Ha ha, it's Burl!

Burl reviews Satan's Black Wedding! (1975)

2012-03-03T22:33:00.000-06:00

Hi, Burl here to review a weird and strange little movie! Ha ha, it’s called Satan’s Black Wedding, and it’s one of those little no-budget 1970s treasures you run across every now and again!

Now I must caution you: it’s not a treasure because it’s a particularly good movie! In fact it’s one of the most poorly-made movies I’ve ever seen! Framing, camera placement, scene structure, general mise en scene – all of this was most studiously ignored by the filmmaker, Nick Millard! But I don’t hold that against him, because the movie sort of works anyway!

The movie starts with a lady slashing away at her wrists with a razor blade, causing a nearby mustache man to sprout a mouthful of enormous cardboard fangs! Then Mark, a Hollywood actor, is shown driving up to Monterey to attend the lady’s funeral! It’s his sister Nina, and she’s apparently spent the two years leading up to her su*cide researching and writing a book about demon*logy or something!

Mark chats with a weird and creepy priest and then checks out the suic*de room of his sister! Considerately, the cops have kept it as she left it, and Mark and the lead investigator chat comfortably for a while in a room splattered with Nina’s lifeblood! It seems the cop is not satisfied that Nina killed herself, and neither is Mark! He plans to stay in Monterey, bunking in his sister’s over-mullioned house, as long as it takes to solve the crime! He teams up with an old girlfriend who used to be friends with Nina and was helping her write her terrifying tale of the supernatural!

But then toothy attacks by zombie vampires, including the late Nina, begin in earnest! Though Mark repeatedly states his intention to stay in Monterey in spite of everything, all the people he speaks to about the situation – his aunt, his aunt’s maid, the cop, his old girlfriend – fall victim to these horrific assaults! Eventually it turns out to have something to do with how Satan would like Mark to marry his sister! Well, Mark beats feet when he hears that, but will he make it safely back to L*s Angeles? You’ll have to see the movie to find out!

Ha ha, this isn’t a great movie, but believe it or not, a few of the sequences are a little bit scary! And it’s really a very weird movie too, a condition which of course rates pretty high with ol’ Burl! It’s a bad movie, make no mistake about that, but it’s a bad movie with heart, and some nice locations, and some gruesome scenes and some hilariously bad acting, and many other qualities that make it enjoyable! I give Satan’s Black Wedding one and a half vile manuscripts!

Burl reviews Out of Bounds! (1986)

2012-03-01T14:26:00.003-06:00

Hi, Burl here! Sorry to start this review on a sad note, but I was just watching this movie Out of Bounds, and got to thinking about the picture’s cinematographer, Bruce Surtees! He shot Beverly Hills Cop as well, and also some very good-looking movies like Dirty Harry and Big Wednesday! Anyway, I thought to myself “Ha ha, now there’s a talented guy,” and then a few days later I read that he up and died! Too bad!

Anyway, Out of Bounds is certainly one of his more minor works, and that’s the picture I thought I’d review for you today! It’s a homburg picture, just like Blue City! That’s my term for the transitional movies in the careers of Brat Pack actors - in this case Anthony Michael Hall - who want to be Taken Seriously and not cast as high schoolers any more! But so often, as is the case with Blue City and, I’m afraid, with Out of Bounds as well, the movies are bad enough to put a real crimp in the actor’s career! (And this might have been the movie Anthony Michael Hall did instead of Full Metal Jacket, which is a pretty poor trade-off if you ask me!)

Still, Out of Bounds is better than Blue City, and better than distaff homburg pictures like Fresh Horses and For Keeps as well! It tells the story of Daryl, a corn-fed Iowa farmboy who travels to Los A*geles to stay with his football-hero brother! Unfortunately, a confusion at the airport results in Daryl walking off with a bag belonging to a murderous drug dealer, who, we’ll have to agree, was a bit of a dummy for flying to L.A. when he could have driven!

Once Daryl is set up in his new digs, an outbuilding behind his brother’s house that’s hidden behind a fake camouflage hedge for some reason, he finds “some kind of crazy stuff” in his bag! Next morning his brother and sister-in-law have been murderized, and Daryl’s on the run, with only a goofy gal named Dizz for company! Dizz is played by Jenny Wright from The Wild Life, and is that sort of crazy L.A. lady we see in all sorts of movies, from The Vals to L.A. Story! She works as a waitress at Barney’s Beanery, yet drives a fancy convertible car and lives in an over-decorated house that would be way beyond any waitress’s salary to own or even rent! Ha ha!

The cops, perhaps to demonstrate their total dedication to solving the crime, make incredibly detailed tape outlines of Daryl’s relatives and then immediately decide he must be the murderer! Under Dizz’s supervision, to the aluminum whine of The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now,” Daryl undergoes an L.A. makeover, donning an all-new lifestyle outfit complete with fingerless leather gloves! Every action Daryl takes seems to dig him in ever-deepening p*o with the police, and soon the cop on the case, played by Glynn Turman from Super 8, tells Daryl that he’s “gone way out of bounds!” Ha ha, oh for the days when a movie’s title would be awkwardly inserted into the dialogue!

Well, this forgotten picture is no classic, but it’s a fine artifact of the era! As a tour of 1980s Los Ang*les, it rivals such players as Into the Night and Miracle Mile, and it even features a surprise appearance by Siouxsie Sioux, whom we find singing in a rock n’ roll club! Anthony Michael Hall’s performance is okay I guess, but Daryl is so reserved and taciturn that at times it seems like Rainman has been made the star of an action picture! Instead of counting toothpicks, his special talent is for throwing knives, which we see him do at the beginning of the picture! From there it’s just a matter of counting time until he bookends that by throwing a knife into the drug dealer too!

In memory of the talented Bruce Surtees, and for its marginal qualities rather than any fundamental merit, I give Out of Bounds two large penguin posters!

Burl reviews X the Unknown! (1956)

2012-03-01T00:34:00.001-06:00

A mighty crack opens in the ground and suddenly it’s Burl standing there, arms akimbo! Ha ha, that’s right, it’s me, here to review an early Hammer picture, a sort of proto-Quatermass sci-fi horror number with some shocking effects!

Do you know, I think this is the earliest picture I’ve ever seen with the magic phrase “Special Makeup Effects” in the credits! There were variations in earlier movies of course, but I can’t recall that particular arrangement of the words, which would later become so popular, previous to this! The credit, by the way, goes to Phil Leakey, who was Hammer’s version of Jack Pierce, designing all-new makeups for their appropriated roster of Gothic horror stars, whose various looks were under copyright at Universal!

The picture takes place in Scotland, where British army fellows are conducting their nuclear detection exercises! The next thing they know, a fissure opens in the ground and their Geiger counters go plumb nuts! What could it be? A faulty mechanism? A minor geological event? A radioactive mud-blob creature from the very bow*ls of the earth? It’s the latter, and science must rally to save the day!

As local Scots are zapped by the creature – here is where the Special Makeup Effects kick in, with gruesome skin-melting scenes and various oozing sores – an American scientist, Dean Jagger, starts putting the pieces of the puzzle together! His ruminations and inductions are strongly reminiscent of Robert Hutton’s incredible leaps of logic in The Vulture! But like Hutton’s they are also correct, and as it happens he’s been working on a project that applies perfectly to just this outlandish situation!

I mentioned that this was a Quatermass-like picture, and indeed it reminds me so strongly of the Quatermass movies that for years I assumed it was one of them; but there’s a crucial difference: X the Unknown is sorely lacking in the audacious metaphysics and the conceptual mind-bogglers with which Nigel Kneale generously larded his movies! But that doesn’t mean it’s bad! Ha ha, it’s pretty enjoyable, and Dean Jagger, though something about his performance suggests a little off-screen experimentation with the local ferments, does an excellent job as the scientist hero!

And that’s maybe my favourite thing about the picture! The scientists are indeed the heroes, and the army helps them out without grousing too much about it! The threat, oddball as it is, is a naturally occurring monster and not a lab creation gone awry! Another quick note: for anyone who’s seen both movies, didn’t the two constantly complaining lance corporals who came to a sticky end remind you of the pair of soldiers played by Dick Miller and Jonathan Haze in Roger Corman’s It Conquered The World? Ha ha, they sure did me!

Anyway, this was an enjoyable movie with good trick effects and a few spooky sequences, and, on the debit side, quite a lot of chatter and some silliness! Ha ha, how do you kill mud, anyway? I give X the Unknown two and a half spinning jeep wheels!

Burl reviews Breathless! (1960)

2012-02-27T23:05:00.003-06:00

Bonjour, c’est Burl ici! Ha ha, aujourd’hui je vais revué le film À bout de souffle, par le grand réalisateur Suisse-Français, Jean-Luc Godard! But no, this whole review won’t be in French! I would make too many mistakes in my grammar, I think, and would thereby annoy my French readership, if I even have a French readership!

À bout de souffle is of course known as Breathless in English, and was Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature! I’ve been a big Godard fan for a long time, and until I watched this picture again the other night, I hadn’t seen it in years! Ha ha, it’s a great picture! I knew that of course, but I had a fine time reacquainting myself with this Gallic classic and realizing just how much it managed to change the motion picture arts as we know them!

Of course this wasn’t the very first movie to take the camera off the tripod and ignore the established rules of editing and mise en scéne, but it was among the first, and certainly was among the most popular! On top of that it’s a lustily entertaining picture, a movie about movies that’s a more effective tribute to the medium than a thousand of those stultifying “Aren’t Movies Great” Oscar night montages could ever hope to be!

Maybe you’ve heard of the movie but haven’t seen it, thinking to yourself “Ha ha, it’s just another boring, impenetrable avant-garde art picture!” No way! It’s a racy and thrilling crime romance that’s of much more than historical interest to anyone who appreciates a good genre exercise! The hero, Michel Poiccard, is played by the incomparable Belmondo, and is a Bogart-worshiping small-time Parisian crook who steals a car and then, cornered, commits a casual copicide! All the flics of France are after him then, but before he can flee the country, Michel needs to do two important things: get his hands on the money that’s owed him for past thieveries, and woo his tentative, impossibly cute American girlfriend Patricia into a dedicated, Bonnie-and-Clyde state of love! Then the two of them can run to Italy, and to freedom!

I won’t repeat the encomiums so many others have lavished on this picture! Ha ha, you’ll just have to see it for yourself and invent some of your own! You’ll be captivated by Belmondo and his habit of running his thumb over his upper lip in imitation of Bogie; with Jean Seberg and her fantastic pixie cut and New York Herald-Tribune t-shirt; and with Paris itself, just for being Paris!

One last note: I’ve often wondered if there was any connection between the character Laszlo Kovacs who is so often mentioned in the film, and the real-life Hungarian cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, who shot Easy Rider, Ghostbusters and of course Butch and Sundance: The Early Days! Ha ha!

I give Breathless four enthusiastic Gauloises, and encourage you to check it out with all haste!

Burl reviews Hospital Massacre! (1981)

2012-02-22T20:09:00.002-06:00

Out of the corner of your eye, a flash of movement – and then suddenly by your side it’s Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to review another slasher picture for you, Hospital Massacre!

Back in 1981 there were a couple of hospital slasher movies released, Visiting Hours and Halloween II, and also a notable Valentine’s Day slasher, the renowned My Bloody Valentine! And then, as though trying to trump them all in a single stroke, along came a hospital slasher on a Valentine’s Day theme, Hospital Massacre! I’ll give you a quick sketch of where this one sits in the classification system: it’s a semi-mystery maniac picture with a touch of the Past History bit and a few splashes of actual Makeup Effects here and there! (There isn’t a credit for Special Makeup Effects per se, it should be noted, but a quick eye may spot a credit for “Makeup Master!” The name beside it is Allan Apone, who also did the trick effects for Silent Madness and The Sword and the Sorcerer!)

Ha ha, the mayhem in this one starts on Valentine’s Day 1961 at Susan’s house! Harold, an awkward boy, loves Susan and leaves a card stating as much! But she and her little buddy laugh and stomp on the card, and this makes Harold so mad he goes instantly and untreatably insane, and hangs the little buddy from a coat hook! Ha ha, that’s the motive? Class Reunion had a more reality-based kickoff to murder than this one!

Well, almost twenty years later, Susan is going to the hospital to get the results of her tests! Wouldn’t you know it, Harold is there, wearing a surgical mask and breathing heavily! He does a little subterfuge with Susan’s X-rays, making it seem like she’s got a bellyful of worms! You’d think worms would be pretty easy to test for by simple use of the stethoscope or maybe a p*o sample, but this hospital is not exactly the Mayo Clinic!

So for the whole middle part of the picture, the horror comes not from Harold’s slicing and dicing, but from Susan’s tribulations with the hospital staff! She’s also cursed with the dumbest, most ineffectual boyfriend ever! If two lady nurses, even tall ones, tried to bundle my girlfriend off down the hall as she screamed “Let go of me!,” I like to think I’d help her out! Ha ha, this guy sort of deserved to get his head cut off with a bone saw, I think, and that’s exactly what happens to him!

This is not a particularly gory picture, just to let you know! There are Special Makeup Effects, as I’ve mentioned, but they’re fairly minimal! A guy gets an acid facewash and ends up with a visage of foam! A snooty doctor gets a chop to the head and another is poked through the throat! There’s a hypodermic needle murder, which I suppose has to happen in every medical horror movie, although they always manage to simultaneously disgust and bore me somehow! Most of the killings are pretty dry, it has to be said!

More notable are the touches of weirdness with which the movie is graced, and I suppose that since this comes from the director of Hot Bubblegum and The Last American Virgin, bizarre flourishes such as the room full of squirmy bandage patients, the troika of witchy old ladies or the scene with Harold holding up a bedsheet as he runs down the hall are to be expected!

Well, it’s a little dry, a little boring in spots, a little sl*azy here and there with the bre*st exams and so forth, a bit silly and a bit stupid, but Harold gets as good as he gives in the end (stabbed, splashed with flammable liquid, bopped several times with a metal pipe, lit on fire and sent over the edge of a building to plummet screaming ten stories to his death), so I give Hospital Massacre one and a half weirdo fumigators, half as many as are in the film itself! Ha ha!

Burl reviews The Errand Boy! (1961)

2012-02-22T00:05:00.001-06:00

Hi, Burl stumbling at you from out of the darkness! Today I thought I’d review a comedy from that exciter of the French funnybone, Jerry Lewis! This one, The Errand Boy, has particular significance to me because it bears an uncanny resemblance to a script idea titled The Clapper-Loader which I myself had thought up almost twenty years ago! Of course, Jerry still gets the credit, but I swear to biscuits that I’d not seen The Errand Boy prior to thinking up The Clapper-Loader!

Like The Clapper-Loader, The Errand Boy is about a clumsy nebbish who comes to work at a Hollywood movie studio and causes chaos! Unlike The Clapper-Loader however, The Errand Boy lacks a compelling narrative and witty, sparkling dialogue to go with the physical comedy! But not every movie can be The Clapper-Loader, and in fact not even The Clapper-Loader can be The Clapper-Loader, since I have yet to even finish the script!

But let’s concentrate on The Errand Boy! Jerry plays Morty S. Tashman (so named in tribute to Frank Tashlin I’m sure), a hapless goof who gets recruited by the Paramutual Studios to find out where money is being wasted on the lot and then report back to the Paramutual executives! The executives are all named Paramutual – it’s a family business, and I guess this is a jab at the Brothers Warner – and are led by blustery Brian Donlevy in the role of T.P. Paramutual!

This is the plot, and the spy business is forgotten about as quickly as the film can manage it! It becomes a series of self-contained gag sequences set on the film lot and often pointing out the artifice involved in filmmaking, which perhaps was novel at the time! Morty’s base is the mail room, which is presided over by a master of the slow burn, Stanley Baker! His performance was great, ha ha, and the scene where he lays down the law to Morty and the rest of the peons has a classic climax involving Morty’s jump onto the desk!

The skits are pretty hit and miss! The best ones don’t end up as you assume they will, and often take a turn into surreality! The worst ones tend to rely on verbal rather than physical or metaphysical comedy, and aren’t much better than something you’d see on a third-rate variety show or cornpone Vaudeville circuit! The presence of the character Mr. Sneak, a man literally driven insane by his own sycophancy, is a warning sign that the scene will be a little less than stellar!

Of course, Morty himself is a bit frustrating! You wonder how someone so incompetent, so dimwitted, so blissfully un-self-aware, could even get dressed in the morning much less make his way down to the studio without getting killed! But that’s always the point with these Jerry Lewis guys, who aren’t really supposed to be human beings at all; until the inevitable sensitive ending in which Jerry tries to convince you, by the sudden appearance of strings on the soundtrack and the liberal spreading of saccharine, that indeed yes, contrary to all heretofore provided evidence, this clown prince of goofballs is meant to be someone with whom we the audience are meant to empathize and even identify! Ha ha!

Well, it never really worked with me! But that aside, as a joke delivery system The Errand Boy does pretty well, and if The Clapper-Loader never gets made Jerry’s picture will stand as a pretty fair replacement! I award it two and a half enormous jars of jellybeans!

Burl reviews Summer Night Fever! (1978)

2012-02-20T11:06:00.002-06:00

Burl’s here again! Ha ha, it’ll make you HAPPY! So says the copy on the video box of Summer Night Fever, and that kind of come-on is well nigh irresistible to a fellow like ol’ Burl! So I made no attempt whatever to resist it, and the result is the review you’re reading right now!

Here’s a grand teen s*x romp in the great European tradition! Like The Wild Life, this one has never made the leap from VHS to DVD, at least not in North America, and the reason is probably the presence of the dreadful and expensive hit song “Baker Street” on the soundtrack, and also the fact that one of the leads wears a Mickey Mouse shirt for the first few scenes of the movie! Ha ha, those copyright issues will get you every time, particularly where irritating softrock saxophone riffs or good old Uncle Walt’s animation corporation are concerned!

Summer Night Fever begins in Munich with two buddies, Peter and Freddy, hanging out at a groovy Teutonic disco and the next morning hopping into Freddy’s yellow convertible VW Bug to begin a summer road trip to Ibiza! Ha ha, I’m already happy! But Freddy has a sister named Vicky, a glasses nerd, whom he is being forced to take along! This bums Peter out, and for the first time but not the last he declares that “This trip is ruined!”

But Vicky, while nerdly, is pleasant enough, and the film sets to documenting their misadventures as they drive through late-70s Europe with the same five or so songs recurring in alternating scenes! Their car, every bit the lemon its appearance would suggest, gives them nothing but trouble! Peter, a goodtime ladies’ man, can’t score to save his life because all the freuleins, femmes, señioritas and niña bonitas assume that Vicky is his girlfriend! In the meanwhile, shy, myopic Freddy is going to b*d with every one of the more elderly ladies in the cast! And along the way, plenty of ladies take off all their clo*hes!

Well, if you thought driving across the continent was fun, wait till this little group reaches the Mediterranean coast! Yes, they hit hotspots like Monte Carlo, where they tangle with an incredibly louche Eurotrash yachtsman, and St. Tropez, where Freddy has a quick af*air with his math teacher! Eventually their car is stolen by a melonman and his cohorts, but that doesn’t concern our heroes overmuch since it was always breaking down and stranding them anyway! A romantic misunderstanding separates Peter and Vicky, who were becoming closer along the way, and the whole thing wraps up on the legendary partyisland of Ibiza!

Ha ha, I have to say that, despite some irritating characters and the brain-melting repetition of some very strange quasi-disco songs, some of which sound like children’s music and bear titles like “You’re A Person Of Importance,” Summer Night Fever is a terrific treasure of yesteryear! I personally would have loved to go on a trip like this at that time in history, and since I was much too young and not European, this is truly the next best thing! I have to admit that the picture lived up to the letter of its video-box boast! It’s well-paced, nicely photographed and it delivers the goods! And of course it makes you HAPPY! Ha ha!

I give Summer Night Fever three narrowly (and thankfully) avoided date r*pes!

Burl reviews The Wild Life! (1984)

2012-02-19T17:35:00.001-06:00

Ha ha! Ha HA! It’s Burl! I’m here to review another movie for you! This is one of those pictures that for some reason seems not to have ever been released on DVD, which perhaps means it’ll never make it to any future format either! I’m sure you can find it to watch somewhere on the Internet, but me, I’ll stick with my VHS copy, which is what I watched the other night!

I’d never actually seen this picture before, which is odd considering that I’m something of an 80s movie scholar, and am fond of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, with which this movie shares a few key elements! Both The Wild Life and Fast Times were written by Cameron Crowe before he got a little too interested in making bland pictures ol’ Burl has no interest in seeing! That happened pretty much right after Say Anything, to tell you the truth! As well, both pictures feature at least one member of the Penn family! Fast Times has Sean as the notorious, pizza-loving st*ner Spicoli, and The Wild Life has Chris as a dreadful bozo named Tommy Drake, and also a brief appearance by their dad Leo Penn in the role of Tommy’s dad!

Both movies also have California locales, a general shambolic quality and a bunch of characters who know one another but have separate stories and problems of their own! But there’s no actual narrative crossover or shared characters, so if you ever were under the impression this is some sort of Fast Times II, think again, young cowpoke!

Our characters include Eric Stoltz as Bill, a straight arrow of a fellow who has recently broken up with his gir*friend Lea Thompson and taken his first apartment at a high-life rental complex in his quest to become a single successful guy! Lea Thompson meanwhile is having a donut-shop af*air with a bootblack handlebar mustache attached to a cop! Her pal Jenny Wright works at a crazy clothing store managed by Rick Moranis, whose hair and outfits here are crazier even than they were in Streets of Fire! She’s fending off both his advances and those of her sometime boyfriend, the odious wrestler Tommy! And Tommy decides to move in with Bill so that he can start a non-sop party parade! And of course we can’t forget Bill’s little brother, who is obsessed with Vietnam and practices nun-chuk-as in his room like the killer from Fear City! Ha ha!

The character of Tommy has got to be one of the more loathsome would-be charmers in movie history! I don’t know why, but I really hated him! He’s meant to be oafish but charming, clueless but big-hearted, and with his Made In California catch phrase, “It’s casual,” I suppose he’s meant to be cool and hip also! Ha ha, well, “It’s casual” made its way to the Great Dumping Ground Of Failed Catch Phrases pretty quickly, to lay beside gems like “Bau bau bau” from Surf II and “Be Scottitfitous, buddy” from Hardbodies! Tommy is just one of the most objectionable characters I’ve ever encountered in my long movie watching career! I don’t know why he rubbed me so very wrongly, but there was just something about him!

But I enjoyed the movie on the whole, since I do tend to like these laid-back, directionless teen comedies of yesteryear! I liked its loose ends, its supporting cast (Randy Quaid appears as a depressed, sm*ck-addict Vietnam vet, and of course a Moranis appearance always brings a picture up) and the random rock stars that showed up throughout! It’s not in the same class as Fast Times, but I rate The Wild Life a respectable two Ron Wood cameos nevertheless!

Burl reviews Killer's Kiss! (1955)

2012-02-19T15:22:00.003-06:00

The door opens to reveal… Burl! Yes, I’m here to review another Stanley Kubrick movie, this time not a late-period movie like Full Metal Jacket, but one of his earliest productions, Killer’s Kiss! He made this one for a pittance way back when, after he’d only done a few other pictures, mostly short documentaries!

But he’d already had lots of experience behind the camera – the still camera that is, as a photographer for Look magazine! That’s probably why Killer’s Kiss looks so darn good! The fellow was just born with a good eye, I guess!

The tale is a pretty basic one! It seems there’s a boxer, Davy, who is cursed with an eternal glass chin! He fights Kid Rodriguez for the title and loses, falling to the canvas like a stumblebum! No matter how many times he shakes his head to clear it, he can never quite get his mojo back! Ha ha, in the world of the sweet science, he’s naught but a clumsy lab assistant!

But he lives in a dingy apartment with a view of the other dingy apartment across the courtyard, the tenant of which is a beautiful lady named Gloria who turns out to be a taxi dancer at a hall owned by a greasy mustachioed gangster-ish fellow, Rapallo! Well, Rapallo, who has feelings, is in love with his employee and visits her one night anxious to make l*ve! But Davy hears her screams, rushes to the rescue, and though Rapallo has gone, he manages to provide some comfort for the weepy Gloria! The next morning they put on the day, exchange tales of woe (Gloria’s involves a lot of ballet dancing) and begin very tentatively to fall in love!

Of course love never runs smoothly in a noir caper like this, and when Gloria tries to quit her dime-a-dance career to join Davy on a trip to Oregon, Rapallo’s thugs are waiting! In a case of mistaken identity they put a fatal punching on Davey’s fight manager, and then they kidnap Gloria! Davy tracks her down and then there are some ferocious fights – brittle-chinned Davy is of course knocked out easily in the course of one of them – and a nifty rooftop chase! The grand finale is famous for taking place in a mannequin warehouse, and it ends with a gruesome transfixion and a pitiful dying scream!

Ha ha, this is a great little movie, if probably not the one Kubrick was most proud of! It would certainly make a terrific double bill with Blast of Silence, which is just as good and even grittier and rougher, but unlike Killer’s Kiss was not the start of a legendary directing career! Kubrick’s picture has got some flaws, sure, like the weak story, the narrated flashbacks that are obvious narrative bandages, the rushed and improbable denouement and the fairly obvious techniques used to cover the fact that there is no audience and no auditorium in the boxing scene; but on the other hand almost every shot has some visual treat in it!

On balance, and though I admit my opinion is coloured somewhat by the film’s pedigree and the fact that I just like looking at shots of New York in the 50s, I’m going to give this little noir three soon-to-be-neglected fish!

Burl reviews Terror of Tiny Town! (1938)

2012-02-16T23:06:00.002-06:00

Hi, Burl here to review a very short movie! Ha ha, it runs barely more than an hour! I’m talking of course about Terror of Tiny Town, a Western made with an all-little people cast! As you can see from the poster, it is “rated comedy,” but in fact it’s a fairly straight-ahead Western action-drama!

Of course the movie is notorious in the exploitation field, more so even than the Werner Herzog movie Even Dwarves Started Small, in which I believe the cast was not only small-sized but hypnotized! But the movie doesn’t do much with the height-deficiencies of its actors, and in fact it’s easy to forget, or at least not fixate on, the shortness of the cowpokes and just get caught up in the wainscoting-high drama!

Ha ha, it seems that there’s a goodly amount of rustlin’ going on around Tiny Town, and two ranching families are each convinced the other is behind it! Buck Lawson, who wears a brilliantly white hat and a dust-repellant ice cream suit, is the good guy, and his dad owns the ranch; Nancy Preston is the young lady newcomer to town whose uncle Tex runs another big ranch! Well, that nasty Bat Haines is behind it all, rustling the cattle and setting the two families against one another!

Buck and Nancy carry on a Romeo/Juliet relationship for a while before Bat opts to raise the stakes by shooting Tex and pinning the crime on Buck! Ha ha! But of course everything eventually gets sorted with the help of a few well-placed sticks of dynamite!

Sure, there are a few midget gags in this movie, like the comedy relief cook who is terrorized by a cunning duck, and who walks in and out of his cupboards like they were closets! And there’s a fellow who guzzles down snifters of beer as big as his head! And the midget who sings basso profundo! (There’s a lot of singing in this movie – the whole town gets to warbling at the drop of a ten-gallon hat!) And, yes, one guy does walk into a saloon by trundling under the swinging doors! But the movie isn’t really a comedy unless you’re one of those people who simply point and laugh whenever you see a little person, and if so, ha ha, you’re a jerk!

The wee folks ride and shoot and fight just fine, though they’re not very good actors! A few of the action scenes are surprisingly exciting! On the whole, this is not much different than the typical Monogram-type Westerns of the period, and if you like those, you should enjoy this one too! And if the look of the film is familiar to you, it’s because it was shot by the same cinematographer as Cosmo Jones: Crime Smasher! Ha ha, I give Terror of Tiny Town two extremely mysterious penguin cameos!

Burl reviews Silent Madness! (1984)

2012-02-14T23:01:00.002-06:00

Burl! It’s Burl! Ha ha, another slasher movie to review for you today! I know that many of my readers enjoy these pictures above all! And this one, Silent Madness, appears to be especially loved by a small but dedicated contingent of motion picture admirers!

Some of you may recollect that one of my ongoing projects on this blog is to create a proper, if loosely organized, taxonomy of these slasher pictures! Mystery killers, faceless killers, deformed killers and motive-driven killers all ought to have their own comfortable categories in which to loll and plot their mayhem; movies which use the science and art of gore should be segregated from those which for some reason refuse to do so; and good movies must be separated from bad!

Where does Silent Madness sit in all this? Ha ha, well, let’s have a closer look! The plot in its broadest outlines is fairly scrupulously recycled from Halloween, actually: we have an escaped lunatic, a dedicated mind-doctor on his trail and a group of unwary goodtime gals directly in his path! There are a few victims along the way and a sheriff who refuses to believe the threat is real! From there, however, the two movies diverge pretty completely!

It seems that a pasty-faced individual named Howard Johns is released by mistake from a New York bughouse! He makes his way without delay to the small college town where, almost twenty years before, he’d been driven haywire by a brutal sp*nking inflicted on him by some sorority sisters! He’s never forgotten that b*m paddling, nosirree, and he’s back to inflict revenge on all the current-day sisters of Delta Pi or whatever! (Ha ha, it’s all Greek to me!)

