Burl reviews From Beyond! (1986)

Well slap my bucket, it’s Burl! Ha ha, remember how good Re-Animator was? Well, on the basis of that, I recall in the mid-80s becoming very excited at each new Stuart Gordon picture that got mentioned on Fangoria’s Terror Teletype: movies like Dolls and Robo Jox, and the sadly never-to-be made Gris-Gris, and of course the picture under consideration today: another H.P. Lovecraft adaptation, and therefore the most direct follow-up to the great Re-Animator, and therefore the most exciting of them all, From Beyond! Ha ha, I had a one-sheet for this one up on the wall of my teenage bedroom, and it was a prized possession indeed!

The picture begins with a long pre-credit sequence that dramatizes the entirety of the Lovecraft story the movie is based on! Ha ha, we meet young and earnest science assistant Crawford Tillinghast, played by the committed Jeffrey Combs from The Man With Two Brains and Cellar Dweller, and his boss, the voluptuary and radical sybarite Dr. Edward Pretorius, impersonated here very well by Ted Sorel of Basket Case 2 fame, and who, a trivia, was the nephew of famed Universal monster makeup man Jack Pierce! Pretorius has invented a machine, the Resonator, which opens up mutually accessible pathways to normally extra-perceptible dimensions that are populated by monsters!

When a flying eel puts a biting on Tillinghast he knows it’s all gone too far, but before he can destroy the machine Pretorius has his head chomped off, and after a neighbour lady’s dog finds the body and licks the head stump, Tillinghast is thought mad and accused of the murder! (The neighbour lady, it should be noted, is essayed by Bunny Summers from The Kid With the 200 I.Q.!) Cue the arrival of a comely psychiatrist, Dr. Katherine McMichaels, played by Barbara Crampton from Fraternity Vacation and Chopping Mall!

The next step, of course, is to have the putative axe-murderer Tillinghast released into the custody of good Dr. McMichaels so they can return to the Pretorious house and figure out what happened! This may seem an unlikely happenstance, but the authorities aren’t fools: for security they send along an ex-football player-turned-cop called Bubba Brownlee, played by Ken Foree, whom we remember so fondly from shopping centre-based pictures like Dawn of the Dead and Phantom of the Mall! The trio set up camp in the house, and as soon as dials are fiddled with and giant tuning forks start glowing purple, the extradimensional creatures show up, accompanied by a now-bestial Pretorius!

Things don’t go well from there – there are locust attacks, an encounter with bondage gear, and a giant lamprey eats off Tillinghast’s hair! Moreover, pineal glands start acting up and an officious doctor played by Stuart Gordon’s wife Carolyn Purdy-Gordon has her brains sucked out through her eye socket! Yuck! This is a scene which was depicted in the pages of Fangoria, but was cut out of all prints of the movie until fairly recently! I was glad to finally see it, but I have to admit the scene is gross!

And what of the movie itself? I like the creatures a lot, Combs is a nervous pleasure as ever, and it’s always terrific to see Foree on screen! Plus I like the pink-and-purple colour scheme (popular hues for Lovecraft apparently – remember The Color Out of Space?), and the craft across the board is very strong for a low-budget horror picture! And yet it doesn’t measure up to its predecessor! The story is fairly limp, the characters not terribly well-developed, and there are a few ropey trick effects! I don’t accuse the picture of being overly ambitious – ha ha, I admire ambition in low-budget pictures! – but they might have bit off a little more than they could chew with some of the dimensional effects!

Still, that’s not a big problem; the trouble really is the “That’s it?” feeling we’re left with at the end of the picture! It gets darker than I remembered – the conclusion has something of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre feeling, or maybe more of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 feeling, ha ha! But despite any shortcomings, the pleasures here are many; and if it’s not a revelatory experience like Re-Animator was, it’s nevertheless a fine chunk of 80s horror with some terrific monsters! I give From Beyond two and a half ill-fitting bald caps!

Burl reviews Leviathan! (1989)

 

Speaking bubbly, it’s Burl, ducking my head beneath the waves to bring you a review of yet another of the underwater monster movies of 1989! You’ll remember it well, I’m sure: in January we got Deep Star Six, in August we plunged down The Abyss, and somewhere in between, in around March of that year I believe, came this picture, Leviathan!

As has likely been noted by every single other reviewer, if you took Alien and The Thing, mashed them together, plunged them to the bottom of the sea, and made them not very good, you’d get Leviathan! Ha ha, it’s amazing how precisely the picture tries to ape those two predecessors! It’s shameless, really; and then you add on the fact that it was only one of several underwater creature pictures that year, and it starts to seem pretty darn derivative!

Our characters are undersea miners nearly at the end of their ninety-day tour of duty! The boss man is Beck, played by Peter Weller from Buckaroo Banzai and Robocop, and his character note – his single character note – is that he’s not an administrator by trade or avocation, but a geologist, and struggles with the people-managing parts of his job! Richard Crenna from First Blood plays the Wilford Brimley part of the doctor who, on realizing that the problem won’t be cured simply by the application of a little Bon-Zoe, comes to believe the goings-on at the undersea mine must be kept at all costs from infecting the rest of the world!

