Burl reviews Thunderbolt and Lightfoot! (1974)

 

Wacka-doo, snakecharmers, it’s Burl, here to review a picture I’ve long wanted to see but somehow never got around to until now! It’s a Malpaso picture from the 1970s, and you know what that means: Clint! And most of those movies, whether Eastwood directed them or not, have that Malpaso feeling: you watch them and just know that each take is the first or at most the second, and that whether it was directed by Don Siegel, who was Clint’s directing mentor, or James Fargo, whom Clint mentored in turn, or by Clint himself, in each case the same philosophies and work methods were employed! So there’s a sameness to these films, which isn’t unwelcome – in fact it’s comforting! Nevertheless, when you see one that’s clearly operating on its own principals, it’s pretty refreshing, and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is just such a film!

Of course we know Eastwood from such pictures as Blood Work and Tarantula, and here he plays a laconic vault cracker-turned-fake-priest known as Thunderbolt, and we meet him at the pulpit just as an angry George Kennedy from Creepshow 2 and Earthquake arrives at the church and tries to shoot him dead! In his frantic escape he hooks up with a young Jeff Bridges, not yet of Starman and King Kong fame, who has just stolen a roadster from a used-car salesman played by none other than Gregory Walcott from Plan 9 from Outer Space! Bridges, of course, is Lightfoot, and soon this pair of sillynames are bombing around picturesque Montana, being buddies and, in their masculine, mid-70s manner, falling in love!

Their first adventure together involves catching a ride from a completely insane driver played by Bill McKinney from Cannonball! Ha ha, this demento keeps a caged badger in the front seat and tears it up on and off the road, and after he’s barrel-rolled the auto it turns out he’s got a trunk full of live bunny rabbits, which he starts blasting at with a shotgun! Soon we get a taste of George Kennedy again, and it turns out that Kennedy is playing Red, an old partner of Thunderbolt’s who believes the craggy longuebönes to have stolen some ill-gotten loot! Red and his confrere Goody, played by Eastwood buddy Geoffrey Lewis, whom we’ll recall from Smile and ‘Salem’s Lot, first do some fisticuffs with and then enter into a foursquare partnership with Thunderbolt and Lightfoot in order to once again take out the vault Thunderbolt et al. had robbed the previous time!

So the gang is assembled and the plan is made, but first they all have to get jobs to buy the equipment they need to do the heist! Ha ha, we get all sorts of amusing vignettes featuring famous faces like Gary Busey from Silver Bullet, looking young and handsome; Burton Gilliam from Fletch, playing the sort of grinning good old boy he made his stock-in-trade; Dub Taylor from Creature from Black Lake just being Dub; and Luanne Roberts from Simon, King of the Witches as a stark naked housewife! Lightfoot has an encounter with a motorcycle rider who’s handy with a hammer, played by Karen Lamm from Ants!; and before the heist can be pulled off, the fellow monitoring the security alarms must be taken care of by a drag Lightfoot, and the security fellow turns out to be a chubby, girlie magazine-reading individual played by Cliff Emmich, who played another chubby security officer who gets hit on the head later on in Halloween II!

The picture dwells less on the robbery details than most heist pictures do – perhaps because it’s not centrally a heist story but is organized more around buddy themes! Still, there is the unique aspect that the vault is broken into by means of a 20mm cannon, ha ha, and the use of this tool is what earned Thunderbolt his name! And then of course after the heist it all goes pear-shaped, and the tensions within the group are expressed physically (and boy-arr-dee, how great an actor is George Kennedy!), and we come to realize that a line delivered earlier in the picture (“Ate ‘im?”) was a case of Dramatic Foreshadowing!

Now, this is the first picture from Mr. Michael Cimino, who vaulted into the prestige picture business with his follow-up, The Deer Hunter! This one isn’t a prestige picture though – it’s a genre film with a higher-toned style and an almost defiant insistence on theme and subtext! The idea of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot as unconsummated lovers is not very subtle (although I’m not sure Clint was cognizant of it, Bridges was, definitely), and what it really is, once you factor in the other couple, Red and Goody, is a study in how well an all-male machine, each component having a few teeth missing from their gears, can operate; and the answer is, ha ha, not very well! I found the movie a splendid entertainment, wonderfully photographed and impeccably cast: an unsung gem of the 70s! I give Thunderbolt and Lightfoot three broken cigars!

