TVSquad

Must be Columbo week here at TV Squad. Yesterday I talked about some Columbo trivia, and today comes news that they are starting to release the movies made from 1989 and beyond.

The movies from 1989 will be released on April 24. They include Columbo Goes To The Guillotine (with Anthony Andrews), Murder, Smoke, and Mirrors (Fisher Stevens), Grand Deceptions (Robert Foxworth), Sex and the Married Detective (Lindsay Crouse), and Murder: A Self Portrait (Patrick Bauchau). The set will be three discs and probably won't have many (if any) extras on them.

The movies aren't as good as the regular series movies from the late 60s and the 70s (though I like the Andrews episode, where he plays a murderous magician). They just aren't as clever as the older shows were, though a few from the 90s were pretty fun. Those will (hopefully) be released later in the year.

I really should pick up the DVDs for this show. I really enjoyed the first couple of seasons, though I think it sort of strayed after that. The four seasons of the show have been released on DVD, and now FOX is releasing the two TV movies they made after the show was canceled.

The first one, Pretender 2001, was a good continuation of the series. The second one, The Pretender: Island of the Haunted, if I remember correctly, was rather lame. It had Jarod and Miss Parker on an island where they somehow found out some (more) secrets about their past. It will be released as one disc, with one movie on each side. Hopefully that won't cause tech glitches as double sided discs sometimes do.

This show had a great premise and, like I said, the first two seasons are quite good. But it just kept on getting more and more ridiculous. The cast was good though, especially Michael T. Weiss, Andrea Parker, Jon Gries, and a pre-Desperate Housewives James Denton - only he was called "Jamie" back then.