Burl reviews Halloween Ends! (2022)

 

Ha ha and pumpkin guts, it’s Burl, here with a seasonally appropriate review for you! In Octobers past I’ve taken a look at the new version of Halloween from 2018, and its sequel, Halloween Kills, which came along a few years later! And now that the air is crisp again and the leaves are swirling through the air, landing crunchy and brown ‘neath the skeletal branches and grey clouds heavy with the coming snows, I’ve caught up with the third in this tributary of Myersania: the maligned Halloween Ends!

 

In part it’s maligned because it fails to provide exactly what a fan of these films expects and wants, which is to say many repetitive scenes of Michael Myers stalking and killing the people of Haddonfield! It shares this fake-out quality with an earlier production, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, and, to demonstrate its own self-awareness, and also perhaps a bit of wishfulness concerning its legacy, it also shares the opening title font, if not the computerized pumpkin imagery, with that now-celebrated picture! Ha ha, I must say, I was heartened when I espied that italicized, powder-blue lettering!

 

Though this series takes the position that none of the Halloween stories exist except the one told in the original 1978 Halloween, the second picture of the new cycle shares with Halloween II the aspect of taking up exactly where its predecessor left off, and now with Halloween Ends, although instead of telling a loopy story of warlocks and killer robots in a completely different town we’re still in Haddonfield, but a break from the contiguity of the first two is still indicated, because it’s four years after the events depicted in those photoplays! The effective opening scene, set in 2018 like the first two films, introduces us to Corey Creekmuir, a hapless and nerdy babysitter whose ill-fated charge turns out to be a bit of a jerk! This leads to a plummet-related tragedy for which Corey Creekmuir is blamed!

 

Then it’s four years later and Corey Creekmuir is a skulking pariah who is given the hairy eyeball by Haddonfielders and is outright hassled by the local marching band jerks! Meanwhile our favourite donkey girlscout, Laurie Strode, who in the earlier films was a wild-eyed survivalist hiding out in a trap-filled shanty, is now, unaccountably, an apron-wearing, pie-baking granny living in a normal house and writing what sounds like a preachy and unreadable memoir about her experiences with Michael Myers! Her granddaughter is now a nurse with her own set of problems, which Laurie tries to help assuage by introducing her to Corey Creekmuir! There follows a wildly improbable romance, during which time Corey Creekmuir also discovers Michael Myers hiding in a sewer and begins to fall under his baneful influence!

 

So for a while it’s sort of a romance movie and a buddy picture, and then it morphs into a revenge story with Corey Creekmuir using first Michael and then later just his mask and kitchen knife to exact rote revenge against his various enemies! Concurrently to all this there’s been a steady stream of tributes to John Carpenter, and not just to the Halloween-related works either! Corey Creekmuir watches Carpenter’s The Thing at his babysitting gig early in the film (just as Laurie watched the Howard Hawks version in Halloween); there’s a radio station as we saw in The Fog; and Corey Creekmuir works at a junkyard which strongly recalls the wrecker’s yard in Christine!

 

And that’s when we realize that this picture is not a remake of Halloween or even Halloween III, but of Christine! Corey Creekmuir shares much with Arnie from that 1983 release: a surname; an initial cringing nerdishness; Buddy Holly glasses which are broken by bullies, and whose absence signposts the character’s gradual de-nerdification; a cartoonishly angry and overbearing mother; a facility with automobile repair and a large industrial facility in which to practice it; a doomed romance with someone way out of his league; and a willingness to fall under the spell of an evil force in order to exact his revenge, at the eventual cost of his life! Once that finally occurs the movie can get back to half-heartedly portraying Michael Myers as a vaguely dangerous slasher with an unexplained grudge against Laurie Strode - or is it the other way around, ha ha!

 

The picture retains the impression set in the previous two films of Haddonfield as an infinite series of neighbourhoods, an endless, physics-defying expanse of landscape urbanism easily containing all the people, services, streets, overpasses, sewer systems, hovels, mansions and everything else the story may require! The performances from the veteran actors are good: Jamie Lee Curtis, whom we know so well from Grandview U.S.A., once again demonstrates her commitment to the character of Laurie, and Will Patton, famed from The Puppet Masters, once again plays Officer Hawkins, and here very touchingly so as he shyly woos Laurie!

 

I was pleased to see the picture try something different, but I was never sold that this was the best route to take, nor that Corey Creekmuir was the best candidate to take it with! Even more than ever, the movie is dramatically powered by human behavior that ranges from unlikely to downright bizarre; and though the conceit is that their years of fearing Michael Myers has driven everyone in town slightly bonkers (though, strangely, it has never diminished their enthusiasm for Halloween parties and costumes), this just results in a movie that offers no one with whom it is possible to latch on to as a surrogate or narrative helpmate! There are some effective scenes, but too many others that feel as though they were not so much directed as merely gotten over with! I’m glad they went in a weird direction, but I wish it was weirder - ha ha, some killer robots would have hit the spot! I give Halloween Ends two tongue-skipping records!

