Burl reviews Steele Justice! (1987)

 

Killoo-killay, it’s Burl here with classic VHS action! Ha ha, there sure were a lot of action movies made in the 80s for the booming VHS market! Some of them – many of them in fact – had a theatrical release, but as the decade wore on, such a release became more cursory, more obviously just a promotion for the videocassette release that would allow wide (and double-wide) audiences to see the pictures! In the wake of Beverly Hills Cop and Rambo there was no end to the low-budget cop and war variants eager to cash in, and occasionally there were combo platters aiming to suck from both troughs at once! One of these – its glowering VHS cover familiar to many an 80s kid – is the subject of today’s review: Steele Justice!

Ha ha, is there justice of any other kind? Steele Justice begins at the tail end of the war in Vietnam, with stone-faced, rock-brained John Steele, played by Martin Kove from White Line Fever, Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, and of course Rambo, standing tall in a small hovercraft as it cruises up a jungle tributary! Steele is so tough he wears a live snake as a necktie, and accompanying him is his best pal Lee, essayed by Robert Kim from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off! They discover a bunch of dead bodies and realize their supposed South Vietnamese ally, General Kwan, played by Soon-Tek Oh from The Man With the Golden Gun and Death Wish 4, is not actually a very nice man! Kwan has Steele and Lee shot, but that doesn’t kill them, and Steele in turn shoots Kwan with a gun that shoots knives, but that doesn’t kill him either! And somehow a colonel named Harry played by Joseph Campanella from Hangar 18 figures into this preamble!

A dozen or so years later, Steele is married and divorced from Sela Ward from The Fugitive, and has been employed with and fired from the Los Angeles police department! His buddy Lee is still a cop though, and when Steele bottoms out, Lee is there to help him up! But, uh oh, Lee and most of his family (including a granny with a Moe haircut played by Kimiko Hiroshige from Blade Runner and Fletch) are murdered by Kwan’s evil son, impersonated by Peter Kwong from Big Trouble in Little China; and as a further ignominy it all happens while Steele is relaxing in a bath, so he gets very angry and figures on delivering a little Steele justice!

Kwan has become a respected American business man, and so Steele is faced with a bogomil crisis when Ronny Cox from The Car and The Beast Within shows up as his old boss on the force, Bennett! And there’s another cop played by Bernie Casey from Ants! and Never Say Never Again, who’s more sympathetic to Steele and his methods! While protecting the surviving Lee daughter, played by a terrible actress I’m sorry to say, Steele first bothers, then intimidates, then finally attacks and kills Kwan and his crime bunch!

As though a political psychodrama is lurking camouflaged within the movie, there’s a lot of real estate dedicated to showing the depths in respect, both self- and from everyone else (except for Lee and his family, who are the biggest Steele fans in the world), to which the agate-visaged hero has plummeted since the war! Killing is his only balm, and after the massacre of his only friends he seems almost gleeful at the opportunity to dispense the Steele justice I spoke of earlier! Of course his necktie snake gets involved, and the final fight against Kwan involves the old “battle-atop-a-shipping-crate-being-lifted-by-a-crane-operated-by-?” routine!

It’s a dumb, reductive, reactionary, Reagan-era movie, of minor (but hardly unique) interest thanks to the Asian gangs angle! But the bad guys are allegedly fearsome, and, ha ha, you know General Kwan is really mad when he appears on the scene wearing a floral print dress! Kwan has Shannon Tweed from Dragnet on his side as a fellow crime boss, or at least the daughter of one; meanwhile Phil Fondacaro from Phantasm II and Land of the Dead shows up as a wee bartender, and of course Al Leong henches once again, just as he henched in everything from Lethal Weapon and Die Hard to Death Warrant and Protocol!

As sedimentary as its hero, the picture does nevertheless provide a few hyocks, a modicum of confusion, a fine B movie cast, and occasionally the impression that it must have been written and directed by Clyde the Orang-utan! It sat on shelves in the Action section alongside The Patriot and Instant Justice and Born American, and there perhaps it should stay - but, ha ha, that's up to you! I give Steele Justice one RPG – Rat-Propelled Grenade! Ha ha!

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 Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3! (2023)

Ha ha and pieww-pieww, it’s Burl here with space action-comedy for you! Yes, it’s the summer blockbuster season, and the big shows are being rolled out weekend by weekend; and, seeing as how my son and I recently watched the first two entries in the Guardians of the Galaxy series of pictures, which come from the director of Super, James Gunn, we thought we might go out to catch the third in the series! The official title of this third entry seems to be Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3!

I will here and now confess that I’m no great adherent to the Marvel superhero pictures, which I mostly find cacophonous and bewildering! Well, they’re not that bewildering – I’m not an idiot after all, ha ha – but when watching one I’m always conscious there’s a whole mess of back story and relationship dynamics of which I’m cheerfully unaware, and knowing this tends to dull my enjoyment of their product! But of all the various series, the Guardians of the Galaxy ones have been among the most amusing, both because they seem to sit apart from the Avengers and all those associated heroes, and because there is for the most part a refreshing lack of reverence for the interwoven Marvel universe as a whole!

