr (as Mike’s daughter), Gerald McRaney, Pat Hingle, Pat Crowley, Sherry Jackson, Gary Lockwood, Francine York, Tim O’Connor, Andrew Robsinon, Mark Goddard, Michael Strong, Richard Herd, Johnny Weissmuller, Jr., Marlyn Mason, Alan Fudge, Ellen Geer, Johnny Haymer, Noah Keen, Frank Maxwell, Robert Walden, Skip Homeier, Bruce Glover, Ned Beatty, Susan Oliver, Virginia Gregg, Richard Bakalyan, Christopher Atkins, June Dayton, Mark Hamill, Carl Weathers, Bill Quinn, John Rubenstein, Lois Nettleton, Linden Chiles, Paul Comi, Bert Freed, Pernell Roberts, Beth Holland, Linda Kelsey, Beverly Washburn, Herbert Jefferson, Jr., Jerry Hardin, and Dennis Patrick.

Act IV

The full frame format Streets of San Francisco looks great, bright with strong color and impressive clarity. Disclaimers note that “some episodes may be edited from their original network versions,” but the shows I looked at seemed complete, unaltered, and not time-compressed. The set we received is composed of two volumes containing all 24 episodes spread over six discs. The Dolby Digital mono is fine. There are no Extra Features.

Epilogue

It took time but this series really grew on my over time, and I’m delighted to see CBS/Paramount speedily getting these and other shows in their deep-catalog library out on DVD. Recommended.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes film history books, DVD and Blu-ray audio commentaries and special features. Visit Stuart’s Cine Blogarama here.

The Movie:

Directed in 2010 by Mark Edlitz, Jedi Junkies takes on the fairly massive task of exploring the more obsessive side of hardcore Star Wars fandom. We’re not talking about the people who own the six films on DVD or Blu-ray and pull them off the shelf a few times a year to enjoy on a weekend for kicks, we’re talking about the guys who build life sized scale replicas of the Millennium Falcon in their backyard and then have sex inside it. We’re talking about the ladies who dress up like Slave Leia from Return Of The Jedi and then belly dance across a convention floor and we’re talking about the guys who teach courses in the proper uses of a lightsaber. What about a dude who builds custom made lightsabers in his shed and who has built a decent little business out of this talent He’s here too. Oh, and there’s a Star Wars inspired band here called Aerosith which is lead by a guy dressed up like Emperor Palpatine.

Additionally the documentary, which clocks in at just over seventy-minutes, features a look into the Star Wars fan film community. A popular movie about Darth Vadar’s brother, Chad, caught on some time ago and remains popular as it basically shows what it would be like working in a supermarket with Darth Vader. On top of that, we also visit the set of a fan film being made in New York City and witness the hard working crew setting up for green screen effects and the cast members getting into makeup for the shoot. An odd European fan film shows what can be done in terms of editing and effects as we watch two combatants duel only for one to fly away by way of some handy rocket propelled boots, and yeah, we see some Jedi Cats use lightsabers too.

We visit with a young man who lives in a small Manhattan apartment with his lady friend and young kid as he explains how he has had to tone down his collecting ever since he’s become more domesticated simply because he doesn’t have the room for everything he wants anymore and he’s got larger financial responsibilities. We also learn that he and his girlfriend sleep on an air mattress because there’s so much Star Wars stuff in the apartment they don’t have room for a proper bed. Another man has up to thirty pieces of the same toy simply because he feels he needs to own as many pieces of one particular piece as are mentioned in the movies. He also makes custom figures and owns an incredibly rare Toys-R-Us promotional Millennium Falcon toy of which only approximately five hundred were ever made. It’s big enough that it looks like you could sleep inside it. We also learn that Eduardo Sanchez, the man who directed The Blair Witch Project, is a fairly obsessive collector and that despite the fact that he’s got a huge room dedicated to his collection he still has to keep loads of it in storage.

