Burl reviews Redneck County! (1974)

HAW HAW HAW it’s Burl, reporting from Redneck County! Yes, it’s a clear case of hayseed action-comedy today, and while the picture in question is variously known as The Great Lester Boggs, The Hard Heads, The Tapioca Tree (ha ha!), or Hootch County Boys, I know it as, quite simply, Redneck County! (Adding to the confusion is that Redneck County is also an alternate title for the Leslie Uggams kidnap picture Poor Pretty Eddie, but that’s neither here nor there, ha ha!)

One might lump this movie into the great burst of rural carchase pictures that bloomed after the marvelous success of Smokey and the Bandit! Yes, there were many - The Great Smokey Roadblock, Smokey Bites the Dust, Every Which Way But Loose, Moonshine County Express, Hotwire - but this one, Redneck County, came along well before Burt’s Trans-Am triumph! There were other hicksploitation pictures before Smokey and the Bandit too, of course, several of them starring Burt himself, but Redneck County has nothing to do with those, and is sort of its own thing!

Our heroes are a white guy with old lady hair and a black guy from Tupelo! The white guy, first seen motorcycling away from a funeral with a potted plant in his sidecar, cruises for a while before heading down into the redneck latitudes, where he comes across a fellow about to catch the beating of his life at the hands of a troublemaking motorcycle gang! Well, the old lady haired fellow, whose name turns out to be Malcolm Vandiver, rescues the other guy, whose name of course is Leroy Jones, and a banjo-pluckin’ chase sequence ensues!

Despite a-slippin' and a-slidin' off their machines over and over again, the bikers are somehow about to catch our duo; when suddenly a dyspeptic biplane pilot named Lester Boggs, played by Robert Ridgely from The Wild Life, swoops in and save the day! The trio become fast friends and from there it’s a series of would-be hilarious outrages throughout the county!

Alex Karras, the burlyman from Porky’s and When Time Ran Out, is the local law, and he of course spends his time a-cluckin’ and a-squawkin’ about the various rucki caused by the trio! It’s ruckus after ruckus, sure enough, spiced with some finger-pickin’ car chases, some games a' dice, a little romance between Malcolm Vandiver and a local farm daughter, some airplane stunts from the moonshine-swozzled Boggs, and lots of shockingly casual racism against Leroy Jones! (Ha ha, the racism comes from the redneck characters, not from the filmmakers, it should be noted!)

Ha ha, Malcolm Vandiver and his old lady hair might be played by Scott McKenzie, the singer of the San Francisco song, in his only movie appearance, but I’ve heard tell that he later denied it was him in the picture! Maybe that was the reason for the old lady wig, if indeed it was a wig!

Anyway, critically speaking there’s not a lot to say about a picture like this! The pacing is tolerable, and there’s a fair bit of incident! The behaviour of Lester Boggs is just “plane” irritating after a while, ha ha – he’s supposed to be a good-time folk-rebel anti-hero, but he just comes across as a dangerous, bumbling, drunken ass! It’s pretty plotless – I think the movie was modeled, curiously enough, on the anti-redneck production Easy Rider more than it was on White Lightning or something similar, but in any case it’s altogether a typical rural hayseed yaa-hoo skid-out comedy, and I give Redneck County one big bottle of 'shine!

Burl reviews Pumpkinhead! (1988)

In an Octobery frame of mind, it’s Burl, here to review you a corn-pone backwoods Gothic tale of curses and hullabaloo! Yes, of course it’s Pumpkinhead I’m talking about, the original one I mean, the one that opened exactly twenty-seven years ago today! Ha ha, I’ve yet to see any of the others they made, the blood wings or what have you!

But this one I saw at the picturehouse, the same cinema in which I saw Child’s Play just a few weeks later! But, ha ha, when they were screening this one, the theatre was in the midst of some kind of renovation; they had taken out the entire huge middle section of seats, leaving only a thin strip of seats, rows of six or eight perhaps, up each side! The floor was clean, so naturally my friends and I, the only ones in the theatre, sat on the deep grade and watched from there! We had our big coats to recline on, so it was very comfortable!

And I was excited to see the movie, for I had been primed by the stills in Fangoria magazine and by the mere fact that the picture was directed by famed trick effects man Stan Winston! Ha ha! And indeed the trick effects were very fine, and the backwoods atmosphere with its big fake pumpkins was artificial but thick, and although it wasn’t a case of discovering my new favourite movie, I did not come away disappointed!

That, however, was in 1988; how does the movie stack up these days? Ha ha, glad you asked! The story of course has quite purposefully the feel of a rural fairy tale, of the sort meant to ward off bad behavior! It seems that in some unnamed but remote region of the United States, a pumpkinhead is running around! Or at least, he’s running around once someone commissions him to commit some vengeance!

That someone is Wally Schirra himself, Lance Henrikson, well-known from The Quick and the Dead, Nightmares, Aliens, The Horror Show and of course The Visitor! Some citified young folks happen by and go dirtbiking, and before you know it, Henrikson’s beloved little son, who looks a lot like the kid from Death Valley, has been run down! This part of the picture made me sad! Anyway, most of the city folk aren’t bad sorts, but Lance doesn’t know that, so he visits an old crone and gets that gosh darn pumpkinhead on their tails! Ha ha! Watch out, kids, it's a pumpkinhead!