Feisty Dr. Lady is on his trail, and she in turn is pursued by a couple of incredibly sle*zy and horrible orderlies from the hospital, who have been mandated by bughouse officials to kill Howard Johns and turn the doctor into a mental vegetable! Other characters mixed up in the action include the aforementioned sheriff played by Sidney Lassick from Carrie, Alligator and The Unseen; a soap-star type newspaper editor whose heroics consist of getting bonked on the head, tied up and locked in the back of a van; and the house mother played by the great Viveca Lindfors from Creepshow! Ha ha, it’s a pretty good cast actually!

Meanwhile Howard Johns has gone murder-happy, using a variety of relatively imaginative methods for his killing! He does a head-crushing in a vice, steams someone to death, tosses an animated hatchet and inventively uses a barbell, a rope and a window at one point as well! Some of the killings are fairly (almost uncomfortably) gruesome, and there’s a bit of actual gore here and there as well, and that treat for any slasher viewer, a credit for Special Makeup Effects! Ha ha, there’s also a special appearance by that great video game of days gone by, Dragon’s Lair!

Well, I won’t say too much more about this picture, except that it was made in 3D, so there are some things tossed, pointed and otherwise aimed at the camera lens! (The light-hungry 3D process also ensures that this is the rare slasher movie which takes place entirely in the daytime!) Also worth noting is the East Coast atmosphere, so different to the discerning viewer from the California or Midwest ambiances so often found in these things! And I must say it again: Viveca Lindfors! This is far from her greatest role, but I’ve always liked her, and her presence put me in mind of a picture called Last Summer in the Hamptons which I remember enjoying at a film festival once! Maybe I’ll watch it again and review it here sometime!

Silent Madness more or less delivers what anyone watching it deliberately might hope for, and though there’s an excess of plot and it gets a little chatty here and there, I’ll still give it two sudden nailgunnings!

Burl reviews Fear City! (1984)

2012-02-12T22:44:00.005-06:00

Hey and hah-trayah, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m here with another review of a motion picture, once again plucked almost at random from my basement VHS collection! This one is an Abel Ferrara movie I’ve never seen before, and it’s called Fear City! It maybe should have been called Sle*zeball City, but I guess Fear City works pretty well too! It's part of that micro-genre of movies that are partially about psycho killers but are also part of some other genre too, just like Delirium!

It’s also part of that category of movies whose raison d’etre seems to be making New York look like the most horrible, gritty, dangerous and generally unsavoury place ever! There are mainstream movies that work on this theme, like Cruising, and there are low-budget pictures that do it even more persuasively precisely because of their low budgets (Maniac and Basket Case would be good examples of these); but Fear City, with its cast of recognizable faces and reasonable budget, fits somewhere in the middle!

It seems that Tom Berenger, whom we know from such Hollywood bumkins as Someone To Watch Over Me and Last Rites, is an ex-boxer who once boxed his opponent into the grave, and so he quit pugilizing – though his flashbacks won’t let him forget the incident – and started up a strip*er management business with his pal Jack Scalia! Well, wouldn’t you know it, as our story proper begins, one of those self-righteous maniacs on a morality crusade decides to clean up the streets by practicing his various martial arts techniques on random ex*tic dancers, at first just mutilating them with scissors and knives, but soon working his way up to brutal murders!

Since the first two victims work for the Berenger/Scalia Agency, an incredibly angry cop played by Billy Dee Williams decides these fellows must know something about the tragedies! Soon a mobster played by Rossano Brazzi from South Pacific gets involved for some reason; and there are lots of ladies about too, like Melanie Griffith as the exo*ic dancer Tom Berenger loves, and Rae Dawn Chong as the exot*c dancer Melanie Griffith loves, and Janet Julian from Humongous as the exoti* dancer everyone loves!

Of course we all know that even with all these characters and plot strands and flashbacks, it’s all going to come down to the killer boxer vs. the chopsocky maniac, and indeed that’s what occurs! Ha ha, the fight is pretty good, and it’s always satisfying to see one of these extreme social conservatives – and he’s a brutal murderer too, don’t forget – receive the harsh and painful pummeling they deserve!

Ha ha, Abel Ferrara is a pretty interesting director! I guess he’s best known for Bad Lieutenant and King of New York, but he’s done lots of other weird pictures as well, like his own (pretty good!) version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers; a movie about Madon*a and Harvey Kietel making l*ve; and a movie adaptation of William Gibson’s New Rose Hotel! Fear City is one of his earlier productions, and despite running off madly in all directions plotwise, and presenting maybe too many scenes of *xotic dancing, and featuring a lot more harsh, brutal violence against women than ol’ Burl is all that comfortable with, and losing its narrative thread like you would a worm in a bowl of rancid spaghetti, it’s not that bad a movie! I give it two long, wordless nun-chuck-a practices!

Burl reviews Malpertuis! (1973)

2012-02-10T22:19:00.002-06:00

Well, it’s that time again! Time for ol’ Burl to grab the cinematic bull by the horns and wrestle it into the dirt – the dirt of critical evaluation! Ha ha, over my many years of movie watching, I’ve identified more than a few micro-genres, and built up a pretty extensive taxonomy! One category of movies I like is the Expensive Arty Horror Picture, which consists of uniquely oddball, almost experimental genre movies that break some new ground in the field! Matango is a good example, and so are movies like Horrors of Malformed Men or Lisa and the Devil or The House with the Laughing Windows or Zeder! I guess you might toss Videodrome in there as well!

Today’s movie is another picture in the great artsy horror tradition! It’s Malpertuis, which was adapted from a weird surrealistic horror book by the pseudonymous Belgian writer Jean Ray! Ha ha, the movie was made by Harry Kümel, who also made a movie about n*de vampire ladies called Daughters of Darkness, and in fact has made several other pictures that you never hear about! Or maybe you do if you’re of the Benelux nations, but not so much outside of that particular socioeconomic region!

Malpertuis is also part of another micro-genre, the House Movie! These are pictures which take place mostly or entirely within the walls of a single house, and the house itself is more or less a character in the film! There are lots of haunted house movies in this micro-genre of course, like The Haunting, House, The Legend of Hell House, This House Possessed, The Evil and The Nesting, just to name a few, but there are also left-field weirdpics like Sunset Boulevard, Demon Seed and Guy Maddin’s new feature Keyhole!

Well, I guess I ought to tell you a little about Malpertuis, but I’ll keep it sketchy, because it’s one of those movies you might prefer to go in knowing only a little bit about! It seems that a pretty-boy sailor-man is on shore leave and looking for the house in which he grew up! It seems to be missing! He chases his sister and ends up in a nightclub free-for-all where he gets bopped on the head! He wakes up in Malpertuis, the house of his uncle Cassavius, who is played without even getting out of bed by Orson Welles himself! The house is filled with all sorts of other people, mostly petit bourgeoisie or resentful servants or weird hangers-on, who all seem to be waiting around for the bedridden Cassavius to croak!

There’s a strange atmosphere in the house, and an odd reluctance or inability on the part of its denizens to leave! All sorts of things happen, including gruesome murders and illicit s*xual acts, and later on some much, much stranger events and revelations, some of these involving the gods of ancient Greece! By the time the young sailor discovers the secret of Malpertuis and those who dwell within its mildewed walls, the movie has mustered up an otherworldly feeling that stays with you well after the credits have rolled and the last strains of the Georges Delerue score have faded!

Many of the movie’s pleasures are visual! It was shot by Gerry Fisher, a British cinematographer whose eclectic credits include lots of Joseph Losey and Tony Richardson pictures, a bunch of late-period John Frankenheimer and Michael Ritchie works, and crazy movies like Billy Wilder’s Fedora, William Peter Blatty’s The Ninth Configuration, John Huston’s Wise Blood, and of course Wolfen and Highlander! Truly an interesting career! And, in concert with the production designer and Kümel he does a great job with Malpertuis, giving the house enough varied life and colour and flaming gas lamps to make it an expansive and multifaceted environment with personality to spare!

This is a picture well worth seeking out! There are a few different versions, and I watched the 119 minute director’s cut, which is what I recommend to you! I give it three and a half swooping eagles!

Burl reviews Carnival Rock! (1957)

2012-02-09T11:10:00.004-06:00

Hi, Burl here with some early Roger Corman to chat about for you all! Ha ha, old Roger certainly has made his share of movies over the years, and for a producer he was an awfully prolific director too! I guess when you make a movie in three or four days, you can pack quite a few of them into a year! This particular one has a pretty bland title, so it’s better known around my house as No! Don’t Touch Me!

But though Carnival Rock isn’t one of Corman’s better-known pictures, it’s one of his more serious-minded efforts of those early days! Ha ha, it wasn’t all monsters and dragsters for that fellow! This movie was certainly intended as a drama above all else, but it was still ultimately a drive-in picture, so Corman salted it generously with the shakinest tunes of the day in an effort to keep the kids on the Southern ozoner circuit intrigued! There are numbers from David Houston, Bob Luman, The Shadows, and a groovy theme tune from The Blockbusters! The best musical interlude comes from The Platters – it’s a truly excellent slice of goodtime vocal pop, and a highlight of the movie!

But most of the movie is the story, and the story is as follows! It seems that on “the pier” – it’s never specified which pier, or where the pier is, and we never even see any remotely pier-like details, since Corman wasn’t shelling out for any location photography on this one – there is a nightclub establishment known as Christy’s! Christy, the owner, is a potato-faced Greek who, we are repeatedly told, is fifty years old! He’s desperately, passionately, completely in love with his star attraction, a lady singer named Natalie, played by Susan Cabot! He’s so be-smitten, in fact, that he’s completely neglecting his failing business, despite constant reminders from his stylish factotum Benny, a role essayed by the great, great Dick Miller, my very favourite actor!

As the business pressures on Christy get heavier, his demented refusal to face reality becomes only more determined! Benny’s complete and unexplained devotion to him (perhaps Christy saved his life in the war?) is severely tested as Christy’s hard-headedness calcifies into looniness! And Natalie, a decent lady with no attraction to the Greek, is driven further and further away! Her fiancé Stanley wins the club from Christy in a simple game of high card/low card, and in a desperate attempt to stay near his beloved, Christy takes a job as the club’s baggy-pants comic! Ha ha, saddest clown ever! Well, when Christy finally goes over the edge and starts the club on fire (it’s the lowest-budget conflagration ever committed to film!), matters come to a head, and it’s up to the decent Stanley to save both his lady love and the cracked Christy! There’s a very bittersweet conclusion after that, tinged only ever so slightly with hopefulness!

Ha ha, it’s hard to say what the drive-in crowd would have made of this one! It’s very talky, so they would have had plenty of time to m*ke out between the musical numbers! The romantic and business travails of a homely pentagenarian would not likely have interested them overmuch! But what do I know, maybe they were riveted! In any case, I say the movie is well worth a look! The performances and script are both strong, and the moody photography by Floyd Crosby (he shot F.W. Murnau’s Tabu and such prestigious pictures as High Noon and The Old Man and the Sea, and later on all the American-International beach movies) gives it some carnival atmosphere! And you know how much ol’ Burl loves a carnival picture!

And what a cast! You’ve got the excellent Dick Miller of course, and then in the role of Stanley there’s Brian G. Hutton, better known from his later action-movie directing career! He made Where Eagles Dare and Kelly’s Heroes and the 80s moustache picture High Road to China before apparently chucking it all to become a plumber! Ha ha, weird! And there’s Susan Cabot, whom I’ve liked in all her roles, but she had a troubled life and came to a sticky end when her dwarf son clubbed her to death with a barbell while she was sleeping one night in 1986! That’s very sad, she was talented! And you also get Bruno VeSota from Attack of the Giant Leeches, and Jonathan Haze, Seymour Krelboyne himself, in supporting roles!

Maybe I’m just a sucker for a little good music, or for a Corman stock-company cast, or for a movie that tries hard! I know I’m a sucker for any Dick Miller performance I happen to run across! At any rate, all of this means that despite its cheap talkiness, I’m going to give Carnival Rock three skinny neckties!

Burl reviews Full Metal Jacket! (1987)

2012-02-08T17:09:00.003-06:00

Hi, it’s Burl here, standing tall before the man! Today I want to talk about Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam movie Full Metal Jacket, which is a dilly of a picture! Kubrick had made war pictures before this, most notably Paths of Glory, and when you factor in films like Spartacus and Dr. Strangelove you get a pretty good idea of how the man felt about armed, organized human conflict! He thought it was ridiculous, ha ha!

Full Metal Jacket almost plays as a comedy at times! The bandy-legged, leather-bound drill instructor, Sgt. Hartmann, is so outrageously over the top that I think if I was one of the maggots under his tutelage, I’d have reacted to his rants like Private Pyle does, with a hard-to-conceal smirk! Ha ha, I’d have certainly received a punching or two from that beef-jerky of a DI!

Allow me to digress for a moment! Ha ha, I saw a special advance preview screening of this movie back when it was released in 1987, and I was so excited to see the movie that I got there early so I could catch the regular feature that had been double-billed with this one! This was in the days before the Internet, remember, so most everyday people had no idea the movie was coming, or what it was about, or anything! And maybe that’s why the theatre people decided that Full Metal Jacket should be paired up with none other than Ernest Goes to Camp! Ha ha, the theatre was full of families who were there to see the big-screen debut of Ernest, and who liked the idea of seeing a second mystery film for free!

You could sense the confusion from the audience as the seemingly endless shots of the recruits getting their heads shaved went on and on! They’d been primed to laugh by Ernest’s antics, so there was plenty of titt*ring, and more once Sgt. Hartmann started his prof*ne bellowing! Ha ha, he was always threatening to p*op on people’s necks, that crazy Sgt.! But one by one, as his threats and insults became more graphic, and the atmosphere chillier and less recognizably human, the families began to drift away! All except one devoted dad and his two eight-to-ten year olds! They stayed for the whole show, and I often wonder how he and the kids described their evening at the pictures to Mom later on!

This movie was a part of the great Vietnam Surge of the late 1980s, and initially I thought Platoon was the better movie! Platoon is hardly a bad picture, but, for me anyway, it’s become apparent that it’s more just an exercise in surface impact, and has less thematic follow-through than the Kubrick picture! There’s a generic feel to all the jungle creeping and yelling of Platoon, whereas Full Metal Jacket is and always will be its own unique thing!

A few random thoughts: The whole cast is great, but Dorian Harewood is especially good in the picture! He plays Eightball, and I thought he did a standout job! Also, that Colonel who shows up, the one who asks of his soldiers only that they obey his every command as they would the word of God, is Bruce Boa, the Waldorf Salad guy from Fawlty Towers! And whatever happened to Douglas Milsome, the cinematographer? He did a great job, and you’d think he’d have been set for a career shooting prestige pictures after this one! But the next thing you know he’s photographing killer Rumplestiltskin movies and Jean-Claude Van Damme direct-to-video cheapies! Weird!

Anyway, this is a singular picture and an extremely entertaining one! It’s brutal and funny, and even though you’re always conscious that it was shot on a backlot in England and they never went anywhere near either Parris Island or Vietnam, it has a thematic and emotional effect that bonks most other Vietnam pictures over the head! I give it four re*ch-arounds!

Burl reviews 8: The Mor-mon Proposition! (2010)

2012-02-08T17:05:00.003-06:00

Burl here to review a documentary feature! This one details the machinations of the Utah Mor-mons who made it their business to interfere in the California proposition to ban gay marriage, which appeared on the ballot in November of 2008! I remember following this story and, frankly, making the assumption that the proposition wouldn’t come within a mile of passing; but I was wrong, and the lesson, I guess – and the lesson in this documentary – is not to underestimate how much organized socially conservative religious people are determined to interfere in other peoples’ lives!

So there’s an interesting and relevant story here, and with the recent judicial declaration that this proposition is unconstitutional, it’s timely once again also! So it’s pretty unfortunate that this tale is told in such a cheap, unimaginative and out-of-whack movie as this one! Let me give you an example of the movie’s approach! One of the interviewees is enumerating the elements necessary to influence a vote in a place as large as California! One, he says, is money! Cut to a shot of hands counting fake-looking bills! Two: volunteers willing to go door-to-door! Cut to a shot of someone knocking on a door! Three is something less tangible, like influence, and the filmmakers’ limited imaginations were unable to come up with a crashingly on-the-nose visual to go along with it, so they just show a shot of a building and leave it at that! Ha ha, nice try!

But I’m far from the ideal audience for this picture! It may shock you to learn this, but ol’ Burl is a fairly cosmopolitan guy! I live in a place where gay marriage has been legal for years, so I can tell you with cheerful certainty that it presents no danger to so-called “traditional” marriage or to the fabric of society! I don’t require documentaries such as this to endorse marriage for whatever consenting adults want it! I have friends who are in gay marriages and who are raising happy, well-adjusted kids, so I don’t need to be persuaded that these families are perfectly normal! The idea that anyone could think otherwise is what tends to surprise me! And I’m not in the least surprised to learn that Mor-mons were behind the big money push to influence the California vote! I thought it was common knowledge, but this movie presents it as though they’re unveiling a shocking and little-known revelation!

A gay couple whose marriage was rent asunder by these meddling Mor-mons are the default main characters, and most of their screen time is them telling us that they truly love one another and that they deserve to be allowed to marry the same as anyone else, and that it’s all about love! Since I take those things for granted, I was pretty much looking at my watch, waiting for the movie to go deeper! It could have presented all those things with some choice visuals, showing these guys at home or something, instead of having them repeat it over and over! But like I said, not much imagination at work here!

Still, I learned a few things! I’d never heard of this loathsome Senator Buttars guy before, and I could have gone through life quite happy never to have heard of him I guess, but now at least I can picture his horrible face as the proposition he so unctuously championed is undone by the very constitution he presumably would have had to swear allegiance to at some point! So maybe that made watching this thudding and ponderous doc somewhat worthwhile!

I certainly wish this had turned out better, because as I say, it’s an interesting story! Perhaps, as the story is ongoing, there is a more ferocious, more stylish and more dynamic effort yet to come! I give 8: The Mor-mon Proposition one single easily-pressured Mor-mon!

Burl reviews National Lampoon's Class Reunion! (1982)

2012-02-07T22:29:00.002-06:00

Ha ha, it’s Burl here to review a comedy! Or at least a movie that supposes it’s a comedy! I’m talking about the slasher movie parody National Lampoon’s Class Reunion! I guess that’s the official title, but if I was Mr. National Lampoon, I’d maybe keep my name off the poster of this particular effort! Ha ha, stick with possessiveifying Animal House and Vacation, Mr. Lampoon, that’s my advice!

Let me tell you right up front: this movie st*nks! It st*nks so hard! There were a number of slasher movie parodies made around the same time as this, pictures like Student Bodies, Wacko and Pandemonium! Now I haven’t seen all those movies, but I feel pretty sure that they must certainly be better than Class Reunion! They could hardly be worse!

The movie starts out a lot like that old favourite Terror Train! At a graduation party, a hapless class dweeb is tricked into an unpleasant assignation with a supposed sure thing! But instead of a dismembered corpse as in the railroad picture, the bagheaded certainty with whom the dweeb is coupled turns out to be… well, that’s the twist! Wouldn’t want to give it away, ha ha!

Well, okay, I will: the dweeb turns out to be making l*ve to his own twin sister! By garr! No wonder that ten years later at the class reunion he shows up with a bag on his head and a mission to kill! And here is a group worth killing: you’ve got Gerrit Graham as the BMOC who masterminded the cruel prank; Stephen Furst, the flounder from Animal House, playing the gross-out king Hubert and applying whatever he learned from John Belushi to his part; Art Evans from Fright Night as a ston*r – which is funny because he usually seems to play a cop; and many more! The great Michael Lerner shows up as a mystery doctor, and he provides a special surprise later on!

Now, these are not untalented people! And the script for this movie was written by John Hughes, and whatever you think of his teen angst pictures, he’s usually good for a few bon mots! On top of this, behind the megaphone was the portly director Michael Miller, who, the very same year he made this bumkin of a movie, made the enjoyable Chuck Norris-vs.-Frankenpsycho picture Silent Rage! (Ha ha, I’ll try to review that one pretty soon!) So why did Class Reunion end up as such a feeble cruickshank of a movie?

Things just fall that way sometimes, I guess! There are some okay bits – Anne Ramsey, well known from Deadly Friend, plays the lunch lady, and she has a fairly hilarious kung-fu battle with the killer! And Chuck Berry provides some fine musical entertainment, but he’s apparently finished and gone before the killer begins his violence work! But the rest of it is almost aggressively unfunny, and not in a Neil Hamburger way! The filmmakers probably didn’t think that, for example, a blind crippled lady crashing into things was inherently funny, but they sure fooled themselves into thinking other people would find it funny! I liked the idea that one of the students was a vampire for some reason, but he never did anything particularly vampiric, and he had the worst attempt at a Bela Lugosi accent ever! Ha ha, I thought anyone could do Bela! Even Martin Landau from Without Warning did a pretty good Bela!

Well, this movie is the worst kind of daffodil, and I can in good conscience give it no more than one half of a girls’ convenience!

Burl reviews Tower of Evil! (1972)

2012-02-06T10:35:00.002-06:00

Ha ha! You know who it is? Burl! Yes, I’m here to review another picture for you, this one straight from the foggy shores of Blighty: one of those early-70s British pictures I was talking about in the review of Scream… and Die! It’s Tower of Evil, also known as Horror on Snape Island, and I think it’s got some other titles too! But let’s keep things simple and call it Tower of Evil!

This movie doesn’t get the recognition that it—well, I don’t want to say deserves, but that I’d expect it to have! I suppose it’s an older movie at this point, low of budget and short on stars, but on the other hand it’s got plenty of mayhem and n*dity, and sometimes the mayhem and nud*ty are all wrapped up together in one crazy few moments of motion picture!

Some fishermen arrive on foggy Snape Island, a bleak and inhospitable promontory, honeycombed with caves, upon which perches a decrepit lighthouse and be-rubbled house! Well, they start finding corpses, and the next thing you know a nak*d lady runs screaming at them, managing to give one of them a pretty thorough poking before catching a bop on the head from the other!

Because one of the murder weapons was an ancient Phonecian spear, some artifact historians become involved and head to the island to see what’s up! In the meantime, the n*ked lady has been given some clothes and is being hypnotized by a nine-light covered with multicoloured gels! The idea is to lift her out of her funk so she can explain what happened on the island!

Flashbacks to these events, which involve a bunch of British youths trying to sound American, are salted in as we follow the relic hunters to the baneful islet! The surviving fisherman, a mysterious detective and a dimwitted treasure-hunting tightpants are along for the ride! Altogether they make up as petty and nasty a bunch as you could ever hope to find, and all of them dumber than a box of dead crabs in the bargain! It quickly becomes clear even to this unleavened group that they’re not alone on old Snape Island, and soon there are corpses a-plenty littering the rocky ground! Heads and hands are cut off, faces chopped and torsos poked, and screaming victims plummet from the top of the lighthouse!

The thing about this particular group of people, and the real downside to this picture, is that they’re ready-made victims who may as well have been groomed in some behavioralist’s operant chamber to act in just exactly the way that would best guarantee a domino-like mass demise! They’ll wander off alone for no reason at all, ignore obvious danger signs, and disrobe for s*xual interc*urse in the middle of a desperate fight for survival! Ha ha, they’re a bunch of pretty dumb bunnies!

There’s one scene that stands out for sheer stupid behaviour! Someone hears a scary noise, and the men of the group go out to investigate! “Ha ha, stay right here,” one guy tells the ladies! Of course while the fellows are out, one of the ladies gets the chop! Instead of offering abject apologies, the guy is all like, well, nothing we could have done to prevent that! And later, when another scary noise is heard, the remaining lady says “Ha ha, you’re not going to leave me alone again!” The guy responds in a tone suggesting she’s a child who’s just asked the stupidest question in the world: “Of course not! Get your coat!” Sorry buddy, but you’re the idiot here!

It’s pretty enervating! But the rest of the movie is fairly enjoyable! You might be wondering who’s doing all the killing? Well, usually in movies like this – Raw Meat, for example – the killer turns out to be a disheveled, giggling madman with a big shaggy beard, and that’s the case here! He’s got some pretty spooky scenes, I can tell you! I give Tower of Evil two and a half model lighthouses!

Burl reviews Secret Admirer! (1985)

2012-02-04T22:38:00.004-06:00

Well, again, it’s Burl reviewing at you! And how fun it is to do it! Yes, another comedy about the horm*nes of young people for you today! This one is a pretty mainstream example of that marvelous genre, and what it might lack in go-for-broke teen ra*nchiness, it makes up for with its fine cast and reasonably strong script!

This one is called Secret Admirer, and it’s got a fairly gimmicky plotline that might sort of remind you or The Earrings of Madame de… or something along that line! It seems that C. Thomas Howell is one of those young high schoolers who’s got a good female friend who is also gorgeous and has an obvious crush on him, but whom he doesn’t consider romantically attractive for some reason! Instead C. Thomas has the h*ts for a blonde girl played by Mrs. John Travolta! It’s similar to the dynamic we see in the same year’s Teen Wolf, where “Boof” is the neglected but loving pal! Ha ha, I guess 1985 was a big year for this sort of confusion!

Well, a love letter is written and passed anonymously to C. Thomas, and when his gaggle of pals find it tucked inside his arithmetic book, they convince him that it certainly must have been written by Mrs. Travolta! Well, confusion sets in all around the neighbourhood after that, spreading to anyone – kids, parents, other parents – who accidentally discover the letter or one of its follow-ups and immediately jump to a faulty conclusion!

I won’t detail these confusions, but the movie is pretty much divided equally between the confusions of the kids and the confusions of the adults, all of whom come to believe that their partners are up to some adult*rous no good! If these adults hadn’t been cast properly – Fred Ward and Dee Wallace are among them, just to give you an idea – then these parts of the movie would have been a complete waste of time! So thank goodness for lively actors!

As for the young people sections of the picture, they’re more naturally successful because that’s where the movie’s heart lies, after all, and that is the crowd the picture-makers were presumably catering to! Here again, the performances help out! C. Thomas is okay I guess, with a few good moments here and there, and his gal-pal is really good, I thought! Mrs. Travolta is fine too, and doesn’t hesitate to disr*be when the narrative arc calls for it! C. Thomas’s gang of pals are okay as well, and one of them wears businessman clothes and carries around a briefcase, which I thought was a nice touch since I seem to recall a guy in my own high school who did the same thing!

My favourite scene in the picture, actually, involves all these pals – it’s in a treehouse or something, and they’re in there drinking beer and hanging out because they’ve just finished school for the year! Ha ha, always an exciting day! There’s nothing special about the scene – it’s where they discover the letter, blah blah blah – but it’s just a pleasant bit of hanging out, and I liked it! Ha ha!

The movie looks slick and professional, which isn’t always the case with this sort of picture, and it has a score by Jan Hammer, the guy who did the Miami Vice music! There are clever bits in the script, a few likeable characters (the ostensible “bad guys,” like the apeish boyfriend of Mrs. Travolta’s character, are given little empathy-inducing soliloquies) and a highly unlikely final scene! All this equals a reasonably enjoyable, if instantly forgettable picture! I give it two and a half tumbling grandfather clocks!

Burl reviews Fraternity Vacation! (1985)

2012-02-03T00:13:00.005-06:00

It's Burl talking! I’m sure you all know and are fascinated with Stephen Geoffreys, the fellow who played Evil Ed in the original Fright Night! Ha ha, if you’ve ever seen this delightful individual, you can hardly have forgotten him! And did you know that along with his supporting part in Fright Night and his role as the mast*rbator in Heaven Help Us, he had a few starring roles in other pictures? Yes, it’s true, and although many of his roles were in movies not likely to get discussed here, Fraternity Vacation seems like a pretty good candidate for a review from ol’ Burl!

There’s a black and white prologue, which is pretty unusual for a movie like this! It’s a Wizard of Oz thing I guess, because it starts out in Iowa during the winter and then the bulk of the movie is in Palm Springs, and that part of course is in colour! It seems the very nerdly Wendell Tvedt, played by Stephen Geoffreys of course, is a rich pig farmer’s son, and his father, played by ALF’s dad I think, is paying not just for his trip to Palm Springs but for his prospective frat-mates Mother and Joe also! Mother and Joe are willing to tolerate Wendell because of this, but only barely! And Mother is played by none other than Tim Robbins!

Well, there are some rich guys from a rival frat in Palm Springs also, and they’re pretty rotten fellows, as rich blond frat guys always are in these pictures! Quickly a rivalry develops between Wendell’s quasi-friends and the other guys, and the main contest is who can sl*ep with a particular beautiful lady first! Wendell is a sweet-natured guy who just wants to meet a nice girl, so he has nothing to do with any of that!

The movie proceeds in episodic fashion from there, with lots of pa*tying and shen*nigans enacted by a pretty interesting cast! You’ve got Stephen Geoffreys and Tim Robbins of course, but there’s also Geoffreys’ Fright Night castmate Amanda Bearse; Barbara Crampton from Re-Animator and Kathleen Kinmont from Bride of Re-Animator; Britt Ekland from Endless Night; Nita Talbot from Island Claws; ALF’s dad, who of course was the health inspector in Grumpier Old Men; and in the role of the angriest police chief ever, none other than John Vernon! Wow, ha ha!