Burl reviews Lady in White! (1988)

 

Hello and a happy post-Halloween to you all! Just a few days ago, and for the very first time, I watched a movie I’ve been aware of for years and years, something I saw on the shelves of the video store I worked at and the ones I patronized! I never did pick it up, because although it was a spooky picture and I like those, it seemed a bit too much like a kiddieshow! Ha ha, it was the same with The Monster Squad! But having a kid myself now, who's the same age as this film's protagonist as it happens, it seemed the perfect time to finally sit back and take in The Lady in White!

The opportunity to see the picture came from the director himself, Frank LaLoggia, who posted a link to his director’s cut on a social media! I downloaded it toot sweet and watched it with my family, it being a family-type movie more or less! It’s a flashback sort of a story, a childhood memory caper like Stand By Me, and so it’s appropriate that it begins in the present day with the main character as an adult, a Stephen King-type horror writer played by LaLoggia himself, being ferried to his old stomping grounds by a cab driver played by Bruce Kirby from, yes, Stand By Me! Ha ha!

The young version of this character, Frankie Scarlatti, is played by Lukas Haas from Witness, Mars Attacks! and Who Loves the Sun! He dwells in a small upstate-New York town with his dad, Alex Rocco from Gotcha, Stick, and Herbie Goes Bananas, his brother Geno, played by the talented Jason Presson from Explorers, and his old country bickerson grandparents! Life is good for jug-eared Frankie except for the fact that his mom has recently died, and he must occasionally suffer some older-brother ribbing from Geno!

Also there’s a pair of mean kids in his classroom, and one evening close to Halloween they lock him in the cloakroom at his school! There he sees the ghost of a little girl who was murdered a decade earlier, and then a rather more substantial presence: a man with a hooded face who comes into the cloakroom to find something, and, realizing he's not alone, starts to strangle poor Frankie! Yes, it seems the town has been suffering a series of child murders, and Frankie, having survived his encounter, realizes he’s got access to clues that might help him find the killer, and that another ghost, the legendary Lady in White, might be a further key to the mystery!

But he only comes upon these realizations gradually, for Frankie is no precocious boy detective but a refreshingly real kid who gets scared and doesn’t always do the right thing! And the movie itself is not a fast-paced, Goonies-style kids’ adventure, but a more meditative memory piece that moves at its own tempo, bringing on characters like a family friend played by Len Cariou from One Man, The Four Seasons, and Executive Decision; the local crazylady, Katherine Helmond from Time Bandits and Brazil; a storytelling postie well played by Sydney Lassick from Alligator and Silent Madness; and Lucy Lee Flippen from Summer School as Frankie’s teacher! And then of course there’s the poor school janitor, blamed for the killings mostly because he’s black; and his poor wife, left alone with her children to suffer the wrath and scorn of the town; and the grief-stricken racist lady, mother to one of the dead children, who gets a mad look in her eye and plots revenge against the wrongly-accused janitor!

Between the child murders and the racism it gets kind of murky for a family film, but some tonal equilibrium is maintained thanks to the heavy filter of nostalgia, the antics of the grandparents, and, since the story unfolds over a period of months, the inclusion of both Halloween and Christmas scenes! The narration, delivered by LaLoggia, is pretty ropey and is probably best ignored, which the poor sound mix on the director’s cut I watched made easy to do; and some of the optical trick effects are silly in both conception and execution! Also, at 122 minutes, the movie, or at least the director’s cut, might be a tad overlong, ha ha! The cliffside climax does tend to linger like the last guest at a Halloween party!

But it all comes straight from the heart, and that’s a virtue not to be airily discounted! LaLoggia took his own history - that of a horror-loving kid named Frank growing up in an Italian family in upstate New York - and married it to an established local lady-in-white legend and an invented serial killer story, and the result is a heartfelt if minor spookshow! I should also mention Rocco, who so often played a hard case but here is warm and kind as the anti-racist father! It was nice to finally catch up with this little movie, and I give Lady in White two and a half squirrel hunting jackets!

Burl reviews Halloween Kills! (2021)

 

Boo to you and boo to you too, it’s Burl, here with some slasher sequel action! Ha ha, yes, it’s true - after my experience with Malignant, I returned to the cinema for more horror! This time I was the only guy in there, thanks to my clever policy of seeing matinees if possible! As a fellow who more or less enjoys the Halloween series, it was a real treat to see this pumpkin-flavoured madness on the big screen, though I wished there was no pandemic and I could comfortably watch it in a crowd!

Of course we know from my recent review of the 2018 Halloween that this cycle of films makes a point of ignoring all the other Halloween pictures except the 1978 Carpenter original! But, like the 1981 Halloween II, this newest picture, Halloween Kills, takes up right at the moment its predecessor ends, though with the addition of an extended flashback to that terrible night in late October of 1978! Eventually we get another flashback which rewrites the end of the original film, or at least rewrites the beginning of (and obviates the entirety of) its sequel!

Jamie Lee Curtis, famed from her appearances in Prom Night and Trading Places, returns in the role of Laurie Strode, former donkey girlscout, now vengeance granny! But she’s too injured from her encounter with Michael to do much beyond lie in her hospital bed and soliloquize about the terror and the evil, and occasionally to reminisce with her roommate, Will Patton, who got grievously injured in the previous picture by a rogue Turk, but somehow survived!  