We get commentary by way of interviews with actors like Ray Park and Peter Mayhew, both of whom seem to really and truly appreciate all of the Star Wars fans and who note that they basically owe their careers to them. Fan favorite Attack Of The Show hostess Olivia Munn pops up a few times to offer some comments, noting that she hopes the guy who built the Falcon in his backyard has at least touched a boob once in his life. Evidently he has, but she offers to let him touch hers if he hasn’t had that important life experience yet. A psychologist pops up here and there and offers fleeting and fairly rudimentary observations on why people collect in as hardcore a way as some of these people do, but this part of the documentary doesn’t go nearly as in-depth as it could have and you feel that it does fall short here. As it doesn’t offer much, it seems unnecessary and the space it takes up might have been better used for more interviews with the collector’s and cosplayers and amateur filmmakers who live, eat and breath Star Wars fandom . Ultimately though, this is a fun, if somewhat shallow, look at Star Wars fandom made by some people who have an obvious affection for it. It could have gone into more depth as to why these people latch onto the series the way they do and it could have made some more insight into the psychology behind it all, but what’s here is enjoyable enough for what it is.

The DVD:

Video:

Jedi Junkies arrives on DVD looking every bit the low budget standard definition video production that it is. Presented in non-anamorphic widescreen framed at 1.78.1 the picture is stable enough but soft and not particularly detailed. Much of the documentary was shot in convention halls and isn’t always professionally lit and some of the interviews look murky. It’s all completely watchable, however. Go in knowing that this was a labor of love more than anything else and that it’s shot on consumer grade video and you won’t be disappointed.

Sound:

The English language Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo mix is on par with the video in that it’s not anything to write home about but it gets the job done. Some of the interviews sound better than others and a lot of this has to do with background noise and general convention chit chat happening around the microphone at the time. Levels are generally balanced well, however. There are no alternate language options or subtitles provided.

Extras:

The main extra on the disc is a commentary track with director Mark Edlitz who is joined by a few other crew members like the producers and camera man. This is a pretty active and jovial track with Edlitz leading the charge but plenty of input coming from his collaborators along the way. Topics discussed include setting up the interviews, some of the quirks that the interviewees showed, reception to the idea of the movie and where the genesis of the project started. There’s a nice mix of humor and information here and it’s worth listening to as some fun stories are relayed in a very casual, laid back manner.

Rounding out the extras are fifteen minutes of extended/deleted scenes (including more footage of Olivia Munn, a clip about building your own custom action figure, more on the cult of slave Leia and more) and the movie’s trailer. Menus and chapter stops are also included.

Final Thoughts:

Jedi Junkies isn’t going to win any awards for audio or video presentation and at just over seventy-minutes it feels like it could and should have been much longer and more in-depth. With that said, for a low budget independent production, the crew has delivered and interesting movie worth seeing that treats its subjects with the right amount of respect and good natured humor. Unless you’re a hardcore collector this isn’t likely something you’ll need to watch over and over again but it is worth seeing if you have an interest in Star Wars fandom. Rent it.

Ian lives in NYC with his wife where he writes for DVD Talk, runs Rock! Shock! Pop!. He likes NYC a lot, even if it is expensive and loud.

Hours before the outbreak and eventual quarantine of a building in a nearby town, the friends and family of Clara (Leticia Dolera) and Koldo (Diego Martín) gather for their wedding. Unfortunately for the happy couple, one of their guests is Uncle Victor (Emilio Mencheta), a veterinarian who was recently bitten by one of his patients. By the time the newlyweds are having their first dance, Uncle Victor is vomiting blood, and it’s not much longer before the ceremony is trashed by vicious, bloodthirsty demon-zombies, standing between Clara, Koldo, and happily ever after.

The first two [•REC] films were of a pair, following the same story of a late-night TV crew, a couple of firefighters and police officers, and the terrified residents of an apartment who discover they’ve been labeled a health hazard and locked inside. The found footage flicks were co-directed by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, and were a huge success for Filmax, which excitedly greenlit two more sequels on the strength of [•REC]²‘s box office performance. The twist: this time, neither film would be found footage, and Balagueró and Plaza would direct each film separately. [•REC]³: Genesis is Plaza’s effort; Balagueró’s [•REC]⁴: Apocalypse is slated to shoot in early 2013.