The Guardians of the Galaxy are of course a motley band of space people who live in a lumpus called Knowhere, are led by a ragamuffin called Quill, played by Chris Pratt from Jurassic World, and occasionally cruise around in their spacecraft doing missions! Ostensibly they’re flying around out there to battle evil, but most of their time seems spent on investigating their own origins and past traumas, as though the whole hero caper is really just some good old fashioned recovered-memory therapy! The first one dramatizes the origins of the group, but takes time to investigate how the battling sisters Gamora (who is green and played by Zoe Saldana from Star Trek Into Darkness) and Nebula (a mostly-blue patchwork essayed by Karen Gillan from Oculus) came to be what they are, which has something to do with their father, a rock monster! Then the second one showed that Quill’s father was secretly a space god played by Kurt Russell!

This time it’s the raccoon man’s turn to look back on his life! The character of Rocket is an irascible procyon with the voice of Bradley Cooper, and at the beginning of the picture a golden boy flies in and tries to kidnap him! After a fearsome battle the golden boy is driven off, but poor Rocket hovers on the edge of death! It turns out the only way to save him is for his pals to bust in to the scientific facility that created the raccoon: a place run by Chukwudi Iwuji from John Wick: Chapter 2 playing “The High Evolutionary,” who’s a maniac with pretensions to godhood! This is our bad guy, and the rest of the movie bounces between the Guardians’ efforts to find the information that can save him, and Rocket’s comatose recollections of his childhood, in which he was caged with three other similarly mutilated weirdo child-animal friends!

It's as melancholy a picture as Marvel will allow, meditating (ha ha, again, as much as Marvel will allow) on loss and survivor’s guilt; and it’s also got a strong anti-vivisectionist message! These things are over and again subsumed by the pieww-pieww, but you can tell Gunn means what he says because there’s significantly less joking around than in the previous installments, and a lot more talking about feelings! There’s a scene that takes place in what I took to be heaven’s antechamber that, for a conversation between two non-human CGI confabulations, is really quite touching! And eventually everyone cries, even the raccoon!

It’s a long, busy picture – ha ha, the Marvel extravaganzas all seem to be in running time and character-number competition with one another – but fairly straightforward when you break it all down! The High Evolutionary is a mean man but gets what’s coming to him, and I could never decide whether Iwuji’s performance was a minor triumph or a silly hamfest – ha ha, or maybe it was both! I liked it, though! Otherwise except for the occasionally dour tone, the movie mostly follows the pattern set by the previous volumes, including the requisite moment of fighting triumph for the tree-man; some literal-mindedness from manmountain Drax, played by Dave Bautista from Dune; a cameo appearance measurable in seconds by Sylvester Stallone from First Blood; and lots of cacophony and endless song cues! Although, ha ha, they seem to have dropped the trope of Quill listening to mix tapes his mother made him – although there are still 1970s AM radio cuts here, the selection is also watered down by what I suppose are simply songs James Gunn likes!

Anyhow, it’s more enjoyable than the usual Marvel nonsense, and it has an alternate earth populated by animal people, so I’ll give Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 two blue jay men!

Burl reviews Twister! (1996)

 

From within the whirling winds of the Hollywood Midwest, it’s Burl, with a review of some big-budget 1990s weather spectacle! Ha ha, the second half of the 1990s saw the rise once again of the large-scale disaster movie: we had the lava duello of Dante’s Peak and Volcano; meteor-vs.meteor with Armageddon and Deep Impact; alien blast-vasions in Independence Day and Mars Attacks; and various randos like Daylight, Titanic, Godzilla and Firestorm! But among the earliest in this cycle was the tornado drama Twister, the summertime success of which helped kick off the late-90s disaster-spasm!

Ha ha, I remember reviewing this one back in my semi-professional movie reviewing days, and I didn’t care much for it, declaring it, rather harshly perhaps, "flatulence from the sky!" But whether it’s a softening of my heart, or of my head, or the stench of nostalgia, or wistfulness for the days when Bill Paxton was alive and could headline big movies, my attitude toward this twistravaganza has improved somewhat! I still think there’s too much bickering in it and an overly healthy dose of silliness, and that it irresponsibly encouraged the goofy sport of tornado-chasing; but I must admit that on a recent re-viewing of this windy action-drama, I more or less enjoyed it!

Paxton, whom we recall from Aliens and Weird Science and so many others, plays Bill, who does a little weird science of his own by sniffing dirt and looking at the sky to see when the tornados are going to appear! He’s a former tornado chaser, legendary for his recklessness, who rejoins his old gang, temporarily he thinks, in order to have divorce papers signed by ex-wife Jo, who’s played by Helen Hunt from Next of Kin (which Paxton was also in, actually)! Bill has in tow his fiancée Melissa, a straight arrow played by Jami Gertz from Mischief and The Lost Boys, who is initially interested in the tornado gang but, after a few close calls, is happy to walk away and let Bill have both his twisters and his old wife back!

That’s the human drama part of the movie, and too much screen time is spent on it if you ask ol’ Burl! And then there’s the antics of the tornado gang, which is to say the crew of pseudo-scientists who drive the highways and byways in their motley of vehicles in pursuit of supercells, and pine for the days when Bill was their wild and fearless leader! This group includes Phillip Seymour Hoffman from Jack Goes Boating and Mission Impossible III in the role of Dusty, the most comedic scientist; Alan Ruck from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as Rabbit, the crew's putative wise man; Sean Whalen from The People Under the Stairs as Allan; Scott Thomson from Parasite and Police Academy as Preacher; Wendle Josepher from Intolerable Cruelty as Haynes; famous director Todd Field as Beltzer; and Joey Slotnick from Plane as Joey! Ha ha!

