Burl reviews Phantom of the Mall! (1989)

Booga-booga me with a spoon, it’s Burl! Yes, ha ha, I’m here with a review of a 1980s mall picture for you, and you know what that means! Valley Girls! Well, ha ha, not really, since they were seven or eight years passé by the time this picture was made, but you can be sure their successors are present and accounted for in this mall!

As you can surely tell from the title, Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge is a Phantom of the Opera update, and I’m pretty sure it’s set in the same mall as Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Chopping Mall, and it looks awfully like that mall they used in Commando too! Ha ha, maybe it’s just that all 1980s California malls look the same to me!

I won’t give you the plot in much detail, because, ha ha, that would waste all of our valuable time! Be it known, however, that a young lady who takes a job in a new mall has many flashbacks to the times a year ago when she was keeping company with her true love, Eric! But then, ha ha, a horrible housefire kills Eric’s family and purportedly him, although not really because he’s now got a puttyface and is stalking the back rooms and ductworks of the new mall – the very same new mall within which his one-time inamorata is employed!

Well, from then on it’s killings! The victims are mostly security guards to begin with, so nobody really notices! Ken Foree, back in a mall again a decade after Dawn of the Dead, is the only one sharp enough to be aware of a sudden decline in the mall’s heretofore robust population of perverts, peeping toms and general scumbags! Somehow, even when the mall owner’s astonishingly delinquency-prone son is trapped screaming all the way up to the top of an escalator where his neck is snapped like a cannoli, nobody sees a thing!

Our young protagonist has several pals, the goofiest being Pauly Shore, the comic actor best known for his role in that pregnancy drama For Keeps! She also has many enemies, principally the killer arsonist who originally set Eric’s house on fire – he’s played (I believe) by Gregory Scott Cummins, the star of Action U.S.A.! And Tom Fridley from Jason Lives plays the aforementioned mall owner’s son, who was so nasty he reminded me of the customer who enrages Dick Miller at the beginning of Starhops! And then there’s the town mayor, a role essayed by Morgan Fairchild from Deadly Illusion – we don’t know if she’s friend or foe for most of the movie, but, giving it away here for just a second, she’s foe! So naturally she gets tossed off a balcony and impaled on some kind of pointy sculpture! Ha ha! It’s just like what happens to that lady in Mausoleum!

When he’s not murderizing people, Eric is listening to “Our Song,” the tune he and his young ladyfriend unaccountably loved, and which is the most horrible song imaginable! It gets played and replayed until your ears want to fly south, and frankly it’s probably the real reason Eric went homicidally banana-monster! I have to say, that terrible song really lets the movie down!

Otherwise, for one of these things it’s not half bad! It’s not great either, of course: it’s never scary or suspenseful, and the romance part, a critical element to any phantom picture, falls flat! On the other hand, it gives us a lot of nasty characters to boo and their murders to cheer; and there are a few Special Makeup Effects here and there, including Eric’s puttyface; and I liked that it really created a feeling of community within the mall, even if it’s a dysfunctional community populated entirely by jerks and airheads!

On balance it’s a generally enjoyable friton-bleu, though hardly essential! I was glad to have finally had the chance to see it! I’m going to give Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge two exploding eyeballs! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Chopping Mall! (1985)

Bleep boop, it’s Burl, here to review a robot picture for you! Ha ha, it’s called Chopping Mall, and it’s a picture I’ve always remembered fondly, both because it stood out from the slasher movie pack by virtue of its mechanical antagonists, and because it features a nice little cameo from none other than the great Dick “Apache Woman” Miller!

Watching it again, I can see that, while Miller is as entrancing as ever, the picture is really not very good! Still, it has its pleasures, as we will see! Now, as the title implies, the movie is set in a mall, which places it in the Retail Horror microgenre with pictures like The Initiation and Hide and Go Shriek! The mall (the same one from Commando, ha ha) has security doors like the ones on the Death Star, and a trio of security robots which have somehow become homicidal because of lightning strikes!

And this is the very night that four couples – adults mind you, and not teens – decide to spend the night partying in the department store! Why do they pick the department store to party in? Don’t they have homes in which they could party? It seems a very strange decision, ha ha! Nevertheless, among the ad-hoc impedimenta which make up what looks more like a jumble sale than a furniture store, three of the couples set to work on the beds, while only a few feet away the fourth couple settles in to watch Attack of the Crab Monsters! Ha ha! Meanwhile, the robots have begun their marauding, taking out first the security staff (one of whom is played by Gerrit Graham, an actor we know from pictures like Class Reunion and The Annihilators), then angry janitor Walter Paisley, played by who else but Dick Miller, and working with the dirtiest mopwater ever seen on film!