Fans of franchises are always resistant to significant change, but let’s get this out of the way upfront: there’s nothing wrong with [•REC]³‘s stylistic change in principle. Although the premise is built into the title, there are plenty of ways Plaza could’ve naturally played with and branched out beyond the format. All artists strive for freedom and new ideas, and if Plaza and Balagueró feel that found footage no longer has anything to offer them or the series creatively, it’s understandable and commendable that they want to try something different.

At the same time, while it’s fine theory, it stinks in principle, because Genesis spends a significant amount of time refusing to commit to its new style, before finally failing to do anything particularly interesting with it once it does. The movie opens with the nice, tongue-in-cheek selection of the “PLAY” option on a wedding video DVD, but the segment of raw footage that follows goes on way too long before the title finally comes up and the film jumps to a traditional narrative style. Personally, the most exciting chapter of the was the second film, because it developed its baddies beyond generic zombies and into an interesting demon-zombie hybrid. Although Plaza has the creatures tear apart the wedding with a little flair (some of them literally fly out of the projection screen in the dance hall), the new technique reverses some of that creativity, trading first-person intensity for standard zombie death scenes. Plaza also ignores perfect opportunities to integrate some series flavor by refusing to cut to cell phone cameras, security cam feeds, etc., which feels like a big missed opportunity.

Some of this could be forgiven if [•REC]³ fully represented the change of tone it also seems to want to go for: the time-tested transition from horror into horror-comedy. There’s plenty of comic potential in nervous Clara and wimpy Koldo’s journey to becoming demon-slaughtering badasses, but Plaza and his writers spend more time on the mechanics of keeping them separated from one another (the film’s conflict) than the characters themselves, who remain woefully underdeveloped. Business with Koldo putting on a suit of armor and the package shot of Clara wielding a chainsaw really don’t amount to anything, much less Army of Darkness-style mayhem. Plaza also sets up fun characters like Koldo’s younger cousin Adrian (Àlex Monner) and goofy cameraman Atun (Borja Glez. Santaolalla) and then basically forgets about them once the mayhem starts.

Although the first 40 or 50 minutes of [•REC]³ are tolerable and keep the viewer hopeful the film will find a new twist on the series, as the film drags on into the second half, the characters suddenly get dumber and dumber, whittling away goodwill and patience by taking an eternity to make obvious decisions. If there was any hope of the film working even as a curiosity piece for fans, it decidedly dribbles away long before the film crawls to an inevitable conclusion. Plaza may have had good intentions with this one, but the result is more red-headed step-child than intriguing alternative.

The DVD
Sony released the first [•REC] in standard definition in the US, then let magnolia pick up the slack for the sequel. Although magnolia also brought [•REC]³ to theaters, Sony has home video duties again, offering Genesis on DVD only. It’s a pretty standard package: the poster art is retained, there is no insert, and the disc is housed in a plastic-reducing Amaray case.

The Video and Audio
Well, 21 minutes of this 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation are intentionally crummy-looking, with visible interlacing, weak color, etc. The other 59 are on the strong end of standard definition, appearing generally well-rendered and free of artifacts but exhibiting a noticeable softness that gets in the way of fine detail in anything but close-ups. Blacks might be a little crushed, but I didn’t spot any artifacts, and whites are a little hot, but that seems to be either intentional or part of Sony’s traditional transformation of whites to very light grays. Scenes drenched in red light also look a little oversaturated, but all in all, this is a fine effort.

Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 is fine but unimpressive, delivering across all channels but never really blowing my socks off. Perhaps more interesting things were being done in the previous two films, but the roaring and gnashing of teeth all seems fairly middle-of-the-road to me. Some bassy echoes during the wedding footage are nicely evocative, but that’s about it. English subtitles and English captions for the deaf and hard of hearing are provided.

The Extras
No interviews or behind-the-scenes material is included, but there’s a fair amount of extra footage here: an extensive reel of deleted scenes (23:15), and a chunk of outtakes (2:47). The only problem? 15 minutes of the deleted scenes are from the movie’s already overlong pre-title sequence, and the rest are not very interesting — the most you’ll get here is an unnecessary explanation of how the authorities find out about the incident.

A promo for Blu-Ray and trailers for Quarantine 2: Terminal, Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, Resident Evil: Damnation, and “Breaking Bad”: Season 4 play before the main menu. No trailer for [•REC]³: Genesis is included.