Burl reviews Any Which Way You Can! (1980)

 

Ha ha, right turn Clyde, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m here to review one of the good ol’ boy apestravaganzas Clint Eastwood appeared in back in the late 1970s! In fact, the one I’m reviewing for you is not the epic that kicked it all off, Every Which Way But Loose: nope, although I did watch that one a while back (but didn’t review it for some reason), I’m skipping right to the second and final entry in this abbreviated series, Any Which Way You Can!

You might ask “Ha ha, but Burl, aren’t these movies terrible, and why are you wasting precious, precious minutes of life, which is so dear, to watch them?” Your inquiry has merit, and I’ve asked the same questions myself! But while the movies are indeed fairly terrible, they have a hominess to them, along with a little bit of nostalgia, that afford them a certain edge! They have other values as well, which I’ll get to presently!

But first: the plot! No, ha ha, there’s no plot, so I’ll give you the setup and the situation instead! It seems there’s a beer-drinkin’, engine-block haulin’ bare-knuckle fighter, lean mean and taci-tureen, who goes by the name of Philo Beddoe! He has a best pal, Orville (or is Orville his brother?), but an even better pal in his orang-utan roommate Clyde, an inveterate cop-car shitter! A hapless gang of Nazi idiot bikers are constantly after Philo, and are always outwitted by him, which, ha ha, isn’t all that impressive really, since they're dopes! He has an irascible old Ma, and in the first movie he fell for a lady singer named Lynne Halsey-Taylor, who dumped him at the end of it!

In this one, Philo decides to quit bare-knuckle brawling just as some gambler gangsters organize a big-money brawl! They want to pit Philo against their east coast monster Mr. Jack Wilson, played by Big Bill Smith from Fast Company and The Mean Season; but in the meanwhile Philo and Lynne Halsey-Taylor (played again by Sondra Locke from The Shadow of Chikara) have rekindled their romance by playing bohankie in the filthy barn where Clyde dwells, as the fascinated and horny ape watches! Ha ha, yikes! So under the influence of his family and friends, Clint decides to pull out of the fight; the mobsters kidnap Lynne Halsey-Taylor in an attempt to force the issue; Mr. Jack Wilson and Clint become friends while jogging and work together to save Lynne Halsey-Taylor; and then they have a big fight anyway! And, in an ending I did not expect, the Nazi bikers become millionaires!

See, here’s where we come to one of the virtues of this picture, to which I alluded before: the cast! Of course Clint, whom we know so well from Tightrope and Tarantula, is Philo, who is a pretty dopey guy really, and from his facial expressions frequently seems overwhelmed by a mystifying modern world that baffles him at every turn! But he’s a generally amiable dimwit, and he’s backed up by Geoffrey Lewis, familiar from Smile and ‘Salem’s Lot, in the role of Orville, the unscrupulous tow-truck driver who also lives in the compound; and Ruth Gordon from Rosemary’s Baby and The Big Bus is Ma, crotchety old Ma, ha ha!

Familiar faces abound! There’s Bill McKinney from Cannonball, Barry Corbin from My Science Project, Al Ruscio from The Naked Flame and Michael Cavanaugh from Collateral Damage! Plus the cast is filled with stuntmen of course, because the movie was directed by a stuntman, Buddy Van Horn, and so there are plenty of casual stunts to go along with the more obvious and heavily planned stunt gags! And then there are the Quinces, a Midwestern couple recently arrived in California and played by real-life spouses Logan Ramsey from The Beast Within and Anne Ramsey from Deadly Friend! They serve as completely marginal story elements, like living Sergio Aragones drawings, whose coincidental proximity to the ape-fuelled antics at first provides only alarm, but eventually reinvigorates their moribund sex life!

Digressions like this are one reason the picture runs an unconscionable 114 minutes, and musical interludes are another! In addition to the songs sung by Lynne Halsey-Taylor, we get material from both Glen Campbell and, amazingly, Fats Domino, sporting a cowboy hat and singing a country song in a shitkicker bar! And weirdest of all is the opening theme song, a duet by Eastwood and Ray Charles called “Beers to You!”