But this rabble are unconvincing not just as scientists but as genuine human people, and their interest in, essentially, air is about all there is to them, and makes them only as substantial as that passion would suggest! A scene in which the whole gang stops off unannounced at the home of Aunt Meg, played in granny-artist mode by Lois Smith from Black Widow and The French Dispatch, and proceed to eat her entire supply of steak, is meant to be endearing and humanizing but it comes off more as just a bunch of insensitive louts mooching off an old lady, no matter how affable Aunt Meg is about it nor how much it’s implied that this has happened many times before and Meg must be used to it by now! Ha ha!

And then there are the rival scientists, who drive in shiny black trucks, have all the latest equipment, and are led by windbag showboater Jonas, played by Cary Elwes from The Princess Bride! Of course the ragtag heroes disdain them, in this Universal Pictures-Warner Bros. co-production, for accepting corporate sponsorship to fund their activities, though the script doesn’t bother detailing which corporation would want to sponsor tornado chasers, nor why! At least there’s some nuance in the presentation: Jonas is a bad guy, but not so bad that the heroes don’t try in earnest to dissuade him from blundering into an F5! But he’s still the bad guy after all, and for his sins he reaps the whirlwind! Or rather, ha ha, the whirlwind reaps him!

So it all comes down to the tornadoes, doesn’t it, and these scenes are pulled off with, if not realism, all the techno-aplomb the mid-90s could offer! The trick effects are still impressive today, and the number and length of the tornado scenes stop just short of the point where they’d become repetitive and boring! The filmmakers take care to vary the types of debris thrown at the heroes: trucks, exploding trucks, farm equipment, exploding farm equipment, cows; and there’s a good nighttime scene at which a drive-in movie screening of Psycho and The Shining is interrupted by one of the larger twisters! Still, as thrilling as these scenes often are, and as awesome as the tornadoes shown here can be, it still falls short of the one seen in The Wizard of Oz, and that was just a big black sock wasn’t it!

The physics displayed here are about as authentic as they are in Oz (a film much alluded-to in this production), and the great goal of Bill's team - to release their science instrument named Dorothy into a tornado so as to discover its characteristics and therefore be better able, somehow, to predict them - seems both unrealistic and a bit underwhelming! Meanwhile the dialogue is unspeakable, most of the characters are annoying, and the drama is flaccid! But the effects sequences remain marvellous and the atmosphere of Midwestern heavy weather is nicely achieved! There’s a summeriness to the movie that I like, too, so in the final puff I’ll give Twister one and a half handfuls of dirt!

Burl reviews Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves! (2023)

 

With a rousing jig and a hoy-te-toy and a merry, merry click of the heels, it’s Burl, here with a review of the latest in theatre hits! At least I assume it’s a hit – ha ha, I don’t keep track of the box office figures, so for all I know it might be a big old flopparoo! But the people in the theatre seemed to like it, so I’m going to guess it’s doing well! Incredibly enough it’s not a sequel, but it is an adaptation of a recognized intellectual property and I guess that’s what counts for daring originality in today’s marketplace! Of course I’m talking about Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves!

Chris Pine from Star Trek Into Darkness plays the role of the roguish, not too bright, charming-scamp hero, Edgin or Ederin or something; but like the other characters do, we’ll just call him Ed! He’s in a jail with his barbarian-lady chum, and they live in a land more fantastical than, say, the world of Ladyhawke, but maybe not quite so much as The Lord of the Rings! Michelle Rodriguez from Machete is the tough gal-pal, who pines not for Pine, but for a three-footer who dwells in a glen in the forest! They escape their prison by means of a birdman even though they were about to get paroled, and immediately begin a series of enfiladed quests with their buddies!

And who are these buddies? Well, there’s a young wizard without, yet, the self-confidence required to master his trade, and a druid lady played by Beverly from It! They also meet a supernaturally benevolent paladin who joins them for a couple of the interior sub-quests and is a big help when it comes time to battle a porky dragon! The antagonist is none other than Hugh Grant from The Lair of the White Worm, a scoundrel of a rapscallion of a nogoodnik, formerly a chum himself, who betrays our heroes and becomes a rich mayor or something, claiming Ed’s daughter as his own, dwelling in a castle, and employing an evil witch to help with his schemes!

I didn’t expect much from this one, I have to say! I was never a D&D player, though I sat in on a game once! My son is playing it every Sunday with some pals though, and I took him and one of the chums to see it at the theatre, where the exhibitors occasionally busted out some old-style showmanship by projecting extra edges to the frame along the side walls! The effect was surprisingly un-annoying and even a little bit immersive! Anyway, I thought I was just being a decent dad by taking some kids to a movie, but darned if I didn’t enjoy myself thoroughly!

It’s no Conan the Barbarian, but it’s got some laffs along with the usual not-quite-Peter-Jackson level fantasy action scenes! Hugh Grant, whose stammery smarm was always ready and able to be put in the service of evil, gives good value here, and Pine, playing a hero halfway between Han Solo and Jack Burton, does exactly what the picture needs him to do with unshaven aplomb! It’s all nonsense of course, and nonsense with an airy, arbitrary feeling to it; and the story and structure sure could have been a lot stronger; and I for one would have liked more of the grotesque creatures - sucking worms and so forth - that I remember from the monster manuals; but it hits some emotional beats with surprising solidity and integrates the comedy with the fantasy in fine fashion!

