Burl reviews Jaws: The Revenge! (1987)

Ha ha, Burl here again! Ooh, something smells fishy! Can you imagine an even worse Jaws picture than Jaws 3-D? Well you don’t have to, because here it is: Jaws: The Revenge! Again I have to mention the absolutely precipitous downfall the series took in only four pictures! I remember going to see this one at the Park Theater as a teen (the same place I saw the original picture, ha ha!), and at the end I came reeling out, my brain snapping with skunkfire, hardly able to believe how bad the movie I’d seen really was!

I recall that it was a summer release, but it’s a Christmas picture when you get down to it! The movie opens in Amity, the scene of the first two shark adventures, to the sound of carolers, with the wife and son of the sadly deceased Chief Brody doing the best that they can on the island! They seem pretty jolly, what with the holidays coming up and all, but it seems that young Sean Brody, who was a cowboy afeard of water in Jaws 3-D, is now a deputy on the Amity PD, and it falls to him to move a harbor log out of the way!

Well, that’s him munched! The action then moves to the Bahamas, where the older son, Mike Brody, works with Mario Van Peebles counting conchs! Mike is played by Lance Guest from Halloween II, and though he’s got a beard and seems to be living the life of Riley in the islands with his wife and daughter, he’s perpetually morose and grumpy, except in those moments when his wife (Karen Young from Heat) is snapping her panties at him! Ha ha!

Old Ma Brody, still played by Lorraine Gary as she has been since the original Jaws, arrives in the Bahamas, and brings the party down still further with her insane conviction that Jaws himself has a grudge against her family and has purposely been eating (or, in Roy Scheider’s case, giving heart attacks to) as many Brodys as possible! Pretty soon though, she’s dancing with Michael Caine, who has swum these waters before, in The Island, and who here plays a loveable pilot rogue named Hoagie! Ha ha, being named after a tasty sandwich would place Hoagie high on Jaws’s menu, one might think, but like so many of the characters, Hoagie escapes without a scratch! He doesn’t even seem to get very wet after crashing his plane in the ocean to rescue crazy Ma Brody, and at any rate he comes out of it in better shape than Michael Caine!

The shark attacks a few people and yanks a luckless lady off the back of a banana ride, and all that sounds much better than it plays! Then comes the climax, with the shark’s heartbeat thumping away thanks to a device created by Van Peebles, and he keeps poking his body fully halfway out of the water and roaring like a dinosaur! The real head-scratcher is the end, when Ma Brody aims her spar right at the shark and he explodes like the Pinto in Top Secret! Ha ha! It’s the goofiest thing you ever saw!

They say this movie was put together on a remarkably tight schedule for a Major Motion Picture - soup to nuts in five months or something like that! Well, it looks it! At least we get a reasonably cinematic look to the thing, with decent widescreen photography and one or two nice underwater shots! Joseph Sargent, the director, has done some good work (The Taking of Pelham I,2,3, ha ha!), but this isn’t among it! No, this picture simply lies there like a dead crappie on the sand! I give Jaws: The Revenge one half of an enormous rainbow lolly!

Burl reviews The Island! (1980)

Hi friends! Yes, it’s Burl again! Ha ha, I have had occasion already to review a movie adaptation of one of Peter Benchley’s literary efforts – Jaws in that case, as you may recall – and now here I am, barely a month later, trying the same trick again! This time the movie in question is The Island, which, after Jaws and The Deep, represented Benchley’s first tentative steps out of the ocean and onto dry land, like one of our Galapagosian antecedents of millennia gone by! But he takes care to keep the comforts of saltwater within easy reach!

The movie is less looney-tunes than the book, but not by much! It seems that Michael Caine, the Billion Dollar Brain, playing the sort of adventuresome magazine writer encountered only in the pulpiest fiction, has decided to investigate the Bermuda Triangle, a very late-70s thing to do, and because he has to, is taking his twelve year-old son along for the adventure! Ha ha, and an adventure it soon proves to be, as, after a quick stop at a gun shop operated by Don Calfa or someone a lot like Don Calfa, the pair are involved in a plane crash, an interrogation by Zakes Mokae (whom we remember from The Serpent and the Rainbow), a successful barracuda fishing trip and, finally, assault and kidnapping by pirates!