Conclusion
Even for fans of the series, [•REC]³: Genesis is a disappointment. As a horror fan and sequel lover myself, I know that most of them are going to rent it regardless, but I have to recommend skipping it.

Please check out my other DVDTalk DVD, Blu-Ray and theatrical reviews and/or follow me on Twitter.

THE MOVIE:

First of, there is really no boogieman in The Boogie Man Will Get You. Only the slightest hint of one. Which just goes to show you how slapdash this would-be slapstick comedy from 1942 really is.

Frankenstein-star Boris Karloff stars as mad scientist Professor Billings, owner of a historical homestead and a pile of debt owed to small-tow con man Dr. Arthur Lorencz (Peter Lorre, The Maltese Falcon). When a naïve young woman (Jeff Donnell, In a Lonely Place) decides to buy the rundown house and turn it into a hotel, the usual shenanigans that go on around the Billings place begin to compound. You see, the old Prof. is conducting experiments in his basement, luring traveling salesmen into his lab to be guinea pigs in his experimental procedure to create a flying super soldier to win World War II for the good guys. The girl’s estranged husband (Bill Layden) is a fumbling do-gooder who thinks his wife is being taken advantage of. Soon Billings and Lorencz turn their sights on him, thinking they can submit him to the experiment before he can tell the cops about the strange doings and all the bodies piling up in the cellar. Naturally, something goes wrong each time they try to put him or anyone else into Billings’ machine, but an endless supply of new salesmen keeps the movie chugging along.

The Boogie Man Will Get You is a short B-comedy meant to capitalize on and make hay out of Karloff and Lorre’s sinister reputations. It works in so much as they are the only real reason to watch this cold cinematic stiff. Both are gung-ho to go after the gags and mug for director Lew Landers, with whom the pair made a few other comedies, including The Raven, but based on how much else doesn’t work in The Boogie Man Will Get You, I won’t be checking out that or any of the others any time soon.

The film isn’t terrible, it’s just not very good. The scant plotting would be fine if the dialogue were clever or the pratfalls remotely agile. None of the rest of the supporting cast even belong in the same room as the two stars, and as a director, Landers is merely efficient, not effective. Horror and noir fans will probably enjoy seeing these well-known heavies applying a lighter touch, but even at a brief 66 minutes, expect to take a bathroom break or two–without having any real desire (or need) to hit pause on your DVD player.

THE DVD

Video:
The Boogie Man Will Get You is part of the Sony Choice Collection, the studio’s manufacture-on-demand label, and it is shown in black-and-white as a full-frame DVD transfer. The picture quality is basically average, with okay clarity and not too much by way of shimmer or jagged edges. There are marks on the film, but nothing egregious. Blacks are fine. Everything is fine.

Note: Though my Blu-Ray player ran The Boogie Man Will Get You just fine, my computer is refusing to recognize that there is anything on the disc. This is the first time this has happened to me on one of the Sony M-O-D titles, but I mention it as explanation why there are no screengrabs with this review.

Sound:
The mono soundtrack is free of dropouts and is mostly clear, though an occasional background whistle, like a wind blowing through a tin shed, can be annoying.

Extras:
None. Not even a menu.

FINAL THOUGHTS:
Rent It. The Boogie Man Will Get You is harmless fluff, putting two horror regulars into slim comedic situations in hopes that they’ll manage to make something out of them. Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff are good in this would-be wartime chuckler, but the gags are as dead as the monster Karloff is most famous for playing. It would take some kind of mad comedic genius to stitch these set-ups together and make something living out of the pieces. Only for the most dedicated fans of classic noir and horror.

Jamie S. Rich is a novelist and comic book writer. He is best known for his collaborations with Joëlle Jones, including the hardboiled crime comic book You Have Killed Me, the challenging romance 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, and the 2007 prose novel Have You Seen the Horizon Lately, for which Jones did the cover. All three were published by Oni Press. His most recent project is the comedy series Spell Checkers, again with Jones and artist Nicolas Hitori de. Follow Rich’s blog at Confessions123.com.

“When storage units are abandoned in the great state of Texas, the treasures within are put up for auction.”