But wait, just what are the goings-on? Well, the resident jackanapes, an unpleasant, bathrobe-wearing workplace harasser and all-around reprobate called Sixpack, mysteriously tolerated by the rest of the crew and played by Daniel Stern from C.H.U.D., discovers a sunken Russian vessel called Leviathan, and filches some vodka from it! He and a lady called Bo, essayed by Lisa Eilbacher from 10 to Midnight and Beverly Hills Cop, sip from the vodka flask and soon start growing scales and other assorted bodily unpleasantnesses! The rest of the crew, which includes Amanda Pays from The Kindred (in which, you’ll recall, she turns into a fish mutant, ha ha!), Ernie Hudson from Ghostbusters, Hector Elizondo from Pocket Money and The Fat Black Pussycat, and Michael Carmine from Invasion U.S.A., realize, to their horror, that their former colleagues are blobbing together and becoming weird bloodthirsty monsters!

Meg Foster from They Live plays the evil company woman with whom Beck occasionally teleconferences; she’s always hanging up on him and is of no help anyway, so the miners arm themselves with an assortment of makeshift weapons, including a flamethrower, I suppose because Alien and The Thing had them too, a highly impractical-looking saw, a fire axe, and also a hedge trimmer for some reason! The biology of the monsters is pretty confusing: there’s the blobbing together, but also presumably some kind of cell-like division, which, if that happens, is kept off screen! Tentacles that are chopped off swim around and grow into new monsters, or expel toothy eel things that look like the monster from Parasite! In short, you never know how many monsters there are, what they might look like, or what needs to be done for the monster peril to be defeated!

All the monster scenes are terribly staged and incomprehensibly edited, and one gets the sense that thanks to this incompetence, a lot of the creature effects crew’s hard work was elided, obscured, and otherwise ignored! Behind the megaphone is George P. Cosmatos, who brought us Rambo and Cobra (or at least so the credits claim) and directed Weller in a rat picture called Of Unknown Origin, and he brings one or two moments of style to the movie but otherwise works in a very static, pep-free mode! The underwater stuff is done in the same dry-studio way they did that old Irwin Allen show about the bottom of the sea, but, with some fine camerawork and by sending the occasional big-jawed fish across the screen on a string, the effect is not too bad!

The cast, as you can see, is pretty great, and they certainly spent some money on the sets and trick effects! They might have spent more time on the body horror aspect before getting to the monsters, and would that they’d given the characters more than one single characteristic each (Sixpack is an unpleasant horndog; Pays loves money; Hudson hates waves; Eilbacher has nice breasts; Carmine, in the role of DeJesus, is obsessed with Alpine skiing; Elizondo, the shop steward, is a by-the-book union man; and Crenna’s doctor is never around when you need him), but I remember having fun with this in the theatre, as I had fun with all the underwater movies that year, so I’m going to give Leviathan one and a half tube worms!

Burl reviews Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday! (1993)

 

Hello all you toast pops, it’s Burl with a review of what may not have been the final Friday - ha ha, another duplicitous subtitle! - but will be the final Friday the 13^th movie review by me, since I think I’ve reviewed every other one of them already, even that terrible remake-boot from a decade ago! This picture is called Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, and of course it was not the final one, since there was still Jason X to come and of course Freddy Vs. Jason, which I don’t count as an entry in either series, or as a movie at all really!

This picture was the first F13 made after Paramount Pictures finished out their run with the disastrous Jason Takes Manhattan, then handed the series over to New Line Cinema, a.k.a. The House That Freddy Built! Anything New Line decided to do with it had to be an improvement, and what they decided was to ape one of their own earlier productions, The Hidden, and make it so the evil and literal heart of Jason could hop orally from body to body, just as The Hidden’s bug-alien did!

The beginning is pretty clever: a situation that seems specially designed to attract a Jason attack turns out to be just that, and the would-be victim is an FBI agent with a battalion of snipers backing her up! Jason is fired upon and finally blown to flinders, and his bits and pieces end up in the federal morgue! There a luckless coroner is hypnotized by the beating heart, and once he disgustingly scarfs it down, he becomes possessed by the murderous spirit of the Crystal Lake fiend and sets about finding some campers to kill!

Meanwhile, there are characters! I know what you’re saying: why do there always have to be characters! Ha ha! Here we stray into territory already staked out by the lesser Halloween pictures: it’s all about family, it seems, and several of the personages we meet here are Voorheeses! A helpful bounty hunter played by Steven Williams from House supplies plenty of goofy exposition, though how he has come by all this information we never find out! Our hero is a glasses nerd who is blamed for several of Jason’s crimes, and so cops, including a sheriff played by Billy Green Bush from Critters, who’s usually terrific but is here a nonentity, are chasing him down! The glasses nerd’s ex-girlfriend is a Voorhees, and so, ipso facto, is their baby!

Yes, a baby figures in, just as in Halloween 6! It’s a real cute one too, but thankfully is not placed in too much jeopardy! By the time hands come reaching out of the ground to drag Jason to hell (at least the main title is not a lie, ha ha), the baby has been rendered safe, and instead of the intimation that it will one day take up the mantle of its demented great-uncle, the finale is lumbered with a punchline that sets up the battle between Jason and a certain stripe-sweatered cash cow that would take place nearly a decade later!