The other notable thing in this movie is the weird fake-out with Amanda Bearse! She plays the daughter of the psychotic police chief, and she seems like a very sweet and innocent young lady, but then Wendell thinks he’s detected that she’s secretly mean, and he decries her as such in an impassioned speech which briefly brings a feeling of reality to the picture! But just as quickly something about that speech and some subtly oddball elements to Bearse’s performance conspire to make it seem like Wendell’s just managed to escape a looney-tune of the sort seen in movies like Play Misty For Me and Fatal Attraction or even Swimfan!

And by the end of the movie, united by their oppression at the hands of the maniacally belligerent Vernon, all the frat guys are friends, and all of them like Wendell! Since Animal House it’s rare to seen the Snob half of the classic opposition turn over a new leaf and become decent chaps! But it happens in this one, and that sort of leaves you with a good feeling about humanity at the end of the movie! That and all the moon*ng!

Ha ha, it seems like I’ve been finding good things to say about fairly dire movies lately, but I guess I’ll just continue on this positivity jag for at least one more review! I enjoyed Fraternity Vacation for much the same reasons I enjoy any of these movies in the winter: because watching them is like taking a tiny micro-vacation yourself! And the cast and occasional strange efforts to replicate actual human behaviour bring it up a couple of pegs from there! I give it two and a half exposed human bu*tocks!

Burl reviews Bells! (1981)

2012-02-01T10:00:00.002-06:00

Ring, ring! Hi, it’s Burl calling! Ha ha, did I scare you? Today I’m going to talk about the movie Bells, in which all telephone calls take on an aura of menace! If you ever missed the hearty ring of an old telephone, this is the movie for you! The sound effects department certainly didn’t skimp on that particular noise!

Bells is better known under its video title Murder By Phone, but that version is truncated by a full fifteen minutes! For the full effect you have to watch Bells, my friend! You’ll meet a dedicated environmentalist science professor played by Richard Chamberlain, whose prize student gets zapped by a subway platform payphone one night! How? Why? That’s the mystery! Chamberlain travels to Toronto to figure it out, and hooks up with his old mentor John Houseman, who taught him everything he ever learned about environmental activism!

But in a startling coincidence, Houseman is now working for the phone company as an environmental consultant, “behind the fence,” as he puts it! And the phone company knows something about the phone-zapping incident! Meanwhile there are further zappings, all of them a great pleasure to watch! One lady gets zapped and her Mickey Mouse phone is spattered in blood! Another fellow catches the zap while seated in his office chair, and he flies out the window and down ten stories and onto the top of a car, lounging in his chair all the while! Another lady is doing the dishes and the whole sink explodes as she flies back across the room!

So what’s the story on all this zapping? Since Chamberlain is an activist who’s hit the barricades many times in his struggle for environmental justice, and is naturally (and justifiably) suspicious of big businesses, I thought the answer would involve a corporate conspiracy, but it only does in the most minimal way! It’s kind of disappointing actually, to find that a lone maniac is behind it all, killing for mostly fairly petty reasons! The initial killing that sets off Chamberlain’s investigation was merely a test, it seems, and the fact that the victim was a student of a man whose friend is closely connected with the deadly events is a remarkable coincidence never remarked upon in the picture! Ha ha!

I like the world presented by this movie, in which there’s a great history of what used to be called ecological activism and a codified system of protest in which long-time players achieve infamy in corporate circles! Also, this movie seems to assume that of all corporate practices, those of the phone companies are the most fiendishly destructive! I also was glad to see Houseman in this picture, even though he gets a glasses-shattering zap scene of his own! And frankly there are some pretty effective suspense sequences, in which the heroine, a muralist played by Sara Botsford, is tele-stalked by the nebbishy maniac!

The zap scenes are pretty good, as I mentioned, but I thought they could have sprung for at least one exploding head! That would have been totally appropriate! But we get some exploding eyeballs and a semi-crushed head, so it could have been a lot worse! I kind of like the drab look of the movie; and the chattiness of the script, especially in the full 94 minute version, is perfect for a movie about talking on the phone!

Bells is a massively, goofily, cheerfully silly picture, there’s no doubt about it, but I still thought it was a pretty good time at the movies! I’m going to give it two and a half ominous shots of Royal Bank Plaza, which is actually a lot fewer than the movie gives itself!

Burl reviews Rubin & Ed! (1991)

2012-01-30T16:47:00.001-06:00

Well hello there, stranger! It’s Burl! I’m here to review a picture that many of you won’t have seen or even heard of, and yes, I’m talking about Rubin & Ed! Ha ha, it’s a buddy picture, and a little bit of a road movie too, and it’s set in Utah to boot, just like Sweater Girls and The Boogens; and while neither buddy, road nor Utah pictures are in my list of top movie subgenres of all time, I can certainly appreciate them when they’re done well!

Rubin & Ed will remind viewers of catholic tastes a little bit of the Gus Van Sant movie Gerry, in which two guys drive out to the middle of nowhere for reasons that are at best hazy, and then start walking through the desert toward some ambiguous goal, having nonsensical conversations all the while! Ha ha, that’s pretty much what happens here! Ed, played by Johnny Fever from WKRP, is a lifelong loser whose last chance for success and self-respect, he thinks, will come from a guru-like sales seminar, and so to achieve his sales goal he tries to recruit Rubin, a reclusive longhair in mourning for his recently deceased cat, into the obviously shady sales organization! It goes without saying that Rubin is played by Crispin Glover, ha ha!

Next thing you know, Rubin and Ed are marching through the desert with the dead frozen cat packed in ice! Rubin drinks the melted catwater from the cooler every now and then, or else wrings out his Odor Eaters for further liquid sustenance, while Ed just gets thirstier and thirstier! Eventually Rubin ends up in the Cave of the Echo People and has hallucinations in which his huge shoes get even bigger! And for those who ever wondered why Crispin Glover ever tried to kick David Letterman in the head, this movie will answer all of their questions!

Ha ha, I guess this is what they mean when they talk about cult films! There’s a cult for this one and no mistake, and the watchword among its members is “My cat can eat a who-o-ole watermelon!” I like the film because it’s often pretty funny – a lot funnier than Due Date, which seems to have modeled itself on this one almost as much as on Planes, Trains and Automobiles – and because it seems possessed of a genuinely humanistic spirit! Both characters seem like they’d be genuinely difficult to get along with, and neither of them change all that much in the end, just to achieve some contrived rapprochement as we see in more mainstream buddy movies, where personalities are often altered completely somewhere in the third act!

Plus I love the dedication Crispin Glover shows! It helps that he’d been doing the character for years before the movie was shot, but nevertheless, there’s no winking and nodding to the audience from Rubin! He’s a genuine eccentric, and a Rep*blican too! Ha ha, somehow that makes sense in the context of the movie, even though I’m fairly sure that by and large Republ*cans don’t like cats!

I heartily recommend this picture to any and all who appreciate movies which set modest goals for themselves and achieve those goals very handily! I give Rubin & Ed three and a half whole watermelons!

Burl reviews Billion Dollar Brain! (1967)

2012-01-29T17:23:00.005-06:00

It’s me, Burl, with a review of a spy picture for you! Like everyone I was saddened to hear of the death of Ken Russell! He had a pretty good run there for quite a long while, with his biopics and musical movies of the 1970s and his eccentric 80s pictures like Crimes of Passion, Lair of the White Worm and Salomé’s Last Dance and even Gothic! And of course movies like The Devils, Women in Love and Altered States are all plenty of fun! I heard he ended up making pictures in his garage at the end there, using his neighbours as actors, which strikes me as some pretty impressive dedication to the craft!

Billion Dollar Brain is a bit of a standout in his filmography! Ha ha, it’s a spy picture as I mentioned; one of those Harry Palmer movies in fact, like The Ipcress File or Funeral in Berlin! This was the third one to come along in as many years, and thanks to Russell, it’s certainly the weirdest of them! It starts out fairly normally, with former spy Palmer, now apparently a low-rent private eye, being forcibly re-recruited into the service by his old boss, and then hired by a supercomputer with the voice of Donald Sutherland to deliver some eggs to Helsinki! Soon Harry’s in Finland hanging out with his old buddy Karl Malden, of Phantom of the Rue Morgue fame, and then in Latvia with the hilarious Oscar Homolka, and now and again he’ll take another phone call from the supercomputer!

Eventually all this traipsing around the beautifully photographed snowscapes of Northern Europe leads Harry to Texas, of all places, to the compound of General Midwinter, a crazy right-wing oil-rich nutbar who fears com*unism so much he wants to risk World War III by fomenting rebellion in the Baltic states! Ha ha, it’s the same logic employed by another Texas millionaire-moron-warmonger in the run-up to the war in Iraq – surely the people are so hungering for Western-style democracy that at the slightest provocation and with the smallest hint of Western backing, they’ll rise up and do most of the work themselves!

Well, as was the case in Iraq, it doesn’t quite work out that way for the General, and there’s a massive climactic sequence of chaos on the ice such as was seen in the great Sergei Eisenstein picture Alexander Nevsky! But the curious thing is that neither the supercomputer after which the movie is named, nor the ostensible hero of the piece, Harry, have much to do with it! Harry himself, blundering along after the General, is nearly wiped out along with Midwinter and his army of yankee-doodle fasc*sts in fact, and only escapes by the skin of his teeth!

So there is a fair bit of goofology in the film’s plot and construction, and the curious eccentricities of Ken Russell are certainly evident even at this relatively early point in his career! But the cast is game and the photography very nice, and there are plenty of entertaining details, especially when they get to the actual supercomputer! And, as in Malone, the presence of a right-wing bad guy is sort of appealing, since they seem so much like bad guys in real life! I’m sure there are lots of people across America not so far removed from this General Midwinter guy, even if he seems a bit like a particularly cartoonish villain from the old Batman series! Ha ha, he could be called The Superpatriot or something like that!

Anyway, I enjoyed this picture quite a bit, as I have enjoyed most of Ken Russell’s films, and I award it three fantastic wooden ferris wheels!

Burl reviews The Black Cat! (1941)

2012-01-25T22:06:00.001-06:00

Ha ha, it’s Burl “in da house!” Today I thought I might review The Black Cat! What’s that? No, not the great 1934 Edgar Ulmer picture starring Boris and Bela! Hmmm? No, not the 80s Lucio Fulci version either! Or the weird 1960s super low budget version! Ha ha, this one was made in 1941, and if it has any actual connection to the Edgar Allen Poe story after which it is ostensibly named, it flew right by ol’ Burl!

Bela is in this one though, I should note! I wonder how many other stars appeared in two totally different films that have the same titles? Not many, I’d guess! And do you know what else: Basil Rathbone is in this picture, and later on made another version, an animated short, with that very same title! So two of the stars of this Black Cat also appeared in two totally different movies also called The Black Cat; and on top of that Rathbone also appeared in Roger Corman’s Tales of Terror, an omnibus picture that featured a segment called The Black Cat! Ha ha, that’s the vicissitudes of Hollywood for you!

But on to this version! As I mentioned, Bela is in this movie, lurking around the edges mostly, just as he did in Night Monster! Here he’s not a butler though, but a gardener, and again serves as just about the most obvious red herring you could conceive of! The plot concerns a rich, ailing old lady who loves cats – but not black cats, the racist! – and is surrounded by her vulture-like relatives who are waiting to grab her fortune the moment she croaks! One of them seems quite willing to help her along!

Broderick Crawford, of The Vulture, appears in the Lon Chaney Jr. role of the husky, romantic but rough-around-the-edges dupe – he’s a real estate agent who hopes to broker the sale of the house and its contents, but he’s not as rapacious as the others! Along for the ride is the comic relief, Mr,. Penney, an antique dealer who wants to sell off the old lady’s furniture! His running gag is that he believes antiques can be sold for more if they’re damaged, so he goes around scratching and scraping and breaking the various pieces, and admonishing the movers for being too careful with the items! It’s not quite as tiresome as the comic relief often found in these old dark house pictures, but only just!

These fellows I’ve mentioned and a whole lot of others all get trapped in this house by a rainstorm, and of course there’s a murderer loose! The eventual solution to the mystery is highly unlikely, but ha ha, I guess that’s the point! It’s not a great picture, and you could fairly accuse it of wasting Bela, and the comedy gets on your nerves, but it looks fantastic, the cast is game and it has a few spooky or at least atmospheric sequences, so I can’t judge it too harshly! And after all, it runs barely more than an hour, so it doesn’t take too much of your time even if you hate it! I’m going to give this version of The Black Cat two poisoned bowls of milk, and I’ll try to get to the 1930s and 1960s iterations sometime very soon!

Burl reviews Streets of Fire! (1984)

2012-01-24T22:10:00.000-06:00

Burl talkin’! It’s time to have a look at a crazy cult classic that I finally caught up with: Streets of Fire! This is in some ways the action genre’s One From the Heart, namely an expensive, highly stylized, colour-saturated, music-filled, weakly-plotted, hermetically-sealed, labour of love super-flopperoo! Ha ha, nobody went to see it when it came out in the summer of 1984, and it’s no wonder Walter Hill had to move on from this picture to a bland would-be crowdpleaser like Brewster’s Millions!

But Streets of Fire is by far the more interesting movie! Ha ha, it claims off the hop to be “A Rock n’ Roll Fable,” and I guess that’s as good a description of it as anything! It takes place in a neon netherworld where people listen to a weird hybrid of 80s and 50s rock music and wear poodle skirts and grease their hair back! The action begins when a superstar lady warbler is kidnapped right off the stage by a loutish group of bikers, led by Willem Dafoe, who sports a truly astonishing pair of garbage pants!

So of course Michael Paré, the songstress’s ex-boyfriend, is called in to solve the problem! He's tough and cool, but also tends to pout like an eight year old much of the time! With the help of a tough-talking lesb*an and a doo-wop group, as well as a perpetually angry glasses nerd played by Rick Moranis, Paré fights Willem and his gang until, naturally, the whole affair comes down to a mano-a-mano sledgehammer fight! Ha ha, that’s how these things always end up, isn’t that true!

In the background, Rick Moranis, dressed like a 1950s nerd, hops around spewing venom! I guess he’s supposed to be overcompensating for his nerdly insecurities, and in the process, he actually becomes just about the most well-rounded character in the entire movie! The other most interesting character is Amy Madigan, who plays some sort of soldier lady who just won’t fall for Michael Paré’s charms! He’s a real pretty boy, so most of the other ladies in the movie, except his sister, consider him pure catnip!

It’s an interesting experiment of a movie, and I guess was closer to the comic-book craziness that Hill had envisaged for The Warriors! But the story is really weak tea, and the narrative, such as it is, essentially comes to a close halfway through! I know the thing’s supposed to be a fable, with the characters being types and nothing more, but in the end, dramatically speaking, it just doesn’t satisfy!

But it satisfies in a whole lot of other ways! The movie looks great, the music’s not too bad – it’s no Phantom of the Paradise, but it’s still much better than most movies where a character is supposed to be a great rock star – and the whole enterprise just feels slightly crazed and out of control! And, ha ha, I surely do like that in a movie! This is one of those grand, soaring cinematic Icari that books such as Mr. Rabin’s My Year Of Flops mean to celebrate, and if Mr. Rabin hasn’t covered this movie, he sure should consider it!

I give Streets of Fire three broken down tour busses!

Burl rviews The Boogens! (1981)

2012-01-22T20:40:00.004-06:00

Hello! It’s your good friend Burl! I thought I’d review a movie about the monsters you might be unlucky enough to find if you go around opening up old mines in the Utah mountains! This picture’s called The Boogens, and it has the reputation of being a movie well-regarded by the famous spookbook author Stephen King!

Well, it’s not an all-time classic maybe, but I can see why somebody might consider this an underrated booga-booga movie of its era! It concerns a couple of guys who hook up with two amiable, rough-hewn older gentlemen to open up a long-abandoned silver mine, which, some fake newspaper clippings in the title sequence tell us, was the scene of mysterious attacks and cave-ins that claimed the lives of several miners! And the two guys have some girlfriends, and the four of them are all staying in a lonely mountain cabin not too far from the mine!

Well, after some dynamite is set off, what do you think is released from the previously sealed areas of the mine? You guessed it, boo-boo-Boogens! These are tentacled, vaguely turtle-like critters which scuttle about looking for victims! There’s a spooky sequence early in the picture involving a woman alone in the cabin, where she is of course menaced by boogens, which have come into her basement via tunnels that were purposely built there for some reason! And of course it all comes down to a lot of running through the tunnels of the mine, trying to evade the toothy varmints!

There are quite a few entries in the mine/cave horror subgenre – this, The Strangeness, My Bloody Valentine, the Descent films and more – and there are two potential flaws endemic to the form: impenetrable darkness resulting from the underground setting and the tediously repetitive creeping through rocky shafts that all look the same! The Boogens has generally decent lighting, which was a pleasant surprise, and while it has no shortage of the standard issue cave-creeping, it mixes things up a bit by the inclusion of an underground cavern with a lake in it!

There are a few good sequences and the characters are quite likeable, thanks mainly to the unexpectedly strong performances! But at the same time, there’s some real wasted potential in this picture! It’s stated at one point that there are tunnels leading from the mine to every house in town, which would seem to be the set up for multiple boogen attacks of all sorts of different people! But we don’t get such boogen attacks – two of our four young people, the two older guys, the lady in the house, an old doom-crier fellow in the vein of Crazy Ralph from the first two Friday the 13^th pictures, and a yappy dog are the boogens’ only victims! And maybe six victims and a little pooch sounds like a lot, but somehow there nevertheless seems to be great attack-free stretches in the movie during which you want to grab the picture by the lapels and remind it that, after all, it’s a monster movie! Ha ha, bring on the boogens! I call for more boogens!

Still, it’s not like it doesn’t try to deliver the goods! There’s a bit of nud*ty, unusual for a Utah-based production (this and Sweater Girls are the only two Beehive movies I can think of with b*obs in them), and some of the attack scenes are even a little gory! I thought this picture had a lot of heart, and that’s worth a fair bit to ol’ Burl! Plus I’d like to say that the dog in this movie gives one of the single greatest canine performances I’ve ever seen! I could recommend it just for him, actually, and was sad when he became boogenmeat! I give this effort three not completely wrapped bath towels!

Burl reviews House of Psychotic Women! (1973)

2012-01-22T11:44:00.001-06:00

Hi, Burl here with some Iberian horror for you! Ha ha, the Spaniards have a long tradition of spookshows, and one of their most famous monstermen was Paul Naschy, aka Jacinto Molina, who often played a troubled werewolf named Count Waldemar, or else he fought mummies, sorceresses or yetis! Monster trouble was a regular staple of his working life, and his refrigerator-like body was often pushed to its very limits by their incessant attacks, or by his own lycanthropic transformations!

But there weren’t always monsters in his pictures! This one, for instance, as promised by the title, features a dwelling inhabited by neurotic ladies, and is informed by the then-popular giallo black-gloved killer films being produced in Italy! (The movie is better known these days under its original, more giallo-esque title Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll!) Old Jacinto plays an ex-con with a history of violent behaviour who, in his quest for employment, finds himself working as a handyman in the tit*lar structure! The ladies in question are three sisters who each have their own dire problems, which are not necessarily solved by Jacinto’s arrival! However, as in movies like Forbidden World, we find that his janitorial duties include quite a bit of, ha ha, “troubleshooting!”

But there are also murders afoot of course, all enacted to the strains of Frère Jacques, which is a song I had to sing a lot in school when I was but a young sprout! That added a strange aura to the proceedings, I must say! The murders are all of pretty young blonde ladies, and involve the gruesome post-mortem removal of the victims’ eyes! Ha ha, yikes! But who could be behind this killing frenzy? Could be Jacinto, or one of the psychotic women, or any of a number of other characters! The final answer is slightly convoluted, as always in these pictures, but also entertainingly goofy!

And of course the fireplug presence of Paul Naschy is always a boon to any picture! He helped write the screenplay too, so of course there are numerous scenes where he takes off his sh*rt and makes l*ve to the beautiful but damaged ladies of the house! But I do have to say I was surprised at his fate in the movie! It’s always nice when something genuinely unexpected happens in an otherwise fairly prescriptive outing! And as it all comes to a climax, so too do the haunting strains of Frère Jacques!

As for the rest of the movie, well, it’s a bit of a daffodil and could really have used a bit more Eurocool style, that being the currency in which your typical giallo prefers to trade! But more often House of Psychotic Women seems to prefer the rather cheap-looking, gritty and zoom-lens happy techniques we see in Jess Franco films and suchlike! Oh well, it makes for an interesting pudding at the very least, and I give this picture two unsafely utilized garden harrows!

Burl reviews Delirium! (1979)

2012-01-15T22:25:00.005-06:00

Hi, Burl here with a real obscurity for you! Ha ha, it’s called Delirium, and that is a quality this picture certainly manages to conjure up! It’s always nice to find an unexpected congruence between the title of a movie and the movie itself, even if it’s not entirely what was intended by the filmmakers, ha ha!

Here’s a movie for those times when one of your buddies wants to watch a slasher movie and another one wants to watch a police procedural and still a third would like to see a conspiracy picture! That’s when you triumphantly produce Delirium from your basement and say “Gentlemen and ladies, ha ha, guess what, I can accommodate you all!”

Well, it seems there’s a maniac named Charlie out killing ladies as quickly as he can find them! He spears one through a door, gives another a pretty stiff neck-twist, and pitchforks a third right in the neck! It’s pretty horrendous, and gory in that great fakey late-70s way! He even gives the chop to an innocent delivery boy, yikes!

While all this is happening, a couple of checkered-jacket detectives are on the case, trying to figure out who crazy Charlie is and what he’s going to get up to next! Ha ha, the detectives are a real couple of St. Louis characters, that’s for sure! Did I mention that the movie was filmed in St. Louis? Well, since the St. Louis Arch is visible in just about every shot during the daytime exterior scenes, you probably would have figured that out yourself pretty quickly!

And while all this is happening, we learn about a mysterious cabal of local businessmen – a Star Chamber if you prefer – who see to it that no criminal goes unpunished in the greater St. Louis area! To that end they hold their own little kangaroo courts on the miscreants and then unleash a psycho on them, someone like Charlie! But what’s been happening is that Charlie, their latest psycho-for-hire, being a crazy man, has gone rogue and is doing pleasure killings of his own volition! Ha ha, cabal of businessmen, surprise! Crazy man acts crazy, who’d a thunk it!

A bald fellow in sunglasses played by someone called “Barron Winchester” is the leader of this star chamber, and by the end of the picture he’s as crazy as Charlie! Both of them have dime store ‘Nam flashbacks, which look more like flashbacks to an abandoned St. Louis drive-in or something! It all kind of comes together in a climax which involves lots of machine guns and exploding blood capsules!

Well, let me tell you, this is once crazy picture! It was made for pocket change and a few of the scenes are too dark to see much, and the performances have a distinctly local theatre group feel, and there’s nothing imaginative or exciting about the filmmaking, but I still got quite a bit of enjoyment out of this loopy daffodil! You’ll notice I’ve said several times that the movie is crazy but haven’t said exactly how, and that’s because I don’t think I can get more specific than that! Maybe it’s just me, I don’t know! But try to get your mitts on a copy, have a look, and we’ll figure it out together! Until then, I’m going to give Delirium two unlucky delivery boys!

Burl reviews For Keeps! (1988)

2012-01-15T10:48:00.001-06:00

Hi, Burl here to review a forgotten picture from the 80s! Ha ha, if most of the people have forgotten that Blue City ever existed, then all of the people have forgotten about For Keeps! But I haven’t forgotten about it, because I actually watched them shoot a little bit of this movie way back when, when it was called Maybe Baby! I always wondered how it turned out, and so finally the other day I gave it a look!

Ha ha! Well, Molly Ringwald’s in the picture, and I guess this was the movie she made after falling out with John Hughes, her old pal who put her in so many of those teen 80s movies! Maybe he wanted her for She’s Having A Baby, but she said no, I’d rather do this other movie about someone having a baby! So off she went! She plays a Kenosha, Wisconsin-based high school girl who has a boyfriend named Stan Beefteque, and she and Stan make l*ve one day and we, the audience, get the whole view of what’s going on biologically within them! The scene reminded me of a similar one in the movie Enter the Void, and any of you who have seen that picture will know what I’m talking about!

Molly and Stan have all sorts of post-high school plans! She’s going to Madison to become a journalist and he, an accomplished designer of novelty tents, has an application in to the architecture department at Cal Tech! But of course as soon as they learn there’s a baby on the way, they consider all these plans scuppered! And of course they have to deal with their parents! Stan ends up becoming estranged from his, while Molly’s single mom, unlucky in love herself and embittered, gives unwise counsel!

The couple move into a coldwater flat and have the baby, and from there their lives become harrowing! I had no idea how thickly this movie laid on the drama, but there seems to be shouting in every scene, and after Stan becomes a sullen and shirtless be*r-guzzling young husband, angry inside because he was accepted to Cal Tech but turned them down, it looks like that’s it for the relationship! But wait a minute – is that a happy ending lurking in the wings? No, it’s a somewhat confusingly ambivalent one that appears to believe it’s a happy ending!

I can’t say this movie is any sort of lost classic! It’s from the director of Rocky and The Karate Kid and Joe, and in a way it’s a sort of mixture of all those movies, with a little bit of Guess What We Learned In School Today mixed in! As I say, there’s an awful lot of shouting, and while I’d previously wondered what happened to the guy who played Stan Beefteque, who was a functionally personable and good looking actor, I realize now that he must have blown out his voice on this picture and been unable to star in movies thereafter! Does he consider For Keeps his legacy project? If so, I’m glad at least that I watched it for that reason!

I guess this is an attempt to deal with teen preg*ancy in a semi-realistic way, but it’s not much more realistic than a John Hughes movie when you get down to it! And on top of that it’s not really ol’ Burl’s type of picture – I just watched it because I remember when they were making it! I guess I give it one and a half invisible bathroom walls! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Night Monster! (1942)

2012-01-14T10:38:00.003-06:00

Hello, hello, it’s Burl! I’m here to review a creepy old Universal picture from the olden days, those innocent wartime days when you could just put together a bunch of people in a scary old house and you'd have a brand new booga-booga movie for the bottom half of the bill!

Of course it helps if some of those people in that scary house are the likes of Lionel Atwill and Bela Lugosi, even if Bela’s just playing a butler! You keep waiting for him to turn into a bat or something, but he’s pretty much just a stiff old butler with a strong sense of loyalty to his employer! Of course we well know that Bela’s abilities ranged far beyond such portrayals, so in a way it’s kind of nice to see him just play a fairly regular if still somewhat creepy guy!

Bela’s far from the main character in this picture! It seems there’s an elderly invalid whose arms are like old batwings, just leathery husks, completely useless, and whose legs are quite simply gone! He got that way in spite of the efforts of a trio of doctors who’ve been invited for the weekend! In addition there’s the invalid’s possibly-mad sister; a lady psychiatrist the sister has invited to see if she’s crazy or just being gaslit by the others in the house; a sinister housekeeper in the Mrs. Danvers mould; a friendly neighbour who writes murder-mysteries; and a be-turbaned swami with weird knowledge of Eastern occult practices! Ha ha, quite a crew!

It was when the swami showed up, and when it turned out that his hocus pocus was of central importance to the narrative, that I began to suspect that here, finally, is another picture in the tradition of The Amazing Mr. X! Ha ha, I really like these movies where a vein of Eastern mysticism makes its way into a spooky All-American situation! I guess I just like that particular chemical mixture!

Of course there are murders – in fact, the murders started before the movie even did! There’s a foggy, froggy swamp near the mansion, and it seems a doctor had been found there, the victim of a pretty stiff neck-twist! And a chambermaid who was going to spill the beans – same thing! And every time the sinister strangler is afoot, all the frogs in the swamp fall eerily silent! Soon the neck-twister is roaming the house, taking care of the very doctors who had failed to save the helpless invalid’s limbs! But it couldn’t be him, could it, somehow taking revenge personally on these sawboneses?

Well, there might just be some limb-regenerating going on, but I don’t want to give too much away! I’ll just say that the concept behind this strangler’s means of locomotion is pretty spooky! This was an altogether enjoyable picture, in fact! If you can get around the idea of Bela playing a supporting butler role, and you like that gleaming monochromatic Universal Pictures atmosphere as much as I do, you might enjoy it quite a bit also! I give Night Monster three empty pant legs and an extra turban jewel to Nils Asther who plays the role of the swami!

Burl reviews Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter! (1984)

2012-01-13T14:27:00.003-06:00

Hi, Burl here to look at another one of the famous killer Jason’s crazy machete-waving adventures! I’ve always thought of the Friday the 13^th movies much the way many others think of the Star Trek pictures: namely that it’s the even-numbered ones that are better and more entertaining than the odd! I’m not what you’d call a great big fan of any of them really, but I’ll take II, IV and VI over I, III and V! (I haven’t really sat down and watched the ones after that, except for the one where he goes to he*l and the one where he goes to sp*ce, both of which I saw in the theatre! But the one with the psychic girl, his grand trip to Manhattan/Vancouver and his match-up with the redoubtable Fred Krueger, along with whatever others there may be, have all passed me by!)

I watched the fourth one again the other day, because I recalled it somewhat fondly, and because Crispin Glover is in it! Ha ha, he’s great in the picture, I have to say! He brings a really welcome note of eccentricity to it, probably in spite of any direction he was given, and certainly in spite of anything in the script!