So there are items of interest salted throughout the picture, but ultimately it’s a pretty dumb good-old-boy comedy: the kind of picture that wildly over-commits to the running gag of an orang-utan befouling police vehicles! As a director, Buddy Van Horn makes an excellent stunt coordinator, and there’s a loose and ramshackle vibe to the whole thing that’s appealing if you’re in the right mood, irritating if you’re not, and in any event loses all value no matter what mood you’re in once the picture is over and you’re trying to remember it later! Ha ha, I give Any Which Way You Can one and a half flying car hoods!

Burl reviews Sully! (2016)

 

Heading for runway two-niner, it’s Burl, reporting birdstrike from the sky! Ha ha, it’s a real-life disaster movie – or is it? Those of us who remember watching the news in early 2009 remember that it wasn’t a disaster at all, but a heartening story of competence! Yes, it’s a picture from the man who reinvented himself as a chronicler of ripped-from-recent-headline stories, and this, as far as I can tell, is the best-regarded of them: by garr, it’s the fabulous story of Sully!

Yes, it’s Sully Sullenberger, Airport Pilot, and who better to essay him than Tom Hanks, the fellow we recall from Dragnet and Big and pictures like that! Why, Hanks already had the real-life-pilot-wrings-triumph-from-disaster angle covered in his portrayal of Jim Lovell of Apollo 13! Like Lovell, Sully keeps a calm head and is helped by his even-keeled co-workers, and from the oncoming rush of too-certain tragedy comes the joy of unexpected survival – a water landing from which the aviatrons emerge smiling!

You recall the story: in January of 2009, a flight takes off from La Guardia airport in New York, and instead of its intended destination, Charlotte, a capitol of one of the Carolinas I believe, the airplane is struck by passing birds and, bereft of thrust, is forced into the icy waters of the Hudson River! Injuries are minor and fatalities nil, and pilot Sully Sullenberger is hailed as a hero! But wait – the Red Cross blankets draped across the shoulders of the survivors are not the only wet ones in this story, because various authorities, especially those concerned about insurance costs and so forth with regards to the plane, ask whether Sully and his co-pilot could not have returned to the aerodrome even in their bird-crippled state! By the end of the picture it is revealed that the pilots did all the right things, and their reputations and hero status remain intact!

Aaron Eckhart from Olympus Has Fallen is the co-pilot of Mustache Air flight 1549, and he provides a stolid backup to Sully, a faithful wingman, someone for him to talk to! Laura Linney from Congo is the worried Mrs. Sully, whose scenes are all on the telephone and who doesn’t get to do anything but fret from a distance! Ha ha, it’s a bit of a nothing part, but Linney is a good actor and does what she can! And of course the picture is directed by Clint himself, who as a filmmaker has brought us many pictures: some of them very good, others more like Blood Work! And yes, as mentioned above, of his ripped-from-the-headlines pictures, which include one about the terrorists on the train to Paris and another about the security guard who was thought to have planted a bomb, Sully is the one people thought was pretty good!

Maybe that’s because Sully himself was such a readymade white middle-aged man hero, and therefore perfect to be played by Hanks! Hanks is good in the role, but there’s not all that much to the man aside from being a good and dedicated pilot who’s certain of the rightness of his actions aside from one or two moments of doubt! The picture is assembled in such a way as to break the actual crash and rescue into sections, one of them from the perspective of the La Guardia tower; and occasionally we are privy to the explosive visions with which Sully is occasionally assailed – snapshots of how the disaster might have unfolded if everything hadn’t gone exactly right in the aftermath of the birdstrike!

Like most Eastwood pictures, it’s a competent but unspectacular work! It certainly doesn’t wear out its welcome – at 93 minutes, including credits and explanatory titles, it qualifies as a miniature in the Eastwood oeuvre! It’s a fine piece of reportage, very basic in its themes and emotions, and carries nearly to a fault an abhorrence of nuance or complication! It’s no Unforgiven, ha ha, and it's no Sully Sullenberger: Airport Pilot either, but then what is! Still, I’m going to give Sully two and a half cries of “Heads down, stay down, brace, brace, brace!”

Burl reviews Blood Work! (2002)

 

You have the right to remain reading! Ha ha, it’s Burl here, ready and willing to review another movie for you! It’s Clint Eastwood doing a cop thriller again, one very much in the vein of Tightrope and other one-offs (The Gauntlet, The Rookie, In the Line of Fire) where he plays an iron-nosed cop not named Harold! In this one he’s an “FBI profiler,” but he acts just like any other cop, though his iron-nosedness, or at least his ability to act on it, is compromised by a serious heart condition! Ha ha, the movie is called Blood Work!