And then there are the minor characters who met Michael that first time he came home! Ha ha, it’s quite a gallery! Anthony Michael Hall from Out of Bounds plays Tommy Doyle, the kid being babysat by Laurie in the old picture, grown into a big solid man whose hobbies include bird whistling and mob inciting, and another fellow plays Lonnie, the kid who was kind of a bully in grade school and gets scared away from the Myers house by an uncharacteristically playful Dr. Loomis, but in this picture he seems to be the object of bullying, which I suppose is part of the film’s “what goes around comes around” theme!

But many of the original actors return from the Carpenter picture: the original Lindsey, played then and now by Kyle Richards from The Car; the psychiatric nurse played by Nancy Stephens, whose character was killed in Halloween H2O, but of course that never happened as far as this movie is concerned; and Charles Cyphers from Truck Turner and The Fog, whose Sheriff Brackett is no longer the police chief but has become a very grampy-looking hospital security guard! Many of these people either become involved in or else try to stop a homicidal mob on the trail of Michael, or else become involved in it and then try to stop it! The mob sets great store in their catch phrase, “Evil Dies Tonight,” but frankly their follow-through is lousy!

The mob provides plenty of victims, but other victims are just minding their own business! People in their homes are poked, bonked, neckbroke, and gouged! Of them all, I’d most like to hang out with Big John and Little John, the affectionate couple who have moved into Michael’s old house, where they smoke pot and watch John Cassavetes movies - and Little John is played by none other than the fellow who directed Anthony Michael Hall as Walter Paisley in that A Bucket of Blood remake! Ha ha!

They really tossed a lot of mackerels in the pot for this one! There are some gross murders with plenty of marinara; an effective score from Carpenter, his son, and a buddy; a confused ideology; a sad scene involving another escaped patient who is mistaken for Michael by the mob despite the two-foot height difference in the men; not a whole lot in the way of affrights or basic common sense; and lots of references to the other Halloween pictures, even to Halloween III! (Ha ha, I think the movie’s reality should have included the events of both Part I and Part III, with some somber references in the dialogue to the great mask massacre of ’82!)

And yet for all the silly behavior and bloodthirstiness, Halloween Kills is what David Lynch refers to as a “neighbourhood film!” I think the fact that Haddonfield is supposed to be a small town yet runs on for endless streets is a sort of tip-off to this picture’s alternative universe: as though it exists in a Tardis and everything is magnified and under which magnification a simple local madman may be catapulted to mythical status and motivate half the town into forming a violence gang, and the stairwells of the Haddonfield hospital seem to be twenty stories high! From almost any aspect - rational, narrative, geographical - it makes little to no sense, but nevertheless I give Halloween Kills two smoking pumpkins!

Burl reviews Halloween! (2018)

 

Ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-HA-ha, it’s Burl, laughing the famous Halloween theme tune for you! And I know what you’re saying: “Ha ha, Burl, haven’t you already reviewed Halloween?” Yes I have, but now I’m reviewing the recent remake of that picture, or actually more of a belated sequel: the 2018 picture known, like its inspiration, simply as Halloween!

This new picture was directed by David Gordon Green, who brought us Prince Avalanche, and the idea here is that every other sequel, including Halloween II, Halloween 4, Halloween 5, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, and any other sequels there might be, are completely ignored! Halloween III: Season of the Witch, being as it’s a story that has nothing to do with Michael Myers or Haddonfield, is not necessarily being ignored - ha ha, we just don’t know one way or the other! And as for those Zombie ones, well, I haven’t seen them, but I detected no references to them in this picture!

Jamie Lee Curtis, whom we know so well from Prom Night and Grandview U.S.A. and so many others, is of course once again Laurie Strode, and, as in Halloween H20 (the existence of which is, naturally, also ignored), she’s a jumpy, paranoid mess as a result of her terrible experience from her days as a babysitting teen! Now though, instead of channeling her fear and rage into running a private academy for jerks, she has become a doomsday prepper with a house full of guns and alarms and locks and bolts and bars! She has installed such survivalist accouterments as a gun cubby and a swivel counter, and has made sure her house is fitted with louvered closets so she can re-experience the trauma of her babysitting days any time she chooses! Ha ha, she reminded me a bit of Rambo in his final adventure, Last Blood!

Between installing floodlights and target shooting at mannequins, she has found the time to have a daughter, played by Judy Greer from The Descendants and Jurassic World! But her paranoid ways have driven her daughter away, and Laurie’s penchant for wine-guzzling and angry non-sequiturs even have her granddaughter, a teen who calls Laurie “grandmother” as though she were addressing Mrs. Manson Mingott from The Age of Innocence instead of Laurie Strode from Halloween, looking at her a bit askance!

But what about Michael, you ask? Well, he’s been in an institution, standing on a checkerboard floor and attended to by another crazy doctor now that Loomis is long gone! The new headshrinker is Haluk Bilginer from Ishtar, and his idea of therapy is to let a pair of dimbulb podcasters approach Michael on his checkerboard floor and dangle the old Shatner mask in front of him! Ha ha, of course these podcasters are made short work of once Michael escapes his checkerboard and heads back to Haddonfield!