The story is pretty standard! There’s a family who live near Camp Crystal Lake: a single mother, her teenage daughter and her son, the monster-mad Corey Feldman! Also they have an amiable retriever dog, Gordon! Next door to them is a rental property that’s inhabited by a group of kids out for a wild time, and there is also a pair of comely twins who apparently live somewhere nearby! This, with a little ski*ny-dipping as a garnish, is precisely the formula needed to encourage the murderous rage of Jason! Although he doesn’t seem to need much encouragement, ha ha!

I think the filmmakers really did intend this to be the final chapter of the Friday the 13^th story! Apparently the movie was originally going to end with Jason getting his head frizzle-fried in a sort of microwave oven contraption which Corey Feldman had created for some reason, but they scrapped that because it was too outside of the established M.O. of these movies! Ha ha, if only they could see into the future of the series, with the enraged ambulance driver and the psychic lady and the space stuff and the body-hopping and all that, they’d have known there was room to move with this formula! Anyway, they settled on the famous machete-slide for Jason’s demise, which was still supposed to be pretty final; but of course the picture made quite a few ducats, and they figured out a way to continue the movies anyway!

I still kind of like this movie, because it has Crispin Glover and his insane turkey dance, and some pretty tasty, if abbreviated, Tom Savini trick effects! It also has a few nice directorial flourishes, like the opening shot, which might be the single most ambitious shot of the series with its complex craning and tracking and lighting and choreography, and even a helicopter! On the downside, it has even less well-developed characters than most of these pictures, a dumb script, and The Last American Virgin, who is in the film as Crispin Glover’s “friend” Ted the Computer, is a really annoying jacka*s! And can anyone tell me why Gordon the dog jumped out the window like that? And what happened to the mother? Ha ha, so many questions!

I give this picture one and a half lightning-quick haircuts!

Burl reviews Rawhead Rex! (1986)

2012-01-12T11:34:00.005-06:00

Hi, Burl here to review a monster movie! It’s not the best monster movie ever made, and the monster in it isn’t the best monster ever made, but it’s still just a plain and simple monster movie, along the lines of Prophecy, and sometimes that sort of simplicity is just what the doctor ordered!

The monster and the movie share the same name: Rawhead Rex! Of course it’s based on a story by Clive Barker, and since Barker wrote the script too, it follows the story pretty closely! Except he changed some of the names for some reason, as though he was adapting a true event and wanted to protect the innocent! Ha ha! He also changed the location of the story from rural England to Ireland, or maybe it was the producers who changed the location because they could get some good tax credits or cheaper labour there! Who knows! The location change doesn’t alter much about the story anyway!

It seems there’s a monster living under the ground near a small village, a decidedly un-jolly green giant put there hundreds of years ago by some previous generation of villagers who then er*cted a big stone pen*s on top of him! But they forgot to leave any sort of warning about the huge, savage monster man buried beneath the fields, except to make a little representation of the whole affair in stained glass and stick it in the church right next to the rectory!

Rotten luck: just as the big green man escapes his earthen custody, an American historian researching something about churches happens along with his family! The mayhem starts up in earnest, and among the victims is the historian’s son! So now it’s personal! The historian calls upon his historian superpowers to devise a way to beat Rawhead, and in the meantime, ol’ Rex does his thing at a trailer park and here and there around the village! Heads and hands and all manner of body parts are wrenched from their moorings! Ha ha!

Some might say wait a minute, ha ha, is Rawhead Rex really a monster? Because monsters don’t wear clothes! Well, it’s true that he sports a sort of shredded leather jerkin, and that he has hypnotic powers and seems quite crafty in his diabolical way, but I still say he qualifies as a straight-up monster! I mean just look at him! By garr! But while he’s got a pretty good look, the trick effects that are meant to bring him to life are a bit of a cruickshank! He’s a bit on the stiff side, and his expression doesn’t ever change much!

The optical trick effects are a similar let-down! I can imagine what Barker wrote in his script, and the sort of thing he had in mind for imagery such as the historian’s view of Rawhead standing majestically on a distant hill in the moonlight, clutching a severed head; but there’s only one word for the final product: ch*esy! Ha ha, the ending has what the filmmakers suppose to be a magical light show in the vein of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but it looks more like a Maximum Ice ad from the late 80s!

Those effects and the often-ridiculous dialogue undermine the film, but I do like a monster movie, and I also like movies with ancient Anglo-Saxon myth as their foundation! (That’s one of the things I like about Halloween III, for instance!) And of course it’s always grand when a head-munching monster is stalking the countryside! I give Rawhead Rex two creepy vergers and a wish that the filmmakers had tried a little bit harder to make it good!

Burl reviews Malibu Beach! (1978)

2012-01-11T00:03:00.003-06:00

Burl here! Today I wanted to stroll down the beach with you for a bit! What beach? Ha ha, Malibu Beach, of course! “'Cause school is out and nothin’s gonna hold us down! Malibu is calling, it’s got the best looking girls around! All day and all night we’ve got no troubles, everything is fine! Love is here, that’s summertime!"

That last paragraph was mostly me quoting the theme song of Malibu Beach, and not only is it a great song, but it pretty thoroughly describes the plot, such as it is, and outlines the main themes of the picture as well! Ha ha, this movie is just a movie about being young in Malibu in the late ‘70s in the summer, full stop! That’s it! And as a result, you don’t really watch the movie, you immerse yourself in it for ninety-some minutes and just enjoy!

There are a few characters, like a lifeguard girl, her friend, a couple of surfer-type guys (though they don’t do any surfing or even talk about surfing), a rich-kid named Claude, a local goodtime gal called Glorianna, and, wouldn’t you know it, a muscleman named Dugan – the very same Dugan from that marvelous picture The Van! All of these people, and many others, interact on and around the legendary beach of the title, and while there are a few mild conflicts here and there, mostly involving Dugan and a dog who steals bik*ni tops, just like the one in The Beach Girls, the overall vibe is extremely mellow!

What do they do? Well, they sit around driftwood beach fires, drink be*r, smoke p*t, go ski*ny dipping, make l*ve, drive around, attend a party at Claude’s place (he’s got an awesome stereo system, a catcher’s mitt chair and a huge neon sign reading “Pleasure!”), have a swimming race, toss around the old pigskin and oh so much more! It’s a lot like the opening scene of Jaws, but without the shark! Oh, wait a minute, there actually is a shark in the picture! It chases one of the characters, but he gets away okay!

This is a Crown International picture, it hardly need be said! Crown International was a company that seemed to specialize in this sort of plotless summer youth movie, and they made a whole bunch of them in the 70s! The Van is another one, and The Pom-Pom Girls, and The Beach Girls, and there’s plenty more too! They made other sorts of movies as well, but I think they’re best known for goodtime classics like this!

It’s the middle of winter as I write this, and therefore the perfect time to watch Malibu Beach! It’s like taking a little holiday, not just to California, not just into a groovy and mellow past, but to your own teenage years! And sometimes a movie with no plot at all is just what you want! As there’s no sense of forward motion to the movie, none of the usual signposts that tell you where you are in the narrative and that the climax is approaching, the movie seems to last forever! I mean that in the best possible way, of course!

Go on, seek out Malibu Beach and check it out for yourself! I don’t think you’ll be disappointed, though the third or fourth time you hear the same song on the soundtrack, you might become slightly annoyed! Just try to roll with it, dude, and take a puff on the nearest jo*nt! I give Malibu Beach three very strange jukebox-type machines that Claude fools around with! Ha ha, you’ll have to see the movie to see what I mean by that, but trust ol’ Burl, it’s worth it!

Burl reviews The Adventures of Tintin! (2011)

2012-01-08T23:26:00.005-06:00

Hi, Burl here to review a cartoon movie from none other than Steven Spielberg! This is apparently his first cartoon, and it was done using a new technique quite different from the pen-and-ink styles employed by the late Walt Disney! The drawings here have a strangely lifelike look to them – but their close approximation of human appearance and movement almost comes to work against these drawings, as we are constantly reminded that they are not real precisely by the fact that they are so nearly!

The movie is The Adventures of Tintin, and I was very excited to see it as I have been a longtime fan of that world-famous young journalist-adventurer, who never writes or files a story, has no editor that we ever see, and yet seems to live very comfortably with his little dog Snowy, and enjoys endless leisure and worldwide travel! He’s really got it figured out, ha ha! I’d long thought how nice it would be to see a good live-action version of one of his adventures, so I was a little disappointed when I heard it was going to be a cartoon, but I guess it’s no big deal! A live action version would have had so many trick effects that it would have been something of a cartoon anyway like so many Hollywood action pictures these days!

The movie is a mash-up of three of the Tintin books, The Secret of the Unicorn, Red Rackham’s Treasure and The Crab With the Golden Claws! Those aren’t bad choices, but I’d have liked The Black Island mixed with Tintin in Tibet, I think! Ha ha, one has an ape in a tam o’ shanter and the other has a big coconut-headed yeti! I think this Tintin movie has been a fairly sizable hit, so who knows, maybe we’ll get that down the line!

This story has the intrepid boy reporter getting mixed up in a mystery involving a model ship and, ultimately, a sunken treasure, ha ha, naturally! He meets a man destined to be his lifelong chum, the dipsomaniacal sea captain Haddock, and together, along with help from the inept Scotland Yarders Thomson and Thompson and the little white terrier Snowy, they battle a perfidious first mate and a piratical, devil-bearded malefactor along with all their attendant henchmen!

It’s been a while since Spielberg made one of these lighthearted action pictures, or at lease a while since I saw a new one of them, and now and again as I watched this picture I got a little ghost of the frissons I recall having back when I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time! But only occasionally, and that’s in part because I’m now an adult, of course, and in part because there’s a kind of mechanical and rote aspect to the goings-on this time around! Some of the action scenes appear to have strange ellipses in them which the top-of-his-game Spielberg would never have allowed! During a big chase in an Arab town, for example, we see a tank driving along with a building stuck on top of it; but we never see the moment when the tank actually tried to drive through the building and became wedged, and then just pushed the building along with the Thom(p)sons inside! Ha ha, it’s a solid comedy action beat, or would have been, and SS is usually on those like a dog on chocolate!

That’s not the only example! There’s a bit of a “Yeah, yeah, here’s your Tintin movie” aspect to it, from the script on up! And Tintin has always been a fairly one-note fellow, but in a movie you might hope for a few little crenellations that expand upon but don’t undercut or alter the character too much! A difficult balance, I’m sure, but they might have at least given it a shot! Also, they steal at least one gag from Commando, and, ha ha, where’s Calculus anyway?

But it’s not a horrible movie or anything, just a sort of time-waster sprinkled with moments of excitement and adventure, but generally just sort of there! We get a couple of references to past Spielberg triumphs – Tintin’s ginger quiff poking above the water like a shark fin as he stealth-swims toward some villains, for example – but these somehow feel as though they were put in by different people, maybe while Spielberg was in the bathroom or something! I think it’s possible that Spielberg simply realized halfway through the process that he didn’t enjoy making cartoons after all, and that’s fine! Anyway, I give The Adventures of Tintin two blistering barnacles and am keeping my fingers crossed for a live-action Black Island adaptation!

Burl reviews The Power! (1983)

2012-01-06T23:20:00.002-06:00

Yes, that’s right, it’s Burl! You probably already know how much I enjoy reviewing movies from the Goopy 80s Makeup genre, pictures like Mausoleum, Forbidden World, The Outing and many others! Well here’s another one, an earlier effort from the guys who brought us that goopy semi-classic The Kindred!

This one is called The Power, and the vagueness of that title is reflected in just about every other aspect of the movie! It takes a while for the hapless viewer to get his or her footing, because we start with some characters who aren’t our protagonists by any stretch, but their introductory scenes go on for so long we can be forgiven for thinking they must be! It seems there’s a tiny Aztec idol which somehow finds its way repeatedly into the United States to cause havoc and destruction! First a college professor has it, and after it gives a smart-alec student a nosebleed and another guy a crick in his neck, it sends the professor up to get impaled by his flagpole! Ha ha, it’s a pretty good trick effect!

Next there’s a scene in Mexico where the guy who got the crick in his neck is looking for the idol! Apparently after each visit to America it returns home to live with an old man and his grandson, who keeps it in a special secret place away from prying gringo eyes! But for some reason they bring it out anyway, and even let the crick-neck fellow hold it, and of course he gets idol fever and goes bats, whereupon he shoots the idol’s keepers and then has a terrible bleeding attack!

In some crazy leap I didn’t understand, the idol heads back to the States and we meet a whole new group of potential protagonists, including a trio of intrepid high school students, a lady journalist named Sandy who does crazy tabloid stories about Bat Boys and Wrestling Cheeses and suchlike, and also her pal Jerry, who wears the most extraordinary curly mullet and comes to stay with Sandy! Well, the kids somehow get their hands on the idol, then Jerry, an easygoing guy, becomes obsessed with it and turns into a maniac! He soon transforms into a pig, and next thing you know he’s on a porcine murder spree! Eventually, in front of the people he’s tried to murder but hasn’t quite managed to yet, he bursts at the seams! Then there’s a long coda involving the crick-neck and another character, and of course a twist ending which underlines the movie’s tagline and thesis: “When Will Mankind Learn? It Cannot Be Destroyed!” Ha ha!

If that plot description made only a little sense, and seemed to have no structure or direction, or any particular raison d’etre for anything that goes on, then guess what! You’ve just had a taste of what it’s like to watch the movie! Ha ha, there are good bits in it though, plenty of them! One of them might have been a mistake though, somewhat reminiscent of when David Lynch saw a crew member accidentally reflected in a mirror during the making of Twin Peaks and thought it would be a good spooky moment to leave in! There’s a nightmare sequence involving arms popping out of a bed that’s as good as anything Wes Craven ever came up with! And there are a few bits of imaginative staging and trick effects and bits of business that leave you pretty impressed with the movie!

But the dialogue r*eks pretty badly, and the story is a mess! You keep waiting for somebody to assert themselves as the protagonist and it never quite happens! The long multiple introductions take up too much time, and the baton-passing structure becomes tiresome, making the eighty-seven minute movie seem much longer! And what does the idol want? Why does it kill? What does anyone think they’ll get out of owning it? I don’t think the filmmakers really thought any of these questions through! One thing though: the score is fairly ambitious and impressive, and often sounds like that tinkling music they put behind montages of great cinematography!

Ultimately though, ol’ Burl is kind of a sucker for these low-budget goopy makeup movies! This one was clearly made by a bunch of people who really put their hearts into it, and that’s always nice to see! So despite its many faults and the fact that it really isn’t all that good, I’m going to give The Power two and a half swinging kitchen doors!

Burl reviews Roller Boogie! (1979)

2012-01-06T14:23:00.001-06:00

Hi, it’s Burl here with another review for you! Ha ha, it’s disco time everybody, your big chance to get down and boogie with that little d*vil-possessed girl Regan, Venice Beach style! On wheels!

Roller Boogie is a feast for the eyes if you like ridiculously short shorts on men, tight Lycra bathing suits on ladies and wheels on everybody’s feet! It apparently takes place in some alternate universe where everybody has a crazed mania for roller skating, and also for suspenders! Was roller skating that big a fad? Maybe, maybe not, but it doesn’t matter, because as long as we have Roller Boogie, we can happily pretend it was!

The movie opens with a great scene where a feather-haired skating champ takes off down the rollerways and starts a giant conga line that snakes its way all around the beach, past couples making l*ve on top of dumpsters and over stacks of trash cans perfect for jumping! Of course there’s a famously clumsy skater who tries to jump the cans too, but he doesn’t get too far with that plan, ha ha! Anyway, it’s a fabulous scene, and if the movie can never quite match it through the rest of its running time, well, you can’t really get too upset! There’s plenty of crazy clothing, short shorts and roller stunts to come!

It seems Linda Blair, playing Terry, is a rich girl and a talented flautist who for reasons of her own has an itch to win the big roller boogie contest! There are forces arrayed against her of course: her pill-munching mother, her cold fish father and of course Franklin, a would-be suitor whose buffoonish behaviour leaves him humiliated by the end of every scene he’s in! Terry escapes their cloying clutches and recruits mushmouthed skating star Bobby James – his name’s not kid, it’s Bobby James, ha ha! – to help her up her roller game! But the very contest itself is in jeopardy after thuggish real estate developers threaten Jammer, the unlikely former roller skating champ and Irish Avery Schrieber who is also owner of the local roller rink and sponsor of the contest! It’s up to Bobby James and his funky pal Phones to save the day, and of course Linda Blair must perfect her roller boogieing techniques!

Ha ha, this is a pretty bad movie, but it can be a true joy to watch if you’re in the right frame of mind! I might even go so far as to recommend a touch of mar*juana before embarking on such an endeavour! But, as it is with roller skating, for every up this movie has, there is a down! There’s a maid who seems to have walked right out of the 1940s (or out of Mausoleum!); there are marginal characters, like Phones or the clumsy rollerskater, who should have been given much more screen time; the movie is at least fifteen minutes too long and gets a little boring no matter how much mari*uana you may have ingested!

But when you get to the scene where Bobby James puts on his signature BJ shirt and does a mournful solo skate around the otherwise empty roller rink to cheer up his despondent pal Jammer, you want to forgive this picture all its failings! It's also nicely shot by the portly cinematographer Dean Cundey! Ha ha, and the ending, which is slightly unexpected, earns it some extra credit too! I give this relic of a delightfully misbegotten past two terrible lead performances, which, to be frank, it already has! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Eyes Without A Face! (1959)

2012-01-03T11:10:00.001-06:00

Hi, it’s Burl! Ha ha, I’ve long enjoyed movies from France, and today I thought I’d review one of that country’s fine films! This picture, Eyes Without A Face, was made during one of the nation’s real moviemaking heydays, the late 1950s, just as Truffaut and Godard and people of that sort were really gearing up!

Eyes Without A Face has a plot that will seem very familiar to many of you, but that’s because the story has been remade countless times in many different iterations, many of them by that old rascal Jess Franco! Yes, there’s a mad cosmetic surgeon, and yes he has a daughter who, through the scientist’s reckless behaviour, has been facially disfigured! And yes, a series of young and comely women are recruited as unwilling face donors for the daughter, but there is always something that goes awry with the operation, trapping the doctor, his matronly assistant and his near-innocent daughter in a descending spiral of murderous violence and weird science!

Ha ha, what a great picture! It’s beautifully shot by the great Eugen Schüfftan, who, as you know, developed the Schüfftan Process, a fantastic trick effect you should look up, and also shot such an oddball array of pictures as The Bloody Brood, The Hustler and Chappaqua, many G.W. Pabst films, a René Clair movie or two and, early in his career, in a strange premonition, a German movie called The Stolen Face! He also secretly shot Edgar Ulmer’s Strange Illusion, so they say, though another cameraman was credited, ha ha!

And though you’d never guess it, for a French movie made in 1959, this film is exceptionally gory! You get to see faces sliced right off, and let me tell you, audiences of the period were not used to seeing such outrageous grue! It’s a truly Great Moment in Horror when the surgeon begins scalpeling around the periphery of a young lady’s face and the blood starts dripping out of the wound slowly and realistically, Savini-style!

The smooth, eerie mask worn by the daughter is the film’s key visual element, and the scenes in which she drifts sadly about the house like a particularly lachrymose ghost are pure pictorial poetry! Ha ha, and although most of the movie takes place in some far-removed banlieu, there are still some breathtaking shots of Paris, particularly of its trains, that remind me of how much I love monochrome photography of the City of Lights from this era! It makes me want to watch a Jean-Pierre Melville film now, please!

I heartily recommend this beautiful, gory, hypnotic movie, and am pretty sure you’ll enjoy it too if you give it a look! Billy Idol certainly seems to have liked it! I present it with four pearl chokers and a fulsome ha ha!

Burl reviews Grumpier Old Men! (1995)

2012-01-02T14:46:00.004-06:00

Hi, Burl here to review a sequel! In the days leading up to Christmas of 1995, this was probably one of the most-anticipated sequels to come along since The Empire Strikes Back in 1980! Everyone had seen the original, and the big question on everyone’s mind on this return to Wabasha is “This time around, does Max Goldman get his chance for romance?”

Well that question is answered, but in most other respects this continuation of the story spells disappointment! The picture takes place in the summer months, which is initially interesting, but robs the film of one of the aspects that most intriguingly regionalized the original! Ha ha, no snow, no ice fishing! Wabasha looks like Anywheresville U.S.A. all of a sudden! I guess this decision probably had to do with Walter Matthau contracting double pneumonia on the Grumpy Old Men shoot and not wishing to repeat the experience a second time around!

After the rollercoaster of romantic travails in the first picture, this one opens with Jack Lemmon and Ann-Margaret living together in Lemmon’s house! What happened to the old Klickner place, that’s what I’d like to know! Anyway, he and Matthau are on friendly terms, as their kids Kevin Pollack and Daryl Hannah have decided to get married! And then, the next thing you know, old Spaghetti Raghetti’s sister Sophia Loren moves into town intending to turn the late Chuck’s bait-a shop-a into a fancy restaurantay! The winds of war are a-blowing through Wabasha again!

Although this movie has all sorts of flaws, which are especially and unavoidably apparent when it’s held up against the first installment, it does contain arguably the best scene in both of the movies: a two-hander on the old fishin’ couch between Lemmon and his dad Burgess Meredith, where the Burge explains his secrets of long life, which pretty much amount to eating a lot of bacon and drinking beer for dinner! Ha ha, sign me up!

But what I don’t get is how they could take a character like Ann-Margaret’s Ariel Truax and then totally change her around from the sophisticated Berkeley bohemian she was in the original into an irritating, parochial shrew! She’s suspicious and jealous and easily enraged, none of which she was before! Can a year of marriage with John Gustafson really have had such a dramatic effect? The Pollack and Hannah characters are touchier too, and all of this is clearly just so they can manufacture some drama and eventfulness for the picture, and it’s so baldly manipulative that you just sit waiting for these scenes to end so you can get back to some Grandpa moments, or some old man grumping, or a scene with Sven! Ha ha, like old Sven says, “Biggest.. fish… I ever saw!”

Like many sequels this one is a bit slicker and more expensive than its predecessor, but those qualities are useless, and even a bit debilitating, to a picture like this! It ought to be gritty and realistic like the first one! And of course someone in the movie has to kick the bucket, and it was pretty much preordained who this go-round’s victim would be, but you’re still pretty sad to see him go! Ha ha!

Maybe it’s just as well there was never a Grumpiest Old Men, which feels like a strange thing to think, as in my earlier, more frivolous days I wanted nothing more! But as disappointing as this installment of the GOM saga is, I’ll still give it two fatty Alfredos for the couch scene, Sven, the excellent special effects in the Catfish Hunter jumping shot, Grandpa saying "Speak for yourself!" and several other moments!

Burl reviews Grumpy Old Men! (1993)

2012-01-01T14:25:00.006-06:00

Ha ha, hello mo-rons, it’s Burl! Sorry to call you “mo-rons” – I didn’t mean it at all! That’s just how the old ducks in this movie address one another, and I guess it’s a little catching!

The movie of course is the legendary Grumpy Old Men, a gutbuster of a picture released way back in the early 1990s, when the greatest stars in the Hollywood firmament still walked the earth as men! Of course I’m talking about Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, and in fine supporting roles, Burgess Meredith as Grandpa and Ossie Davis as Chuck the bait shop proprietor! These excellent players have all gone to the great Slippery's in the sky, but for one glorious 104 minute thunderclap of a motion picture, they could all be observed walking more or less erect and dropping profane bon mots left and right in the snowscapes of northern Minnesota!

It seems that John Gustafson and Max Goldman are next-door neighbours in the little town of Wabasha, and because of events from many years ago involving a lady they both liked, they hate each other with a passion! Ha ha, good morning putz! Hello moron! But they have mutual interests, like ice fishing and their pal Chuck, and discussing their old man ailments, and soon their common passions clash once again when Ann-Margaret moves into the old Klickner place across the street!

Why does she move into the old Klickner place, you are almost certainly wondering! Ha ha, it seems that Ann-Margaret’s mother was a shopgirl in old man Klickner’s department store, and also was his secret mist*ess! Well, when a little baby was conce*ved, her mother had to leave Wabasha to avoid the scandal! But old man Klickner never forgot his illegitimate daughter, and eventually willed his house to her! And that’s the tale!

Well, most of the movie concerns the battle for Ann-Margaret’s affections between Max and John, and also the growing affection between Max’s son and John’s daughter! I have to admit that on my initial viewing, after Ann-Margaret takes up briefly with Chuck and then Chuck subsequently kicks the bucket, I thought the movie was going to be a black widow thriller! But no, it's just a simple, perfect comedy with some masterful pathos mixed in! Of course, Grandpa Gustafson pops up regularly to deliver unforgettable comments on the goings-on, as well as the sort of advice only a 107 year-old man can provide! And of course there are several scenes in Slippery’s bar, the greatest bar ever portrayed on film! The climax takes place on Christmas Eve, and later, when everyone has recovered, we witness the final humiliation of Snyder, the evil revenue man!

What a terrific picture! It just makes you cozy and comfortable to watch it or even to think about it! Ha ha, I don’t know how many times I’ve seen this tremendous movie, but it just keeps getting better every time! The laughs start in the opening moments when the snowy shots of Minnesota are juxtaposed with Irving Berlin’s “Heat Wave,” and they just never let up!

The marvelous success of this picture when it was released on Christmas Day of 1993 led to several subsequent old man pictures with Matthau and Lemmon, including Out to Sea, The Odd Couple II and of course the sequel to this one, Grumpier Old Men, which I’ll be reviewing here soon! But none of them quite measured up to this picture, I’m sad to say! But on the other hand, how could they? Ha ha, I give this major motion picture four skinboats to Tuna Town and recommend you make enjoying it an annual experience from now to perdition!

Burl reviews Scream... and Die! (1973)

2011-12-31T14:44:00.002-06:00

Hi, Burl here with a movie review for you! Ha ha, let’s have a little chat about British horror movies of the 1970s! There’s lots of good ones that I really enjoy, like Tower of Evil or Raw Meat or Theatre of Blood or The Wicker Man, and that’s not even counting the works of Pete Walker or Norman Warren, or the Tigon or Hammer films of the period! There was no shortage of marvelously entertaining spookshow pictures, but I have to say that Scream… and Die! is not one of them!

It was made by an Iberian director who directed a couple of his pictures in Merrie Olde England, including one from 1974 called Vampyres! Ha ha, I haven’t seen that one, but people tell me it’s pretty er*tic! Having now seen this slightly earlier work, which is full of ladies wearing no cl*thes, I can certainly believe it! He really seems to enjoy filming ladies getting in and out of beds, judging from the number of times this occurs in Scream… and Die! Ha ha, I think there’s more of that sort of thing than there is of knife pokings or other scary stuff!

The story concerns a lantern-jawed fashion model of no especially great mental acuity, who looks a little like a cross between Gaylen Ross from Madman and lady singer Liz Phair, and who accompanies her shady, unpleasant boyfriend on a break-and-enter mission in the countryside! Ha ha, it’s a foggy night, and as dull-witted as our fashion model may be, she looks like Ludwig Van Wittgenstein next to this dim specimen! They blunder into the wrong house looking for who knows what, stumble across a pile of passports belonging to young foreign women, and happen to witness a brutal poking committed against a n*de lady by an unseen gentleman in black gloves! Ha ha, it’s giallo time!

No, not jello time, ha ha, stop licking your lips, and there’s no pudding pops here! I’m talking giallo, those Italian movies about black-gloved killers which are a close and generally more stylish cousin to the slasher movie! The style spread beyond Italy of course, and this picture is one example of that, though it trades the sophisticated Milanese vibe typical of the Italian movies for a bleak and foggy Blighty grot!

Anyway, the fashion model gets away from the strange house, but her boyfriend does not, though it’s no great loss! She spends the rest of the picture fearful of the murderous mystery man, and trying to find the house where the murder happened so she can convince her friends that she’s hasn’t gone bats! Eventually the murderer proves to be exactly who we thought it was, but who we convinced ourselves it couldn’t be because that was too obvious! Ha ha!

There’s a scene in this picture that everybody talks about, and that’s the one where the mask-painting young fop makes l*ve to his middle-aged auntie! Ha ha, most of the reviews make it sound like the auntie is a withered old crone of a lady, but she’s actually quite attractive, and so the scene is not the wild, tab*o-braking head-spinner that many of these namby-pambies make it out to be!

I’m usually a pretty patient fellow when it comes to movies – they don’t need to be all zip-boom-bang to entertain ol’ Burl! And while this one has a few spooky moments and little shreds of atmosphere here and there, it’s pretty muddled and boring most of the time! The pace is slow and the so-called mystery is uncompelling! It’s not a terrible movie or a complete waste of time, but it could use a little more vim and perhaps a dash of pep! I give Scream… and Die! one and a half mysterious bedroom monkeys!

Ha ha, a happy New Year to you all, and see you in 2012!

Burl reviews The Speed Reporter! (1936)

2011-12-28T16:16:00.001-06:00

Hi, Burl here with another dusty, creaky old B movie for you! This one is called The Speed Reporter, and it tells the story of a reporter so devoted to getting his story that he’ll face any danger at top speed and engage in almost any gymnastics you can think of to get it!

