Product Details

• Format: Color
• Language: English
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B0006MTZOY
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #536,133 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not a bad low budget bio-pic, January 11, 2008

By 

Tom Savoy "YELLO fan" (Kokomo, IN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: [VHS] The Three Stooges, 2000 (TV) (VHS Tape)

I saw the movie when it aired eight years ago, and I have to agree that it could have been done much better. The basic accuracy and the great acting convinced me to give it 4 stars. It was nice to see Paul Ben-Victor play a good guy for a change. Evan Handler was very funny as Larry Fine (I'm now a fan of his thanks to his role in this film). Michael Chiklis did a wonderful job portraying Curly. John Kassir did a fine job playing Shemp.

Now for the knocks. I think they could have toned down Shemp's on-screen cowardice. A few more remade bits of some of the Shemp comedies from the late 1940s would have been nice, especially if they had added the one in which Curly played a cameo role. I didn't like the way they treated Joe Besser's character. Besser was a very funny man in his own right, but he already had an established character and it simply didn't mix well with the deliberately roughneck Stooges. I think the creators of the film could have toned down Ted Healy's villainy. Yes, he was a chronic alcoholic and didn't pay his stooges what they were worth, but offstage Ted and Moe were dear friends.

I can forgive the errors in the timeline. The casual fans get the idea of roughly when certain things happened. With only 90 minutes or so, there's only so much the filmmakers can do. The portrayal of Curly's illness beginning around 1940 was off the mark, but not by a whole lot. Although Curly didn't start having his strokes until 1945, chances are good he probably started feeling the effects of his high blood pressure, poor diet, drinking, and hectic schedule for at least a year or two prior to that. As an overweight person in his late 30s, I know my health would be shot in short order if I had to follow the same schedule Curly did.

I agree that this film should have been at least a two-part miniseries. Had it been shown on the big screen, the filmmakers would have had to extend the film by another hour just to tell the story with significant accuracy.

Overall, I really liked the movie and I hope they release it onto DVD soon. I taped it off TV when it was aired, and now the tape's worn out. So hopefully this appeal to have this film re-released will not fall upon deaf ears.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great video but where can you find it???, June 27, 2005

By 

Dan Praydis "Dan" (Baltimore MD) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: [VHS] The Three Stooges, 2000 (TV) (VHS Tape)

I watched this movie when it aired on cbs for the first time and I loved it and there should have been alot of copies of the tapes released because in my opinion they would have sold and sold but they decided not to and only make a few and now there is so many people trying to make there three stooges collection perfect but with the exception of one this movie maybe since Michael chickliss is starting to get bigger maybe they'll release the past movies hes stared in and if not they'll just go up in price perusual.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A typical biopic, August 18, 2006

By 

Anyechka (Rensselaer, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: [VHS] The Three Stooges, 2000 (TV) (VHS Tape)

Like a lot of other biopics, this one is no exception in that there's a lot more fiction than fact. Most of the basic facts are correct, but there are also a great many errors, character assassinations, and events that are either depicted as happening differently than they really did or cut and pasted with other events. For the casual viewer, this will probably seem like a great movie, but for those who are more serious fans, it's going to be a lot harder to take. While it's true that most movies based on books aren't 100% true to the original, nor should they be expected to, given the limited amount of time to tell the story, this is more of an inexcusable thing when the movie is actually based on the lives of real people. Casual fans aren't going to know or care about things like when such and such a director began working at Columbia, that the sound effects are wrong, or who was the head of the short subjects department when the Stooges began working at Columbia; if only nitpicking details like that were the only errors here, it wouldn't have been so bad.

The biopic was based on Michael Fleming's book 'From Amalgamated Morons to American Icons,' a book which also isn't 100% accurate (which in actual fact has some embarrassing errors), but which still has a lot more fact than this biopic. The biopic doesn't even follow all of the events the way they're outlined in Fleming's book. The real story of these men is fascinating enough, so why does it need to have so many liberties taken and so much pathos inserted to try to make it appeal to a wider audience? Additionally, an hour and a half is hardly enough time to tell the story of an entire career; perhaps less important events would have been left out and less time glossed over had this biopic been at least a two-parter.

There are too many errors and omissions to get into here, but some of the more important ones are the character assassinations (Ted Healy may have had some problems with drinking and didn't really pay the boys enough money, but he was far from the complete monster he was depicted as here, and Shemp may have had a lot of phobias, but he was far from the cowardly crybaby the movie shows him as; he was actually the one who was the least afraid of getting hurt), the fact that the boys are more or less always acting in character, even offscreen (when in actual fact there was a really interesting, and even quite touching, contrast between their screen personae and their real-life personalities; for example, Moe was an incredibly nice guy in real life, the complete opposite of the short-tempered bully he portrayed), Curly is shown as having minor strokes as early as 1940 (and the circumstances of his major stroke in 1946 are all wrong; he did not have a stroke while the cameras were rolling), the perpetuation of the apocryphal legend about Joe DeRita being the new Stooge of choice after Shemp died, the Shemp era itself being glossed over in the blink of an eye (one minute they're shooting 'Fright Night' and the next he's in a coffin!), how the three youngest Horwitz brothers are shown performing onstage together as kids in the opening scene and doing bits of their act (the three brothers who got into show business never were onstage together as kids, and weren't even doing stuff like hitting one another until years later), and the fact that the entire premise of the movie makes no sense (since by April of 1959, they already knew they were on the comeback trail, so it makes no sense for Moe to want to refuse to appear before an audience again). The recreations of the shorts also come across very badly and inaccurately. Oh, and I don't think that Mabel Fine was a stripper. She was a dancer, but not the exotic type.

As I've said, this does seem like a really good movie and a nice way to pass some time if you're just a casual viewer or a new fan, but if you're more of a hardcore fan, you're liable to be distracted and angered by all of the inaccuracies. And since there was so much pathos in this movie, it's baffling as to why they left out some very poignant events or portrayed them differently (such as their reactions to hearing Ted Healy had been murdered, or the real circumstances of Curly's stroke). Although I will give this biopic credit for depicting how they were exploited by Columbia and never given a raise for like 25 years, something I don't think many casual fans are really aware of. I'll admit that there are some accurate things in it and some moments I did find moving, but overall, it comes across as more of an insult than a tribute.