Yes, it’s pirates at the bottom of everything! There are some scenes sprinkled throughout of the pirates doing their thing on hapless boating parties, and they chop heads and cut throats with Voorhees-like abandon! This may have seemed crazily anachronistic back in 1980, but today of course we know there are many pirates out there who strike at yachts whenever they get a chance! Anyway, pirate leader David Warner takes a filial liking to Caine’s son and decides to induct him as an heir to the pirate throne; in the meantime Caine is given over for stud duty to a comely she-buccaneer! His first escape attempt is foiled by jellyfish, but eventually, after the pirates have taken over a Coast Guard ship, he manages to catch them unawares and machine gun the lot of them! Almost all of them anyway – it takes a flare gun to get rid of David Warner!

This is certainly a cracked concoction, and despite its provenance and arresting poster imagery, it flopped miserably when it was released to an unsuspecting public on June 13, 1980! Ha ha, they all went to see the slightly less gory Friday the 13^th instead, I guess! One of the oddest things about this movie is the director: it’s Michael Ritchie, known to us for his comedy work in pictures like The Bad News Bears and Fletch! The movie was shot by the great Henri Decaë, but it shows little of the artistry he displayed in his many French New Wave efforts! But there is a nice score from Ennio Morricone, who, just as he’d done with Orca and other such movies, proves that he’s perfectly happy contributing good work to a goofy project!

But it’s got a pretty good cast – I always like Michael Caine, ha ha! – and some nice tropical locations, and the scenes of pirate attack do generate a healthy frisson! Ha ha, I liked when they attacked the schooner full of cocaine-smuggling hippies! The movie gets worse rather than better when Caine and his son get to the pirate island though, which demonstrates a pretty fundamental failing somewhere along the way! I’m going to give this goofnugget one and a half tight-shorted karate guys!

Burl reviews Harry Brown! (2009)

Hi, Burl here to review not a person, but a movie named after a person! That person is Harry Brown, an old ex-marine played by Michael Caine! He lives in, apparently, the worst place in the world, or at least that’s how the filmmakers present it! It’s a council estate in London, dominated by a group of the most unsavory young people since… oh, I don’t know, since the I Know What You Did Last Summer movies!

Ha ha, what happens is that Harry’s good friend is stabbed and mutilated by these ruffians, and so with out so much as a by-your-leave, Harry takes up weapons and starts to slay the miscreants! I thought for a while it was going to be an indictment of Britain’s gun control laws or something like that, but it was very easy for Harry to get all the guns he wanted! So maybe it was more of an indictment of lax enforcement of gun control laws? I’m not sure! Ha ha, this is a pretty confused movie in many ways!

It’s a real downer too! It has very little to offer aside from a good Caine performance and the possibility of satisfied bloodlust when the young nogoodniks are massacred! But it’s curiously unsatisfying even on that simple point! I mean, that should be the easiest thing in the world for a revenge picture to pull off, and certainly it manages to create a few hateful bad guys! But it’s as though the movie wants to give a little bit of lip service to the possibility that there are societal roots to the nasty behavior of the hoodlums, but then wants you to forget it even brought it up when Harry starts a-blasting!

It’s the kind of movie where they mistake long, nicely lit still shots for actual gravity and substance! Sure, Harry is newly a widower as the movie opens, and of course you feel empathy for him! And then again when his friend – his only friend, mind you – is killed! But he becomes a merciless killer so quickly, and with so little regard for actual guilt versus associative guilt, that he becomes a cartoon! Even Death Wish had more nuance to it!

Also: CGI blood! My gosh, how cheap can you get? I can understand it in a low-budget zombie movie where every second shot has a fountain of the red stuff, but in a medium-sized movie like this, which climaxes with a riot, features a big-name actor and has maybe a total of six bloody deaths, they should be able to afford a few squibs and some fake blood! My gosh, how many gushers were there in Dawn of the Dead, a two-million dollar movie? Lots! This movie, which cost nearly $8M, might have tried a little harder in the grue department, particularly because that’s what it appears to consider the important part, rather than, oh, say, well-rounded characters or a consistent philosophy!

Anyway, because I like Michael Caine, even in Jaws the Revenge, as well as a couple of the other performances, I give this movie one and a half pistol-pipes! What’s a pistol-pipe? You’ll have to watch the movie to find out, but the scene is almost worth it! Ha ha, enjoy!