I’ll tell you this right up front: I love a good newspaper movie! This picture comes from the golden age of them, the same general era that produced The Front Page and His Girl Friday and even Citizen Kane! And even a bad newspaper movie has the power to entertain a broadsheet-minded fellow like ol’ Burl, ha ha!

I guess The Speed Reporter would qualify as a bad movie, more or less! The star of the picture, Richard Talmadge, was originally a tumbler by profession, and the movie makes a lot of room to show off his athletic skills, of that there is no doubt! But he’s got a weedy voice, of the sort we hear from Neil Sedaka in Playgirl Killer if you remember that movie; and a decided inability to deliver the roguish charm with which his poorly-written lines are meant to be laden!

But Talmadge sure can jump around! In accordance with almost every other role he played in his career, his character here is named Dick, and he works at the city desk of a big-city newspaper! His designation as a speed reporter is unmentioned but nevertheless well-earned, for the instant he hears about a possible story, he’s jumping out a window and onto the top of a passing truck in hot pursuit!

The story in this case involves a morality squad set up to police the city’s gangsters, but the squad has been set up by the gangsters themselves, with a milquetoast puppet executive installed as the head of the organization! Somehow the gangsters figure this will allow them to operate with impunity, but they’re not counting on Dick’s speed reporting!

Ha ha, Talmadge does some pretty impressive stunts, and he’ll never leave a room by the door if there’s a window closer by! And the movie is filled with these crazy, flailing fistfights between the indomitable newshound and various thugs and nogoodniks! Ha ha, the speed reporter will throw wild roundhouses, then flip his opponents over desks and chairs! Eventually the bad guys are rounded up and the speed reporter gets his scoop and a special bonus from the crusty editor so he can marry his special gal!

As I mentioned, this is not an especially good movie, but it sure manages to entertain! I’ll give it two amazing futuristic phone booths and recommend you give it a look!

Burl reviews The Christmas Martian! (1971)

2011-12-26T14:37:00.003-06:00

A belated Merry Christmas to you all from me, Burl! Here’s a review of a movie that’s supposed to be a Christmas picture, but it’s more of a completely berserk kids’ movie that just happens to take place around Christmas!

It takes place in small-town Quebec, and in that way is similar to another picture released the very same year, Mon Oncle Antoine! That one also centers around a youngster and takes place in small-town Quebec around Christmas, but in most other ways it couldn’t be more different than The Christmas Martian! But I think the two movies would make a pretty stellar double feature, quite frankly!

It seems there is a brother and sister whose Christmas vacation has just started, and their first stop on the way home from school is the store! While they’re in there bantering with the shopkeeper, a net-faced stranger in a long raccoon coat comes in, emits bubbles like he’s Robot Monster or something, makes some funny noises and then gobbles candy like it’s going out of style! The blustery shopkeeper chases him out, and from that time on, ha ha, the townsfolk know they’ve got a Martian problem!

While the kids go out looking for a Christmas tree to cut down, the strange incidents in the town multiply! One man sees an egg flying through the town at night, and the taxi driver has an encounter with an elderly flying lady clutching an umbrella like Mary Poppins! And then, after the siblings have found their tree, they spot the green footprints of the otherworldy intruder and follow him to his craft! They meet the oddball alien, whose name is Poo Flower, and he turns out to be pretty friendly! He feeds them candy from a vacuum tube and then shows them special pictures from his home planet!

Plot similarities to E.T. pile up as we learn that the Martian’s spacecraft is damaged and he’s stuck on Earth against his will! But a little welding fixes the problem, and after a flight around the world and some further antics with his brother and sister pals, Poo Flower’s only concern is escaping the skidoo posse of Francophones that has assembled to chase him out of their town and off the planet! He evades them by use of his Red Planet trickery, and then shows up at the kids’ house dressed as Santa Claus! There’s a confusion involving the children’s father, also dressed as Claus, and the police, and arrests are made and bitter recriminations uttered! But it all ends on a bittersweet but more or less happy note as the alien takes off to rejoin his own children back on Mars!

What an odd movie this is! Words can’t really express it fully, and certainly aren’t equal to the task of describing the peculiar aura exuded by Poo Flower himself! As stated, there isn’t much of a Christmas atmosphere to this picture, but the small-town Quebec vibe is thicker than mule paste, so that makes up for it! And there are a couple of Père Noëls there at the climax of the picture, so we have that! The snowmobile posse is pretty impressive too, I must say!

So for sheer craziness, a free-for-all attitude of improvisation, kooky happenings and the sheer fact that it exists at all, I give this peculiar holiday bauble an enthusiastic two and a half well-crafted prop UFOs!

Burl reviews Blade Runner! (1982)

2011-12-24T12:44:00.000-06:00

Hi, it’s Burl here with a review of a science-fiction classic! Ha ha, let me tell you a little story: when I was a young lad, I entered a filmmaking contest with a friend of mine! We made a little super-8 movie that was a sequel to The Birds, and our only competition was a group of older lads who’d made a sort of Jekyll and Hyde movie! There were at least five of these fellows, and they won the contest quite handily!

Well, first prize was two movie passes per entrant, and second prize was one movie pass apiece! As we were the second bananas, my friend and I got our envelope of movie passes first – and as we opened it up we realized there were ten passes in there! The first prize envelope had mistakenly been given to us! Believing that we deserved it anyway, we skedaddled! Ha ha! And then, with my ill-gotten five movie passes, I went to see Blade Runner five times in a row!

Maybe that’s a strange movie for a little kid to obsess over, but I was a strange kid I guess! Anyway, I watched the movie again just the other day to see how it stacked up now! But ha ha, I made sure to watch the director’s cut, just so there wasn’t any of that sad-sack narration which even as a youngster I had thought sounded phony and out-of-place! Aside from that and a sequence with a unicorn running around, and the disappearance of some countryside flying scenes at the end, I didn’t notice too many changes!

The story is pretty basic – it’s the future, and robots are so fantastic that you can hardly tell them from humans, until they want to grab something from a container of intemperate liquid! Then you know it! But they get pretty rowdy now and again, and special cops called Blade Runners are employed to keep these droids in line! Harrison Ford is one of these officers, and his attitude towards contraptions has mellowed somewhat since his days as a space pirate in Star Wars!

Well, a bunch of robots go haywire and land on Earth, which is prohibited by law! No robots allowed on earth, say the signs! However, these droids just want to extend their life spans, which, thanks to the glasses nerd who invented them, is pretty stingy – only about four years! Rutger Hauer is the leader of these crazy robots, but, in a stunning twist, he might well prove to have more humanity in him than any of the so-called real people! Ha ha! Although he really does a number on that glasses nerd, it has to be said! Crick-crack-splort!

The future world they created for this movie is still stunningly realized and quite plausible! And the trick effects are still among the best ever created for a movie in ol’ Burl’s opinion! They go extremely well with the great Vangelis musical score! And I just like the look of these old school trick effects more than the fuzzy and fake digital effects they have these days! I know that makes me sound like a get-off-my-lawn curmudgeon, but that’s okay! It’s just how I feel!

I still like Blade Runner a lot! Not as much as I used to, maybe, because I can see now that there’s not much of a story to it, and having read the Phillip K. Di*k book it was based on, I know how rich and kooky a picture it could have been! That’s neither here nor there though – it’s still an amazing classic of a motion picture, and I give it three and a half Esper machines!

Burl reviews Port of Missing Girls! (1938)

2011-12-18T12:47:00.006-06:00

Hi, Burl here with another old curio of a motion picture for you! This one is called Port of Missing Girls, and it packs a fair bit of incident and action into its brief sixty-two minute running time! This is a classic bottom-half-of-the-bill movie, and sometimes that’s just what you want!

The story begins in New York, somewhere near some stock footage of Times Square, where, at a swingin’ club called Rossi’s, the featured attraction Miss Della Mason is about to warble a tune! But mob shenanigans are afoot, and a killer sneaks into Della’s dressing room and forces her to call in her boss, and then there’s a gundown! Well, poor innocent Della is implicated in the setup, and following an olde-tyme car chase, she has to jump a freighter for parts unknown!

On the face of things she’s picked the worst ship possible to stow away on, because the ferocious captain of the vessel is none other than notorious woman-hater Josiah Storm, known to have despised ladies ever since his wife packed up their baby and left him for another man lo these twenty years! But he’s played by the great Harry Carey, and so you know he’s just an old softie underneath! The steamer makes its way to the South Seas, and, as Della and radio operator Jim fall slowly in love, the captain decides to drop her off at the Port of Missing Girls, an island or peninsular or at least isthmic community which might be Hong Kong or might be Macao or might be some totally invented place, but in any case is where the fugitive girls of the world have gathered to entertain grumpy tourists!

The house mother of this strange nightclub is Minnie, and I do have to admit, with my twenty-first century cynicism, that the place seemed more like a House of Ill R*pute than it did a nightclub, and Minnie its Madam! Be that as it may, it also makes Port of Missing Girls a part of that subgenre I love so well, the International Gathering Place of Fugitive Expatriates genre! Lots of great movies touch on that, from Casablanca to The Wages of Fear to Naked Lunch, and even a hucklebuck like Soldier of Fortune uses this trope to a degree, and whatever the movie it’s always welcome as far as ol’ Burl is concerned! An extra bonus in this picture is an appearance from the sassy and gorgeous Betty Compson, who plays another missing girl named simply Chicago!

Some vague intrigue involving a white Chinese general and a dastardly Frenchman is whipped up while the ship is in port, and Della risks her newfound freedom to save Captain Storm, Jim and the rest of the boys from a legion of coolies in rice picking hats! Ha ha, the climax of the picture is an enormous popgun battle on the deck of the ship, with the screen almost completely obscured by great drifts of revolver smoke!

It’s an entertaining little movie, though it has all the strange quirks of its time! The Chinese are of course jabbering hordes, and the ship’s cook, Misery, is played as a fearful, foot-shuffling idiot by a low-rent Mantan Moreland pretender named Snowflake! He does get a few good moments in the climactic battle, hiding in a funnel and bopping coolies on the head with his frying pan! Ha ha, racial sensitivity, thy name is emphatically not Port of Missing Girls!

Otherwise it was an enjoyable little daffodil, and although it might have tried harder with the exotic South Seas atmosphere, I give it two and a half cables from Washington!

Burl reviews Malone! (1987)

2011-12-17T10:40:00.002-06:00

Hi, it’s Burl here with some action-drama for you! Ha ha, you know how Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey have their famous trilogy of pictures, Flesh, Trash and Heat? Well, in the 1980s, the decade when anything could happen it seemed, Burt Reynolds also completed a similar trilogy of single-word-title movies, but his were called Stick, Malone and Heat; and I own all of these fine films on stunning VHS!

I’ll get to those others eventually, but Malone is the one I thought I’d review today! Ha ha, there weren’t a whole lot of 80s action movies with overtly right-wing bad guys, but this was one of them! Usually it was drug dealers, terrorists, mobsters or the gosh-darn Commies! I’d have liked to see a lot more of these Oliver North-esque heavies, because after all, the country was crawling with them back then, and I suppose it still is now!

In Malone, Cliff Robertson plays a fascist zealot millionaire with a plan to wear khaki pants, stand before a giant American flag and bellow nonsense, and thusly Take Back America; though you’d think a guy like that would have been reasonably happy with a brain-addled fellow traveler in the White House! Ha ha, with these Koch brothers we hear about, and others like them, that’s the sort of thing I suspect might be brewing up right now all through the U.S., so in a way Malone was ahead of its time!

Ex-CIA dirty-deedsman Burt Reynolds is driving his Mustang through the Pacific Northwest when he experiences car trouble! Luckily his car chooses to die in the very valley Cliff Robertson is trying to buy up as the staging ground for his coup! But there are still some stubborn families and businesses refusing to sell their land to this gun-happy wingnut, so it’s a good thing for them that Burt happens along to help them out! The usual scenes of escalating violence occur, and before you know it Burt is pumping out shotgun blasts before a wall of flame! Metaphorically anyway, because the photo assembly seen on the VHS cover never takes place in the movie precisely as it is thereon depicted!

Burt, sporting a real wallaby on his head this time around, takes a bullet at one point, and it looks pretty serious! It goes right into his abdomen and out the back, and then he falls down the stairs and soon after is involved in a pretty serious motor vehicle accident! But a few days of rest and some good lov*ng from Lauren Hutton is all he needs for a full recovery, and soon enough he’s out vaulting fences and climbing barns like an uninjured man half his age! Needless to say he makes short work of all the über-conservatives, and that was pretty satisfying for ol’ Burl I must say! A giant explosion closes the film, just as it should!

Ha ha, it’s never very clear exactly what Cliff Robertson’s dastardly plan involves, and I chose to take this as a commentary on the juvenile and inchoate nature of all such “Take Back America” schemes rather than as simple lazy plotting! Burt, for his part, stands aloof from the politics in this role, but he sure won’t stand for petty would-be dictators throwing their weight around a community of generally decent people! In many ways the picture reminded me of Eye of the Tiger, even though I guess it’s trying to be more like Shane or one of Clint Eastwood’s Mysterious Violent Drifter movies!

Malone is strictly cookie-cutter nonsense in a TV movie style, but it’s pretty enjoyable in its own unambitious way; and having a non-Arabic bad guy with some ideological motivation beyond simple greed qualifies it as slightly novel! Ha ha, give this picture a look and pretty soon you’ll be shouting “Malone!” along with all the supporting characters in the movie! I give Malone two burning identification cards!

Burl reviews Hot Splash! (1987)

2011-12-15T11:45:00.002-06:00

Ha ha, time to review a crazy teen s*x comedy from the 1980s that I’ll bet you’ve never heard of! The picture’s called Hot Splash, which is on the face of things a kind of disgusting and nonsensical name for a movie, but is somehow completely appropriate for this one!

It was shot in Florida, a place I’ve never been; but from all I’ve heard about it, and from the other movies I’ve seen that were made there, this could practically be a documentary about life in the Dangleberry State! There’s a venerable cinematic history in Florida: why, just consider the films of Herschel Gordon Lewis! And the fine work of William Grefé, like Sting of Death and Death Curse of Tartu! The early works of Fred Olen Ray! And the Porky’s movies, along with other fine Bob Clark pictures! And Errol Morris’ Vernon, Florida! And Miami Vice! And Blue City! And the great killer capon picture Blood Freak! And any number of nud*st camp films and fun-on-the-beach pictures like Spring Break! And of course The Artist Lewis Van Dercar!

Phew, that’s a lot of pictures! But it just goes to show what a marvelous cinematic history Hot Splash had to draw upon, should it have chosen to do so! But it didn’t! It does have a sort of an attempt at a plot involving surfers and their surfer ch*cks, but mostly it’s one of those non-movies like California Girls or something like that – just the stringiest of narratives clinging like stray hairs to goodtime documentary footage of young people having a grand old romp on or near the beach!

Well, it seems a big surfing competition is coming up, the Sundek Challenge! There’s a group of surfer buddies, like Woody and his jerk pal Jimbo and Jimbo’s incredibly ill-treated girlfriend Jennifer, and some other non-characters! Jimbo keeps playing around on Jennifer and stealing her money, and she says things like “You don’t understand, that’s what I like about Jimbo!” Ha ha, I hate to blame the victim, but that’s one young lady who ought to rethink her romantic devotion! Thankfully by the end of the picture she does, but only after the most unsex*est n*de hot tub scene ever between her and the loathsome Jimbo!

Eventually Jimbo gets kidnapped by a slapheaded gangster named T.J., whose niece becomes a part of the surfer gang, and the race is on to rescue him in time for the big surfing competition! Ha ha, if I knew a guy like Jimbo and he got kidnapped, I’d have left well enough alone! But they go get him anyway for some reason, and he arrives at the beach in a big car shaped like a shoe! I liked that car, so I'll show you a picture of it!

The actual Sundek Challenge competition, which I guess is the climax of the picture, is conducted entirely out of long-distance shots of guys surfing tiny waves while a voiceover tells us that one or another of the competitors is doing better than the other! Ha ha, I don’t like to use sarcasm in my reviews, but in this case I’ll just say ooooohhh, how very very thrilling!

This movie is pretty bad! It was made by people who have no idea how to make a movie or tell a story, and I really hated the character of Jimbo more than I can express! Hot Splash is so st*nky in fact that I have to fractionate my rating system further than ever and award this misbegotten cruickshank one quarter of an enormous inflatable bottle of suntan lotion!

Burl reviews Cosmo Jones, Crime Smasher! (1943)

2011-12-13T17:23:00.002-06:00

Hi, ha ha, hi, it’s Burl! I wanted to tell you about a movie I saw that was evidently based on a radio serial that must have been popular in the early 40s or so! I think this is the only movie they made from the series, but I think maybe it’s the only one that needed to be made!

It’s called Cosmo Jones, Crime Smasher, and it starts out in a nameless town with two rival gangs creating crime havoc for each other and everyone else, sort of like in Miller’s Crossing! The newspapers declare a crime wave and proceed to have a field day, just as they always like to do in these pictures! Ha ha, when I was in school, field day was just us running around doing sports and collecting little ribbons! Mine usually said “Participant” on them, which I assume is good!

Anyway, the chief of police is none other than the master of the slow burn, Edgar Kennedy! You know the slow burn: somebody does something exasperating, and a high blood pressure individual like Chief Edgar widens his eyes and rubs his hand across his face, sighs deeply and shakes his head in disbelief, and even though it’s in black and white you can tell he’s turning red as a tomato! Then, when you know the rage has boiled up into a white-hot frenzy, he blows his top! Ha ha, that’s the slow burn!

Chief Edgar’s best lieutenant is Pat, and Pat's girlfriend is the mayor’s secretary! There’s a lot of political pressure on the cops to stop the crime wave, and that’s when we finally get the titular detective, Cosmo Jones, who turns out to be a glasses nerd who has taken detective courses by correspondence! He seems hapless and ineffectual, but when a flirtatious party girl is kidnapped, he’s clever enough to help the newly-demoted Flatfoot Pat and Chief Edgar solve the crime!

But of course even Cosmo Jones, Crime Smasher would be helpless without his sidekick and good pal Eustace, played by Mantan Moreland! Of course, Mantan does the sort of shtick that is not very well received in this day and age (I think the last time we saw it is probably in Mausoleum!), but it’s pretty fascinating to watch! He does the “feets don’t fail me now” routine a couple of times, I think! He was a talented guy, and to a degree manages to use that talent to override or subvert the demeaning caricature he plays!

I guess the best way to approach this picture is as a crazy curio of yesteryear! It doesn’t really hold its own as a movie, though I will say that it mostly manages to keep the comedy and the crime drama fairly well segregated! Ha ha, and the cast, from Kennedy to Moreland to Frank Graham, the radio personality who plays Cosmo, to the rest of them, are at least competent and in some cases really good! And it also makes me wonder why nobody names their kids Cosmo any more! Ha ha, I’ll give this loony daffodil one and a half angry calls from the mayor!

Burl reviews Mountaintop Motel Massacre! (1983)

2011-12-11T12:57:00.001-06:00

Hi, Burl here with a review of a slasher movie from just past the subgenre’s annus mirabilis, 1982! This one was made in 1983, but I don’t think it got a proper release until several years later! It’s called Mountaintop Motel Massacre, and it provides pretty much exactly that, courtesy of a scythe-wielding crazylady named Evelyn, who runs the grimy titular establishment!

I sort of like this one, because it’s got a different set-up, and ultimately a whole different vibe, than most of its ilk! We learn that Evelyn had a three year stretch in the bughouse and was released in 1981! We find out that her daughter, who’s just as bats as Mother, keeps all manner of animals as pets, and is also a part-time Satanist! Or else she’s trying to revive the spirit of her dead father by way of diabolic means, or something like that! Anyway, we’re left to connect the dots behind this family dynamic, which is fine by me!

The first victim is a harmless guinea pig, which made me sad! I don’t like it when animals get the chop in these movies, but luckily all we see in this case is a splatter of GP blood! Then Evelyn finds her daughter doing a ritual, and that sends her into a fit, at the end of which the daughter has been given an accidental poking! Well after that, it’s game on! All that’s left is for the various victims to arrive, set themselves up in the filthy, horrible cabins of the Mountaintop Motel, and wait for batty Evelyn to pop up from the bathroom trapdoors and do her thing!

The parade of choppees includes a hefty preacher who likes to suck directly from a bottle of Old Granddad every chance he gets; a self-described gentleman carpenter who was probably my favourite character; a pair of newlyweds who reminded me of the ones from Maximum Overdrive, except the bride was less annoying and wasn’t played by Lisa Simpson; two young ladies whose hopes of becoming country music stars were doomed even without the stopover at the murder motel; and a slickster city boy who pretends to be the owner of Columbia Records to woo the young warblers! Ha ha, in such situations it’s usually safer to pretend to be just a producer or perhaps a lower-level record executive, but wouldn’t you know, those ladies half-believe his story anyway!

Evelyn starts things off not with killing, but with a program of fauna-based harassment! She releases snakes, rats and roaches into the various rooms, chuckling as the guests wake up to these unsavory animal surprises! Ha ha, the carpenter gets the roaches, emerging from slumber to find himself covered in them, and where I’d have gone screaming out the door this mighty man merely brushes them off and grouses that “they oughta call this a roach motel!” Anyway, that scene literally made me squirm, and I have to say that was one brave actor!

After all that it’s hand-sickle time, and there are a few pretty gory moments, like when the newlywed bride gets the scythe through her cheeks! There’s a chopped-off hand, a slit throat, a sliced face and a poked tummy! Finally a hefty sheriff arrives and helps out, taking over from the guy who was sort of set up to be the hero but then disappears for a stretch, later reappearing to claim that he’d knocked himself out by accident! That sounds like an attempt at complex plotting or a red herring or something, but I’m pretty sure the actor had to attend a wedding or other event that kept him away from the set as they were shooting the climax, so the sheriff simply took over!

This picture was shot in Louisiana I think, and in any case has a good regional vibe to it! So it’s got that going for it, and some weird touches and a few unconventional aspects, and of course a little of the red stuff! On the debit side it’s a little slow in parts, and just plain not very good in most others! But it has a certain je ne sais quoi, and for that I’ll award this goony-bird two amazing vintage ca-trucks!

Burl reviews The Princess Bride! (1987)

2011-12-11T10:49:00.004-06:00

Ha ha, so we’ve come to a pretty pass, have we not my friends! Burl reviewing The Princess Bride! But why not? It’s a movie after all, and judging by the Santa on the wall in Fred Savage’s room, a Christmas one at that! And it was made in the 1980s too, which is an era I seem to keep revisiting in this blog!

I saw this one in the theatre, but, as I recall, only because it was playing at the movie theatre at the end of my street! Otherwise I probably would have ignored it in the way I ignored many of the other big 80s fantasy pictures, like Willow or The Golden Child or Labyrinth, none of which I’ve ever seen! I did see Ladyhawke though, which I seem to recall was pretty st*nky!

I won’t bother relating the plot of The Princes Bride in much detail, ha ha! Pretty pretty princess, handsome suitor, quirky sidekicks and dastardly villains: that’s about it, and all framed by scenes with Peter Falk telling the story to his grandson Fred Savage! Everybody loves the bits with Wallace Shawn, Mandy Patinkin and André the Giant, and rightly so because those parts are great! André is very huge and loveable, and we get to hear Wallace Shawn, a long way from My Dinner With André – though he probably had dinner with André the Giant every day during the shoot – sputter the line “Do you want me to send you back where you were? Unemployed in Greenland???”

It’s all competently staged by Rob Reiner and nicely shot by the late Adrian Biddle, ha ha, but it’s never what you’d call a super thrillshow! Nor, for all its chatter about true love, does it ever pluck the heartstrings the way it intends; and this has been blamed in many reviews on the performances of Cary Elwes and Robin Wright in the lead roles! I guess there’s no denying that they're a bit deficient in the chemistry department – a supposedly history-making smo*ch between the two of them isn’t even shown in its entirety! – but I didn’t think their performances were bad! It’s just that they were comic performances more than anything, particularly in the case of Cary Elwes! I thought he was pretty good with his little comic bits, in fact!

The sword fighting scene between him and Mandy Patinkin is also very impressive! It’s well-choreographed and performed, and I’ll bet they had to practice it quite a bit before they got it right! It’s always nice to see the results of many hours’ effort on the screen! Still, they say Cary Elwes gave one of the worst performances ever committed to the screen in Saw (which I’ve never seen), so maybe he was just a man born out of time – he should have been there fighting alongside Errol Flynn back in the olden days of pirate movies!

The picture takes on something of a variety-show aspect in the last third, as it parades out comic stars in heavy makeup or outlandish costumes for the delectation of the viewers! Of course we see Billy Crystal and Carol Kane in old-folks slather doing Catskills shtick, and Peter Cook doing a funny bit as the Impressive Clergyman! There are a few others in there too, and they’re okay, but don’t exactly keep us engaged in the picture!

I’ll give this enjoyable, often funny but slight fantasy picture two and a half six-fingered gloves, and an extra ha ha for conducting its business with such ruthless efficiency!

Burl reviews Head of the Family! (1996)

2011-12-10T15:12:00.003-06:00

Ha ha, Burl here to review one of those crazy oddities from the mind of Charles Band! He’s the guy who’s obsessed with tiny little toy monsters and miniature killer dolls and such curiosities as that! Ha ha, he made Puppet Master and Demonic Toys and Dollman, and of course Dollman Meets Puppet Master Vs. Demonic Toys!

Of course he also made Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn, which I’ll have to review here someday; and his father Albert made I Bury the Living and his brother Richard wrote the music for, among others, Re-Animator, so he’s part of a real filmmaking dynasty!

And who knows, Head of the Family may be his attempt to dramatize this saga in some way! We non-Bands can never know! Anyway, Head of the Family isn’t about killer puppets or dolls with knives, but about a strange family “headed,” ha ha, by a guy with a little tiny body and a big enormous melon! They’re the Stackpool family apparently, and the big head guy is Myron, who controls his three siblings with his mind! One of them is a guy with bulgy eyes and sharp ears, another is a pretty lady and the third is Otis, an oafish strongman!

Mixed up in all this is a neo-noir plotline involving Lance, a guy who owns a store-slash-diner, who’s in love with Loretta, the nub*le wife of Howard, the local tough-guy biker! Every chance they get, they sneak off to make l*ve! One night Lance happens to notice the Stackpool family up to some nefarious deeds – turns out they kidnap people for use in Myron’s brain operations, and the Stackpool manse has a whole bunch of brain-vegetables running around the basement! So naturally a little blackmail is in order to force the Stackpools to get rid of the biker!

But the two l*vers soon fall into the clutches of the giant head and his family, and the whole thing climaxes with a performance of, I presume, George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, with the soldiers and cardinals enacted by the brain operation victims and Loretta in the role of the about-to-be-roasted Joan! Of course, matters are complicated further by the tiny shred of autonomy Otis has left, which refuses to see such an outrage done to a pretty lady! A housefire is the inevitable conclusion!

It’s a weird little movie, I’ll say that much! I like weird movies, so that’s a good thing as far as I’m concerned – the best thing about the picture, in fact! The acting is surprisingly solid all around, and the special effects of the giant casaba man are sometimes pretty good – they use forced perspective and such Mélies-era tricks as that! I always like to see that stuff!

On the other hand, there’s not much to the movie, and it’s a talky one, greatly deficient in action! The story could use a few extra wrinkles too, and the characters some depth! There are quite a few scenes of sex*al congress between Lance and Loretta, and she’s completely nak*d when she plays the part of Joan of Arc at the end, but somehow this doesn’t liven up the movie to the degree that you’d expect! Ha ha! The weirdness, however, just about almost carries the day!

Because it tries something different and does pull off a few small coups, and because it’s slightly funny or clever in parts, and because there’s an oaf wearing a jerkin and a guy with bug eyes, I’ll award this strange curio two pork tenderloin tongues!

Burl reviews Tower of London! (1939)

2011-12-09T21:34:00.003-06:00

Hi, Burl here with a bit of history for you! I don’t think it’s what you’d call very accurate history, but it sure is exciting and scary! Ha ha, when you’ve got Boris Karloff playing a hulking, club-footed executioner named Mord, you know it’s going to be a journey into fright!

The picture’s called Tower of London, and though it gets called a horror movie a lot, and is filled with horror stars, and is directed by Rowland V. Lee, a guy best known, inasmuch as he’s known at all, for his horror movies, I’d still say it sits somewhere in the netherworld between spookshow and straight historical drama! But I guess classifying the movie isn’t the most important thing now, is it!

It’s the story of Richard III’s cruel and heartless path to the throne of England! Ha ha, he keeps a wee dollhouse with figures representing all those between him and the crown, and every time he manages to get rid of one, he tosses their doll into the fire! As this takes him several years, I had to wonder that apparently no one, a servant dusting the room for instance, or maybe one of his wives, ever found his macabre and rather incriminating little display!

The one-by-one nature of his fatal userptions gives it a bit of a slasher move aspect too, like Prom Night or something, which is a little bit of extra fun for those of us who know that genre! And the aforementioned great cast of horror stars is yet another marvelous bonus! Ha ha, we get Basil Rathbone as Richard the Crookback, Vincent Price as his ineffectual drunkard brother Clarence, Leo G. Carroll as a royal adviser and of course Karloff as the terrifying, completely fictional Mord the Dragfoot who is totally and creepily dedicated to his humpbacked master Dick the Third! The rest of the cast is pretty good too!