Will Patton from The Puppet Masters plays the local lawman, and there are other assorted victims or potential victims wandering around the town! Michael enjoys a little welcome-home killing spree once he arrives in Haddonfield, which we the audience mainly observe from outside the windows! It’s a pretty effective sequence! Meanwhile, Laurie, her daughter, her granddaughter, and the good-time comedy slaphead dad who seems like a holdover from more lighthearted David Gordon Green projects, are all arguing about whether Laurie is too paranoid or not paranoid enough; and Michael, who is emphatically not related to Laurie this time around (phew!) nevertheless seems to have some kind of Laurie Strode homing beacon implant which has him on a steady course toward the strapped granny’s security castle!

Head-bashing is Michael’s favored killing method this time around, frequently with messy results! Even Laurie catches a bonk, though a non-fatal one! Yes, there’s significantly more grue than in the original picture, which features approximately zero Special Makeup Effects but is a far superior movie nevertheless! I think that should go without saying, but after all, this is a movie review, ha ha, so critical comparisons like that are part of the game! This new one isn’t the worst potato on the block though - it’s entertaining enough, and does a fine job of making Michael a primal force of evil and all that, but it never does manage to bring us that skittering-leaves October atmosphere the original provided so satisfyingly, even though it was shot in the summer and on a much lower budget!

It’s always a pleasure to see Jamie Lee Curtis on screen though, and I appreciated that they kept it reasonably simple and didn’t try to add family connections, cult antics, or supernatural mumbo-de-jumbo! I give this newest Halloween two dollops of peanut butter!

Burl reviews Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers! (1995)

 

Ha-ha-happy Halloween everybody, it’s Burl! And yes, I’m here with a review of one of the Halloween pictures! It’s not one of the best of them, nor is it one of the worst, but with stinkeroos like Halloween 5 and Halloween: Resurrection to choose from, that’s not saying much! This middling effort, which really isn’t all that good at all, is Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, the sixth of them if you’re counting!

Whatever you think of it, though, it’s a part of history, being as it is the very last appearance of Donald Pleasence, the marvelous actor we recall from his turn as Blofeld in You Only Live Twice and of course his role as the worm-addled doctor in The Devonsville Terror! And it’s also among the first appearances from Paul Rudd, who became famous for his comedy in pictures like Our Idiot Brother, and lately, for his superheroism as the man-ant!

Pleasance is playing good old - very old - Dr. Loomis, now more enfeebled than mad, while Rudd has taken the role of Tommy Doyle, the little boy who caught affrights in the original Halloween! Thanks to his terrible experience on Halloween of 1978, Tommy has become the sort of eccentric who keeps Michael Myers clippings on his wall and a photograph of Divine on his fridge, and as far as the rest of the neighbourhood is concerned, he’s the creepyweird guy across the street from the Strode family! Apparently the Strodes are being targeted for some reason that might have been outlined in the two previous movies, but which is so spurious a justification that I’ve completely forgotten it!

The confused narrative of this picture offers no clues, ha ha! We get to hang out a bit with the Strodes, a singularly unpleasant family who require no backstory to deserve the chop, says I! The dad is a horrible brutish hard case played by Bradford English from The Malibu Bikini Shop, and one is relieved when the electrical panel makes his head explode; the mother is a doormat essayed by Kim Darby, playing essentially the same character she did in Better Off Dead!

The picture begins with a baby born to a young lady who is then chased around by a black-clad Michael Myers cult led by Mitchell Ryan from Lethal Weapon, and by Michael himself! The chase leads to a bus station cursed with a very lax janitorial service, and while the young lady meets her doom at Michael’s hands, the baby is rescued by twitchy Tommy Doyle! Now, I don’t normally care for baby-in-peril stories, because I like babies and don’t want to see them jostled about! Of course the baby is mostly played by a rubber reproduction - ha ha, I’ve worked on a couple of movies with fake babies in them, and one was played by an item called Baby Accurate! I thought I recognized the touch of Baby Accurate in this film!

Anyway, the cult stuff is somehow very tiresome, and I don’t know if the alternate cut, known as the Producer’s Cut I believe, clears anything up, because I’ve never bothered to watch it! I saw this one in the theatre, and thought it was okay just because it’s exciting to see a Halloween picture on the big screen, but watching it again I do admit the exploding head is the best part! There’s an obnoxious radio host, a blonde kid with dark eyebrows who also gets terrorized, and a hilariously-edited scene at the end where Tommy Doyle goes ape on Michael’s head with a lead pipe!

It replaces the Panaglide style of the Carpenter movie with garish rock video lighting, though it does manage a bit of autumnal atmosphere here and there! In sum, it’s middling-to-bad, but it’s still a Halloween movie, and therefore you could do worse at this time of the year! I give Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers one and a half self-defenestrations!

Burl reviews Kenny & Company! (1976)

 

Hello gumchewers, it’s Burl, here to review a family film from Don Coscarelli, the director of Phantasm! Yes, that’s right, a family film, but one with some pretty heavy Halloween themes, so rest assured it’s entirely apropos for this time of the year! The picture is a nice little bibendum by the name of Kenny & Company!