Even though it’s machine-tooled to be the first of a series (which they’d better hurry up on before Pine ages out of his scalawag years), it’s nevertheless still at this moment a standalone film and not a sequel, remake, reboot, or requindle; and although it’s derived from an age-old and highly recognizable IP, it’s not one with which I was overly familiar; and the effect of all this on me, and of attending with a pair of 11 year-olds, was the feeling of an old-fashioned 80s-era outing to the movies, which feeling probably brought me more pleasure than the movie itself! But the film is amusing too, and so in spite of its cumbersome title, I’m going to give Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves two and a half gelatinous cubes!

Burl reviews Vampires! (1998)

 

Bluh bluh and again bluh, it’s Burl, here to review vampire antics gone southwestern! It’s a picture from what can only be considered John Carpenter’s declining years as a director (though not as a composer of course!), by which point he had only a picture or two left in him, and one of them was The Ward! Ha ha! But this one has still some Carpenterian touches, and if you ask me he never made an unwatchable picture! The movie I’m talking about here is Vampires!

It’s based on a novel, which I suppose accounts for the rich backstory that is implied and/or spelled out as the picture goes along! We open with a Vatican-funded vampire-killing team run by Jack Crow, played in very James Woods fashion by none other than James Woods from Videodrome! This well-equipped posse includes second-in-command Montoya, essayed by Daniel Baldwin from Nothing But Trouble, and familiar faces like Mark Boone Junior from The Quick and the Dead and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa from Big Trouble in Little China, and there’s also a ridealong priest played by Gregory Sierra from Pocket Money and The Towering Inferno!

Well, they clear out an old farmhouse full of vampires, but don’t find the leader of the bite 'ems: the master vampire! They hold a motel party anyway, and of course the master vampire, played by a tall drink of water named Thomas Ian Griffith, shows up and slaughters everybody! Well, everybody but Jack Crow, his buddy Montoya, and a hired evening-lady called Katrina, played by Sheryl Lee from Wild at Heart! Meanwhile a scarlet cardinal essayed by Maximillian Schell from St. Ives sits at home until the surprise at the end!

Montoya takes charge of Katrina and hotel-rooms her, while Jack Crow and a new ridealong priest, a young beard played by Tim Guinee (who encountered vampires again that same year in Blade), track the master vampire! The rest of the movie almost manages a Phantasm II vibe as they follow the fearsome hemogobbler across the country, evade his traps along the way, and finally confront him at the old mission as he’s about to enact his master-vampire plan! Much baring of fangs ensues, ha ha!

Well, I’ll admit it’s a far cry from the glory days of Carpenter – Halloween, say, or The Fog, or The Thing, or Prince of Darkness! But as I say, there are a few moments here and there which remind you this is indeed a movie from that singular Kentucky-born picturemaker – some characteristic framing, camera moves, Hawksian themes, and of course the score, which is much in the mode of his music from They Live! There’s some nice vampire gore and a performance by Woods that’s so hard boiled it seems demented, but, ha ha, that’s Woods for you!

On the frownier side, the picture has kind of a bad script! There are some bon mots, and Woods elevates it all quite a little bit, but there’s no getting around that this is a simplistic and unfulfilling narrative without much in the way of interior logic! The master vampire is fairly boring, too – he’s just a tall guy who glowers a lot! Much more energy should have been spent on every aspect of this guy: his dialogue, his look, his performance, his pep! He should be a memorable and frightening presence, but he’s just not! He seems more like a local longuebönes recruited for a vampire movie mostly because he’s tall!

There’s fun to be had with the movie, make no McSteak™, but potential-wise I think it leaves a lot of good stuff on the table! While I appreciate the unexpected destruction of the team from an unpredictable, Psycho-inspired narrative point of view, at the same time the movie never really recovers from their loss! The picture tries to make the friendship between Crow and Montoya the emotional centrepiece, but that doesn’t work terribly well, and certainly not well enough to revitalize the Hawksian energy of the opening reel! It’s not too scary and it's too often silly, but après tout it remains a John Carpenter movie! I recall going to see it with my dad back in the day, and it was the perfect sort of movie to see with him, so I have that extra affection for it too! I’m going to give Vampires two hardworking winches!

Burl reviews John Wick: Chapter 4! (2023)

 

Ha ha and bang bang bang, it’s Burl, here to recount a tale of gunfire and mayhem! Yes, it’s the latest in the increasingly long line of action fables featuring the bearded Keanu Reeves, whom we recall so well from Bill & Ted Face the Music and other associated productions! It’s the John Wick pictures I’m talking about, of which I’ve seen all, but have only reviewed, I believe, John Wick: Chapter 2! This one is called John Wick: Chapter 4, which I figure they chose as a title because, ha ha, it’s the fourth chapter in the series!

Of course these crime pictures are set in a crazy copless world which seems essentially run by a big gangster conglomerate known as the High Table! Ha ha, the movies are so dedicated to this world that they often seem ridiculous, but at the same time the fealty to this criminal fantasyland is so complete as to be kind of admirable at the same time! And my belief – the belief that allows me to fully enjoy these movies, ha ha – is that the filmmakers know about and encourage that ridiculousness, while still endeavouring to make worthwhile action pictures!