I saw this picture in the theatre, as I recall, and I believe at the same cinema and with the same girl as I saw Children of the Corn II! Ha ha, it’s amazing what I subjected people to back then! Still, it’s hardly the worst of the Friday the 13^th pictures: it contains a few recognizably human moments along with the gnarly gore, and there’s mild imagination on display here and there! It’s not just pokings, you see: an unpleasant diner owner played by Rusty Schwimmer of Sleepwalkers, for example, catches an elbow to the mouth, which results in an amusing and largely bloodless Special Makeup Effect making it look like she just ate the world’s sourest lemon! Ha ha! And there’s a pretty horrific meltdown too!

But a lot of it simply refuses to make sense, or to cohere in any way! One of the great virtues of the series is its simplicity: a killer stalks the night and kills campers! When they try to complicate matters it only messes things up and shows off the profound stupidity of the whole enterprise! That happens with Jason X and it certainly happens here! I’m going to give Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday one and a half Jasonburgers!

Burl reviews Galaxy of Terror! (1981)

By grimbus and by garr it’s Burl, here with a review of one of Roger Corman’s early-80s sci-fi/horror hybrids! You all know about such gems as Forbidden World and Humanoids From the Deep, and you may even know about Space Raiders, but the picture I’m reviewing for you today, Galaxy of Terror, is in many ways the most special of them all!

Ha ha, when this one came out I tried to go see it with my friend Dave! We were both little kids, but we loved horror movies; and, as Galaxy of Terror was showing in a multiplex and was rated R of course, we bought tickets for a Rocky Horror Picture Show revival then tried to sneak across the hall into the cinema where the movie we really wanted to see was playing! But halfway through the opening credits we felt strong hands clamp on our shoulders, and two burly ushers hoisted us up, marched us to the door, and tossed us out into the street to roll in the gutter! It's too bad, because what a victory it would have been to see this beauty on the big screen!

It’s a Alien knock-off, of course, but only to a point! We open in the office of The Master, a fellow with a glowing red head and the voice of that fine gent Ray Walston, famous for his roles in Silver Streak and Johnny Dangerously! He’s talking to an old space witch played by Mary Ellen O’Neill from Van Nuys Blvd., and he decides the thing to do is to round up a spaceship crew and head to Morganthus, a mystery planet where a previous spaceship crew has disappeared! Thanks to the enthusiasm of spaceship captain Grace Zabriskie, whom we recall from Drop Zone and many fine David Lynch pictures, the characters find themselves on the nightmare planet in no time flat!

Our hero is an upright fellow named Cabren, played by Edward Albert from When Time Ran Out and Getting Even! Ha ha, everybody has lame space-names, like Baelon, the mildly antagonistic character played by erotic film director Zalman King, or empathy-lady Aluma, played by Joanie herself, Erin Moran! Bernard Behrens from The Changeling and The Man With Two Brains is an old man along for the ride; Taafe O’Connor from Hot Chili is the buxom lady with a fear of worms; Robert Englund, Freddy himself from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, is a little guy called Ranger; and Sid Haig, whom you surely remember as the Righteous Brothers’ drummer in Beach Ball, is the virtually mute Quuhod! Ha ha, Quuhod! And Ray Walston is along as the cook, who by an amazing coincidence has the same voice as The Master!

It turns out the planet, and in particular a big pyramid located there, is a place that makes manifest the worst fears of anyone who enters! The first to go is a whinyman played by Jack Blessing from Summer School, who gets eaten by a big doodlebug and we’re glad to be rid of him! The old commander guy goes down a wormhole and is sucked dry by vermiforms; Sid Haig has his beloved crystals turn on him and his own severed arm delivers the death-stab; Zabriskie’s Captain Trantor is incinerated; and poor Erin Moran ends up getting crushed by cable snakes in a crawlhole! Ha ha, yikes! But the worst and the goofiest of all is of course the famous maggot assault, which makes neither psychological nor physiological sense but was intended only as an over-the-top outrage designed by Corman to attract daring or depraved viewers!

There’s some good squoochy gore in here, and mixing this together with ambitious low-budget special effects, James Cameron’s tenpenny production design (and his shock-dancing maggots, ha ha), that stellar oddball cast, and some gloriously dumb metaphysics, we get a heady brew indeed! The movie cares not a fig about making sense, but it does deliver a parade of trick effects you will surely enjoy! I don’t care for the maggot rape, nor for the sensibility that concocted it, but it’s outlandish enough to be more or less ignored, and I’m only glad the actress escaped being crushed by the giant worm prop! Galaxy of Terror is not a movie for everyone, but it’s got a strange hold over me, so with some reservations I award it three redheads!

Burl reviews Night Beast! (1982)

 

Dateline: Baltimore! Yes, it’s Burl, returning to the wooded suburbs of that Eastern metropolis to review a work by its most famous filmmaker! Now some might say the filmmaker I allude to must be John Waters, while other, more mainstream cineastes may insist upon Barry Levinson! However, the hep among us know that I can only be referring to Don Dohler, who brought us the magic of Fiend, and then, by some unknowable wizardry, filigreed together a space monster epic called Night Beast!