Eastwood, who of course is well known from Tarantula and many other fine films, as well as from bad films like City Heat, plays Terry McCaleb, who in the opening scene is investigating a mystery murderer who not only likes to kill, but, in the traditional late-90s/early-oughts style, is fixated personally on McCaleb in that taunting, teasing way such serial maniacs have! McCaleb spots a suspect, gives chase, and the next thing you know is collapsing of a massive heart attack!

Two years later McCaleb has a new heart, is retired, and is rusticating on his cabin cruiser docked at the marina in Long Beach! This Quincy-esque lifestyle is interrupted by the reemergence of the killer, who still carries a McCaleb fixation, and by the appearance of a woman called Graciella, played by Wanda De Jesus from Robocop 2 and Ghosts of Mars, who reveals that McCaleb’s new heart came from her sister - who was one of the killer’s most recent victims! This is a pretty good hook, and the movie settles into a laid-back investigative groove, with McCaleb enlisting his slacker boat-neighbour Buddy, played by Jeff Daniels from Speed and Arachnophobia in full Jimmy Buffet mode, to be his driver!

Meanwhile McCabe’s heart transplant doctor, played with plenty of finger-wagging by Anjelica Huston from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, admonishes him not to do any investigations lest his new ticker explode; and he also gets static from the cops on the case, played by comedian Paul Rodriguez and Dylan Walsh, the blando from Congo! But he has a cop ally too, played by Tina Lifford, and we get hints that they were once something more! Ha ha! As all this is going on, McCabe clutches his chest a lot and falls for Graciella, and the twist ending becomes as obvious as a panda in a swimming pool!

The movie takes a tone and a pace that matches up with the yachtsman’s lifestyle enjoyed by its leads, and while this is perhaps not the optimum approach for a putative thriller, it’s just that old leatherbag’s way! He makes his movies in that same relaxed manner, so they say - practically keeps bankers’ hours! Ha ha, never let it be said that Clint Eastwood ever kept a grip from having his dinner at home!

In any case, while Clint has made some memorable movies, this is not one of them! It’s a fairly stolid piece, competent but never exciting, perfectly watchable but as ephemeral as an episode of TV! I saw it at the dollar theatre with my friend Pellonpaa, and at the end of it we both agreed we’d seen a movie! Ha ha, and when I watched it again recently, my takeaway as the credits rolled was about the same! I give Blood Work one and a half notes written on the wall in, you guessed it, blood!

Burl reviews City Heat! (1984)

 

With a bathtub gin in hand, it’s Burl, reviewing an 80s action-comedy nobody thinks too much of! I recently read an interview with the director, Richard Benjamin (who brought us The Money Pit, and also acted in pictures like The Last Married Couple in America), and he likes it; but he might be the only one! Well, to tell you the truth, he said he was proud of it because it was the only collaboration between Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds, and that’s not the same as liking it, is it! Ha ha! Anyway, the movie I’m talking about here is City Heat, which you probably already guessed!

The story is laid in Kansas City round about 1933, and so of course there are gangsters, shamuses, cops, and hot jazz licks! Good old boy Burt, who was just getting ready to embark on his unofficial trilogy of single-word titles, Stick, Heat and Malone, is the shamus, and that fits because he’d once appeared in a movie called Shamus! That old leatherbag Clint, fondly recalled from Tightrope and In the Line of Fire, once again portrays an iron-nosed cop; and these two superstar lawmen naturally despise each other, the reason for the antipathy being mostly an “Of course they hate each other, it’s that kind of movie” thing!

They get drawn into a plot that never has much narrative energy or makes much sense, I’m sorry to say! There are two gangster bosses involved, one played by Rip Torn from Summer Rental, the other by Tony Lo Bianco, the director of Too Scared to Scream; and there are some kind of ledger pages, just like in The Untouchables! Richard Roundtree from Maniac Cop plays Burt’s partner, who goes out the window thanks to shady dealings with hoodlums! Roundtree’s ladyfriend, a sweet jazz warbler played by Irene Cara, is in hiding lest she be next on the hit list, and it’s up to Burt and Clint to get over their mysterious differences to protect her, and to nab whichever of the mob bosses has done whatever it was they did wrong according to the ledger pages! Or something, ha ha!