There’s some good gruesome stuff in this picture! There’s a head-chopping, which of course was a very popular activity of the day, and some scenes in Karloff’s torture chamber, with an iron maiden and a rack and other terrible items; and then of course there’s the scene where Clarence and Richard get into a drinking contest and of course, as we know from Shakespeare's play, Clarence ends up in a butt of his favourite Malmsey! Ha ha, how much is a butt, you might be wondering? It’s about three hogsheads! Plenty enough to drown in, anyway! Poor Clarence!

Of course Richard and Mord get their comeuppance on the battlefield, but it’s a long road of murder and torture and intrigue and deceit before then! It all looks great, with that wonderful 30s Universal gleam and some pretty lush sets! It’s a fine picture for sure, and I’d be so bold as to give it three and a half V.I.P. booths!

Burl reviews Soldier of Fortune! (1955)

2011-12-05T10:42:00.005-06:00

Hi, Burl here, talking to you in w i d e s c r e e n! That’s right, the movie I’m reviewing today was shot in Super-Cinemascope or something along that line, and I mention it because in the end the nice letterboxed cinematography by Leo Tover is pretty much the movie’s primary virtue!

It’s called Soldier of Fortune, which, because of the famous magazine of the same name, might lead you to think that this is a rugged picture filled with high adventure and the never-ending chatter of machine gun fire! There you would be sorely mistaken, though there is some gunfire in the last few minutes of the movie - more on that in a moment!

The soldier of fortune of the title is none other than Clark Gable, but, aside from an opening scene where he rides a funicular train, it seems to take forever before he shows up! The filmmakers throw in a Frenchman who sort of looks like him though, just to throw us off the scent I guess, or make us forget that Gable is supposed to be the star of this picture!

The story is set in Hong Kong, and begins with the arrival of American naïf Susan Hayward, who is searching for her missing photographer husband! She finds out pretty quickly that he’d made his way into mainland China and was immediately arrested by local authorities; how, she wonders, can she possibly rescue him from these nefarious Maoists when both American and British governments have given up? Well, that’s where Clark comes in! He’s a jolly rogue, a smuggler I believe, and the idea seems to have been to make a Harry Lime sort of a character who still manages to be the good guy! We learn, for example, that Clark’s character, Henry Lee, has not one but three adopted moppets, one of whom he is putting through school in the US!

There are scenes set in Hayward’s HK hotel, and others in a bar called Tweedie’s, and in these scenes the movie seems to be aspiring to be one of my very favourite micro-genres, the Eccentric Expat Community picture! There are lots of these, from Casablanca to The Shanghai Gesture to even something like R.W. Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore, which isn’t actually about stateless fugitives hanging around the lobby of a gone-to-seed hotel in a tropical land drinking endless Cuba Libres, but rather filmmakers doing so, and that’s by any measure close enough!

But that particular approach is as transient as anything else in this picture! The hotel lobby is soon forgotten about, and the various international misfits who pop up throughout the film – exiles from China, Portuguese flim-flam men, British police officers, rough-and-tumble Americans and the brawny French romantic, flit through the picture but only make the briefest impression even if they are a part of the movie’s climax!

The location photography, bright, colourful and exotic, is the best and only reason to see the movie! Well, Clark Gable is pretty good too, exuding his roguish charm as well as he ever did even if he’s a bit long in the tooth for the part; and there are some familiar and welcome faces in the supporting cast, like Jack Kruschen and Mel Welles! And after a curiously muffled and underwhelming rescue scene (who knew the dreaded Commies were such creampuffs when it comes to securing their prisoners!), there’s a bit of gunfire excitement in the junk escape that caps off the movie!

Then finally, back on that funicular railcar, we get the answer to the question which the movie hopes will have been burning in our hearts and minds from the moment Gable steps on screen: will Susan Hayward choose the mustachioed charmer or her rather dumb husband? Ha ha, a foregone conclusion perhaps, but frankly I wasn’t too concerned either way! The wrap-up feels in fact as though it was written by someone who always wished Casablanca ended differently than it did!

I give this pretty, pleasingly exotic but strangely lifeless picture one and a half carafes of American bourbon! I was initially surprised that I’d never heard of it before, but now I think I know why! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Watchers! (1988)

2011-12-04T09:46:00.004-06:00

Hi, Burl here, and today I’m taking a walk on the iron side! Yes, Michael Ironside is in this picture, and as usual he’s playing a nasty fellow on the wrong side of the law, totally bereft of any common decency! Ha ha, he’s so good at playing those guys that I sometimes wonder if he ever regrets being born with a bald head and a hawk face! But I guess he’s made a few bucks off it, ha ha!

This picture is called Watchers, and it’s the story of a lab that suddenly blows up and of the experimental creatures which escape the conflagration! One of them is a hyper-intelligent golden retriever and the other is a hairy humanoid monster with an ape face, a jaws mouth and a taste for human eyeballs! There’s yet a third escaped creature, but to explain that one would be to give away important third-act story points! Oh okay, the third lab creation is Ironside, who’s been genetically monkeyed with to be crazy and have no conscience! But we knew that already because, Ironside!

The dog hooks up with Corey Haim, of all people, and he might have been able to live out his doggy life free and easy from there, but for the fact that the ape creature has been trained to kill this particular hound – it’s some sort of experimental weapons system, or some bunkum and honeydew of that sort – and also that he’s being chased by the ruthless Mr. Ironside! Corey Haim dubs the dog “Furface,” and there are many scenes of the dog showing off his incredible intelligence and trying to convince Haim and his mother that danger lurks nearby!

Of course the ape creature, who is somehow able to stroll through suburban neighborhoods and high school hallways without being noticed, is, in a series of unexcitingly-filmed killing scenes, brutalizing people in the area and stealing their eyeballs! A p*t-smoking hobo, a janitor, an Australian appliance repairman (if you know what I mean, ha ha!), a computer teacher, a deputy, Jason Priestly – everyone is fair game to this voracious monster! Finally Haim gets the message that he and his single mom might be in jeopardy, so he beats feet up to a cabin in the woods where he and his pops used to go hunting!

Meanwhile Michael Ironside is causing his own havoc, and when people get in his way he just kills them and plucks out their eyeballs so people will assume the monster did it! Ha ha, very clever, Ironside! It all comes to a fiery climax at the cabin, with everything taking place pretty much as you expect it will; except that in a quiet moment before the final donnybrook the dog challenges Corey Haim to a game of Scrabble; it’s left to us to decide who would have won!

This is not a good picture! It’s a real daffodil: never scary or exciting, and there’s no character to root for aside from maybe the dog, and even he’s not that sympathetic because he just gloms onto people even knowing he’s putting them in danger by doing so! But he’s still by far the most sympathetic character in the movie! The monster is pretty much a particularly vicious Bigfoot, and it’s never explained why he likes eyeballs so much!

Ahh, I hate to sound overly judgmental, but this movie’s not really worth a cruickshank! Because I like Ironside, and because the mom was a little weird, and because after all it’s a little bit Bigfooty, and you know how much I love Bigfoot, ha ha, I guess I can muster up one half of a curiously flammable video cassette for this bumkin of a picture!

Burl reviews Strange Illusion! (1945)

2011-12-03T18:01:00.006-06:00

Hi, it’s Burl here to review another motion picture smash! I’ve always liked the movies of Edgar Ulmer – his amazing picture The Black Cat is one of my very favorite horror movies ever! And of course he made Detour and The Man From Planet X and plenty of other fine photoplays! He always puts lots of great little touches into his films that make it clearly the work of Edgar G. Ulmer and nobody else!

Strange Illusion, which was made the same year as the much more famous Detour, concerns a precocious young scion, Paul, returning from school to the family home only to find that his widowed mother is keeping company with an outwardly avuncular but clearly sinister smoothie by the name of Curtis! Curtis has everyone else pixilated with his city manners and greasy charm, but not Paul, who has been dreaming of this tiny-mustached pretender and is kept on high alert by prehumously mailed missives authored by his father from beyond the grave! Paul immediately suspects that this fellow and his friend Dr. Muleback might have had something to do with the death of Paul’s father!

Ha ha, does that sound familiar? That’s right, it’s the plot of Hamlet! It’s pretty great seeing Ulmer take on the Bard this way, with crazy dream sequences and a spectacular HO scale motoring accident, and all on a budget of about fifty cents too! And he’s got a great snarling chickenhawk of a bad guy in Warren William, who always did a good job in his oily-villain roles and in his spare time apparently designed and built one of the first ever RV camper vans!

The movie takes a strange turn when Paul decides that the best way to investigate and expose Curtis and Dr. Muleback is to get himself committed to Muleback’s nearby asylum! Turns out Curtis is a maniac patient of Muleback's with a taste for making l*ve to young ladies and giving older ones a pretty stiff neck-twist! Doc Muleback’s only in it for the money though!

Well, this is a classic example of a movie that’s no darn good by any defensible standard, but that I really enjoyed anyway! Of course those Ulmer touches are manifestly great, and Warren William too, but I also liked other, less obvious aspects, like the performance of Jimmy Lydon, the fellow who plays Paul! Some might dismiss him as just another over-earnest jug-ear with a Boris Karloff lisp, but I thought he was right on the money! There's a great scene where Paul, on the phone with his girlfr*end, baffles an eavesdropping Muleback by employing then-current teen vernacular! "Hey vixen, what's mixin'!" he cries! "Are you missin' my kissin'?"

On the other hand, the climax of the picture is extremely anti-climactic and rather dull! Too bad – I was hoping it would end with a car chase! But on the other hand we do get another fabulous dream sequence, so that sort of makes up for it! I give this little-loved but moody picture three easily-shattered two-way mirrors!

Burl reviews Sorority House Massacre! (1986)

2011-11-30T09:28:00.002-06:00

Hi, Burl here with a review just for you! Ha ha, I’ve always admired Roger Corman, and one of his many fantastic qualities is that he apparently went to sleep one night thinking about slasher movies and woke the next day believing that they should be written and directed by ladies! I’m not going to say he’s wrong either, particularly when the first result of this new mode of thinking was Slumber Party Massacre! Great title, great movie, and I’ll review it here sometime soon!

Well, Roger tried to capture lightning in a bottle a second time with Sorority House Massacre, another great title and another lady director! This one belongs to its own tiny subset of slasher pictures, which I’ll call the Heroines With History micro-genre! That’s where the young ladies known as Final Girls have some secret in their pasts, often unknown even to themselves, that connects with the killer or the events in the picture in some way! The Initiation is a very good example of this sort of picture; and a good way to work out how you feel about the Larded With History approach is to watch Halloween, which isn’t one of those pictures, and then Halloween II, which, strangely, is!

It’s usually a pretty blatant attempt on the part of the filmmakers to inject what they would probably call “depth” into a genre they clearly regard as inherently lacking same! Ha ha, and as a bonus we get to see their hamhanded attempts to create profound oneiric imagery, which always come off like parodies of heavy-handed film-school work such as we see in the Kevin Bacon movie The Big Picture or the Brian De Palma-produced picture The First Time! In Sorority House Massacre we get a jar of marbles falling to the floor in slow motion, a photograph of young girls which starts bleeding, a knife coming through a mirror and other such treats! Also, it should be mentioned, much of the night photography is quite blue in color, like Madman or Whodunit!

The story? Well, Beth, an orphan plagued by troubling dreams of being stalked by a t-shirt clad madman, comes to stay at a sorority house for the weekend, for reasons which escaped me! Turns out the house is, by a rather epic coincidence, the very house she lived in until, when she was five, her much older brother went bonkers and pickaxed the rest of her family to death! She, the youngest, managed to escape by hiding in the basement! She’s grown into a comely but troubled lass, and is hoping a weekend of partying with the sisters will help break her out of her funk! But of course big brother chooses this weekend to bust out of the booby hatch, and he’s soon on hand to deliver some brutal pokings to the supporting cast! Ha ha, he gets one couple while they’re making l*ve in a tee-pee so small they have to stand up inside it!

A pretty standard maniac movie, I suppose you’d call this! There are a few witty lines, but most of the picture involves the cast running around the house making really, really poor decisions! I mean not just the sort of bad calls you can excuse because the characters are panicked, or because the filmmakers need to keep the plot moving, but especially egregiously stupid moves, over and over again! And the whole thing plays out as though they were all trapped in a giant soundproof bubble: no matter how much they scream and break glass, nobody in the many nearby neighboring houses ever stirs! Ha ha, in real life, when they were shooting the picture, I’ll bet they got all sorts of noise complaints from those houses! The swearing and catcalls of the grips and electrics, the bellowing of assistant directors, and of course the shrieks and cries of the cast – filmmaking is a cacophonous business!

The biggest trouble with this movie: no Special Makeup Effects! It’s all just knives poking into stuffed shirts and a little bit of blood here and there! That’s too bad, because the rest of the picture is entertaining enough that a few trick effects and a little proper gore would have brought it up to the status of (very, very) minor classic! Oh Roger – sometimes saving a buck just isn’t worth it! I give this too-dry movie one and a half ludicrously low-security asylums!

Burl reviews Pépé Le Moko! (1937)

2011-11-27T23:04:00.002-06:00

Burl reporting for duty! Ha ha, it’s time to review an elderly classic, the fine, exotic French crime picture Pépé le Moko! It’s a colonial picture, which is a genre I like quite a bit – movies about consuls, for example, and especially dipsomaniacal ones, are usually fine entertainments for the likes of ol’ Burl!

But this is not a consular movie! It’s the tale of the most famous robber of Algiers, Pépé le Moko, who is beloved throughout the Casbah and is hidden within that labyrinthine quarter by its devoted denizens, who revere him because he’s the most charming and accomplished thief who ever was, and also something of a Robin Hood figure! Whenever les flics come in to arrest him, the good people of the citadel band together to baffle and misdirect them away from their debonair folk hero! This of course frustrates the cops to no end! The Shareef don’t like it, ha ha!

But of course, should Pépé dare to leave the Casbah, he’ll be nabbed by the men in blue the moment he ventures out! So while he rules the quarter and commands total respect from its inhabitants, he’s pretty much a prisoner there! Ha ha, he’s tired of being trapped in there, and tired of his beautiful gypsy-eyed girlfriend! The story follows him as he falls in love with a fancy-pants Parisienne, whom he happens across while she’s slumming one night in the Casbah, dripping with jewelry and briefly on the lam from her old frog-faced industrialist of a boyfriend!

Well, Pépé succeeds in capturing her heart, but now he must outwit the sly, patient police officer who has befriended him, and seems always able to find him just to have a chat now and then, but still amiably maintains that one day Pépé will scr*w up, and there he, Inspecteur Slimaine, will be, waiting with handcuffs at the ready and his fez cocked at a rakish tilt! It’s a great template for all the sympathetic cop-criminal relationships seen since in the movies, with Heat being a particularly good example!

This is the movie that made Jean Gabin a big star and led to him trying his hand at Hollywood in Moontide! And no wonder, because in the role of Pépé he’s as suave and slick as can be, but manages to display both a fundamental decency and an absolute ruthlessness at the same time, all swirled up with the chewy romantic center you’d expect to find in any Gallic master criminal! Of course the picture ends on a note of high romantic tragedy, of the sort we don’t hear played much in movies these days!

The centerpiece of the picture is a long scene in which the local snitch, who’s managed to manipulate one of Pépé’s very closest pals into getting nabbed, is cornered by Le Moko and his gang and has to sweat it out as they get closer to the truth of his treachery! It’s a good scene, with this old grass sweating bullets and playing what he begins to realize will be his last hand of cards! I also liked the exotic atmosphere of the movie, which actually was partially shot in Algiers! The rest was shot in Parisian studios I guess, but the Casbah atmosphere is thicker than mule paste throughout!

I give this fine old classic three and a half ill-timed foghorn blasts!

Burl reviews Hide And Go Shriek! (1987)

2011-11-26T21:21:00.005-06:00

Hullo, hullo, it’s Burl here! It’s time to review another slasher movie, and to figure out even more subdivisions within that exalted genre! Here we have Hide And Go Shriek, which came along a little later in the 1980s slasher parade, but that’s okay! This one takes place in a furniture store called Fine Furniture and as a special bonus has a little bit of the red stuff, including one fairly startling Special Makeup Effect courtesy of a young gentleman whose legal name is Screaming Mad George!

But I’m getting “ahead” of myself, ha ha! There’s a special subdivision of the slasher film that tries to be gritty and urban in its atmosphere, and I guess Abel Ferrara’s Driller Killer is about as gritty as they come! American Nightmare is another one of these, and parts of Visiting Hours fit the bill as well, along with that one scene in The Burning, which is of course for the most part a summer camp picture, and a pretty good one! I have to say that the gritty urban slasher movies rank among my least favorite types of slasher pictures, because they mostly lack the fanciful elements I enjoy, and also usually at least one prosti*ute gets killed by the maniac; and that happens in real life enough that it’s not too entertaining to see it on screen! Those ladies of the even*ng have it tough enough already, it seems to me!

Hide And Go Shriek starts out like it’s going to be one of those movies, with a well-dressed mystery man savagely poking a l*dy of the evening the moment his sordid transaction is complete; but it very quickly and mercifully gives that up to tell the tale of eight teenagers who prepare for what they are certain will be the greatest night of their lives: a campout in a furniture department store! Ha ha, does it get any better!

Well, the teens sneak into Fine Furniture, which actually seems a very drab and boring place, and enthuse repeatedly about the stellar funtime sleepover they’re going to have in there! But of course a certain well-dressed mystery man is in there with them, and he’s evidently got a grudge against recently-graduated high schoolers! Ha ha, I suppose all of us do, but we don’t go homicidal over it! It takes forever for the killings to begin, and after they do it takes another forever for the shouty and objectionable teenagers to figure out that something’s amiss! Of course if they couldn’t figure out that a night in an outlet store wouldn’t be the most delightful night anyone ever had, they probably aren’t the swiftest boats in the fleet anyway!

The well-dressed mystery man turns out to be the jailhouse boyfriend of one of the loading dock workers, and he actually is dressed in leather and nose studs, which makes me think the well-dressed man bit at the beginning was shot and added later to get some murderousness in early! This happens a lot in movies like this, it’s true!

This picture is really quite boring and repetitive, it must be said, even though there’s an unusually generous selection of ladies’ bo*bs on display! The teens run around the store playing hide and seek for what seems like forever, and then run around looking for their friends for what seems like another forever, but which might be intended as a horrific parallel to the earlier carefree hide and seek! However, it comes across more as the exact same scenes played over again, this time with more shrieking! At least nobody can say the movie fails to live up to its title! The highlight of the thing is clearly Screaming Mad George’s excellent trick effect, which involves a freight elevator and the head of a screaming lady!

I did like the ending, where the whole relationship of the killer and his beloved furniture store employee ex-boyfriend is discussed in great detail at least twice! They treat it as a genuinely tender love affair that just happened to go sour, and it actually was quite touching! But since the characterizations of the people we spend most of the movie with are completely non-existent, I have to call it too little, too late! I give this hucklebuck of a picture one and a half startling trick effects even though the movie itself only contains one!

Burl reviews I Bury the Living! (1958)

2011-11-25T12:25:00.005-06:00

Hi, Burl here with a review of a spooky movie from days gone by, I Bury the Living! This one is a low-budget affair to be sure, but it’s really got something going for it – at least until the last five minutes!

The set-up is a little convoluted and strange, involving the Chamber of Commerce in a mid-sized town who take turns administering the local cemetery for some reason! And this year it’s department-store owner Bob Kraft’s turn! Well, he grouses about it, complaining that he’s got no time to manage a cemetery, but the other guys on the board tell him he’s got to accept and that it’s not too much work anyway!

Well, next thing you know Bob’s spending all his time in the freezing cold cemetery office, shivering and listening to the outrageous Scots brogue of Groundskeeper Willie, played by Theodore Bikel! His name is actually Groundskeeper Andy, not Willie, but if someone told me that he was the precise template for the beloved Simpsons character, I’d have no trouble believing it, ha ha!

The office contains a big map of the graveyard, and each plot has either white pins, for still-living people who’ve purchased but are not yet using their sites, and black pins for those already taking the big dirt nap! Of course what happens is that a distracted Bob puts black pins in where white ones should go, and the people who own those mis-pinned plots suddenly and mysteriously croak! As Bob starts to cotton on to what’s going on he begins to go a little crazy, believing himself to have an unholy power over life and death that no department store executive should possess!

For most of its running time this is a nice little mystery-shocker, and I was even thinking it might benefit from a remake, where the mysterious deaths get more of a spectacular, dare I say Final Destination-type treatment! But the plot development at the end pretty much ruins the whole thing! I don’t want to further ruin it by giving it away to you, but my disappointment was such that I don’t believe I could ruin it further! Let's just say there's some pretty stiff neck-twists involved!

Ha ha, I think I’d rather concentrate on the positive, which to be fair is most of the movie! Richard Boone plays Bob, and I really liked his performance! He seemed more or less like a real guy! I also liked the depiction of the Chamber of Commerce or business association or whatever they were! It gave a good portrait of the community to help contextualize the whole thing! And then of course there’s a spooky graveyard atmosphere to the whole thing, which is always a plus! Ha ha, this could easily have been another tale introduced by Reegor from Ring of Terror now that I think of it!

The movie was directed by Albert Band, the father of none other than the miniature monster obsessed Charles Band, whose works include the Puppet Master movies and of course Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn, which I really should review here one day! But as for I Bury the Living, I’ll recommend it with some reservations! I give it two unlikely stranglers!

Burl reviews Sweater Girls! (1978)

2011-11-20T11:34:00.002-06:00

Hi, it’s Burl! Ha ha! I’m here to review the movie Sweater Girls, which is part of a small but vital microgenre of the 1970s, which is to say movies that were pitched as being American Graffiti plus nud*ty! Since American Graffiti had been such a marvelous hit, and of course in the 70s bare bre*sts and backs*des were all the rage, there were many producers who figured that combining these elements would make for a profitable drive-in entertainment! And who’s to say they were wrong? Not ol’ Burl!

There were quite a few of these productions! Slumber Party ’57 was a good one, and it featured a young Debra Winger! There was Hometown U.S.A. and of course the Lemon Popsicle movies from Israel (Going Steady, Hot Bubblegum and others); and then the genre reached its apotheosis with Porky’s, which of course, along with Animal House, begat the whole 80s cycle of teen and collegiate s*x comedies!

But we’re here to talk Sweater Girls, a picture which documents the adventures had by a group of teens over the Fourth of July weekend in 1956! The movie opens with a newsreel of that summer’s happenings, and then we meet some of our primary characters as they smooch in a car at the drive-in! Oh, even though I wasn’t nearly born during this period, scenes like this have the power to awaken a fearsome nostalgia in me, I must admit! I guess I’d prefer to not be a person who wastes a lot of time looking backwards, but one of my facets, even on this blog, is that of historian, so I guess I come by it naturally at least!

From there, the plot sort of starts! Pete and his buddies decide to have themselves a wild time, and they make friends with Henry the glasses nerd because Henry’s dad owns a beer shop! That way they can get giant brown bottles of beer which clink together appealingly even when the boozy town cop steals them from the lads!

Meanwhile, the girls decide to form a club called the Sweater Girls! I was never sure what the point of the club was exactly, but it had something to do with maintaining chastity! They invite the town bad girl, Joella, to join the club, and she does! Then they decide to have a sleepover party at grandma’s house, where they frequently change from one colored sweater to another, revealing great voluminous white bras*ieres every time! Ha ha!

Of course, the lads have gotten themselves sozzled on brewskis, and they show up at grandma’s house to make mischief, but since the girls aren’t particularly resistant to their arrival, what at first seems like a set-up for a siege situation turns into a series of antics and shenanigans, some of them involving somersaulting off roofs, others involving bo*bs and beh*nds! There’s lots of tumbling into the bathtub and a few misunderstandings, and the only real fly in this ointment of paradise is the nosy, beer-swiping cop! But he gets his in the end, ha ha – literally, when his bot*om is covered in paint!

The big flaw in this picture is that the lads get drunk at the beginning and pretty much stay drunk for the entire movie! That gets kind of wearisome after a while, I must say! Most people would say this is a boring movie where not much happens, and they wouldn’t be wrong, but I really enjoyed it! Little scenes like the glasses nerd and Joella excitedly admitting to one another that they prefer Adlai Stevenson over Ike make this kind of thing worthwhile for a guy like ol’ Burl! I also kind of like that this movie, uniquely in its subgenre, isn’t crammed wall-to-wall with cheaply-licensed 50s hits! No, they wrote and recorded one themselves, calling it Sweater Girls of course, and they play that one over and over throughout the picture! I give this low-budget trinket two and a half Charlene Tilton cameos!

Burl reviews Lightning Over Water! (1980)

2011-11-19T09:49:00.002-06:00

Hi, it’s me, Burl, and I’m back! Ha ha, for anyone who’s counting, this is my one hundredth movie review! Ha ha, it’s all so delightful!

Anyway, I’m here to review the movie Lightning Over Water, which I guess fits into the same microgenre as another movie I reviewed a while back, Voyage in Time, which followed director Andrei Tarkovsky around Italy as he prepared a new movie! This one is about director Nicholas Ray as he tries to make a new movie with his pal Wim Wenders, but the grim spectre of death gets in the way! Talk about your microgenres – I guess you’d call it the autobiographical movie director semi-documentary! There are probably some more out there, and if I come across one, I’ll be sure to review it! Or if you think of one, be sure to let me know about it! Ha ha, thanks!

Lightning Over Water starts with Wim Wenders arriving in New York to hang out with his buddy Nick, the great director of such classics as Bigger Than Life! Nick is awfully sick though, and they decide to collaborate on a movie that would essentially be about Nick and Wim trying to make this movie! Of course it’s really a movie about Nick Ray dying, and about the passions that had kept him going this long (movies; smoking), and about the little world of acolytes he’s gathered around him for the final act of his life! And in the background, Susan Ray, his wife, wears a slightly strained expression and practices a lot of yoga! This can’t have been a very easy time for her, so she’s a pretty impressive character in her own right!

She’s also proved a good steward of Nick Ray’s life and work in the years since his death, recently having seen through to release his final solo feature, We Can’t Go Home Again, which we see glimpses of in this movie! We also see a nice chunk of Ray’s Robert Mitchum picture The Lusty Men, which I’ve never seen in full! Ha ha, I think it’s time, because it looks pretty great!

Much of Lightning Over Water is Wim Wenders reflecting on Ray, on his relationship with Ray, and on his worries of how this movie they’re making is impacting Ray’s health and his own feelings toward the great director! He relates an argument he has with another acolyte, a guy named Tom, over whether they should be thinking of Nick as a father figure! Tom claims it’s natural and proper to do so, while Wim believes it would just interfere with what the relationship should actually be, and would prevent them from knowing Nick first and foremost as a person in a simple, direct and human way! I appreciate that point of view, but it’s pretty clear throughout that Wenders is caught in a pretty bad case of hero worship, which is sort of the same thing! But that would be hard to avoid with a figure as accomplished and iconic as Nick Ray!

Ray himself is the heart and soul of this movie, of course, and it’s great in that it doesn’t crowd him or ask too much of him, but still makes it clear how scared he is behind his cigare*te-smoking tough-guy façade! We also get a sense of the betrayal he still rightly feels at having been dumped by Hollywood in the early 60s for being a troublemaker and a boozehound! It’s a sad story, but the whole point of Lightning Over Water is to provide Ray a chance to go out with his head held high, and by that measure, and by most others I can think of, it’s a marvelous success! I give Lightning Over Water four hacking morning coughs!

Burl reviews Murder by Contract! (1958)

2011-11-11T23:57:00.002-06:00

Hi, Burl here to review a lone wolf hired killer movie, which is a genre I certainly like, but don’t have the great love for that some other people do! This is an older one though, and so it has some very special attributes, which I would like to tell you about now!

This is the story of Claude and how he became a hitman, and then the bulk of the movie takes us through his most difficult contract! We see Claude’s first few jobs, including a very nicely-done barbershop murder, and the next thing you know he’s a veteran cold-blooded killer-for-hire and on his way to sunny California for an extra-special task!

In California he’s aided and minded by two assistants, Marc and George, who accompany him everywhere as he gets ready to fulfill the contract! Ha ha, but what do you think he wants to do to get ready? That’s right, swim in the ocean, whack a few at the driving range, take in a movie or two, stroll around and see the sights! It drives Marc and George bananas! But he’s the stone-cold expert hit man and they’re just the mob’s b*m boys, so they have to take it and like it!

Finally Claude decides to take a look at the person he’s supposed to assassinate, and it turns out to be a lady piano player! Well he’s not too happy about that, and that’s when the plan starts to fall apart and beads of sweat begin to appear on the formerly unshakeable Claude’s brow! As you might guess, this being a film noir, things pretty quickly spiral out of control from there, and all under the watchful eye of Lucien Ballard’s chrome-grey camerawork!

This is a really enjoyable picture, filled with fascinating detail, not so much of the hit man’s methods or of his philosophy, but just of the times! The two actors who play Marc and George are unfamiliar to me, but they play their frustration as high comedy and it works very effectively! They make for a good team, and you almost feel sorry for them as Claude seems to be deliberately trying to drive them nuts for no good reason!