Ha ha, I’ve long enjoyed this little picture, I must say, so I may not be the most objective of critics! I can still recall an all-night festival of VHS viewing held in my basement when I was about 14, in which I and a few friends watched this picture along with Taxi Driver (which we were all seeing for the first time), The Demon Lover, and one other fine film, its title lost to the mists of time! Night Beast is no Taxi Driver, but rather the simple tale of an alien with a prolapsed face and a silver jumpsuit who crash lands on Earth and starts killing the local people with either his ray gun or his fearsome teeth and claws!

The local sheriff, a Bob Ross-looking fellow called Jack Cinder, along with his contextually comely deputy Lisa and a pair of scientists, do their best to pursue and destroy the invader! Ha ha, the head scientist is played by Maryland’s version of Bea Arthur, and her assistant, Steven, is none other than the King of Baltimore himself, George Stover! Ha ha! Of course, we know George from his appearances in Female Trouble and Jan-Gel: The Beast of the East; and another familiar face from the Dohler stock company is the beastly Don Leifert, who played Mr. Longfellow in Fiend and here is a monstrous motorbiker called Drago! One eagerly anticipates Drago’s demise at the paws of the lamprey-faced alien, but he tastes the cruel blast of buckshot instead!

Also entertaining are the corrupt mayor and his addle-pated blonde ladyfriend! Ha ha, they both come to sticky ends (very sticky, considering the maraschino juice they used for blood, ha ha) when the alien busts into their house and makes mincemeat of them! Many of these characters have the same names and are played by the same actors as in an earlier Dohler picture called The Alien Factor, but all of them treat this new alien invasion as though it’s the first one they’ve ever experienced, so maybe they’re not supposed to be the same characters after all! Ha ha, such are the vicissitudes of the Dohlerverse!

Here’s an interesting thing! The synth score of Night Beast was in part composed by J.J. Abrams, director of Super 8, and one assumes his work on this picture informed his own later stab at the invading-alien genre, ha ha, and the amateur moviemakers of the picture may well have been inspired by Dohler and his gang! The ugly night beast himself was designed by a fellow named John Dods, who did up the trick effects in The Deadly Spawn, and that really underlines the connection I think the two pictures have!

In the end the characters crib an electricity-based trick from The Thing From Another World to get rid of their unwanted visitor, but not before he’s raygunned dozens of people, including the director’s children, and savaged many others! There’s plenty of great goopy gore on display, and lots of cheap optical effects, and while the alien zapping scenes get a little repetitive, the picture is never boring! It’s eighty rural minutes of rubes-vs.-monster action, with a little bohankie and a lot of tomato paste thrown in, and how can you go wrong with that! It is, in its modest way, an exemplar of low-budget 80s genre filmmaking, and the poor script, indifferent direction and variable acting are all a part of that! Perhaps it could use a little more Evil Dead-style pep, and maybe it’s not the most original screen narrative ever produced, but gosh darn it the thing has heart, and I like it! I give Night Beast two and a half salt-and-pepper afros!

Burl reviews The House by the Cemetery! (1981)

 

Ha ha and marinara sauce, it’s Burl, here with a review of some pastaland slaughter! Yes, today I’m reviewing a picture made by that much-loved auteur Lucio Fulci, the man who brought us City of the Living Dead and many other movies! Ha ha, and not just gory zombie pictures either - he was a filmmaker for all seasons! But his horror pictures are really his trademark, and in this one, The House by the Cemetery, he really went all out with not just the tomato paste, but the alarming existentialism as well!

I was slightly reluctant to watch this movie again! I last saw it when I was a teenager, but I could remember that it featured a child in peril, and now that I have a child of my own, just a little older now than the one in the movie, I don’t have a very high tolerance for scenes such as that! But the kid in the movie is an eerie looking little moppet called Bob, and I thought maybe, just maybe, he would end up being more the source of the terror than the recipient!

Ha ha, no! The entire last half of the movie, it seems, is made up of scene after scene of Bob being remorselessly terrorized by a zombielike creature who resembles Admiral Ackbar’s disreputable second cousin! This entity is none other than the hideous Dr. Freudstein, a scientist from long ago who has discovered that a steady program of murder can keep him alive, if not especially handsome! So he hangs out in the basement of his old house and murders whoever he can!

The family in the house consists of a bookish scientist who’s there to follow up on the work of the scientist who lived there before and was goaded into suicide by the continuing presence of Freudstein; his wife, played by that familiar face of Italian horror, Catriona MacColl; and poor, unearthly little Bob! There’s also a babysitter who seems to have some agenda of her own, but who is beheaded before she has a chance to enact it! Of course it all ends in a strange, seemingly downbeat ending that’s nevertheless open to some interpretation!

Ha ha! No, I didn’t like the excessive terrorization of little Bob, but outside of that, I must say that Fulci did some good work here, not least in the hiring of his technicians! Sergio Salvati, the cinematographer, provides some marvelous imagery, and good old Gianetto De Rossi does up the trick gore effects in a way few others have managed! Fulci himself weaves an atmosphere of increasing dread and baneful inevitability; not in the relatively subtle way of, say, an Algernon Blackwood story, but with his usual dark sledgehammer lumpiousness! I didn’t enjoy the experience of watching this picture, but I recognize its place in the pantheon! I give The House by the Cemetery two throat rippings!