It’s a slice-o’-life story following twelve year-old Kenny, and his friends, enemies, and family, through a few weeks in the fall of 1975 or so! Ha ha! He lives somewhere near Los Angeles, so there’s not much in the way of autumnal atmosphere on display, but there’s a heavy emphasis on the approaching kidstravaganza of Halloween! We see Kenny at play, nearly messing up a football game by running the wrong way before his best buddy Doug sets him aright; we see him at school, where he interacts with a cool teacher played by Reggie Bannister, that Coscarelli mainstay we know so well from Phantasm II; we see him at home, with parents that are decent but sometimes annoy him or give him bad advice!

Mostly we see him hanging out with his pal Doug, played by the kid who was Mike in Phantasm! They skateboard, ride in their go-kart, pull pranks (including one cruel jest in which they fool the annoying kid across the street into snapping his fingers in a mousetrap) and generally behave much in the manner I recollect from my own days as a 70s youth! Ha ha, Kenny’s a fair bit older than I was at that time, but I still have some groovy memories from those pointy-lapelled days of yore! Much of the picture chronicles Kenny’s battle with a truly imposing bully called Johnny Hoffman, and his creepy little sidekick Pudwell (who is played by one of the kids from the same year's Grizzly, ha ha)!

But the shadow of Johnny Hoffman, large as it is, does not loom over the whole of Kenny & Company! It’s mostly blissfully nostalgic goings-on steeped in a heavy, all-natural 70s atmosphere - a Richard Linklater movie for the pre-teen set! Ha ha, Coscarelli probably wasn’t thinking about making a glorious time capsule when he made this picture, but just look at the clothes, the bikes, the cars in the background! Look at what Kenny and Doug do for fun, double skateboarding in a manner that today would have them on the evening news and then arrested! One of them even skates through a pile of flaming debris, and of course they also ride around in the back of a pickup truck!

We see Kenny daring to hold the hand of a girl he likes! And we see him visit the local muscleman! And of course in art class, Doug pulls the old trick of sculpting a hollow ball that will blow up in the kiln and destroy everybody else’s work! Ha ha, someone did this very trick in my art class back in grade 7! And then there’s Doug’s dad, a big, red-faced cop with a keen sense of humour, whose favourite gag is to lock people up with his handcuffs and then pretend he left the key at the office! It’s all perfectly wonderful, just a blissful good time at the movies! Even the many scenes of Kenny wrestling with his own mortality - a theme not unexpected if you’ve seen Phantasm - don’t harsh the buzz!

I guess I was in just the right frame of mind for this movie, and with the right company when I watched it, because I really loved it! Sure it’s shapeless and not terribly slick, and potentially boring to those who can’t find any entry point into its magical world! But I was with it from the start, and let me tell you, it’s worth a watch! It’s easily found on the internet for free, so go forth and step into the little time machine that is Kenny & Company, a film to which I bequeath three Pudwells! Ha ha!

Burl reviews The Nightmare Before Christmas! (1993)

Ha ha, ho ho ho and booga booga too, it’s Burl! Yes, I’ve just come from a special screening of the animated picture The Nightmare Before Christmas, with a full orchestra playing the Danny Elfman score, so perhaps this review will be slightly skewed by this charming and unusual movie-going experience! Or perhaps not; it’s hard to say! All I know is that it was y first time seeing this picture in any scenario, so my impression will always be that its standout quality was the music!

And this of course is hardly fair to the animation, which is stellar! The story I found less compelling, but that’s okay! It all takes place in the magical world of holidays: each special calendar day, it turns out, has its own little world, which is responsible for that particular holiday! Ha ha, I guess it’s a stretch to call Halloween a “holiday,” because, after all, it’s not exactly holy, and more crucially, your boss doesn’t give you the day off of work!

But anyway, in Halloweentown, a lanky fellow called Jack Skellington is the Pumpkin King, the fellow evidently most responsible for coming up with their annual scary Halloween gambits! Everyone loves Jack, ha ha, but he himself falls prey to a vague but powerful misgiving, a feeling that there must be more to life than Halloween! And so there is: he comes across a forest glen where trees are marked, restroom-style, with the symbols of different holidays, and the trees prove to be doors! After a brief sojourn in Christmastown, Jack is charmed by the concept and resolves to bring Yuletide joy to Halloweentown!

Jack’s specific plan is a little half-baked, but he ends up masterminding the kidnapping of Santa Claus, whom he imagines to be a towering half-man, half-lobster with snapping claws and crushing mandibles! This turns out to be a misapprehension, ha ha!

Anyway, by the time Christmas comes and Jack is riding a coffin-sled pulled by skeleton reindeer, he’s given cause to regret his rash embrace of someone else’s holiday, and Santa certainly upbraids him for the attempt! Ha ha, perhaps Jack would have been better off appropriating Casimir Pulaski Day! Christmas is saved in the end, and the main bad guy, some sort of boogen living in the basement, is revealed as being made of bugs!