I won’t bother relating the plot, as it’s both a continuation and repetition of what’s come before, to wit: John Wick, super-assassin widower and former dog owner, is trying to not be killed by the people who are after him, which is nearly everybody, and endeavouring to get out of this crime-world! (Is there an “out?” Ha ha, if so we never see it!) To accomplish this he must shoot and punchfight all sorts of people in order to satisfy the arcane rules of the people who run things! This time, for John, it ultimately means dueling a fop, but there are plenty of fights to have before that in this nearly three-hour tour!

Characters from previous Wick adventures are here, notably Wick’s pal Winston, played by Ian McShane from Too Scared To Scream, who here loses his beloved concierge and his hotel too! Laurence Fishburne from Fast Break and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 returns as the King of Lower Bumtown, but here his main activity seems to be providing Wick with bulletproof suits, guns, and the occasional boat ride! The new character everyone loves is a blind master called Caine, played by the Ip Man himself, Donnie Yen, known to Western audiences from movies like Rogue One! He’s an appealingly human and ambiguous presence, and his fighting is most impressive!

Other fresh faces include Clancy Brown from Buckaroo Banzai and Extreme Prejudice, who strides through the proceedings wearing a black hat and a big beard, his task evidently to see that the rules of the High Table are strictly followed! There’s a fellow with a dog and a gun but without a name, who will occasionally aim his rifle at John Wick but usually ends up shooting someone else! And then there’s Scott Adkins, who’s been actioning it up in all sorts of movies for some twenty years now, and who here wears balloon makeup and golden teeth in the role of a monstrous card sharp!

There are some fine action scenes, in particular the one up the stairs to Sacré Coeur! The roundelay at the Arc de Triomphe gets a lot of love, and I certainly enjoyed it, but there was a greenscreen weightlessness to it at times – it was all those bodies flying around after being hit by passing Citroëns, I suppose! And I quite enjoyed the long overhead scene in which John Wick blasts people with a shotgun that sets them on fire, ha ha! The last contest with the foppy clothes-horse Marquis, who stands as the picture’s principal villain, is okay, but maybe wasn’t quite the satisfaction I was looking for; but the last-act tribute to The Warriors was a mighty big help, boppers!

In sum, there’s plenty to enjoy here for the action enthusiast, and even the Ridiculous Action enthusiast! There’s a rake-gag aspect to some of this: you’ll lose count of how many times John Wick gets hit by a car, or falls down the stairs, or plummets a distance that would cripple a normal man! There’s a more general repetitiveness of tone as well as event through much of the picture: many times, for example, Wick will meet up with someone with whom he used to be friends, and they’ll refer to this bosom chumship in sober and reverent terms, but every time this happens it leaves you wondering just exactly what sort of friendships these were! Ha ha, did these guys go out for beers or socialize in any recognizable manner, or did they just run across each other in the course of their killing sprees and develop their friendships as a sort of parallel play between gunshots? It’s a conundrum, and it’s perplexities like this which keep you from fully engaging with the movies on a human level – ha ha, that’s is why Donnie Yen is such a breath of fresh air in this hermetic and cloistered environment! But you know, I took my son to see it and we had a fine old time at the picture house, and so I give John Wick: Chapter 4 three doorless cars!

Burl reviews 65! (2023)

 

Ha ha, Burl returning to you good people after an absence! Sorry about that – I’d have warned you there would be one, but I simply didn’t know! These things sometimes happen in Burl-land, and although I’ve watched plenty of movies I’d like to review, the old reviewing muscles simply weren’t twitching! But I’ve just returned from the cinema show, and I figured I’d review you the picture I saw while it’s fresh in my memory! It’s the sci-fi dino-fest 65!

And I know you’re saying “But Burl, by garr! What does that title mean!” Well, it refers to the time frame in which the picture is set: 65 million years ago! It seems an alien man named Mills, played by Adam Driver, whom we recall from Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Inside Llewyn Davis and The Dead Don’t Die, is driving his spaceship past ancient Earth when he gets knocked askew by a meteorite! But there’s some backstory, economically told thank goodness: Mills, we learn, is only driving this spaceship to earn enough money for lifesaving medical treatment to cure his ailing daughter, which is a plot point only an American could come up with! Ha ha, on a sophisticated, futuristic, Trek-style planet, they’ll have universal health care, believe me!

Anyway, Mills crash lands on a planet, which, tah-dahh, is Earth in the dinosaur times, and all the colonists or whomever Mills is ferrying are killed, but there’s one survivor, a little foreign girl! Together she and Mills must trek across the jungle primeval to the other half of the crashed spaceship, where there might be a blast-off pod! Along the way they must deal with dinosaurs, gross bugs, geysers, quicksand, cave-ins, language difficulties, and more dinosaurs! And of course their visit to Earth is perfectly timed with the impending arrival of the planet-killing meteor that wiped out the thunder lizards! Ha ha!

And that’s about it for plot! The bulk of the picture is the overland trek, punctuated by dinosaur encounters and the other hazards mentioned, and it’s all done passably well, but there remains a feeling that more excitement, more suspense, even more art, could have been wrung out of this premise! Driver does a fine job, though his attempts to communicate with the girl don’t always make sense; and the mere presence of the girl, a stand-in for the daughter he misses so much, is about as un-nuanced and sophomorically convenient as storytelling gets!