Soon the younger actors become the targets of robo-rage! Thankfully the constant gum-chewing of John “Secret Admirer” Terlesky is put to a halt by a clanking claw! His false-busted ladyfriend comes next, the victim of a not-bad headsplosion! Then it’s run, chase, zap and rat-tat-tat-tat! Lovely Barbara Crampton, familiar to us from Re-Animator and Fraternity Vacation, is forced by the terrible, derivative script to become irrational and hysterical, and for her trouble is burned to cinders! The hero of the piece is Kelly Maroney, who uses the knowledge of the mall’s layout she gained from appearing in Fast Times at Ridgemont High to outwit the last of the killbots and blast it to flinders! Ha ha, this is after an elevator and a golf cart piloted by Russell Todd from Friday the 13^th part 2 help dispatch the others!

So there are robots and boobs and youngsters running around getting their heads zapped off, but, too, there are cameos! Plenty of Roger Corman alumni make appearances here: Miller of course and Graham, but also Paul “Get Crazy” Bartel and Mary Woronov from Looney Tunes: Back In Action appear as their apparently beloved characters the Blands, which I appreciated even though I’ve never seen Eating Raoul! None other than Mel Welles from Smokey Bites the Dust is on hand as a hideously filthy cook, and Angus Scrimm from Phantasm II appears very briefly as Man Standing Up And Asking A Question!

All of these people and the elements earlier listed, along with a puffpastry of a running time (77 minutes), make a viewing of the picture worth it! But be warned: the script is pretty bad, and the movie happily, but a bit wearyingly, imitative of other things! It has a pretty nice 80s horror look, courtesy of cinematographer Tom “The Malibu Bikini Shop” Richmond, and the acting is mostly not too bad, and it’s generally efficient; but it’s never scary or suspenseful or impactful in any way! Sometimes it’s a little bit funny, but that’s about it! My fondness for it was tested in this most recent viewing!

With all of this said, I’m going to give Chopping Mall one and a half deadly pincings!

Burl reviews The Silent Partner! (1978)

Ha ha, it’s Burl, please give me all the money! No, just kidding, I’m not here to rob you! I’m here to review one of my own Yuletide standards, the great Canadian thriller The Silent Partner!

Yes, where some people have Die Hard or Cobra, my own favourite non-Christmasy Christmas picture is this jolly tale! But many people forget – I myself had forgotten before re-watching the movie, in fact – that it’s only a Christmas picture for the first half, after which it switches to a summery milieu! Nevertheless, the images of a cold-eyed Christopher “Dreamscape” Plummer in a Santa suit are what linger from the movie, so file it under Xmas, say I! Ha ha!

The plot unfolds like the chess game so frequently and unsubtly referred to through the picture! Miles Cullen, played by Elliot Gould from M*A*S*H and S*P*Y*S and W*H*I*F*F*S, is a milquetoast bank teller in Toronto’s then-new Eaton Centre mall! It’s nearly Christmas, and the observant Miles notices clues which lead him to believe one of the many mall Santas is going to mount a bank heist! So he prepares by setting aside most of the money for himself, and Plummer, the bad Santa, gets away with only a small amount!

Well, this does not sit well with Santa, and he sets about trying to von Trapp the teller into giving him the money! Back and forth goes the see-saw, and soon Miles has cleverly led the police to Santa’s very workshop itself! This is where the time jump occurs, with Miles sitting on his money – which he keeps in a safe deposit box at the curiously low-security bank – while Santa sits in the cooler!

Of course the battle continues once Santa is released, and then we have more threats, some shouting, a gruesome fishtank murder and a scene in which John Candy, years before he was Armed & Dangerous, gets married to a vacuum-headed blonde! Finally Santa, who has reinvented himself as a woman, makes another assault on the bank, and Johnny Smith’s dad from The Dead Zone gives him serious what-for!

Anyone who is curious about what Canadian money looks like should watch this picture! They’ll find not just many scenes of Gould counting out bills, but attractive photography from Billy “Billion Dollar Brain” Williams and solid suspense direction from Daryl Duke, who’d made Payday a couple of years earlier! Little remarked upon, other than for its existence, is the score by jazz great Oscar Peterson! Ha ha, it turns out that Peterson was not just a great pianist and composer, but a dab hand at suspense music as well!

Here is a fine genre exercise, dated in only the best ways! (Candy, for example, is quite svelte!) There could stand to be a little less of the relationship between Gould and banking colleague Susannah York, but it pays off in the end, and makes the picture richer! The young and lovely Francophone who makes sweet love to Gould later in the picture is not the greatest performer ever, but she does okay! In sum, this is a movie worth your while, especially at this time of year! I give The Silent Partner three deceased angelfish!