There are Tim Burton design touches everywhere to be found, which would surely have felt fresher back in 1993! Ha ha, Christmastown is sort of boring and boilerplate; you can tell his heart is in Halloween! The movie itself was directed by Henry Selick, who later did a fine job with Coraline and other creepy animations! Jack is given voice in song by Elfman himself, which occasionally gives the thing the flavor of a feature-length Oingo Boingo video; his speaking voice, less frequently heard, comes from Chris Sarandon, well-known from Fright Night! Catherine O’Hara from The Paper provides the female voices, and William Hickey from The Sentinel is a nasty duck-lipped scientist!

I enjoyed watching the picture, but having missed out on it all these years, I can’t see it becoming a holiday perennial for me! Maybe there were just too many songs! But there’s lots to admire, and the live orchestral accompaniment was a lot of fun, so I’m giving The Nightmare Before Christmas two and a half shrunken heads!

Burl reviews Hell Night! (1981)

Ha ha and H-E-double hockey sticks, it’s Burl, here to review another Halloween-themed slasher picture! Ha ha, this one is called Hell Night, and it was even produced by Irwin Yablans, whose Compass International Pictures helped bring us the original Halloween! But make no mistake, this isn’t Halloween!

No, it’s Hell Night, and that means we start at a frat party with everyone in costume! It’s time to rush the pledges, and this means frat bros Peter and Scotty, and their comely accomplice, are going to send four unwitting students into Garth Manor for the night, but not without telling them that, after old man Garth held a murder party for his family, one of the deformed brothers, or "gorks," per the dialogue, was supposed to have survived, and gorks around the manor to this day! And of course this turns out to be true!

Our frosh quartet includes Linda Blair, perhaps best known from Nightforce and Roller Boogie, in the role of Marti, whose defining characteristic is that she can fix cars! There’s fresh-faced Peter Barton, who also faced a maniac in Friday the 13th part 4, playing Jeff, and who tells a tale of the time he saw a three foot man with a long beard, a green jerkin, curly boots and a tall, pointed cap, and concluded that it must have been an elf! We also get Vincent Van Patten, whom we know from Rock n’ Roll High School, as Seth, who spends most of the movie wearing comical boxer shorts and repeating “My name is Seth!” Then there’s a lady with a British accent: Suki Goodwin as Denise!

Kevin Brophy, who plays Peter the frat bro (he also played Peter in Time Walker; and maybe it’s the same Peter! Ha ha!), does so with enough good humour that he doesn’t come off as repellent as most frat bros do in movies like this! He’s got an assistant jokester, a glasses guy who sports a parrot on his shoulder but otherwise seems to be dressed as a waiter in an Italian restaurant! The glasses guy catches a pretty stiff neck twist, and, as with a similar scene in The Prey, a fake buttocks was used!

Hell Night is long for a slasher picture, somewhere north of 100 minutes; and in all that time you get an awful lot of lurking in tunnels, hallways and gardens! It’s a little disappointing, because they had a back story with lots of potential, and a good, scary house to work with, lots of turrets and wrought iron; but director Tom De Simone, who came to the horror genre after a long career in pornoo, was not up to the challenge of making any of it scary! Although there are a few good moments: a great shock cut from a POV shot to a wide of the gork; a mildly scary walk from the front gate up to the door of the house after the characters have finally become aware that a gork is lurking; and a moment with a gork rising up from under a carpet, where there’s a hidden trap door!

But it’s a pretty cozy, good-natured affair overall, though it’s more gorky than it is gory! It’s pretty reserved as these things go, and, I'm sad to say, offers very little pep! On the other hand, it does have not one but two gorks, and both of them are mildly deformed, so we do indeed get some Special Makeup Effects in the end! Most of the deaths are pokings or defenestrations, or in some cases are not really seen at all! It is in other words a perfect slasher movie for people who don’t like slasher movies, and I give Hell Night one and a half shoulder parrots!

Burl reviews Hack-O-Lantern! (1988)

Ha ha and double boo, it’s Burl! Now, call me crazy, but I like my Halloween pictures to have some Halloween atmosphere, and when this movie, Halloween Night, or is that Hack-O-Lantern, started off with a shot of a pick-up truck full of pumpkins, I was heartened! I’m afraid the picture didn’t have the follow-through that I hoped for, but there were a few compensations for that!

The movie is better known as Hack-O-Lantern, and indeed the Halloween Night title card on my copy is clearly a replacement! The story involves the grandpa driving the pumpkin truck, played by Hy Pike from Hollywood High, Slithis, Blade Runner, and Vamp, who turns out to be a crazy Satanist with plans for, and a powerful hold over, his grandson Tommy! Tommy has a younger brother and sister, and a mother who looks perpetually anxious and careworn!

Thirteen years on, Grandpa has a new pumpkin truck and Tommy has grown into a sullen, fish-lipped guy who wears a vest with no shirt (when he wears anything at all) and who tosses cassette tapes around carelessly, wears sunglasses all the time, and dreams of rock videos in which he plays guitar, is zapped by laser eyebeams, and then is decapitated! Ha ha! He’s played by Gregory Scott Cummings from Action U.S.A., Phantom of the Mall, and Cliffhanger!