From there it hews closely to the structure of a slasher picture, with the pumpkinhead taking out the city kids one by one! Lance has a change of heart and decides blood vengeance isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and it turns out that he and the pumpkinhead have a closer relationship than either of them would be comfortable admitting, which makes sense because Lance and the pumpkinhead don’t look all that dissimilar! The pumpkinhead has bigger shoulder blades though, that’s for sure! Ha ha!

I like the multiple layers of backwoodsiness in this picture! Ha ha, Henrikson already seems to live in the backwoods, but when he goes looking for vengeance, he has to travel further still into the backwoods to find George Buck Flower, whom we know from The Fog and Teen Lust and who’s always a welcome presence even in all the crazy cornpone sk*n flicks he did; and there he is told he’ll have to go further into the backwoods to find the old crone, who tells him that he’ll have to travel still further into the backwoods to dig up the pumpkinhead!

Anyway, it’s still a pretty charming little picture! It looks nice and moves fairly quickly, and, like its contemporary Scarecrows, it’s reasonably Halloweeny! It could stand to be a bit gorier though, I think – it has a bit of tomato paste, but a couple of Rawhead Rex-style head pullings would have gone a long way! Ha ha, and though I think Stan Winston did a fair job for a neophyte, it never really gets as creepy or scary or hillbilly weird as you want it to! Still, an enjoyable fricassee, and I give Pumpkinhead two and a half extra-big shoulder blades!

Burl reviews Road House! (1989)

With a hootin’ and a hollerin’, it’s Burl! Haw haw, I’m here to review a much-beloved camp item, the two-fisted Swayze picture Road House! It’s a picture full of honky-tonk punch-ups and redneck romance, and there’s no shortage of Jeff Healey tunes on the soundtrack! Ha ha, in short, it's entirely the sort of picture you'd expect would be made by a guy named "Rowdy!"

Investment in the picture depends on accepting the premise that there are famous bouncers who travel from bar to bar like blue-jeaned superheroes, cleanin’ up the joints and then moseyin’ on to the next one! Dalton, played by Grandview U.S.A.’s own Patrick Swayze, is one such individual, and when he’s invited to a small town just outside Kansas City (though the landscape looks pretty California to me, ha ha!) to clean up the dusty ol’ Double Deuce, he takes the assignment on with tai-chi stoicism!

Well, he makes a lot of enemies, and quickly attracts the attention of both local kingpin “Brad Wesley” and a lady sawbones known only as Doc! Of course Ben Gazzara plays “Brad Wesley,” and, to borrow a phrase from another movie reviewer, if you place an overripe ham beside your television as you watch the movie, you’d swear it was shot in Smell-O-Vision!

Everything you expect to happen in the picture happens: a series of battles with “Brad Wesley’s” henchmen in which everyone involved takes superhuman levels of punishment; a romance with Doc that equally tests credibility; the arrival of Dalton’s shaggy friend and mentor Sam Elliott; another tune from the blind guitarist Healey and then another and another; the belated rebellion of the local businessmen “Brad Wesley” had theretofore kept under his thumb; and the final bloody battle at “Brad Wesley’s” mansion!

Ha ha, there’s a lot of goofology along the way, right up to and including “Brad Wesley’s” final demise, in which he’s blasted repeatedly with shotguns but doesn’t fall down for the longest time! Then, when the cops show up and ask for an explanation of all the dead bodies lying around, everybody shrugs and says “Ha ha, I didn’t see nothin’!” It’s a mostly enjoyable goofology, because as it plays out you can see how earnestly the picture is working to deliver the goods expected of it!

But there’s plenty of disappointment along the way too! Sam Elliott, well known from Frogs and Fatal Beauty, is an enjoyable presence while he’s on screen, but he’s not on screen enough! Even worse is the fact that Keith David is hired on as a new bartender at one point, and then doesn’t get to do anything at all except serve drinks! Ha ha, anyone who’s seen him in The Thing or They Live knows Keith David is capable of delightful tough-guy antics, but he’s kept on an inexplicably short leash here! At 114 minutes the movie is overlong, and the stuff that should have been cut out and replaced with Keith David kicking ass is extremely apparent!

But even though “Brad Wesley” has a silly name that everybody keeps saying over and over again (and maybe I just think it’s silly because an annoying dog named Wesley lives down the street from me, and I constantly hear his owners screeching that name), he makes a pretty good heavy, mainly because he’s such a bizarrely banal one! He’s just a normal, wealthy guy who apparently decided one day to act like a supervillain out of a Bond picture! Ha ha, he’s got a little group of maybe six or seven guys to back up his reign of terror, and he also owns a monster truck and isn’t afraid to use it!

The picture has a kooky script, a glossy look courtesy of portly cinematographer Dean “Halloween III” Cundey, an unexpectedly solid performance from Jeff Healy, a bit of tomato paste, equal-opportunity barenakedness and several scenes in which Swayze does The Claw! It all adds up to a brainless good time at the movies, but one that could have been a much, much better bad movie than it is! I’m going to give Road House two car dealership showrooms that display early-80s autos ready for crushing by a monster truck!