Still, the whole thing moves well, looks good, and clocks in at a trim (for these days) 93 minutes, so even with its obviously huge budget, it counts as one of those appealing B-cinema theatrical experiences that I treasure so well! One does occasionally wish for the R-rated version that might have been, in which there are more survivors among the passengers and therefore more potential victims to be bloodily chewed on by lizards and bugs, but there’s an appeal to this trimmer PG-13 iteration too – ha ha, it was a family outing for us, and it never got too gruesome for my 11 year-old! (He’s got a pretty high threshold for that stuff though!)

Altogether it was more straightforward and enjoyable than, say, Jurassic World or any of those recent ones – it was more on the level of Jurassic Park III, another unpretentious 93-minute special! I can’t accuse 65 of excessive originality or style or a very good title, but the premise works and it’s a night out, barely! I give it two mouthfuls of bug goo!

Burl reviews Troll! (2022)

Höch now, it’s Burl, here to review sweet monster madness! Yes, we’re in giant creature territory here, but not in Japan this time, nor even in Korea or North Carolina! No, this monster hails from the northern reaches of our world, up in Norway! Of course we’ve had monster troubles up there before – ha ha, we all remember Trollhunter! Well, here’s a picture in the same vein, and this one is simply called Troll!

It’s not that Empire Picture from 1986 called Troll, the one where Sonny Bono turns into a jungle! No, in fact it's a pretty basic giant monster picture, garnished with a specific mythology and featuring a more human-like monster than usual! The movie reminded me of War of the Gargantuas if it had just the more sympathetic brown gargantua and not the evil green one! Still, the giant troll in this one does, like his grouch-coloured gargantua forbear, munch down on a poor unfortunate guy, eating him up just like a junior mint!

Anyway, the story is pretty simple! After a prelude showing a girl and her father climbing to the top of a Norwegian mountain and talking about the legend of the trolls, we skip to twenty years later, the present day, by which time the girl, Nora Tidemann, now played by Ine Marie Wilmann, has become a professor of paleontology working with The Rocketeer himself, Billy Campbell! When a mountain-drilling project being protested by environmentalists suffers a strange disaster which kills drillers and protesters alike, the Norwegian government puts together a task force which includes the initially baffled Nora!

Turns out the legends her father always talked about are true, and a hundred-meter troll has awakened in a grumpy mood and is wreaking destruction across the countryside! He’s not a destruction-for-the-sake-of-it sort of a monster, but he sure doesn’t shy away from causing carnage either! He’ll kick a house down without thinking twice if the house is in his way, and his melancholy, bulbous-nosed expression stays constant! But he does start to get irritated when they start shooting at him with rockets, ha ha! And who can blame him!

Most of the time is spent with the humans, though, following Nora as she's recruited by the prime minister to help out after an anthropoid form has been spotted in the billowing dust of a panic video! She’s paired up with a nerdy assistant who’s always telling people about his crazy book ideas, then is seconded to a military unit, and it looks like a pace-crippling romantic triangle might develop between Nora, the nerd, and a handsome military man, Kaptein Kristoffer; but thankfully that never happens! The gang visits Nora’s old dad, who’s now a crazed hermit because no one would listen to his troll theories, and there’s some tension between daughter and dad that needs to be worked out!

Meanwhile the troll attacks, or rather strides through, Lillehammer, where pesky helicopters are ringing church bells at him! Though annoyed he takes a moment to save a father and son from certain doom, and this is where everyone, characters and audience alike, realizes the troll’s primary goal actually isn’t to flatten (or occasionally eat) humans! But he doesn’t mind doing it either, and it soon appears that what he really wants is to stomp Oslo! It turns out he’s got his own agenda beyond that, but I’m not saying Oslo also doesn’t get a little stomped on in the process!

In many ways this is a Scandinavianized update of King Kong Lives, ha ha, but luckily they left out most of the stupid stuff! It’s not much more than a standard kaiju, complete with a “let nature be” message, and it has a few monster-less longeurs, but it’s never boring and pretty consistently entertaining! Plus the trick effects are solid, the troll is a sympathetic figure, and the whole thing is played at just the right pitch – not too self-serious, not too self-aware! Sure the characters aren’t much to write home about, some stuff doesn’t make sense, and a few threads are left dangling, but if you like a giant monster movie this ought to scratch the itch! I give Troll two and a half vintage Chevy pick-ups!  

Burl reviews Plane! (2023)

 

Attention passengers, it’s Burl here to review some January schlock! Ha ha, we all know about the grand January tradition the studios have of releasing lower-brow genre movies into the theatres in the turbulent recirculating flow left by the Christmas holidays! January is regularly regarded as a dumping ground for movies that might inadvertently make some money, but which, even if entertaining, aren’t likely to garner much prestige! It’s a long and glorious tradition and I could name plenty of examples from the past: Deep Star Six, The Kindred, Demon Knight, Phantoms – all of these being entertaining genre fare that appeared in the first month of their respective years!