Burl reviews The Stuff! (1985)

 

Glip glap glorp, it’s Burl, here with a dessert recipe for you courtesy of Mr. Larry Cohen! Ha ha, move that light! Yes, as you probably already know, I’m fond of Larry Cohen and his pictures, even though many of them aren’t very good, and this one in particular is, well, flawed! But as with all of his movies, however technically inept the may occasionally be, or how unformed the narrative, there are compensations both conceptual and performative, and frankly this picture, The Stuff, needs all the compensations it can get!

The idea can hardly be beat, ha ha! We open in an industrial setting, where a worker espies a strange creamy substance bubbling from the ground! Of course his first instinct is to take a big fingerful of this goop and jam it in his mouth, and, finding it delicious, take it to market as The Stuff!

Before you know it The Stuff is the newest taste sensation, replacing ice cream, whipped cream, icing, or any other sweet paste! The establishment confectionary companies aren’t any too pleased about this, and they hire an eccentric industrial espionage agent, Mo Rutherford, so-called, he frequently explains, because whenever he gets something, like money, he always would like some mo of it! Equally unhappy with The Stuff is a little Long Island boy who sees it move in his fridge, and the advertising lady who came up with the dynamite campaign for the uncanny treat once she learns (and easily accepts) the truth about it - namely, that it’s a sentient slime which will hex the eater’s brain and, eventually, grotesquely rupture his body!

So there you go, ha ha, primo material for horror, action, weird trick makeup effects, and social satire; and all of this The Stuff has, but in very budget amounts! Of course this is fair because it was a very budget production, though it must be said here and now that there are some excellent trick effects in it and some obvious but amusing old fashioned techniques on view, like the old spinning set routine or the forced perspective shots! These things give the picture a pleasantly old-fashioned feel!

Cohen was always good at putting together marvelous New York casts, and he does again here! Michael Moriarty, who, believe the hype, is very good in Q, is Mo; Andrea Marcovicci from The Hand is the advertising lady, Nicole; and then Garrett Morris from Motorama (but who isn’t from Motorama, ha ha!) shows up playing an excitable cookie magnate who suffers a wide-mouth demise that looked a lot better in the pages of Fangoria than it does in the movie! Near the end, when Paul Sorvino turns up as a right-wing cock-a-doodle-doo, we get some satirizing of the demented-patriot mindset, as though satirizing American consumerism and diet were not enough for one picture!

I guess the slapdash way Cohen put this together got under my skin a little, ha ha, because I believe he knew perfectly well how to make coherent movies, but so often he just didn’t bother! We find this syndrome in God Told Me To, in which it sort of works because the material is so weird, and in A Return to Salem’s Lot, where it doesn’t so much; but it especially seems the case here! There are explanatory factors: for one, the ambition and the budget didn’t exactly match up, and I understand there was post-production monkeying from the distribution company!

Of course the blame for the movie’s many flaws - the inconsistent acting, the confounding mise-en-scene, the chicken-with-its-head-cut-off storytelling, the whole impossible tanker-truck scene - rests with Cohen, but then so do the virtues! The killer dessert angle is marvelous; there are funny bits throughout; and the supporting cast, including Patrick O’Neal from Silent Night, Bloody Night and The Stepford Wives, Danny Aiello from Radio Days and The Protector, Rutanya Alda from Amityville II: The Possession and Black Widow, and, in cameos, Brooke Adams from The Dead Zone and (appropriately) Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Laurene Landon from Armed Response and Maniac Cop, Abe Vigoda from Death Car on the Freeway, and even Clara Peller from Moving Violations, is truly unique!

I guess whether you like The Stuff or not rests largely on whether you like Cohen and his crazy movies or not! I’m highly sympathetic to them, and him - I was sad when he died, prematurely it seemed to me! - and I also have some pleasant teenage memories connected with the movie! I’m going to give The Stuff two big spoonfuls!

Burl reviews Humanoids From the Deep! (1980)

Blub-blub, it’s Burl, here with monster terror from beneath the waves! It’s New World Pictures time, and more specifically it’s one of their early-80s monster pictures, like Galaxy of Terror and Forbidden World, the kind of thing they were loading full of gore and monsters and nudity and all the stuff that the drive-in patrons of the day truly appreciated! The picture in question is none other than the notorious Humanoids From the Deep!

Now, ha ha, I’ll get into the major notoriety issues later, but first we should address that inaccurate title! For, while the monsters do indeed swim and come up from the water, they never seem to get very deep, and they certainly don’t live in the depths! No, they dwell in the caves and indents of the Pacific Northwest coast, specifically around the small fishing town of Noyo, home of the Salmon Fest!

Doug McClure from Tapeheads and 52 Pick Up is the fisherman hero, a little reminiscent of the Tom Atkins character in The Fog; and while he has an appealing teddy bear presence, by the climax he’s getting some pretty weird ideas! Anyway, it seems that the fishing around Noyo has been poor of late, and meanwhile a big company is thinking of opening a cannery in the area! Most of the townsfolk, including the town jerk played by Vic Morrow, are for the cannery, but the local Indigenous population doesn’t want their land appropriated and their waters polluted! It’s a reasonable position, but tensions are at a boiling point, and when something kills all the dogs who hang out at the pier, a big fistfight is the result!