Roger, the little brother, has become a rookie cop, and Vera, the sister, is still just Vera, ha ha! It’s the night of the big Halloween party, and somebody in a robe is occasionally poking people with sharp implements! Victims include Tommy’s girlfriend, who is famous for her bum tattoo, and Vera’s boyfriend, who ogles the aforementioned bum tattoo (it’s actually a brand), but doesn’t deserve the shovel through the noggin that he catches!

It’s all about the crazy, leering, handsy grandpa and his desultory coven and their barn-bound activities, which include dancing, chanting, cackling, sacrifice, and the branding of people’s bums! Happenings are random and plot twists arbitrary, and everything in the second half, including a comedy routine so bad I had to pause the movie and cover my eyes, seems to revolve around a Halloween party that’s not nearly a patch on the bash in Primal Rage, ha ha! By the end the grandpa has passed on the family bumbranding tradition, but thankfully not his penchant for wild overacting, to the least likely of his grandchildren!

Well, it’s a terrible movie all right, but just occasionally weird and random enough to warrant some interest from the undiscerning Halloweentime viewer! The script is one of the worst ever written, and the direction is haphazard, and they try so slightly to create a Halloween atmosphere that they might better not have tried at all! Ha ha, without skeletal tree branches, heavy skies and a few dead leaves blowing around, it just doesn’t... quite... make it! I’m going to give Hack-O-Lantern, aka Halloween Night, one Dead End Drive-In poster, which I had on my wall too! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Primal Rage! (1988)

Hi! Burl! Yes, I’m back with another movie review! The picture is called Primal Rage, and it’s another late-80s Italian effort shot in Florida, like Welcome to Spring Break, with which this picture shares a lot of cast and crew! It’s not exactly a good movie, but I feel safe in saying it’s a bit of a treat! Ha ha!

First of all, it’s a campus picture, which I always like! There are many enjoyable campus-based horror pictures, like Night of the Creeps, Final Exam, Black Christmas, Monster on the Campus and Time Walker! (Then again there are stinkers too, like Rush Week and Girls Nite Out!) The subgenre is especially fine when a picture includes lots of little details of academe in the set dressing, like the little hand-written poster we see on a door in this one, advertising an upcoming “Geology Seminar Meeting!”

In the opening scene, the male half of our hero couple - played by a guy called Patrick Lowe, ha ha! - zooms around the campus on his scooter, his sweater sleeves tied loosely around his neck, snapping pictures one-handed with a 35mm camera and what looks like a 200mm lens on it, with a criminally bad pop song tootling in the background! Ha ha! (We hear an awful lot of this song, ha ha! I’ll take the metal soundtrack in Demons any day!)

Anyway, the hero guy is a crusading student newspaper reporter with a buddy, Duffy, who considers himself the Hunter S. of Florida U.! The girl is… well, I don’t know who she is, just a girl, and she has a roommate who seems beaten down by life but boasts about her I.Q.! Bo Svenson from Snowbeast, here sporting among the least flattering hairstyles in human history, the mini ponytail, plays a scientist who puts a rage virus in a baboon! There is also a trio of perhaps the most loathsome frat boys ever seen on the screen, and ha ha, that's really saying something!

If you mix all these elements together, you get a lot of growling and roaring and running sores and just plain running, a bunch of particularly gross gore (some of which seems to have been harshly edited to secure an R rating!), and, filling the last act of the film with the expansiveness of a prematurely inflated dirigible, one of the great Halloween parties on film! Ha ha, they must have really busted the budget on costumes, and I admire that! These gems of masquerade include a guy with a saw through his head, an unsettling bird lady (pictured), pig sailors, a giant nose,  and my favourite, the upside-down guy! Ha ha!

Primal Rage has a lot to counter-intuitively recommend it! Almost in spite of myself, I liked all the actors, even the girl who did the big cartoon wince at one point! And the makeup is pretty good, and, as mentioned, frequently grotesque! Ha ha, its pleasures aren’t for everyone, but some of you will truly enjoy it! I give Primal Rage two and a half human faucets!

Burl reviews Halloween 5! (1989)

Ha ha ha, ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha, it’s Burl! Yes, in case you didn’t catch it, that was me trying to laugh John Carpenter’s theme from Halloween! It’s a cheap trick, so is an entirely apt way of introducing a review of Halloween 5, which itself counts as a cheap trick on anyone who ever enjoyed a Halloween picture! It's surely no treat! (And, just to be clear, while the full title on the poster is Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, the title card simply reads Halloween 5, so that’s what I’m calling it too!)

This foul cronkite follows directly from Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers in the same way that Halloween II followed the original Halloween, by showing the last few moments of the previous picture! Unlike Halloween II, it then proceeds to utterly betray the spirit of its predecessor by ignoring the disturbing set-up in which a nine year-old girl becomes the fearsome primal killing force behind the now traditional late-October pokefest! Ha ha!