And now, whoosh, here comes Plane! Ha ha, that makes me sound like a caveman who’s just seeing an airplane for the first time; but yes, the movie is actually called Plane! Yes, just Plane, tout court! Less than half of the picture takes place on the titular conveyance, and so the movie might just as well have been called Island, but never mind that for now! The title helps it fit into its paradigm: the ideal January goofnugget! It takes place on New Year’s Eve after all, with many instances of characters wishing a happy same to other characters (almost as frequently as characters exhort one another to “Get down!!!!”), yet it all happens in a tropical locale in which everybody gets hot and sweaty! So on a wintry January day in Canada, you can go off to the theatre with your son and take in a brainless lark and imagine you too are hanging out among the palms!

Unshaven gumdrop Gerard Butler from Olympus Has Fallen plays Torrance, the pilot with a mildly scandalous past thanks to an event in which he used his brawn against a rage-demented passenger! He and a friendly co-pilot played by Yoson An from The Meg are flying from Singapore to Hawaii with a comically small load of passengers when they run up against a storm that knocks their aircraft all a-frizzle! This drawn-out crash scene is maybe the best part of the picture, and once they’re safely down on a Philippines-adjacent island there’s a bit of time to kill before they realize there are violent separatists lurking nearby – the kind who enjoy kidnapping people, holding them for ransom, then shooting them anyway!

The passengers are mostly a bunch of nonentities, but among them is a Canadian criminal called Gaspare being transported by the RCMP back to Toronto for trial! Gaspare is played by Mike Colter from Men In Black 3, and of course once his handcuffs are off he proves to be a resourceful type and handy at pounding separatists with a sledgehammer! It pretty quickly comes down to Torrance and Gaspare trying to make contact with authorities and rescuing the passengers from the clutches of the separatists!

While all this is going on, back in a glossy black chamber somewhere in Manhattan, the head of the airline, Paul Ben-Victor from Metro, calls in a dealing-with-it specialist named Scarsdale, essayed by Tony Goldwyn from Friday the 13^th part VI: Jason Lives, and he in turn calls in a gang of mercenaries to try to find and rescue the castaway passengers! Once these mercenaries have arrived, we get some group shootouts and, eventually, a return to the plane, which proves surprisingly bulletproof while under extended machine gun attack!

Ha ha, like Butler’s _________ Has Fallen movies, this is a sort of throwback to 80s and 90s action! It’s not quite as fun, cheesy, or action-packed as that description might imply, however – aside from the crash, a fair punch-up mid-picture, and the machine gun / plane take-off climax, the movie is largely made up of people sitting around looking glum! The main bad guy glowers but doesn’t make much of an impression, and we never even get a chance to find out what his specific political issues are! Ha ha, aside from his penchant for shooting tourists and missionaries, for all we know maybe he’s not such a bad guy!

Like its 80s and 90s forbears the picture is pretty simple-minded: as simple-minded as its title in fact, but it’s also perfectly amiable – too dumb to offend, too eager-to-please to embrace the mean spiritedness some action pictures have! (Usually a moment in which the likeable co-pilot shows off a photo of his lovely family is a sure harbinger of his death, but not here!) Being a good candidate for dumping-ground release is not a stellar achievement for a movie, but it’s still an achievement, and I didn’t mind paying a few bucks to see this particular achiever! Still, I hope the next movie I take in on the big screen is better! Ha ha, I’ll give Plane two passenger lists and try to book a better flight next time!

Burl reviews Lethal Weapon! (1987)

 

Getting too old for this shit, it’s Burl, here to review 80s buddy-cop carnage for you! Of course there had been buddy cops before this movie came out, and even black and white buddy cops as we have in this picture (Number One with a Bullet, anybody? Ha ha, anybody?), but the success of this particular duo led to an explosion (often literal) of buddy cops – in only the year and change after this one’s release we had alien/human buddy cops in Alien Nation and The Hidden; living/dead buddy cops in Dead Heat; American/Russian buddy cops in Red Heat; natty/slobbo buddy cops in Tango & Cash, and army/civilian buddy cops in The Presidio! And the movie that kicked this genre into high gear? Ha ha, Lethal Weapon, of course!

And as we know, the picture canonized another tradition: setting action movies around Christmas! Earlier action pictures – First Blood, To Live and Die in L.A., Cobra – had already flirted with a touch of noel flavouring, and then Die Hard came along the very next year to solidify the trend, and Die Hard 2 to lacquer it, but I think it was Lethal Weapon that made it a thing! Certainly it popularized the use of incongruous holiday music to make some kind of ironic point! And it goes that extra Christmas mile by casting Phil Spector’s Christmas Album superstar Darlene Love as Danny Glover’s wife!

The setup and story hardly bear repeating, but here goes! Mel Gibson, whom we recall from his roles in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and Conspiracy Theory, plays Martin Riggs, so archetypally the emotionally hollowed-out cop that he seems a parody of the form; and whether he’s putting a gun in his mouth or sharing his dog’s breakfast or acting all bugeyed and crazy, he doesn’t seem much like a real person! This behaviour had more impact back when it was fresh, but it was never very realistic! Meanwhile, Danny Glover, well beloved from his role in The Dead Don’t Die, is Roger Murtaugh, whom I used to think was so old but is only just turning fifty as the picture opens! And just as Riggs is a near-parody, of course Murtaugh is the very model of the too-old-for-this-shit family-man cop still doing the job, but with half an eye on retirement and his driveway watercraft which ought to be named the Midlife Crisis! The introductory scene where he’s relaxing in his bath and the whole family bursts in to give him a birthday party while he’s in his birthday suit always struck me as odd, but I guess that’s the repressed North American in me!