Most of the actors have to spend the rest of the picture with bruise and abrasion makeups on their faces as a result of this fistfight! They all putt-putt around in little boats with tiny Johnson motors on them, while Morrow and his boys spy and plot strategies against the Indigenous folks! Meanwhile, humanoids created by the young, hungry, and unstoppable trick effects genius Rob Bottin are popping up here and there, slashing at the menfolk with their big long arms and forcing themselves upon the community’s ample stock of young women! For a movie directed by a woman, Barbara Peeters, it seems awfully rapey, but thankfully these scenes - which, indeed, may have been added later by male filmmakers, thus the controversy - are displayed in quick cuts and without much detail; but they’re still most unsavory!

After McClure, his buddy Johnny Eagle, and the lady scientist from the canning company played by Ann Turkel have an encounter with the fishmen and manage to kill a few of them and bring one back to the town, it becomes apparent what scale (ha ha!) of problem Noyo has! Turkel admits that her salmon experiments must have gone terribly wrong! Urgent, immediate action is clearly required, so she shows her new friends a film about frogs! But in the meantime Noyo’s Salmon Festival is about to commence, with the funfair action on the harborside pier, and the local radio announcer celebrating by pronouncing the L in “salmon;” and the next thing you know humanoids are busting up all over, slaughtering folk, slashing at them, pulling off their heads, or just plain ripping off their brassieres! It’s the Corman exploitation philosophy in a seven-minute nutshell, and on some level you’ve simply got to admire it! And Peeters carries it all off with real conviction, ha ha!

Not everything makes sense, though! McClure’s idea to firehose fuel all over the place and set the harbor adjacent to the funfair on fire is a decidedly odd one, and doesn’t help things in any way! Is it an attempt to burn up the creatures, or merely to distract them? He manages to shoot one or two humanoids, but otherwise this supposed hero is virtually useless!

And then there’s the footage Peeters didn’t even shoot - the extra added rape stuff, and the bellybusting birth scene at the end! The knowledge that these were added by male filmmakers after the real director, a woman, was given a pat on the head and told to go home gives the whole thing a distinctly skeevy, unpleasantly old-fashioned edge! But at the same time, if you make the effort, it’s possible to watch Humanoids from the Deep and see the marvelously unpretentious B-movie Peeters intended to make! It’s well-crafted, decently acted, and punches well above its weight in areas such as James Horner's score and Bottin's trick makeup effects! Ha ha, I give Humanoids from the Deep two groovy brown ca-trucks!

Burl reviews The Rejuvenator! (1988)

By headbulbs, it’s Burl! I’m here to review another gloopy monster mess from the 80s, ha ha, that breed of picture I love so well in some strange way! These rubber classics usually have a lot of goo in them, a little to a lot of blood, and maybe a creature or two! From Beyond might be the exemplar of the form, or maybe Evil Dead 2, but there are lower shelves too, where you find The Kindred and The Outing and Night Beast and C.H.U.D.!

Well, I’d seen all those in my teenage movie watching years, but never caught up with The Rejuvenator, which is the picture I’m talking about now! I've always been a bit curious about it - the fact that it had a credit for Special Makeup Effects on the VHS cover was, I believed, an auspicious omen! And indeed, Ed French, who got the makeup effects credit, certainly must have put in some extra hours  on this one, so bra-zos, French and crew, bra-zos!

For this is by all means an effects picture, or at least it becomes one rather late in the game! Our situation is simple: an obsessive scientist and his assistant are working on a youth serum in a lab filled with TVs, and the TVs and everything else are funded by a rich Norma Desmond-type lady, who declares she’s sick and tired of waiting around in her big richlady bed and she wants the operation NOW! The doctor, who exhibits slightly more principle than most mad scientists of this type, warns of certain dangers, but an angry dowager ultimatum is made! (The old version of the lady is played by Jessica Dublin, who played a similar rich lady who gets her head chopped off by a bulldozer in that unpleasant Greek picture Island of Death! She was also in Fellini Satyricon, Visconti’s The Damned, and several Troma films! Ha ha, what a career!)

Of course the operation at first appears to be a success, and the elderly doyenne emerges from her bandages as a pretty younger lady! In celebration the rejuvinatrix and her doctor enjoy a romantic date in which they dance to circus music as first petals and later sparkles rain down upon them from the sky! Then the doughy doctor gets a boob-grabbing love scene with his patient, ha ha, as the vaguely Germanic manservant, the sort of butler who wears a nightdress to bed, glowers in the corner!

But right away after it’s back to the lab for the doc! “We’ve got to find a way to synthesize the serum!” he cries several times to his ladynerd assistant, Stella! (Stella is tall and serious, and talks to herself a lot, and of course nurses a crush on her fiveheaded boss; and by the third act I was a bit in love with her! Ha ha!) The rejuvinatrix regresses, but she doesn’t turn back into the old lady, but into a brain munching creature! For you see, the serum comes from human brains!