There’s an excellent guitar score that reminded me of the zither music from The Third Man, and I’ll bet it’ll remind you of that very same thing! It works perfectly in this movie, though! And there’s a great climax that involves being in a storm drain, but I won’t ruin it for you by describing it further! I’ll just say that I think you’ll enjoy this small gem of a gangster flick, and I give it three exploding television sets!

Burl reviews Skyline! (2010)

2011-11-10T00:15:00.003-06:00

Ah ha ha, it’s me, Burl! I thought I’d review a newer alien picture that I watched the other day! It’s called Skyline and it was made by two brothers who usually do trick effects in other people's movies! These guys apparently financed the picture themselves and shot it almost entirely in the Marina Del Rey condo that one of them lives in!

I’m sure you’re wondering “Ha ha, Burl, why would you watch a movie like that? Don’t you know it won’t be worth a cruickshank?” Well, having heard the background information on the movie, I sort of started thinking of it as a modern-day, California version of a Don Dohler backyard-Baltimore alien caper! And I wondered what something like that would be like!

Well, ha ha, it’s not too good! It seems that a group of fairly dumb people are getting together in Los Angeles for a birthday party! The party takes place in the condo, of course, and then, after we’ve gotten to know the characters enough to realize we don’t like them very much, the alien braineaters make their move! Dazzling blue lights fall from the sky and zombify anyone who dares stare into them! And then you float up into the sky and are hoovered into one of the massive spacecraft which hover over the city at what must be precisely the altitude prescribed by the FAA or someone, since that’s where all the alien spacecraft squat, from V to Independence Day to all the rest of these kinds of movies!

The movie follows these characters as they try to escape the nefarious space creatures, who have different forms and are hard to tell apart from their space buggies if you want the truth! The backyard nature of this particular picture, and the general stupidity of its characters, means that every attempt to leave the building is stymied pretty quickly, and the movie takes on a vaguely Sartrean or maybe Buñuelian aspect as the characters try again and again to exit the building, only to find themselves back in that same condo, engaging in the old Night of the Living Dead debate about whether to hole up and wait for help or make some attempt to escape! It gets tiresome pretty quickly, since if you’ve ever seen a siege picture the same argument will seem to have been raging long before the movie even began!

Eventually, after a valiantly stupid rooftop fight against the aliens, where the main fellow, the dumbest one of all, ends up punching wildly at the alien middle-school wimp-fight style, the two main characters end up in a spaceship where they discover the true reason behind the aliens’ invasion, which is in the nature of a snack run! The E.T.s reminded me of Vermicious Knids, and their antics were initially interesting since they seem more like animals than super-advanced conquerors of the universe; but the last scenes of the picture rapidly become extremely silly, and one is grateful to see it come to an end!

It’s not a total loss, though! Sure it tries much too hard and is never scary or exciting or awe-inspiring in the way it intends to be, and the effects, which are near-constant in the movie’s second half, have a weightless quality that drains them of import; but it still manages a couple of nice images, and though you think about legions of glasses nerds chained to render farms rather than a few sci-fi geeks freezing their b*ns off in a Baltimore backyard, that Dohler can-do spirit I love so well can still be detected faintly around the margins of this bombastic but boring butterberry of a picture! Also, the movie features a performance from the actor Robin Gammell, who’s so good in Rituals and Murder By Phone! Ha ha, I was surprised to see him! I give Skyline one single annoying girlfriend!

Burl reviews Whodunit?! (1982)

2011-11-07T22:12:00.000-06:00

Hi, ha ha, hi, it’s Burl here! Over several of my recent reviews I’ve been assembling something of a slasher movie taxonomy, and I’ll continue breaking the genre down for you now! We’ve heard about Makeup Effects movies and Non Makeup Effects Movies; we’ve heard tell that some slasher movies are very blue looking; we know that sometimes the killer is hideously deformed and sometimes not! Well, here’s another categorization for you: sometimes the identity of the killer is known from the beginning, and sometimes it’s intended as a mystery!

Whodunit?, as should be pretty evident from the title, is a slasher of the latter sort! Like Madman it's very blue in appearance (it was shot, and also produced, by Thomas Spaulding, whose most famous cinematography credit is the original 1958 The Blob, ha ha!) and features a few gruesome makeup effects! So that’s where it sits in the pantheon; but, since the odds are that you’ve never seen this rather obscure picture, you’re probably more particularly wondering 1) what it’s about, and 2) if it’s any good!

Well, it’s about a group of people gathering on an island somewhere – it reminded me of the island from The Slayer, actually – to shoot some kind of up, up with people sort of a movie, about young people putting on a big show in an uncle’s barn or something! They’re just there to rehearse actually, in preparation for the shoot! Anyway, some mysterious person starts playing the most repetitive, annoying rocknroll song ever on a little cassette player, and then this whoever-it-is kills according to the manner suggested by the lyrics of the song! Boiling, chopping, burning, sawing – all of this mayhem occurs in the dumb song, and that’s what happens to this group of silly people!

There’s a misanthropic musician, a mean, bitter girl on crutches, a fresh-faced debutante, a glasses nerd, a he-man, and many more, including the foolish movie director named Mr. Phlegm! That’s right, I should mention that the movie tries to be a bit of a comedy too, but fails pretty completely at that! There’s a bunch of novelty killing though, which always makes things more interesting than simple pokes with a knife! One fellow gets boiled in a swimming pool! Ha ha, how do you get a whole swimming pool to boil unless there are some kind of supernatural forces at work, like in This House Possessed? An unlucky lady gets a battery acid shower, and there are several pokings, an axing and a chainsawing! I think someone even gets blown up!

Then there’s a lot of running around the deserted structures on the island, and after that a twist ending! It’s not the most unexpected twist in the world, but it’s not bad either! There were long stretches when it seemed like this movie would never end, the script and acting are bad and that terrible song is annoying, but even with all that, it’s not the worst movie in the world! At least it tries, which is more than you can say for some movies of its ilk! I’m going to give it one and a half glasses nerds – the half coming after the unfortunate glasses nerd runs into the business end of an axe, ha ha!

Burl reviews Human Desire! (1954)

2011-11-07T10:19:00.001-06:00

Ha ha, hello there! It’s Burl! Have I ever told you how much I appreciate the films of Fritz Lang? Probably! But have I told you how feverishly I enjoy the microgenre of train movies? I don’t think I have! I’ve always admired the great Runaway Train, and when I saw the fantastic John Frankenheimer movie The Train, I knew I had seen something special! Of course I really like train-set murder mysteries like Murder on the Orient Express or The Lady Vanishes, or even comedies like Silver Streak and The Darjeeling Limited, but I particularly like train movies where there’s tons of insider detail on the mechanics of running trains! The Frankenheimer picture is certainly like that!

And so is Human Desire, which you’ll be pleased to hear is a Fritz Lang train movie! In fact it’s a choo-choo noir, which is a great and natural combo, ha ha! It’s based on Émile Zola’s novel La Bête Humaine, but the story was changed around quite a bit! Instead of a psychotic woman-hating killer of ladies, the main character, played here by Glenn Ford, is now a fairly goody two-shoes Korean War veteran train engineer who becomes a typically noir-ish obsessive man-patsy weakling in the blink of an eye, and then towards the end returns to his earlier persona in another blink! Ha ha, they also remove the train crashes and multiple murders at the end, which is too bad! I’ll have to check out the Jean Renoir version to see if they stay truer to the book!

But this movie has plenty of its own virtues! It’s set mostly in and around the train yards of some unidentified small town, and begins with Glenn Ford returning from war and starting back at his old train engineer job! He stays at his old buddy’s house, where the buddy’s beautiful daughter has a crush on him! But meanwhile, Broderick Crawford, the deputy assistant yard master, has been fired from his job and gets his wife Gloria Grahame to meet with a powerful man of her acquaintance in order to get it back!

But Broderick Crawford (whom of course we know from The Vulture) is insanely jealous, and gets it into his head that his wife has had an affair with this rich man, and so, with her unwilling complicity, he pokes the guy with a knife one night on a train! Glenn Ford happens to be on this train too, smoking, and he pretty quickly falls in love with Gloria Grahame! It’s a little unbelievable how quickly it happens actually – blink and you’ll miss it! I must have blinked, in fact! As their love develops, monster-hubby Broderick becomes a meaner and more pitiful drunk, eventually losing his job once again! Glenn, pixilated by love, plots a murder, but it doesn’t quite go as planned! Of course it all ends on the train, but not in the way that I expected!

Well, as far as Fritz Lang goes, this is no M, that’s for sure! It’s not even a Big Heat, which he made a year earlier and which also starred Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame! As I’ve mentioned, the Ford-Grahame romance is kind of unbelievable, and maybe it’s that Ford just wasn’t able to radiate that cowardly pushover desperation vibe that’s so vital to noir men in this situation! You’d think if Fred MacMurray could do it anyone could, but I guess it’s just not that easy! There’s also a little bit of sloppy mise-en-scene here and there in the movie, which is very unlike our Uncle Fritz!

The main problem I think is that Lang just plain didn’t believe in this picture! He didn’t even like the title, for which I don’t blame him one bit – it should have been called That’s Railroading, which is a great line we hear from a minor character early in the film! Also, there was disagreement between Lang and his producer, Jerry Wald, over just what la bête humaine actually was! Lang thought it referred to the beast inside all humans, whereas Wald though it meant women were the human beasts! And so they try to cram the Gloria Grahame character into the typical scheming femme fatale mould when she’s actually not that at all!

No, her character gets a real raw deal in this picture! She tells a few fibs and attempts a little manipulation, but mostly is on the level and is just trying to get by! She gets stymied by nasty men at every turn and I’m sad to report that it doesn’t end very happily for her! I have to say, I don’t think it was very fair! No, not fair at all! But because I love all the train stuff and because there’s plenty of good acting – Broderick maybe overdoes the drunk act a bit, but he and Ford and especially Gloria Grahame are all very solid – I give Human Desire three deadhead trips back home!

Burl reviews Madman! (1982)

2011-11-06T11:21:00.006-06:00

Hi, it’s Burl with another early-80s slasher movie review for you! I have to tell you, there’s a certain sort of slasher movie I always enjoy, and those are the types with the blue cinematography! That is to say that night isn’t black as it is in so many movies – overly so, more often than not, in the case of slasher movies, where they often seem not to have been able to rent very many lights – but rather a bright, shiny blue! A good example of this is The Prowler; another is Sorority House Massacre, and yet a third is the somewhat rare Whodunit!

But the bluest of them all is Madman, which takes place entirely at night – no, not one second of daytime in this picture! – and gets a lot of mileage out of the almost otherworldly azure cast of the woodsy outdoors which are the domain of its lumbering, deformed antagonist, Madman Marz! It's worth noting too that under blue light, blood - at least fake blood anyway - looks practically black!

I tend to categorize this sort of movie more than they perhaps deserve, you’ll notice, and elsewhere I’ve discoursed on slasher movies with and without Special Makeup Effects (“with” being generally superior of course), but here’s another division for you: movies whose maniacs are deformed and those who are not! Putting aside the slightly nasty suggestion that terrible injury or deformation makes you automatically homicidal, I’ll say that I usually prefer the maniacs to be a little on the grotesque side! Jason, Cropsy and the big guy from The Prey all qualify! And Madman Marz, whose nose has been bitten off, whose face was cleft in twain by an axe and who wasn’t anybody’s dream date to begin with, certainly fits that bill as well!

Madman takes place at a camp for special gifted children, and opens with a very effective campfire spook story telling the tale of Marz, who, legend has it, will return to stalk the woods if his name is spoken above a whisper! One especially special gifted child, Ritchie, takes the dare and shouts insults at Marz from the presumed safety of the campfire! Foolish Ritchie! Soon enough the portly maniac has risen from his farmhouse lair and is preparing to generously dole out the chop!

Meanwhile a strange-looking and not entirely sympathetic counselor named T.P. engages in some hot tub shenanigans with the lady from Dawn of the Dead! But soon people begin to disappear, one by one, as the heavy hand of Marz comes down on them! Ha ha, it gets pretty spooky now and then, as when Ritchie spots Marz staring at them from a perch in the trees! It doesn’t seem likely that such a hefty, overall-clad psychopath could demonstrate such agility, but it’s still a chilling image!

The movie gets pretty bloody too, which is a point in its favor! Ha ha, at one point Marz manages a fancy decapitation simply by jumping on the hood of a truck! He’s also pretty handy with an axe, a rope or just his bare hands! And Marz is one of the more primal maniacs of the genre – he’s so filthy and horrible and murderous that he’s practically a Bigfoot or something! He certainly doesn’t dispense quips with his mayhem – all he does is make sounds like a Wookee making l*ve to an Ewok!

I’ll give this enjoyable but very minor picture two T.P. belt buckles! It has some bad acting and some worse dialogue, but it’s about as basic a summer camp maniac movie as you can get, and that’s some sort of achievement I guess! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Famous T & A! (1982)

2011-11-06T11:16:00.003-06:00

Burl coming at you with a review of one of those clip movies! Ha ha, you probably remember those things – they made quite a few of them back in the 1980s, mostly of horror movies! There was Terror on Tape, Terror in the Aisles, Filmgore, The Best of Sex & Violence and It Came From Hollywood, and probably more! They would usually have host segments featuring people like Donald Pleasance or Nancy Allen or John Candy or Cameron Mitchell or John Carradine or Elvira or Cheech and Chong, and then there would be clips from various movies, sometimes organized into themes or sometimes just random!

Famous T & A, hosted solo by Sybil Danning, has its own general theme, which is the b*obs and b*ms of semi-famous and not-so-famous ladies of the silver screen! Other than that it seems to have been organized much in the manner that Jackson Pollock organized his paint droplets! The whole thing opens with Sybil putting on some sexy golden-tin armor and waving a sword around, and then she intones some crazy, sometimes factually incorrect monologues about the beautiful ladies who have dazzled us with their pulchritude! We then get clips from movies like Tanya’s Island, Slave of the Cannibal God, Sweet Sugar and Truck Stop Women, occasionally broken up by some more sword-waving from Sybil!

A few of the clips come in the form of trailers, particularly for The Single Girls, and for Terminal Island and Sweet Sugar we actually get multiple takes of the same scene, complete with slate! They aren’t blo*pers or anything like that, just different takes of the same shot! Not very enlightening, ha ha!

All in all, it’s kind of a boring cruickshank of a motion picture! The video box implies that we’ll see all sorts of now-famous people in various states of undr*ss, and sure, we do see nak*d ladies, but they somehow manage to drain that experience of any prurient interest whatever! Ha ha, quite a feat! But some of the ladies listed don’t even appear in the movie, I’m pretty sure! And worst of all perhaps is the stuff they make Sybil Danning say! My gosh, it makes the end credits of Howling II seem like a exercise in dignified solemnity by comparison! The poor woman – I hope she was at least well paid!

Because I enjoyed a couple of the trailers – I have a weakness for trash-movie trailers, I have to admit! – and because they run the tail credits over a painted, clenched but*ocks, I award this stultifying bore a single t*t maniac!

Burl reviews Dune! (1984)

2011-11-06T08:42:00.002-06:00

It is by Burl alone I set my review in motion! Ha ha, it's me to review a science-fiction spectacular! I guess Dune didn’t do all that well at the box office when it came out back around Christmas of 1984! Ha ha, it was no Star Wars, that’s for certain! I’m not even sure it was a Flash Gordon or a Last Starfighter! But it was and always shall be a Dune, which is to say among the strangest and most unique science fiction pictures ever made!

Ha ha, it still amazes me that David Lynch was hired to direct this mammoth project, given that he’d only made two feature films before this, and one of them was an impenetrable art movie that took him ten years to complete! But I’m glad he was! Of course, there were other attempts to make Dune before this, most famously the Alejandro Jodorowsky kick at it, which would have been crazy that’s for sure! I think Ridley Scott was going to try as well, which is less exciting; but if it had happened during his Alien / Blade Runner phase and not his Somebody To Watch Over Me period, it might have been something pretty special!

A lot of people mourn the non-existence of these versions, and Dino De Laurentiis was probably among them, ha ha, but I’m pretty happy with this Lynch one! It would have been nice if he’d been allowed to make it as long as he wanted, but it had to be 137 minutes and not a second longer, so they could fit in two shows a night! Too bad, because you can really see the forced compression in the final product!

I don’t know if there’s anyone reading this who doesn’t know the plot, but here it is in even more of a nutshell than Lynch had to put it! It’s the future, and there’s a really valuable spice that everyone wants, more precious than cardamom! You can only get it on planet Dune, and the good Atredies and the nasty Harkonnen families both want to control it! But Paul Atredies is destined to be the king of the universe no matter what the bald witches, Emperor Toulouse-Lautrec or the space slugs say, and the race of leather daddies who live in the desert and their giant pet worms have their own opinions on all these matters; and later it rains!

You can see how it would be hard to fit all that into just over two hours and make all the crazy detours you’d want to make if you were David Lynch! Ha ha, thank goodness for Transcendental Meditation! No, he wasn’t entirely successful, but he made a good fist of it, as they say, and the movie certainly looks fantastic! I love the brassy look it all has, and the supporting cast is almost too excellent, since most of them get pretty short shrift when it comes to screen time! Why hire an Oscar winner like Linda Hunt if you’re just going to have her creep fearfully into a room and then leave again? Well, I’m sure that wasn’t the plan, but that’s how it turned out!

And there’s some good creatures in here, thanks to that old rascal Carlo Rambaldi! The worms are amazing of course, and I always wondered what would happen if, as is suffered by one of the characters, you got eaten by one! And who, I wonder, would win in a fight, a sand worm or The All-Consuming Sarlacc from Return of the Jedi? Meanwhile, the space slugs who control the universe, but are really little more than glorified bus drivers, are particularly gross! But even grosser is the Baron Harkonnen, who I’m not even sure was a Carlo Rambaldi creation or not! Certainly he looks even worse than that famous piece of p*o, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial!

For giving it a darn good try even if it could have been so much better, I award Dune three incredibly bushy eyebrow guys with smeared lipstick! But I do have one question: How did Toto of all rock groups get the job of doing the score, and why didn’t they do any more movie work? Ha ha, they did a pretty good job with this one!

Burl reviews Fatal Games! (1984)

2011-11-02T14:58:00.002-05:00

Well hello! It’s Burl here with, what else, a review for you! Ha ha, I can’t really defend this strange affection I have for early-80s slasher movies, but I’ve got a case of it for true, and it’s not going away! I don’t like them all unreservedly or anything – often they can be boring or just plain dumb! In fact, most of the time they are, but still, I have an appreciation for them that nobody can take away!

Anyway, Fatal Games is one of the more obscure of these pictures, and though the copyright date says 1984, it seems like it was made even earlier! It takes place at some kind of athletics academy where, throughout the first act, a series of characters qualify for “The Nationals,” and happy they are about it too, for The Nationals are just one step removed from a spot on the Olympic team! (Maybe that’s why this was released in 1984, to capitalize on the ’84 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles! Ha ha, very clever! I wonder if it worked!)

At any rate, somebody who is a very good javelin thrower apparently has a grudge against these Nationals qualifiees and begins spearing them and hiding their transfixed corpses in the lockers! These disappearances arouse only the mildest concern among their peers and the school’s four staff members, and in the meantime the gymnastics and copious nud*ty continue! Ha ha, if you ever wanted to see nak*d ladies, this is the movie for you! There’s lots of them in here!

The movie pretty much follows all the slasher film conventions, which is more or less a good thing! I have a little checklist of values for these things though – strictly mental – and one of the items I look for is whether or not there’s any actual gore! I’m not what you’d call a goremonger, but I think it’s part of the contract these pictures make with their audiences: there should be a little bit of the red stuff! And I don’t just mean a few drops of stage blood or a retractable knife, I mean special effects that actually have to be made and applied and filmed with some panache! Halloween, as I mentioned in the review of that excellent picture, doesn’t have any such things, but that’s a very special case! A movie like this one or Final Exam or Sorority House Massacre really skates on thin ice by ignoring that simple obligation!

You can usually tell simply by glancing at the credits and seeing if there was someone in charge of Special Makeup Effects! If not, chances are you’re getting a pretty dry picture, and I guess Fatal Games fits that bill! However, with all that said and my rant at an end, I must say that I truly enjoyed this goofy little number nonetheless! Sure, it would have been nice to have a little variation in the killings, as there are lots of possibilities when it comes to athletic equipment (you can see a picture called Graduation Day for an example of some of them – ha ha, spiked football!), but the general amusing goofiness on display here makes up for it! And the revelation of who is doing all the killing has to be seen to be believed! Though to be sure, it’s not the only time this particular motive has been tried on for size in a movie like this, but it might be the funniest such attempt!

For doggedly hitting almost all the slasher movie marks, for giving us a marvelously terrible theme song (“Take it to the limit and don’t look back now / Take it all the way / No second chance, you’re on your own now / Winning isn’t everything / Winning is the only thing / Ha ha!”) and for providing some pretty excellent javelin murder scenes, even if they are a bit dry (couldn’t one of them have gone through someone’s head or something?), I give Fatal Games one and a half trips to The Nationals!

Burl reviews Bad Meat! (2011)

2011-11-01T14:09:00.004-05:00

Hi, Burl here to review a crazy new horror picture! This one is called Bad Meat, and it was apparently shot in bits and pieces over the last few years, and stitched together much in the manner of your classic Frankenstein Monster! You can really tell that it was a tinkered-with production, but I have a soft spot for those special sorts of movies which, because of whatever problems that happened to have come up, are put together by different groups of people into a unique new movie that no one could have planned or predicted, and to which no particular authorial voice can be ascribed! It’s as though the Fates themselves made the movie, ha ha!

The picture begins with a spooky sequence in a hospital room, where a totally unidentifiable bandaged mummy of a patient tells his or her story of how he or she got that way! It seems there was a terrible discipline camp out in the woods somewhere that was staffed by Naz*s, wrestlers and she-devils, and these meanies terrorized a group of teenagers who had been sent there by their presumably nasty parents!

Well, they’re an unpleasant enough group of councilors, but they get even worse when the cook feeds them some spoiled meat! For whatever reason this turns them into crazed flesheaters who vom*t all over, f*rt a lot and chase the kids hither and yon, hoping to pop them into a stewpot next! Meanwhile the kids, who are an argumentative bunch indeed, have to learn to somehow work together to escape or vanquish the hideous flesheaters!

It all ends rather suddenly in the middle of an attack! I guess we’re to assume the nasty bunch won out in the end, leaving only a single victim alive, but so hideously injured as to be absolutely unidentifiable; and that the final horror we take home with us is the thought of that poor person trying to recuperate, just as all those poor people deformed by chimp attacks have to! At least that’s what I took away from it, and I have to admit it gave me the willies!

This movie’s sure gross! There’s some gory bits of course, but worse still is all the chunder and p*o that splashes around everywhere! Yuck! And the beef stew that causes all the trouble is also very disgusting, and of course so are the characters and situations! You can almost smell the terror! So on that level, which is a pretty base level indeed, the movie succeeds!

Dramatically, perhaps not so much! I guess it never really was finished, but as I said, I don’t really mind that, and am personally pretty fascinated by these pariah dog pictures! The inconclusive ending gives the whole thing a strange avant-garde aura that I suspect is better than what we’d have gotten if the movie had been completed as planned!

Still, I’m not going to give the thing a totally ringing endorsement! It’s for certain very specific tastes only, and you probably know who you are! I’ll just say that this is a bizarre, perverse and ultimately compelling exercise in filmmaking at random! I give it two and a half exploding pillows!

Burl reviews Halloween! (1978)

2011-10-31T21:28:00.007-05:00

Ha ha, it’s Burl here to review a seasonal classic! It’s hard to imagine the landscape of cinema without this movie in it – it’s so basic and primal, it feels like this was the movie that had to be made before any more complex horror pictures could be attempted! Of course that’s not how it works, and glad I am of that, but still and all I do mean that as a complement to this fantastic low-budget horror phenomenon!

I don’t need to tell you the plot, do I? Ha ha, babysitters are stalked by a masked madman! Yes, that’s it! Mr. Michael Myers puts on his unpainted William Shatner mask, gets himself a kitchen knife and starts poking away! He puts a poking on his very own sister in the movie’s opening moments, and you’ve got to feel sorry for her because after all, her boyfriend just gave her the quickest rog*ring known to man, or should I say to woman, ha ha!

I’ll tell you, when it comes to movies like this – and there were an awful lot of them in the years following this one, let me assure you! – I always enjoy the part before the killings, where the characters are just hanging out and doing their thing! And these babysitters are a pretty likeable bunch, real classic 70s gals! It’s great that a couple of obviously popular girls hang out with a donkey girlscout like Jamie Lee Curtis! Ha ha, and John Carpenter sure was lucky to find her too, because who else could have pulled off saying “Well kiddo, I thought you outgrew superstition” to herself! Very few!

I like to think that if I was in high school with Laurie Strode, I would have taken her out on a date, not like that Ben Tramer! He obviously didn’t know a good thing when he saw it, and anyway, didn’t he get totaled in Halloween II? I think he did, ha ha! So I could have been the one if only I’d been there! And another thing, isn’t Annie a peach? She was great, even if she was the kind of girl who would babysit for the sort of people who do their laundry in a shed! And then the way she got stuck in the window was maybe not so believable, but it was pretty cute! She’s such a laid back gal, and she does funny jokes as well, like when she says “I have a place for that,” or, about her cynical cop of a father, “He shouts, too!”

Of course what everyone remembers from the movie is the scenes of Michael attacking Laurie in the house, and those are pretty darn good! I’ve seen this movie so many times I can’t even remember what my reaction was the first time I saw it, but I like to think I was right in there appreciating the suspense! The scenes where Michael’s white mask just melts out of the darkness are creepy no matter how many times you see them, though!

A lot of people give this movie some guff because it’s not very gory! Well, the sequel made up for that a little bit, and anyway, I never missed the gore, not really! Sure it might have been nice, but when you get the great performances, the nice photography and the fine direction, what more do you want, really! Mr. Donald Pleasance, who once essayed the role of Blofeld in You Only Live Twice, was excellent as the grump of a doctor who wanted to keep Michael locked away forever and always!

Anyway, these are a pretty scattershot bunch of observations, because after all everyone else has reviewed this movie too, but it’s always fun to watch and to think about, which I do just about every Halloween! I don’t really mind that it was shot in Los Angeles in the summer instead of Illinois in the fall, because they do get some dried leaves and denuded trees in there, and there’s only occasionally a palm tree or bit of California architecture lurking in the deep background! I award this marvelous horror picture four post-co*tal beers served up by glasses guys in sheets! Ha ha!

Burl reviews The Haunting! (1963)

2011-10-31T21:04:00.000-05:00

Ha ha, hi, it’s Burl here, reviewing another movie for my blog, and whoever reviews here, reviews alone! Ha ha, even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to review! But for now, let’s have a look at the original film version of The Haunting!

Of course it was based on Ms. Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, which is a corker! Naturally it made for a spooky movie, and thank goodness the making of it was taken up by someone with at least a passing acquaintance with the films of Val Lewton, which is to say the director Robert Wise! Of course, Wise had more than a passing acquaintance with Lewton’s works, having directed one and a half of them, but I’d still like to see the film Jacques Tourneur would have made of it! That’s a bit churlish of me to say, since Wise did a fine job, but it’s still fun to speculate!

The Haunting is a classic haunted house movie, perhaps the template for the particular strain of them that I especially love! I really appreciate those movies where an investigative team is assembled which includes a heady admixture of psychics, skeptics and scientists, and where there’s a scene in which everybody sips port in the parlor as they listen to the unsavory history of the house they’re investigating! And after that, it’s on! Boogety-boogety of all sorts is unleashed!

There are other movies in this vein, including The Legend of Hell House and The Evil, and of course a reportedly misbegotten remake of The Haunting which I’ve never seen; but of them all this might be the one to beat! The main character, Eleanor, is perhaps too pathetic by about half, but Julie Harris makes it work! The rest of the acting is strong also! And the design of the house is about as spooky as it gets!

Eleanor becomes convinced that the house wants her to stay, and that she’d be happiest if she did indeed stay, as she has nowhere else in particular to go; and of course a variation on that is exactly what happens in the end! The head scientist and instigator of the whole experiment is played by Richard Johnson, and it’s hard to see what his actual investigative plan was intended to be, besides inviting some particularly sensitive people to the house and seeing what happens! It would be nice to read his post-experiment paper on the subject, ha ha!

I’ve heard the remake is simply dreadful, but I’ll tell you one thing I think might have been improved, and that’s the sound design! It’s purely a technical thing: all the times in the older movie when the unearthly thumping comes up and down the hallway, the characters have to tell us where it’s supposed to be! Aiieee, it’s at the top of the door! Ahhh, land o’ Goshen, it’s on the other side of the hallway! Things like that! Whereas modern cinematic sound mixing techniques would allow us to hear it for ourselves, and let the characters be frightened in a more realistically nonverbal fashion!

Of course I haven’t seen the new one, so I don’t know if they took advantage of that! And even if they did, I’ll bet the old one is still far and away the better version! I give the original Robert Wise production of The Haunting three and a half desperately creepy housekeepers!

Burl reviews Island of Lost Souls! (1932)

2011-10-30T14:19:00.001-05:00

Ha ha, am I not Burl? I am, and I’m here to review the first screen version of H.G. Welles The Island of Dr. Moreau, which was titled Island of Lost Souls for some reason! I’ve seen this one a few times, but it just gets better and better, and just the other day I saw the new DVD version that was recently released, and that was the best of all!