There’s a whole gallery of familiar mugs, most of them aptly cast as henchfolk! William Sanderson from Blade Runner; Nicholas Worth from Darkman; Robert Davi from Die Hard; Art La Fleur from Cobra; Jack Nance from Ghoulies: all these old boys get a look in! The action scenes are occasionally elaborate and enjoyable, but mostly take the form of poorly-staged gunfights which alternate between shots of all the participants either firing a bullet or reacting as a bullet strikes near to them! And the comedy is about on the level of the gunfights: a bunch of pointless sniping between the leads, but no real chemistry! Ha ha, even Johnny Dangerously is funnier, though that doesn’t have Burt Reynolds prowling a bordello in a Big Bad Wolf outfit!

Many of the picture's problems come from not just a bad script, but from an accident that happened early in the shooting, when an actor picked up what was supposed to be a breakaway chair but wasn’t, and clobbered Burt with it! He went down for the count, and then for the whole rest of the filming was listless and low energy! Poor Burt’s misfortune affected the whole picture, and the result is the limp rag you see whenever you watch this blighted coxcomb! They spent a lot of money on it, so you may expect the pleasures that come from that, but the primary impression is one of potential wasted! I give City Heat one and a half snot ball competitions!

Burl reviews Tightrope! (1984)

Burl here, with just a touch of Clint! You know, when people think of Eastwood playing a police detective back in 1984, they’ll usually have Sudden Impact in mind! Ha ha, “Make my day,” and all that! (I’ve never actually seen that movie, now that I think of it!) Not many recall how, that same year, old Clint took a step away from Dirty Harry (but not too big a step) and, as Detective Wes Block, took a ride on the sleazy side! Ha ha, the resulting movie was and is called Tightrope!

We open as a Puma-wearing killer in a cop uniform is terrorizing the city of New Orleans with a mad-dog campaign of rape and murder! The crimes are real downers, frankly, but we are mostly spared the actual murder scenes and thankfully spared the rapes entirely; over and again we get the build-up, until the killer springs out from somewhere or pops up in a weird mask, and then we cut right to the discovery of the body! That’s fine with ol’ Burl, as I wasn’t much in the mood for sex-crime stranglings when I recently watched this!

Wes Block, meanwhile, is a crusty murder detective, divorced, with two precocious daughters and a house overrun by garbage-eating street dogs! He’s in charge of solving the killings, but frankly, despite the surfeit of scenes in which Clint barks orders at his staff of underlings, it’s his loyal right-hand man Dan Hedaya (whom we recall from Commando and Buckaroo Banzai) who seems to do most of the work! The killings continue while Block’s daughters chatter a lot and eat Donkey Kong cereal! Wes is distracted from both them and from the killer when he suddenly descends into a red-neon world of sexual perversity and transactional love, and simultaneously begins a tentative romance with anti-rape activist and amateur kinkster Genevieve Bujold! Ha ha, we may recall Bujold from her curiously similar role in Dead Ringers!

The murders continue, and the police are desperate enough to pull in midget oil wrestling referees on the chance they might be the powerfully-built strangler! The pressure starts to chip at Block, and he suffers scary nightmares in which he turns out to be the killer; bourbon benders that terminate only when he falls insensate off the couch clutching a bottle in one hand and a came-with-the-frame style photo of his former family in the other; and half-eaten meals of fried chicken and Perrier! As Block has repetitious conversations with an especially chatty coroner, the killer moves in, peeping on Block’s intimate business moments, killing prostitutes which Block himself has engaged, and first threatening the older daughter (that is, the one played by Clint’s own daughter Alison), then going after Bujold!

I saw this way back in the old VHS days, and have ever since thought of it as being moody and atmospheric, but it turns out I was really just thinking of the poster! In a more recent viewing it felt to me much more conventional, with the red-light sleaziness - the nude strangled dead ladies, the mild kink, the oily sexual encounters - feeling slightly grafted on, with the seams showing in Frankenstein Monster style! The sweet if largely unwarranted love the cereal-munching daughters have for their frequently absent, generally untrustworthy and almost psychotically stoic dad is meant to stand especially athwart the luridness, and I suppose that aspect of the picture works just fine!