Initially entertaining disposable junk TV…about junk. A&E has released Storage Wars Texas: Season One, a two-disc, 16-episode collection of the breakout A&E reality series’ premiere 2011 season. A low-rent, high-concept reality show that would have been inconceivable as a viable series twenty years ago, is now one of (if not the) highest-rated show on the Arts & Entertainment network…so go figure. Mindless television crack. Some bonus footage is included for these sharp transfers.

The set-up is simple…but the draw is elemental. Apparently, the law in Texas states that if a customer fails to pay the rent on his or her storage unit for three months running, the storage facility has the right to auction off the contents for back payment. That’s where the buyers of Storage Wars Texas come in. The storage unit owners contract with auctioneers like Walt “The Colonel” Cade to guide buyers, professional and amateurs, through one-day sales where cash money in your pocket is the only calling card needed to get you inside. One by one, the delinquent, surrendered storage units have their locks cut off, and the buyers have only five minutes to peek inside to see if the visible items are worth bidding on―no one is allowed inside the units, and no one is allowed to touch or move boxes or items around to see what else might be hidden. Regular bidders featured on Storage Wars Texas include Moe Prigoff, a practicing podiatrist and veteran storage lot buyer who looks for unusual items for his antiques store; wholesale warehouse owners Ricky Smith and Bubba Smith (uncle and nephew), known as “The Rangers,” a couple of good ‘ol boys sharp as tacks when it comes to making a profit reselling found treasure; abrasive yapper Victor “The Outsider” Rjesnjansky, originally from Long Island and now transplanted among the “yokels” of Texas, as he calls them; Lesa “The Boss” Lewis and her assistant, Jerry Simpson, who runs a run-down thrift store and who can’t seem to keep her hands any gold jewelry she finds in the units; and former Dallas Cowboy defensive back Roy Williams, a not-too-bright newcomer to the game of storage unit hunting who gets the fever when he tags along with the “The Rangers” at an auction.

When I first heard about spin-off Storage Wars Texas‘s host series, Storage Wars, back in 2010, I distinctly remember thinking, “that has to be the dumbest, most boring idea yet for a so-called ‘reality’ series.” I mean…the notion of people bidding on junky, abandoned storage units? That’s going to be entertaining how (can you imagine a producer trying to flog that idea back during the heyday of the “Big Three” networks)? However, with the increasingly splintered TV audience out there that cable first created, narrowly-focused, cheaply-produced entries like Storage Wars Texas can find profitability with just three or four million viewers―a marketing construct that’s not at all dissimilar to the content of the show itself: hustlers buy discarded, abandoned items for relative chump change in the hopes of fobbing them off on someone else at a profit. I did catch a marathon of Storage Wars and Storage Wars Texas episodes last year (I’m not a committed, regular viewer of either show), however, and I must write that they did maintain my interest for a few hours…until like most other junk TV, I got bored and tuned out.

Certainly the appeal of Storage Wars Texas is primitive and not too hard to divine. Most of us have had that thrill of thinking we’ve found some long-lost, forgotten “treasure” in an attic or basement or at a flea market or garage sale…only to discover it’s really a piece of junk. So Storage Wars Texas‘s continual assertion that thar’s gold in them thar storage units keeps the viewer guessing about what these bidders might find, while we wonder if we could do the same thing. Add to that the inherent attraction of Storage Wars Texas‘s auction format; plainly put, we want to see who “wins,” along with enjoying the games these bidders play to psych-out their opponents: trash talking before the auctions, misdirection as to what might be a valuable unit; tapping out an opponents’ cash by getting into a bidding war on an unwanted unit (the bidders’ inability to paw around the units prior to the auction only adds to the suspense). Additionally, Storage Wars Texas then exploits the appraisal angle (first used so effectively in PBS’ Antiques Roadshow series, and now popular on reality shows like Pawn Stars), where tension is heightened when an item the buyer thinks is valuable is given an official price tag by an expert (it’s always better TV when they say it’s worthless). At the DNA core of all of this is the American-as-apple-pie appeal of capitalism (a couple of my loyal readers are already dialing up Homeland Security…). At its heart, Storage Wars Texas is about making a fast buck―a theme that any real American cottons to on a subatomic level. These self-sufficient hustlers entrepreneurs see an opportunity where you and I don’t, hoping to turn their gamble into a pay-off (for those blinking in incomprehension as they flip through their Little Red Books for a definition: hustling capitalism was a way of making a living we used to laud in this country).