The action is kicked off in the opening moments by a naked lady, zonked on the devil’s dandruff, plummeting to her doom from the top of a luxury tower! This unfortunate lady turns out to be the daughter of none other than Tom Atkins from Halloween III and Night of the Creeps, playing an old pal of Murtaugh’s called Hunsacker! Then we have the obligatory scenes in which Murtaugh meets-cop with Riggs and reluctantly becomes his partner; Riggs acts crazy and near suicidal and Murtaugh becomes upset; and Riggs comes over to the Murtaugh house for dinner and relations between the two buddy cops soften into a true partnership! Ha ha!

The baddies are a bunch of drug-smuggling army fellows led by a pocky old general played by Mitchell Ryan from Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers! The plot particulars are actually a bit murky, and there’s a sense of the filmmakers not really caring much about the mechanics of it, or how Hunsacker’s daughter's death plummet fits in! The important thing is how evil these fellows are, particularly Gary Busey from Silver Bullet playing Mr. Joshua, the general’s right-hand man, who literally offers up his right hand to be burned by a cigarette lighter on the general’s casual instruction just to make a point! And of course, ha ha, there’s perpetual hench Al Leong as Endo, who’s forgotten more about administering pain than the rest of us will ever know! Mr. Joshua’s pain endurance capabilities are not really explored beyond the cigarette lighter scene, and Endo’s legendary talents as, conversely, an inflictor of agony don’t seem to stretch beyond crude car battery electrocution, so in these senses the movie is more talk than walk!

But in other respects it’s a perfectly-wrought 80s action extravaganza, right down to the climactic front yard punchfight, complete with MTV effects provided by a spurting fire hydrant and a hovering helicopter spotlight, and cops kept at bay by only a few words from Glover! Richard Donner, who'd earlier brought us The Omen, directs the thing with about the right amount of flair, and the performances, as clichéd as they may seem to us today, are on point! It hums along like a well-tuned engine, and never mind how sketchy the plot is or how contrived the events! The bad guys all get their just desserts, and then Riggs, who invites himself over for Christmas dinner, presumably gets some dessert too! Ha ha! I give Lethal Weapon two and a half dashboard grenades!

Burl reviews Ronin! (1998)

 

With a screech and a roar and a “Hey you guys!,” it’s Burl here to review some underappreciated 90s stealth Christmas action! It’s a picture I saw and enjoyed on the big screen, and its several scenes of realistic car-crunching chaseology makes good solid sense when you take into account that the picture is a late work from John Frankenheimer, crusty gent and director of Prophecy and The Train! Ha ha, yes, naturally the picture I’m talking about is Ronin!

The movie is all about how things are done, and much less about why they are done! It’s a crime procedural, I guess, and involves a group of folk living on the grey side of the law who gather in France to wrangle a silver case, contents unknown and irrelevant, away from the shady parties who possess it, and get it into the hands of the Irish! Representing the people of the shamrock is Dierdre, played by beauteous Natasha McElhone from The Truman Show, and her crew includes Sam, an American played by Robert De Niro from Mean Streets and Mad Dog and Glory, whom the other characters take to be ex-CIA (but is he ex???); Jean Reno from Godzilla playing Vincent, the man who can get what’s needed; Gregor, a German who used to work for the Russians, played by the Swede Stellan Skarsgard, whom we know from The Hunt for Red October and The Avengers; and the clearly out-of-his-depth Spence, essayed by Sean Bean from How to Get Ahead in Advertising, who’s always good at characters like that, though he can play other types as well!

Ha ha, and we know Bean from GoldenEye of course; and the picture also includes prominent roles for Michael Lonsdale from The Day of the Jackal and Moonraker and Jonathan Pryce from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Tomorrow Never Dies! So there we have a total of three James Bond antagonists in the same movie! Here, one of them plays a bad guy, one a good guy, and one is neither! And there’s also a little smiley cameo appearance from Amidou, whom we might recall from Sorcerer!

The caper involves, or at least results in, several crackerjack car chases, which are without question the highlights of the movie! But with that terrific cast and dialogue from a pseudonymous David Mamet (“You ever kill anybody?” “I hurt somebody’s feelings once”), and a general air of what we might call “invented realism,” the picture is a totally enjoyable bit of non-comic book action! And as I say, like Cobra and Die Hard and Lethal Weapon and Die Hard 2 and To Live and Die in L.A. and Invasion U.S.A., this is an example of 80s Xmas Action – that is, it’s set over the Christmas season and features a few holiday accoutrements, in this case some carolling, a background appearance by Pere Nöel, and a few words of Christmas-related conversation here and there!

It’s hardly a perfect movie, though! It somehow doesn’t fully grip in the way it should, which is probably because it’s so procedural that it doesn’t bother with any of the other niceties of drama, like characters and plot and emotional stakes! It seems at times like an exercise put together by old pros as a display item, for which they concentrated on surface effects rather than substance; but on that surface level it excels! It’s a good, grown-up crime film, sort of a spiritual stepson of Melville’s great policiers, though not their equal, and I’m a fan even as I recognize its unidimensional characters and cereal-box plot! Ha ha, I’m giving Ronin three spilled cups of coffee!