The writer and ostensible director was Richard Tuggle, who had written Escape From Alcatraz for Eastwood, and later directed Out of Bounds for Hall Jr.! Tuggle takes us on a dogged but unflashy checkmark tour of the Big Easy: Bourbon Street, a warehouse full of crazy parade characters, one of those aboveground graveyards, and a Halloween parade standing in for the usual Mardi Gras! Only swamps and voodoo are absent - this is not The Skeleton Key after all, ha ha!

The killer, whose trademarks include red strangling ribbons, handcuffs, scraps of doggerel sent to his favourite police officer, and, oddly, the habit of making and drinking cups of coffee while engaged in his rape/murder sessions, is an especially dislikeable jerk, and one is well pleased to see him mangled by a train, his severed hands still clutching at Clint’s neck! Ha ha, a dedicated strangler to the end! As a suspense picture it’s sort of middling, and as a Clint picture too it sits in the middle of the pack; it has a couple of ok scenes and a lot of claptrap; and one has a difficult time imagining a series of Wes Block pictures! I give Tightrope two cease-and-desist product placement requests from Puma!

Burl reviews Escape From Alcatraz! (1979)

Ha ha and jailcells, it’s Burl! Yes, I have a tale of the big house today, of cons doing hard time, of yardbirds staring down the wrong end of a long stretch! It’s Escape From Alcatraz, one of the many, and maybe the last, of the pictures Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood made together!

What’s it about? Ha ha, the title tells you about everything you need to know! Clint plays Frank Morris, a robber who is sent to the Rock not so much for his robbing, but for escaping from other prisons! Nasty warden Patrick McGoohan dislikes him from the get-go, and Frank spends some time in the lightless bowels of D block! Ha ha, having spent so much time as a prisoner himself, you’d think McGoohan would take it a little easier on his charges!

But no, the steely-eyed turnkey ratchets up his nastiness, causing a terrible incident when he revokes the painting privileges of a kindly dabbler played by the great Roberts Blossom from Christine! Poor Roberts is so despondent that he goes to the wood shop and chops all his fingers off with a hatchet! It’s gory and sad, and for Eastwood it’s the last straw! He begins planning his escape, his first digging tool being the nail clippers he purloined from the darn warden himself!

Eastwood’s pokey pals include Fred Ward from Secret Admirer and UFOria; another guy playing his brother, and yet a fourth fellow, a sad sack called Charlie Butts, well known from Armed and Dangerous, whom you know things are going to go badly for the moment you see him! There’s a tender scene between Charlie and his wife, who’s the only visitor you see anyone get, and in fact the only lady in the whole movie! So you’re rooting for Charlie, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up for him if I were you!

There are some pretty suspenseful scenes and a great cast! Paul Anthony, a very unusual actor of whose work I’m fond, is the one who gives Eastwood the low-down on the place, and it would have been nice to see him get a crack at escaping too! The style of the thing is minimalist, and it’s some of Siegel’s best work of that decade! And that was a good decade for him - he made Charley Varrick after all! And Telefon too, but we won’t talk about that, ha ha!

There’s moody photography from Bruce Surtees, who also shot Out of Bounds of course, and a pretty penitentiary atmosphere! No, it doesn’t make the pokey look like much fun! Except the toques - the toques are nice! And one of the guards seems like an okay guy! But I say no thank you, it’s not the life for me! Ol’ Burl’s going to stick to the straight and narrow! In the meantime, I give the effective Escape From Alcatraz three fake heads!

Burl reviews Tarantula! (1955)

Fss fss fss, it’s Burl, here to review a big bug picture for you! Ha ha, Tarantula may not be the best of the big bug films, but it might be second best, or in the running for that position anyway! (Them is of course the best such film, but The Black Scorpion, with its Willis O’Brien trick effects, has always been a dark horse contender for second as far as I’m concerned!)

Jack Arnold, director of Black Eye, is in charge here, and his great feel for desert atmosphere and landscape is much in evidence! We begin with a pajamaman staggering through the sage, and when we see his face he looks like the guy from Goonies, only worse! It’s a real mystery, and the local sawbones, a dashing fellow played by John Agar of The Mole People, investigates matters by speaking with Professor Deemer, the reclusive scientist conducting his research in a lonely desert mansion!

Professor Deemer is of course played by Leo G. Carroll from North By Northwest, and it’s a canny performance because, without resorting to obvious actor tricks, Carroll is able to subtly undercut his natural avuncularity and show us hints of the driven scientist beneath! This effect, in concert with his lumpen physiognomy, offers prodromal hints of the drastic changes to come, ha ha!