Appealing as all that is, what keeps Storage Wars Texas from transcending its empty calorie junk TV roots into something more substantial and satisfying, is its too formulaic, too cute, too “safe” approach. Now, you can quibble about how “real” this reality show actually is; according to a quote I found, an unnamed A&E publicist stated, “There is no staging involved. The items uncovered in the storage units are the actual items featured on the show.” That sounds convincing…but on closer inspection that statement doesn’t rule out that items haven’t been put in the units prior to the bidders discovering them. The producers may indeed not be “staging” the bidding and the eventual discoveries by the “unknowing” buyers…but that statement doesn’t rule out prior “salting” of the units. Do I care about that? Not really; anyone who thinks “reality” programming is “life as it happens out there,” needs to grow up. All Storage Wars Texas has to be is entertaining, not a documentary. And it is that…for awhile.

Because after just a few episodes, it becomes apparent quickly that Storage Wars Texas is all “process” and no “background.” The bidding and the buying is compelling on a basic level…but we never get a handle on anything else. Just exactly who are these bidders? What drives them to do what they do? How did they get started? We don’t know, because the now-standard “interview inserts” where they address the audience are the same phony, scripted so-called “humorous” throwaways and one-liners that are created by the producers strictly to join up and link the various sequences―they reveal nothing about who these people really are. And I’m sorry, but the producers are missing a golden opportunity in not showing the former owners of the units, and seeing their reactions to having their stuff sold off. Is that a cruel notion? Of course it is…but what else fuels so much of television programming today than coarse maliciousness? Worst of all, there’s no sense of danger to Storage Wars Texas‘ buying and selling. At least in something like Deadliest Catch, there’s the implication that someone might lose a finger in a lobster cage or get swept out to sea in a storm, but here….what? All the bidders say they need the dough, but they all seem to have it ready at hand for the auctions. We don’t see too much of their stores or homes, so we can’t tell if they’re hurting financially, or well off. In one episode, Lesa worries about paying a light bill…but we hear no resolution on that one brief glimpse of true reality in this “reality” series. How about showing us a buyer who messes up and actually loses their shirt, or a buyer who squeezes out a winner at the last minute and saves his home and business? How can we root for these 2-dimensional ciphers (the credits say it all with their nicknames: “The Outsider,” “The Boss,” etc.) when we don’t know them, and when their so-called competition is patently phony? Sure an expert says that goofy-looking lamp Moe bought is worth $1700…but that doesn’t mean Moe is getting $1700 for it, and yet, at the end of each episode, those appraisals and guesses and hunches are tallied up as money actually earned by the buyers (we never see one customer buy this crap). It’s a goof from start to finish: a non-competition with cardboard cut-out characters who suffer no real losses or wins with their storage unit treasures that we the audience can see. And that’s why Storage Wars Texas is mindlessly entertaining for an hour or two…before you figure out it’s a pre-processed, homogenized―and deeply cynical―sham.

The DVD:

The Video:
The anamorphically-enhanced, 1.78:1 widescreen transfers for Storage Wars Texas look super-clean, with a razor-sharp image, saturated color, and no compression issues to speak of.

The Audio:
The Dolby Digital English 2.0 stereo audio track is clean as a whistle, with no much opportunity for any discreet separation effects, and a nice recording level. English and Spanish subtitles are available.

The Extras:
About 21 minutes of additional footage are included as a bonus here.

Final Thoughts:
Mindless garbage that entertains at first…before you see it’s as empty as Jesus’ 10 x 20 storage unit. All the elements are there to celebrate American capitalism and free-standing entrepreneurialism at their best…but the producers play it safe and gloss over anything that might smack of genuine reality. Storage Wars Texas is worth a rental, I suppose…but it’s on TV all the time for free, anyway.

Paul Mavis is an internationally published film and television historian, a member of the Online Film Critics Society, and the author of The Espionage Filmography.