The story ostensibly comes from Simon Nuchtern, who brought us Silent Madness, but really it comes from Roger Corman's 1959 picture The Wasp Woman! Ha ha, it’s not an original tale! But it’s told with some occasional style, thanks to the blue gels the cinematographer was sure to include in his kit, and to some nicely chosen locations! Opportunities for real suspense and horror are largely squandered however, and the picture spins its wheels for a long time, with repetitive scenes of the doctor working in his lab or receiving unwelcome visits from Dr. Germain! Dr. Germain is played by an actor who might be the poor man’s Edmund Purdom or Dan O’Herlihy, but still delivers one of the most on-point performances in the picture!

By the last act the carnage begins! The rejuvinatrix goes out to a club to see the Poison Dollys (an all-girl band, like L7 if L7 were terrible!), where she dances and develops a case of grosshand! Next thing you know she grows a giant purple brain and goes on a rampage: slashing a nurse, ripping through an orderly, twisting the head off a nosy security guard and popping the top off of Stella’s head as though she were a bottle of cherry soda! Finally her big head goes slimy-berserk and starts firing pus everywhere! Ha ha!

It’s a picture that suffers from many debits: poor scripting, hacky editing, mostly indifferent direction, a pep-free first hour! But it livens up toward the end, and there’s some ambition on display throughout, for which the filmmakers are to be commended! It couldn't be more a product of 1988 if Dan Quayle had a cameo, and I give The Rejuvenator one and a half inflating faces!

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 The House on Tombstone Hill! (1988)

It’s Burl with another cheap horror movie for you! This one is called The House on Tombstone Hill, but it’s really called Dead Dudes in the House! Ha ha, but I’m going to call it The House on Tombstone Hill, simply because I much prefer that title!

Nevertheless, Dead Dudes in the House is a fairly accurate summation of the goings-on in this picture! One dude has bought himself an old house, and has somehow convinced a number of other dudes, along with two ladies, to come and help him fix the place up! But, ha ha, when the biggest jerk among the dudes breaks a small tombstone he finds outside the place, he awakens the spirit of a dude in old lady makeup, who I think was supposed to be an actual old lady, or anyway the ghost of one! Supernatural forces are truly at work here, ha ha! Quickly the doors close, the windows become unbreakable, the shutters flap shut, and all the dudes and dudettes are trapped in the house with the old manlady!

Well, the manlady gets to work, luring the dudes one by one down shadowy corridors or up rickety ladders, and when she gets them where she wants them, it’s time for sadism! Yes, she’s a particularly mean old slasher ghost, pinning down her victims with scratch awls, chopping off half their hands before spearing them with pipes, that sort of thing! Ha ha, thanks to the work of Ed French, who startled us also in C.H.U.D., Breeders and Creepshow 2, it gets pretty gory, and they really go the extra mile on the spurting blood in this picture!

More dudes show up, more or less randomly, and have their own encounters with the old manlady! Meanwhile her victims come back to life as murderous talking zombies, who are just as eager to kill the live dudes and dudettes as the old lady is! Like her, they seem imbued with a supernatural strength and resilience, but they are not invulnerable! Neither, as it turns out, is the old manlady, but she holds up pretty well!

The back half of this picture is a slightly repetitive series of fights between the dwindling gang and the ever-increasing cohort of zombies! Luckily the zombies never attack en masse; it would be a much shorter, but probably more thrilling, movie if they did! There is an awful lot of bopping and thwacking and biffing and clobbering, and one fellow carries a four wood around with him as his weapon! Ha ha, I guess they are after all a pretty preppie bunch of dudes!

The picture proceeds with the teensiest amount of wit and a ha’penny’s worth of style, but that’s still more than I was expecting, and is enough to set it apart from other cheapie scare pictures! The location they used was pretty good too - the house is big enough and old enough and ugly enough to make itself a character, though every room on the inside looks alike, which contributes to the decidedly repetitive nature of the film! But we feel trapped in there as much as the characters do, and when one of the sash windows does finally open, we know, having seen Superstition and The Boogey Man, that one shouldn’t linger half in and half out of a haunted house window! Ha ha, the window gets tired of the guy’s dawdling and simply eats him!

It’s got some entertainment value, and the old manlady, as relentless as the Terminator, is a daunting creation! For punching above its weight, even if slightly, I give The House on Tombstone Hill two homemade saw blade knives!

Burl reviews Forever Evil! (1987)

Hi everybody, it’s Burl here with a new movie review! It’s high time I reviewed Forever Evil for you: a movie which, with its 107 minute running time (epic for a little regional low-budget horror picture) and its endless scenes of chat, well earns its title!

The tale is set in and around Houston, Texas, because that’s where the filmmakers lived! Our main character, Marc Denning, is played by Red Mitchell from The Outing and Night Game, and looks a little like Patton Oswalt mixed with Samwise Gamgee from The Lord of the Rings, with just a touch of Jack Black sprinkled in! Marc and his friends are making a weekend retreat to celebrate the completion of some new device invented by Marc and his brother, but the weekend turns sour when everyone but Marc is killed!