Looks like Deemer and his motley gang of monkeyfaced assistants are working on a plan to make animals really big! Ha ha, but there’s a fire, and sadly all the animals are wiped out except the monkey and, of course, the tarantula! When it leaves the house it’s about the size of a coffee table, but later, when sheep and cows and horses and even people begin to disappear, or at least everything but their bones disappears, we realize that it must have grown substantially larger! The town sheriff, played by a grinning Nestor “Creature From the Black Lagoon” Paiva, is baffled by the craziness that has beset his community, but through it all he never stops grinning! Pools of white goo are discovered, and ol' Doc Agar barely hesitates before tasting the stuff! And a pretty scientific assistant, played by Mara Corday from The Giant Claw, arrives in town just in time to be menaced by a spider the size of the Taj Mahal!

Eventually the money shots begin in earnest: the truly huge tarantula stalking the windswept deserts! The trick effects are pretty good, and I particularly liked the scene where that big old arachnid peeks in the window where the lady scientist is sitting! He gives her a pretty good scare, ha ha! But popguns and dynamite fail to stop the beast, and finally it’s up to Clint “In The Line Of Fire” Eastwood to put things aright with napalm drops from his jetplane! Then it’s quickly reduced to a pile of enormous burning pipecleaners, which must have been fairly unpleasant for any towns downwind of it!

I’ll tell you this: I like Tarantula, but it never quite overcomes its one major problem, which is that the monster is just too darn big! Ha ha, this isn’t Godzilla after all! If it was maybe the size of the crab in Island Claws, now, that would be scary! But it’s still a really enjoyable picture, and a solid addition to the big bug cycle we all love so well! I give Tarantula two and a half desperate ranchers!

Burl reviews In the Line of Fire! (1993)

Hi, it’s Burl here to review what must be one of the finer Hollywood thrillers of the 1990s! What else would you put on that list, I wonder? Probably pictures like The Fugitive, Speed and Heat! Anyway, In the Line of Fire is your basic Tinseltown pulse-pounder, I guess, but it’s an efficient thrill machine as these things go!

There’s not that much to say about it, though! The plot involves a Secret Service agent, played by that great old wooden pole carving Clint Eastwood, well known from his appearance in Tarantula, who is filled with guilt at having not adequately protected President Kennedy in Dealey Plaza on that fateful day! But he gets another shot at protecting a President, this one fictional, when cool, calculating psychopath and aspiring Czolgosz John Malkovich shows up and chooses Clint to be his special pre-assassination confidante!

For a guy in need of redemption, this is a gift from the heavens, or at least from Aisle 7 of the Hollywood Contrivances Warehouse! But that’s all right – there’s a long and storied history of the cop/killer cat-and-mouse game in Hollywood films, and this one probably got the go-ahead after the success of Silence of the Lambs, as the relationship between Malkovich and Eastwood is superficially similar to that between Hannibal Lecter and that lady!

Anyway, there are some amusing detours for Malkovich along the way, which reminded me a bit of The Day of the Jackal! A bank teller lady gets a pretty stiff neck twist when she inadvertently discovers that Malkovich does not hail from the Twin Cities area! Her roommate also gets the twist! And some duck hunters fall “afoul” of Malkovich, ha ha, when they see him practicing with his little plastic pop gun!

Meanwhile, Clint is investigating Malkovich’s doings while trying his best to keep an eye on the President! There’s a fellow agent with whom he would like to make l*ve, a lady, and I was sure she was going to end up as a Damsel In Distress, but even though she didn’t really have any other function besides The Sharp-Tongued Woman Who Is Just As Good As Any Man, I was glad to see at least that she didn’t have to be saved by Clint! (Whatever happened to that Rene Russo anyway?)

This was directed by Wolfgang Peterson, who did that fine U-boat picture Das Boot! His Hollywood movies are a lot blander (Enemy Mine was pretty weird, sure, but can anyone even remember what happened in Shattered?), but this one at least tries to be a bit adult about things, and to present itself as a shiny and sharp-creased product! And it does! Malkovich is pretty good in the film too, and he puts on a lot of different disguises, so it’s got that going for it! I award this efficient motion picture product two putty noses!