As in the previous picture, the little girl, Jamie, is played by Danielle Harris, whom we saw recently in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood! Ha ha, she really gets put through the wringer in this one, not just by Michael Myers and his poking knife, but by the increasingly hoarse-voiced and crazy Donald Pleasance, who of course returns with a putty on his face to play the burn-scarred Dr. Loomis! He alternately shouts at and pleads with the little girl in a seemingly endless series of scenes, when in reality such a person would never be allowed near a child, no matter how much of a psychic connection she may have to her supernatural maniac uncle! Ha ha, Maniac Uncle would have been a good subtitle for this one!

The sheriff from the previous picture, the one played by Beau Starr from Fletch and Summer School, returns too, but the action is so confused that I can’t be sure if he survives this one! Other victims include a faux-Fonz called Mikey, played by Jonathan Chapin from Rubin and Ed, who is obsessed with his sweet Camaro and catches a gardening implement in the head! A mid-picture sequence set at a party farm gives Michael a chance to diversify from his kitchen knife and use a few other agrarian tools on his victims, like a pitchfork and a scythe!

I’ll tell you, this is an incredibly scattershot production, lacking in many things but especially in a good script! People are always running from one location to another, and nothing makes any sense; and a fancy-booted man is clomping around the town with no discernible goal in mind! Just about every character is a jerk or an idiot, and you’re glad to see them dispatched just so you don’t have to hear their grating voices or see their smarmy faces again! The opening credits imply the presence of Special Makeup Effects in the picture, and indeed there are brief, near-bloodless flashes of the old KNB artistry in the picture! But they’ve been trimmed to within an inch of their lives, ha ha!

The story seems to have been made up as they went along, the dialogue is bad, and the acting, for the most part, is worse! (The little girl is quite good though!) There is no hint of style to the direction, the picture is completely free of any Halloween atmosphere, and it’s not very well photographed, except for one decent shot of Michael appearing in a dark forest! If not for the existence of Halloween: Resurrection - which I’m not even sure I’ve seen, or at least don’t remember much of, but have heard is very bad - I would say this is far and away the nadir of the Myers saga! I give Halloween 5 one cookie woman!

Burl reviews Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers! (1988)

Ha ha, trick or treat, it’s Burl at the door! Boy, it’s certainly getting close to Halloweentime, and to bring on the spirit a little bit I thought I’d watch one of the Halloween pictures I haven’t seen in years, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers! I was a little confused going in, because I thought this one had lots of goofy backstory and druids running around, and the psychic visions that do their best to ruin any slasher picture, as we know from The Initiation and Sorority House Massacre!

But I think all the weird mythology of this series is packed into episodes five and six! This one is a little more like Halloween and Halloween II: lots of talk about Michael Myers’s inhumanity, but more or less a straight up, relatively dry slasher picture! Halloween III: The Search For Michael Myers is of course ignored, which is too bad because it would have been nice to see those mythologies mixed together; and for those casual fans who maybe haven’t seen the first two pictures in a while, the whole story of Michael to date is blurted out by a nerdy security guard! This prompts the thought “Ha ha, surely there must have been some other way to deliver this information!”

Michael is being transferred somewhere for some senseless reason, but Dr. Michael Pataki, from The Bat People, is glad to get rid of him! Of course Michael wakes up from his coma, pushes his thumb through a guy’s forehead and begins killing his way toward Haddonfield, with Dr. Loomis waddling close behind! The masked maniac, it turns out, is after a little girl, his niece, and his reason for this pursuit, whatever it might be, is treated as though self-evident and so never disclosed to the rest of us! Ha ha! But there are plenty of people to kill along the way, so Michael gets busy with his kitchen knife and some of his best shock-wrestling moves! Soon Loomis, who is of course once again Donald Pleasance from Prince of Darkness, and Sheriff Beau Starr from Fletch are running the masked man all over Haddonfield! Ha ha!

There’s a supporting cast of vaguely familiar faces, like Carmen Filpi from Garden of the Dead; Sasha Jensen from Dazed and Confused; Kathleen Kinmont from Fraternity Vacation; and Gene Ross, who faced an iconic slasher before when he appeared in Friday the 13^th part 4! So it’s nice to have these people scattered throughout, and just as comforting are the bursts of score from the original picture! The mask looks as creepy as ever, and we also get a very nice opening credit sequence (kudos to the second unit, ha ha!), some pretty good bits with a mob of town louts right out of Silver Bullet, and a genuinely disturbing finale!

Those are the good points! But there are plenty of dull stretches, dumb dialogue and stock characters, so it’s hardly a masterpiece! But on the whole it was a better picture than I remembered, and not a bad pick if you want a bit of autumnal atmosphere! Ha ha, it’s a bit like The Devonsville Terror in that way – a crouton for the most part, but an evocative one! There are even a couple of Special Makeup Trick Effects, which the first Halloween didn’t have, as good a movie as it otherwise is! The thumb in the head is one, and then there’s a bit of a face-ripping, ha ha! The rest is stabbings and suchlike, and a few pretty stiff neck twists! (Of course there’s some putty on Dr. Loomis’s face and on Michael’s hands, and I guess those putties count as Special Makeup Effects too, ha ha!)

It’s an okay picture, I guess, and there’s really not much else to say about it! I enjoyed it while it was on, except the parts where I was bored, and I’m going to give Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers two ponky deputies!