It’s pretty gruesome actually, because the first victim is Marc’s pregnant ladyfriend, who is found in the shower with the fetus ripped out of her! Ahh, yuck! The other pals are found with various fatal cuts and gouges, and some unseen creature with glowing red eyes seems to be prowling about! Marc gets his jeans shredded by the beast and must run around for the next fifteen minutes with hilariously shredded pants flapping around his legs! A zombie wearing a string tie appears and gets his eye gouged out, and finally Marc escapes - only to be run over by a car! Ha ha, but he survives!

In the ensuing investigation, Marc makes a new friend named Leo, who, true to his name, is a Law Enforcement Officer! He also meets a lady named Reggie, who, it transpires, is the sole survivor of an earlier, very similar massacre! And now comes the investigation, which should be the most boring part of the picture, but I love this kind of thing when it’s shot on 16mm film and acted out by competent regional players! Marc and Reggie, in the company of the skeptical Leo, discover the whole crazy thing revolves around a Lovecraftian Old God called Yog-Kothag and a local realtor who appears to be murdering people in an attempt to bring this evil demon back to life!

By now Marc has a head full of cracklin’ bran and a new look in which he wears a suit jacket, a pullover and a long black scarf, and limps around on a cane! Leo, who wears a three piece suit without a tie, declares “You’re lettin’ this Yog-Kothag thing get to you! Ha ha!” Shortly thereafter  the forces of evil first steal Leo's nice old car and then kill him, so Marc trades in his college instructor style for olive drab weekend warrior garb, grabs some popguns, and straps on his invention, which turns out to be a grappling hook that shoots out from a Batman-style wrist contraption! Ha ha, Reggie dons her khakis too, and they’re ready for anti-Yog action!

The string-tie zombie reappears, and the evil realtor admits that the zombie, at his direction, has been the one putting a poking on folks! “I’m a busy man,” he explains! “I don’t have time to go around killing people!” Ha ha! Though Marc and Reggie dole out a good deal of punishment to this cracker zombie, it proves hard to get rid of! Well, then there’s a small twist at the climax and the forever evil finally comes to an end!

Now, I can’t say this is a good movie exactly, but, like some other nominally boring regional horror pictures I could name (The Devonsville Terror comes to mind, or Fiend), it’s perfectly enjoyable if you enter into it in the proper spirit! There’s some inventiveness to the plotting, though not much, and a nice variety of spooky effects; but on the down side there’s perhaps a bit too much fetus-ripping for ol’ Burl’s taste! The trick effects involving the demon fetus are fakey enough that it’s not too bad, though! There's also a fantastic moment involving a paperweight that you will know when you see it! Altogether it’s a nicely ambitious bit of semi-amateur genre filmmaking, and I give Forever Evil two worthless old Stu-dee-bakers!

Burl reviews Black Mask! (1996)

Well chop my socks, it’s Burl, here to review up some all-new nonsense action! Now, I say nonsense action, but doesn’t Black Mask, the movie under review today, really fit into the Ridiculous Action category, I hear you ask? Shouldn’t it be mounted along the Via Appia with its fellows, among them the equally guilty Raw Force and Deadly Prey? Ha ha, no I say, and I say again no! While certainly ridiculous in parts, and not lacking in pep, Black Mask, for better or for worse, lacks that certain extra edge of Total Ridiculousness!

But enough of trying to categorize it! Black Mask is a Jet Li extravaganza featuring Jet as an extraordinarily bifurcated character: at once an inhumanly violent, chemically altered supersoldier unmade and re-created in a lab so as to be free of pain, empathy, and emotion of any kind, while capable of killing enemies by the dozen in a thousand different ways; and a soft-spoken, peace-loving, flower-sniffing librarian who only wants to be left alone! Ha ha! And the split between his dual natures seems to trouble him not a whit!

But his fellow supersoldiers are not so complacent! They feel the urge for revenge upon those who experimented on them, and for this they seem to blame just about everybody! So the drug lords, the cops, random doctors and nurses, and really just anyone who gets in the way are destined to become the victims of the special commando squad! Ha ha, and they come up with some pretty gruesome ways of dispatching their victims, like the heart-bomb, or the acid sprinklers!

There are also plenty of punchfights, of course, and very dynamically enacted and filmed they are too, with lots of funky moves! When I saw this picture in the theater with my friend Pellonpäa, we practically stood up and cheered: the action sequences were extremely effective, and they still hold up well today! They’re cartoonish, but not as extremely so as we find in some Hong Kong action pictures! And they get pretty gory too, which, I’ll admit, always brings an action picture up a notch or two in my esteem! Ha ha, I guess it’s the Fangoria kid in me! (I didn’t care for the gift the commandos send to the drug lord King Kao, however!)

The bulk of the story involves Jet’s character, Michael, trying to stop the evil plans of the supersoldiers and their long-haired, Lennon glasses-wearing leader! In this he’s helped by his friend, the cop with whom he plays chess, and also a lady from the library, a flibbertigibbet type who proves her mettle, but not without screeching a lot!

Well, if you like goofy high-octane action and Jet Li at his fastest and most charming, you’ll probably like this picture! I certainly feel an affection for it! You’ll forget the plot details immediately upon finishing with it, but you’ll have had a good time! I’m going to give Black Mask two and a half exploding drug lords!