The story is pretty well known, I would think! A castaway ends up on Dr. Moreau’s mysterious South Seas island, where it transpires that he’s been using weird science to transform animals into human simulacra! Some of his beastpeople, like Lota the Panther Woman, are more successful than others, and some of them have Hungarian accents for some reason! Ha ha, that would be the Sayer of the Law, played by Bela Lugosi sporting the greatest beard ever filmed!

Moreau is played by Charles Laughton, who wears the second-greatest whiskers of all time! They’re shaped like an anchor, and perfectly suit Laughton’s great, haughty moon face! The whip-cracking Laughton is simply perfect in his part as the oily and sadistic but undeniably genius sawer of bones! He can be a real hambone, though I really enjoy his performances in that mode; but here, at least until the last few minutes of the picture, he plays everything pretty well down, to great and chilling effect!

Ha ha, they really play up his sadism in this version! The doctor seems not to have even heard of anesthetic, and so his surgeries are conducted without its benefit; but of course it would probably be a lot easier and more pleasant for him if his subjects weren’t squirming around and bellowing in pain! I guess he’s dedicated not just to the speeding-up of the evolutionary process, which is his stated goal as a scientist, but also to the delivery of pain! No wonder he’s nicknamed his operating theatre The House of Pain!

This is a top-notch picture, and I’d put it up there with other creepy pre-Code horror classics like Freaks and The Black Cat, two pictures I’m just wild about! The climax, with the beastpeople on a vengeful rampage, recalls that of Freaks quite a bit, though it lacks that extra frisson you get from watching actual deformed people slithering through the mud with castra*ion knives clutched between their teeth! But it’s safe to say that Moreau comes to an appropriately sticky end!

The movie looks great, the acting is flavorful across the board and the makeup on the animal fellows is absolutely as good as it gets! Why, this is an excellent picture! I give Island of Lost Souls four drunken seacaptains and urge you to see this remarkable and horrific movie!

Burl reviews A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge! (1985)

2011-10-29T14:16:00.001-05:00

Hi, it’s Burl talking to you once again, and happy to be doing it! I’m here to take a look at another installment in a famous horror movie series, which is to say the Freddy Krueger pictures! This is the second of them, and most people you ask will tell you it’s the worst of the bunch!

Well, I’m not sure about that, but it’s probably the weirdest, and that in itself has value! Ha ha, they also say it’s the most hom*sex*al of them all, and I guess that’s probably correct! Some people seem to think this is a bad thing, but I think there are surely enough g*y horror movie lovers out there that it’s only right and proper that this constituency be recognized a little better than they have been! Ha ha, probably all the horror franchises should have at least one overtly qu*er episode just to be fair about things! The Leprechaun one would be a particular gem, I’m sure!

The main character in A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2 is Jesse, who has the double misfortune of having moved into Nancy’s house from the first picture, and having an unsympathetic dad played by the great Clu Gulager! We’re introduced to Jesse in a schoolbus sequence at the beginning of the movie, which we can immediately tell is a nightmare because in his own subconscious mind, Jesse is apparently a cringing geek!

When Jesse wakes up from this dream, and whenever he wakes up from any dream, and just at random moments throughout the movie, he lets out a piercing, girlish scream that seems dubbed in from one of Fay Wray’s more hysterical scenes! It seems that Freddy is trying to possess Jesse into committing his murders for him; left unexplained is why Freddy (who is referred to in this movie simply as Fred) wants to do the murders at all! In the first picture he had some fairly specific revenge in mind; in this one his mayhem is pretty random, despite the movie’s subtitle!

Everything in this movie is just slightly off, which you might think is because the filmmakers were so clever as to give their entire production an unreal, dreamlike atmosphere, but is actually because the script is simply nonsense! Freddy makes a parakeet explode in flames! Why? He attacks a pool party, revealing himself in an apparently corporeal form to dozens of people! How come? He is apparently able to be defeated by the love of a young Meryl Streep lookalike! Qhé?!?!

I also wonder how Robert Downey Jr.’s pal from Weird Science, once again playing a bullying sportsjock, becomes Jesse’s good friend all of a sudden! I guess it’s because they’re both subjected to the homoe*tic attentions of Mr. Kuato, their coach! (And speaking of Mr. Kuato, there’s one shot in this movie where Freddy looks for all the world like that psychic homunculus of sci-fi fame!)

I realize logic is not what you look for in a movie like this, but consistency, along with excitement and scariness, would be nice! But ha ha, we get none of that! However, we do get the aforementioned Meryl Streep lookalike, who was pretty good in her role and reminded me not only of a young Meryl Streep, but of the female lead from The Outing! Ha ha, it would have been nice to get to know both those gals back in the day!

Anyway, some of the weirdness in this picture is enjoyable, like the exploding parakeet and the fact that Clu Gulager thinks it exploded because it was fed cheap birdseed! I give this sophomore stumble in the Freddy Krueger saga one and a half piercing shrieks!

Burl reviews Moontide! (1942)

2011-10-28T12:30:00.001-05:00

Hi, Burl here to do a review of a classic dramamovie which I’d never heard of before watching it! It’s Moontide, and it was Jean Gabin’s first foray into Hollywood after so much success in France! But he left France because of, you know, N*zis, and this was the story that caught his eye!

It was directed by a guy named Archie Mayo, but it turns out that it was supposed to be directed by Fritz Lang, and in fact old Fritz was at the helm for a couple of weeks before deciding that the combined forces of Gabin and Darryl Zanuck, which were arrayed against him, were too much! He folded his jodhpurs, packed away his pince-nez and off he traipsed! Ha ha, if I’d known Lang had even a small part in the making of this picture, I’d have checked it out long ago!

Well, it’s very Lang, I must say, and it also reminds me quite a bit of one of Josef Von Sternberg’s waterfront melodramas, particularly Docks of New York! Ha ha, I really love those pictures, so when I heard that Moontide took place in a seedy Southern California harbor town, I was sold!

Gabin plays Bobo, the violence-prone dockworker who lives the gypsy lifestyle, weighted down only by his sinister connection to the almost-as-hefty Tiny, an annoying hanger-on played by famed character actor Thomas Mitchell! Bobo likes to drink, and he likes to drink a lot, and a particularly heroic night of consumption leads to what I feel safe in calling the finest Surrealist-inspired drunken montage in film history! Ha ha, they got Salvador Dali himself in to design it, and even though his ideas proved either too disturbing or simply unworkable, a lot of the old brushman’s spirit made it into the sequence!

Turns out an old guy got a pretty stiff neck-twist sometime during Bobo’s binge, large swaths of which he can’t remember too clearly! Did Bobo do the murder? With his mangle-strength hands and hair-trigger temper, he’s certainly capable of it! But the question is less than burning for most of the picture, since Bobo gets a job and a home on a bait barge and coincidentally meets up with a hangdog hash-slinger played by Ida Lupino; and all this makes him think maybe it’s time to settle down!

So Bobo and Ida slowly fall in love and make the bait barge a home, and meanwhile gather a group of fellow waterfronters around them, like the guys who own the barge, a sawbones yachtsman, a bartender and a philosophical night watchman played by Claude Raines! But Tiny is always there in the background threatening to cause trouble, and finally, once Bobo and Ida get married, causing quite a little bit of it!

Seedy waterfront movies, motley-family pictures and proto-noirs are all favorite micro-genres of mine, and this movie is all of those things! Naturally, I enjoyed it quite a bit! It’s also one of those movies where the source material has been so obviously watered down for the morals of the day that the bowdlerization is entertaining in itself! Clearly Ida is meant to be an ex-pro*titute, but she gets referred to as a waitress as though “waitress” is simply another word for prost*tute! There’s a fade to black that screams “r*pe!” more disturbingly than an actual depiction of the act might have done! And so on!

I give Moontide three fancy-pants drinks and recommend you give it a shot!

Burl reviews Garden of the Dead! (1972)

2011-10-27T09:13:00.019-05:00

Hi, it’s Burl shambling towards you with his arms outstretched! Ha ha, I’ve often wondered to myself why there weren’t more zombie movies after 1968, when Night of the Living Dead became the most profitable independent picture ever made at that time! You’d think anyone with a camera, a few feet of film and some buddies willing to slap on blue makeup and stumble around in the night would be cranking out some kind of …of the Dead movie! Ha ha, I sure would have been!

Well, not everybody was asleep at the switch! In 1972, a macabre tale of formaldehyde-huffing prisoners who get killed in an escape attempt and then seek revenge as zombies came along, and it was called Garden of the Dead! I guess their garden was the graveyard in which they’d been shallowly buried, or else maybe the title refers to the fact that they carry rakes and hoes with which to commit their mayhem! Anyway, there’s no actual garden, but that’s okay!

The action takes place at a formaldehyde farm staffed by prisoners and run by a fairly mean warden! The guards aren’t that bad though – they allow Johnson, the nice-guy prisoner, to step outside the incredibly flimsy fence to hug his best gal, Mrs. Johnson, who comes to visit him every day but usually has to talk to her beau from thirty feet away! But after the big escape, in which Johnson gets knifed by the way, the warden and the guards ruthlessly hunt the formaldehyde-addicted felons down and blast them into cranberry jelly and drumsticks as they plead for their lives!

Because of all that formaldehyde they’ve huffed I guess, the boys don’t stay down for long! I didn’t know about formaldehyde’s reanimating properties, and you’d think there would be a lot more reports of hoodoo if that were the case, with schoolchildren being chased out of their biology classes by zombie frogs and the like! So the dead prisoners gather up some gardening tools, bellow their war cry “We must destroy the living!” and they’re on their way!

It’s a siege situation for the rest of the picture, with the camp under attack! Warden, guards, the remaining prisoners, anyone is fair game for these old boys! Except for Mrs. Johnson, whom the zombies would like to make their formaldehyde bride! It turns out that the zombies have only two weaknesses: bright light, which reduces them to Play-Doh form, and close-range shotgun blasts! But still, they’re pretty quick with those rakes and pick axes!

You know, this isn’t a very well-liked little movie by most, I'm sad to report! It’s barely an hour long, and there’s not a lot of time spent on character development and stuff like that – most of the screen time is devoted to the shots of the prisoners, pre- and post-mortem, huffing and drinking and wallowing in their beloved formaldehyde! Boy, they must st*nk pretty bad! I didn’t even know that formaldehyde could get you h*gh!

But there are a few effective scenes, and lots of the old-fashioned foggy graveyard stuff that always plays well with a guy like ol’ Burl! I wish they’d put a bit more energy into the siege and tried to bring it up to Night of the Living Dead intensity levels, but no such luck! There’s one pretty neat scene where the survivors are creeping along towards a safe place, trying to stay within the beam of a prison searchlight as the growling zombies reach in from the darkness around them! And the generator keeps failing, ha ha! So this is a minor league Halloween treat, and I’ll give it two blue-skinned mustachioed goofs!

Burl reviews Halloween III: Season of the Witch! (1982)

2011-10-25T00:21:00.003-05:00

Hi, Burl here to review the most loathed of all the Halloween movies, which is to say number three, the one with no Michael Myers! But it’s not loathed by me, and I find it a lot more entertaining than some of the other later entries! For example, there was one involving some sort of reality show that I found nearly unwatchable! Ha ha, I can’t even remember the title of that one!

But Halloween III discombobulated everyone by having nothing to do with Halloweens I and II, and considering that Michael Myers, the masked knife-maniac from the earlier pictures, had been blown to flinders in a hospital conflagration, it seems an understandable move on the part of the filmmakers! They thought it made more sense to brand the title and, in essence, the holiday along with it, at least as it pertained to horror movies; and then the idea would be to make a different Halloween-themed movie every year!

I actually think that’s a pretty good idea, but Joe Moviewatcher evidently did not! I went to see Halloween III when it came out (very excitedly, though I was on the young side for such a film), but I must have been among the few! Anyway, you’d think with the combined star power of Tom Atkins (from The Fog) and Dan O’Herlihy (from Fail-Safe) there’d be an enthusiastic audience for such a photoplay, but it was just not the case! Perhaps when word got around of the incredibly annoying commercial jingle heard repeatedly throughout the film, the constituency that normally would have flocked to it got scared off! Ha ha, ya bunch of w*mps!

The story is simplicity itself! A man comes running down the street holding on to a pumpkin mask, and then later in the hospital a strange businessman pops out the man’s eyes and then pulls his face up! This leads to an investigation on the part of a local doctor's moustache and the dead man’s curly-haired daughter, and together they discover the nefarious toy company, staffed largely by robots as it turns out, which is the headquarters of a warlock named Colonel Cochrane! I don’t know in which army Cochrane achieved the rank of Colonel, but their recruiting standards are very lax!

Anyway, the Colonel has a plan: blast the skulls of America’s children into fishsticks by selling them rubber masks equipped with laser beams, which will be set off Halloween night by some unholy combination of the aforementioned jingle and the rocks of Stonehenge! His witchery, his weird science and his robot army are pitted against Tom Atkins’ moustache, and we all know that in such a contest there can be only one victor!

Ha ha, this movie is the goofiest thing ever, but I feel a great deal of affection for it! I love the grotesque makeup effects, like the lady who gets accidentally blasted in the face! I love that snakes and bugs are somehow generated when the lasers go off! Ha ha, poor Little Buddy! I like Tom Atkins’ heroics! And it’s great that the Colonel’s plan is so odd and insane and pointlessly sadistic and, as far as we can tell from the sudden cut to black at the end, successful!

It could have been a better movie, I’ll grant you that! If John Carpenter had directed it in full Prince of Darkness mode and made it a little more dynamic, suspenseful and scary, we might have a full-on Halloween classic on our hands! Instead we have more of a curio, a thing some will take to their hearts and most will hate or just dismiss, like those hard, sticky orange-wrapped candies that used to fill the bottom of your bag at the end of a long night of trick or treating! Hey, I liked those candies! I give Halloween III two and a half pulled-off bum heads and all the arterial spray that goes with it!

Burl reviews Ring of Terror! (1962)

2011-10-22T18:45:00.004-05:00

Hel-lo, it’s Burl! Let me take you on a stroll down Graveyard Lane! Ha ha, no, I haven’t turned into a horror host; I’m just quoting Reegor, the cadaverous, string-tie-wearing cemetery caretaker we meet in the opening moments of Ring of Terror, as he searched for his housecat Puma! Reegor prowls the tombstones calling for Puma for about the first half of the seventy-two minute picture, or so it seems, anyway! Puma! Puma! Puma? Don’t be afraid, Puma! Come to Reegor! Pu-ma!

Ha ha! Eventually Reegor finds Puma sitting pretty near the grave of Lewis Moffitt! “Ah ha ha!” Reegor says! “I remember him!” And then the screen goes all wavy, and we’re treated to the story of how Lewis Moffitt met his presumably sticky end! It does for all the world seem like the beginning of an anthology picture with a particularly weak wraparound, as though after Lewis Moffitt’s tale, Reegor’s housecat will go missing again and turn up washing himself on the grave of some other poor sucker with a story; and then it would happen once or twice more before some pithy wrap-up from Reegor! But no, Lewis Moffitt is the only guy we’re going to hear about this go round! Maybe they just ran out of money, or maybe this is an omnibus picture after all, but they decided to make it a single-story omnibus! Ha ha, a bungalow picture, we could call it! Or maybe they assumed Reegor would be such a wildly popular character that this would be the start of a series of anecdotal horror pictures in which he is the recurring character! Or maybe the housecat died before they could shoot any more of his segments, who knows!

So what is this amazing Lewis Moffitt story anyway? Well, it’s hard to imagine Reegor going into as much detail about it in his telling as the movie does in its dramatization; but, in short, it seems that Lewis Moffitt is a dedicated medical student whose apparent lack of fear is disturbing and off-putting to everyone from his girlfriend to his fellow freshmen, to the seniors who are planning the big pledge party and its attendant tradition of uproarious prank assignments! Nobody can understand why Lewis Moffitt isn’t afraid of snakes or dead bodies or peer disapproval! And meanwhile, a goofy chubby couple are trotted out at regular intervals to be made fun of through various unimaginative fat jokes: like, for example, wow, do they ever like eating hot dogs!

Eventually, by way of fraternity shenanigans, Lewis Moffitt’s fear-related Achilles heel is discovered! And the experience which the brothers set up for him is so dreadfully scary that it kills him stone dead! Ha ha! We know from the beginning that he dies, so don’t worry, I’m not ruining anything for you!

The story does become much more interesting, I must say, if you imagine Reegor droning on about the specifics of it, telling the hefty-people jokes and the mundane details of dormitory life or Lewis Moffitt’s relationship with his plain-Jane girlfriend and all the other irrelevant things that happen! It's fun to wonder how, for example, he describes the adventures of the glasses nerd who gets dressed up as Cupid but has nothing to do with the main thread of the story? Ha ha, we can’t know for sure, but if we are to believe this is all a story Reegor is telling us, then I guess he must be relating it some way or another!

Anyway, this is a simple story padded out to an unbelievable degree, but it has all sorts of marvelous aspects, such as the energetic depiction of mid-50s campus life! It makes you feel you were in school at that time yourself, hanging out with your best gal at the cafeteria and listening to the groovy tunes of the Campus Cool Cats, the least-engaged party band ever to grace the silver screen!

It’s a drab, cheap little stinker of a movie, but still surprisingly watchable! I believe it was made fun of on the robot show, so some may prefer to check out that version! Here’s an interesting fact about it: the guy who plays Lewis Moffitt, George Mather, was also the cinematographer of Holy Wednesday! Ha ha, how’s that for an odd connection? I give Ring of Terror one and a half elusive bicolor housecats!

Burl reviews Last Rites! (1988)

2011-10-20T10:23:00.004-05:00

Finally it’s Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to review a movie that has a pretty sour reputation, and that’s the thriller picture Last Rites! When I think of this movie, which is never, I think about it as one of those bland big-budget bombs that helped send MGM into a deep pit of debt in the late 80s! Spellbinder is another one of those, and Masquerade, and Taffin and Memories of Me! Not exactly a gallery of winners there, ha ha!

I’ve never been all that interested in priest dramas, I have to confess – I’m not what you’d call a churchgoing fellow, so that might have something to do with it! Or the fact that crises of faith and wrestling with vows of chastity are not things I can connect with directly or in any meaningful way! But no matter – there are plenty of good priest movies! That Alfred Hitchcock one, I Confess, was pretty good, even if it wasn’t one of his very best! And of course there’s The Night of the Iguana, which is sort of a priest movie, even though I used to think it was about a giant iguana!

I guess I’d better get around to reviewing Last Rites! Well, it seems Tom Berenger from Someone To Watch Over Me plays Father Michael, who runs a giant New York church with only the dad from Sixteen Candles to help him! There’s a popgun murder of a guy who’s just been making l*ve, and the murderess turns out to be Father Michael’s sister, and she’s a mob queen, second only in the Family to their father, Don Something-Or-Other! Meanwhile, the lady who was also engaged in the l*vemaking, a Mexican ex*tic dancer, escapes and goes to seek sanctuary with, of all the padres in all the world, Father Michael! What happens then? You guessed it: priestgasm!

This is a fairly slick production, I suppose, directed with TV blandness by a TV director, but at least photographed attractively by David Watkin, the crazy man who shot one of the most audaciously good-looking movies ever made, Catch-22! But the script! My gosh, it’s like it was written on a series of napkins over a long liquid lunch, and then half the napkins were lost on the drunken stumble home! Ha ha, what was the relationship between the cop and the murdered man? Why so many intimations of inc*st between Father Michael and his batty sis? (She, incidentally, is played by the mom from Deadly Friend!) Why does everybody end up in Mexico, and who are some of these random guys who show up every now and again? They can’t all be from Sicily! And what about that crazy arbitrary twist? Up is down, down is up! Ha ha!

Anyway, it’s a bit of a mess, as you can probably tell! The ex*tic Mexican dancer is played by Daphne Zuniga from The Initiation, and she has, as near as I can tell, the worst Spanish accent since Charlton Heston in Touch of Evil, and I don’t think he was even trying to do one in that movie! Also I’m pretty sure the last shot was supposed to give you flashbacks to the last scene in The Godfather, but you probably don’t even have to ask if it succeeds! Ha ha! Altogether this picture is a real daffodil, and I can’t say I recommend it unless you like goofy, slightly seamy big-budget misfires! I award this dreadful movie one half of a perplexing denouement!

Burl reviews Dead Space! (1991)

2011-10-19T23:15:00.006-05:00

Well, you know what – it’s Burl! This time I’m reviewing a movie called Dead Space, which, if you can believe it, is a remake of another movie I’ve already reviewed, Forbidden World, made only nine years previously! I can just hear the question uppermost in your minds: “Ha ha, Burl, how could they possibly improve on Forbidden World?”

Well, turns out they can’t! You probably remember the plot: a space troubleshooter gets a distress call from a distant space lab, and drops in to offer whatever space help he can! It turns out the scientists have created a life form which is intended to cure some kind of space disease, but it pops out of its incubator, kills a crew member and proceeds to stalk the base, getting larger and larger and munching on people whenever it can!

You can see this is just the same plot as Forbidden World, and of course as Alien too, but that’s beside the point when we’re talking Roger Corman pictures, which we certainly are! What made Forbidden World so memorable was that it very energetically brought what we in the movie appreciation business call The Goods! The goods for a movie like this are approximately as follows: great monsters, plenty of blood and gore, lots of nak*d ladies, a few witty lines and some exciting action! Good old FW has most of these ingredients, while Dead Space has practically none!

Sure, it has a monster, which starts out looking like a little sponge and ends up like something you might see hanging off the wall in a two-bit carnival funhouse! It’s pretty inert throughout, and lacks even the minimal personality found in the earlier Corman monsters, such as the randy maggot from Galaxy of Terror! This monster just seems kind of sad, even though he was made by Gabe Bartalos, famous for creating the dancing leprechaun in those Leprechaun movies, and everyone loves that guy! Also, I did like it when the monster busted in through walls like the Kool-Ade Man! And there’s a na*ed lady in this picture too, but it’s a dream sequence where the space troubleshooter, played by the Beastmaster himself, has a dream about making l*ve! And then there’s one pretty good scene near the end where a fellow’s head is pulled right off!

I do have to mention the Beastmaster’s robot companion, Tinpan, who has a hydraulic chin! Tinpan manages to have a bit of a C3-PO-ish prickliness about him, and he’s got that great chin, but below the neck he just looks like a guy in regular human clothes – not the most convincing droid I’ve ever seen! But he's good compared to most of the rest of the cast, with an exception being Bryan Cranston, who plays the head of the lab! No, I don't think it's a m*th lab, but you know, now I'm not quite so sure! Ha ha, maybe it was! Anyway, he's okay in the movie! I kind of preferred his correlative in Forbidden World, who was played by the mad scientist from Repo Man! Ha ha, that's the guy who should have his own TV program about mind drugs!

But mostly it’s a dull and boring cruickshank of a motion picture about people wandering up and down space hallways, occasionally shooting their guns at a rubber crab! I have to say that the title is well earned! Tinpan’s okay, but I in the end I give this rather misbegotten picture one single blue Spandex workout suit!

Burl reviews The Amazing Mr. X! (1948)

2011-10-18T12:05:00.005-05:00

Hi, Burl talking at you! Ha ha, it’s time to review a marvelous discovery, the 1948 fake mystic picture The Amazing Mr. X! It’s part of a long line of phony spiritualist pictures, which is a particularly touching subgenre as they tend to be very popular during and for a few years after a major world war! This is because there are at such times an awful lot of bereaved people desperate to contact loved ones who have died far away, and no shortage of charlatans willing to take advantage of their pain!

Christine, the protagonist of this picture – well, sort of – isn’t a war widow, but as the story opens her husband has been dead two years, ever since he drove his car off a cliff! Christine is a very rich lady, and she has a younger sister and a foursquare suitor who’s just popped the question! However, this is when she starts hearing mysterious voices on the beach, and runs into local medium and all-around mystic Alexis, played by that dashing foreigner Turhan Bey! After that, with the help of Turhan, her life tumbles into confusion as she falls into a web of fake spiritualism and, later, a twist that’s shocking even to the suave séancer! Ha ha, I won’t reveal the twist here, but it’s a good one!

This has just got to be Turhan Bey’s finest hour! He’s so smooth in this picture you could spread him on toast, and even when he does a little thing like take a cigarette from a case, he does it with such panache that you wonder why he didn’t achieve Valentino-like heights of romantic superstardom! Well, it could still happen – Turhan still walks among us, and there may well be some enterprising director out there with a great role for this underappreciated thespian!

This is a pretty enjoyable movie, just dripping with the greatest post-war SoCal atmosphere you ever saw! It’s got a bit of a noir feel – after all, it was photographed by the great John Alton, ha ha! – and in many instances, such as the terrifying sequence when Christine’s wedding dress comes to life and chases her around the room, it’s a full-on horror picture! The greatest of all though is getting a look into the crazy tricks employed by the phony medium, whose house is rigged for all sorts of ghostly surprises!

Just as Phantom of the Rue Morgue featured a zoologist-psychologist, so this movie gives us a great professional mash-up: the magician-detective, played in this case by a real magician, the Ricky Jay of his time I guess, who performs some very impressive sleight-of-hand in his pursuit of the fake fakir! And the guy who plays – well, I’d better not reveal who he plays, but it’s a character who shows up about two-thirds of the way through the movie – but that guy is just about the best bad-guy actor I’ve ever seen! It sure raises some questions about the judgment of our main character though; but then again so does almost everything else in the movie, mainly how quickly and completely she falls for the spiritualist’s bafflegab!

That would probably be my main criticism, along with the number of loose threads left at the very sudden end of the movie! But that’s a very minor complaint, dwarfed by the titanic virtues offered by this electrifying motion picture experience!

Ha ha, I know I’m all over the place with this movie review (and I haven’t even mentioned the amazing trained crow or the incredible tumbling-down-the-cliff scene!), but the upshot is that you should track it down and check it out if you can! Ha ha, congrats to Bernard Vorhaus, the director, with whom I was previously unfamiliar but whose other movies I will now be looking avidly for you can bet! You’ll really enjoy The Amazing Mr. X, I predict, and for every person who follows my advice to watch it, a new Turhan Bey fan will surely be born! I give this moody and marvelous picture three and a half futuristic security cameras that turn into paintings with the mere swipe of a finger!

Burl reviews This House Possessed! (1981)

2011-10-17T22:39:00.005-05:00

Hi, Burl here! I don’t know what it is about made-for-TV horror movies, but they sure are weird sometimes! The Horror at 37,000 Feet was strange enough, but get a load of This House Possessed! Ha ha, I saw this one when I was a wee sprout, and I remember being very impressed by it to be sure, but boy is it an odd one!

Parker Stevenson stars as a feather-haired softrocker who collapses in the middle of one of his most popular and st*ol softening numbers! Why does he collapse? Well, somehow a haunted house miles away has contrived a plan to reunite itself with its beloved little-girl mistress from years ago; and somehow the house has decided that the now-grown girl will fall in love with Parker Stevenson if given a chance; and somehow it has caused Parker Stevenson to pitch his fainting fit by remote control; and somehow it ensures that Parker Stevenson recuperates in the very hospital, on the very ward, where the now-grown girl works as a nurse! Phew, ha ha!

If you can swallow that series of horse pills, here’s another whopper for you! It seems the evil abode can watch anyone it wants on television at any time no matter where they are! Ha ha, for all you know that house might be watching you on TV the next time you’re on the to*let! Think about that one for a moment!

Well, the house’s plan works perfectly, and the next thing you know Parker Stevenson has hired the nurse as his private caregiver and they’ve moved into the ultra-modern haunted house! It has an extensive security camera system, which seems quite redundant in light of the special TV powers already mentioned, and it also has a high security fence and shatterproof windows! Ha ha, I wonder if all that will cause trouble for our softrocker later on!

Eventually the house starts acting up! Whenever someone gets close to its secrets, such as a nosy librarian or Parker’s manager, Slim Pickens, the demonic dwelling simply engineers a gruesome demise! Ha ha, things get pretty bloody for TV, I can tell you! Slim Pickens, who I could barely believe was in this movie at all, let along playing the cowboy-hatted manager of a limpsy-stricken softrocker, gets impaled by flying glass! The librarian is crushed and burned by the front gates! A goggle-eyed bag lady is parboiled in the swimming pool! Yikes, that’s got to smart!

Even if you just annoy the house slightly, you’re in for an unpleasant surprise! A teenage couple attempt to make l*ve on the grounds, and are chased away by a spraying garden hose! A nasty lady tries to steal Parker away and gets a shower full of blood for her trouble! (I’d have thought the house would want to encourage this relationship so that it could have the nurse all to itself, but what do I know about the motivations of a house?) And a police officer investigating the mystery is himself annoyed when he tries to pin down the genre of music Parker Stevenson trades in! “Ha ha, not exactly rock,” Parker says, and I’m inclined to agree with him!

I do have to admit that the movie was not quite the masterpiece of terror and bizarre shock that I remembered from my youth! And boy oh boy, are those soft rock songs horrible! Ha ha, “Sensitive Burl's Not!” I guess! Nevertheless, it’s a weird and eventful enough motion picture that I enjoyed it thoroughly! I also thought Lisa Eilbacher, in the role of the nurse, did a pretty good job! I give it two pulsating fireplaces!

Also: you can read more about this curious motion picture here!