Burl reviews I've Heard the Mermaids Singing! (1987)

 

On the Toronto tip it’s Burl, here to review some low-budget Canadiana! The picture under review today is a small character comedy that made a pretty big noise in Canada back in the late 80s, mainly because not all that much else was happening at the time! But it’s also a genuine little charmer, and quite rightly served as a solid career-starter for its director, Patricia Rozema! The picture is called I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing!

 

The story is told in flashback and narrated by flibbertigibbet goose-gal office temp Polly, played by Sheila McCarthy from Die Hard 2! Polly is recording her reminiscences into a video camera, and really it’s more of a confession! It all begins when she takes a position at a small Toronto art gallery located either in a church, or on Church Street, or both! The woman who runs the gallery, known to Polly simply as The Curator, is played by Paule Baillargeon from Jesus of Montreal, and with her Quebecois accent, apparently total knowledge of art, and big city sophistication, she instantly captures Polly’s heart!

 

Polly’s ardour is not quite romantic, and Polly herself seems nominally heterosexual, but only because her blinkered mentality can’t conceive of any other type of orientation - ha ha, she does not think the mermaids will sing to her! So it’s a big shock to her when The Curator’s sometime girlfriend Mary Joseph, played by the author and part-time actor Ann-Marie MacDonald, appears on the scene! Ha ha, and when Polly witnesses a liplock between the ladies over a closed-circuit television camera artwork, she’s as shocked as if they’d taken off and flown around the room, buzzing like mosquitoes!

 

This doesn’t diminish her attraction to The Curator, though! And as it happens, Polly is a part-time photographer of things she finds interesting – an Instagrammer avant la lettre, ha ha! – and she packages up her pictures and sends them anonymously to her boss in a pitch to have them displayed in the gallery! But, oh woe, The Curator dismisses them as pure cront, and Polly is heartbroken! She then discovers a great secret The Curator holds, or rather a small series of great secrets, and so realizes that people are not always what they seem, and is thus finally and completely (but not, one hopes, permanently) disillusioned! This leads to her climactic action, and Polly’s subsequent fleeing of the gallery and recording of her confession, and finally to an unexpected and unlikely coda!

 

Ha ha, this is such a Toronto movie, and as a one-time resident of that city I find that aspect ingratiating! It’s otherwise the sort of whimsical character romance that might come out of any city; but, on an absurdly low budget ($35,000, or so they say), Rozema manages to dress it up with fantasy sequences in which Polly flies around like Superman or else climbs, and falls from, office towers, and she gets some nice cinematography from Douglas Koch, who more recently shot David Cronenberg’s new Crimes of the Future! The MVP of this picture, though, is McCarthy, whose goony-bird looks and seemingly effortless performance are perfect for the tale!

 

In its low-key way the picture has a lot to say, and if it’s occasionally facile and glib we can chalk that up to the quilicis of youth! It’s an impressive work which made an outsized impression on Canadian cinema, and if it doesn’t deserve all the accolades it got at the time, it deserves a good many of them! I give I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing three suction cups!

Burl reviews The Last Married Couple in America! (1980)

Ha ha, Burl here, with exciting news to report! I may have stumbled across the fount of my small, sporadic interest in middlebrow adult comedy-dramas from the late 1970s and early 80s! You know, It’s My Turn, Fastbreak and the like! Anyway, this one’s a doozy, and I remember seeing it on TV when I was young, and being strangely intrigued!

Partially this was simply because I was fascinated by Richard Benjamin, who looked, talked and acted just like a friend of my parents’, a guy named Bill! Nice fellow! Anyway, yes, Richard Benjamin, who of course directed The Money Pit and many others, is in this picture, and is easily the best thing in it or at least the funniest!

George Segal, well known from Stick, and Natalie Wood of Brainstorm take on the roles of Jeff and Mari, a married couple who play an extremely informal brand of foot-ball with their friends every week! Well, the foot-ball pals get whittled down as the other couples all split up or separate in some fashion, sometimes recoupling in unusual ways! Ha ha, and when Jeff and Mari start feeling like the last married couple in all of America, they start acting weird, like when George Segal has a one night stand with Rhoda!

In the meanwhile Richard Benjamin’s character Marv is getting a divorce, and poor Marv is unraveling his way through the c.1980 singles scene! Ha ha, the dialogue isn’t all that funny, but Benjamin's delivery does remarkable wonders! Less funny but not un-entertaining is Dom DeLuise, who plays a part-time plumber with, ha ha, other interests! And there are others, like Allan Arbus, known from The Christian Licorice Store, who is also something of an unlikely swinger, and Bob “The Big Bus” Dishy, and Pricilla Barnes from Lords of the Deep! Ha ha!

Ha ha, in spite of the script having been written by John Shaner, who played one of the layabout beatniks in the original A Bucket of Blood, it’s not very good! The picture starts off with sitcom-y, but still recognizably human, behavior, and then slides into a whole mess o’ unlikelihoods an’ proposterousnesses! The early part of the picture, where the couples are breaking up one-by-one style in what seems some manner of marital slasher scenario, is the most interesting and relevant part; but by the time Dom DeLuise has invaded the couple’s house to host a crazy swinger birthday party (ha ha, with the kids in the next room the whole time, it turns out!), nothing means nothing anymore, despite the compelling presence of a giant man-sized prostitute in a weird backless outfit!

I remember being very interested in Jeff and Mari’s plant-filled, open-concept SoCal house, and it was as good as ever, even with sculptress Mari’s blobby work-in-progress sitting in the middle of it! (Ha ha, she’s about as talented an artist as Walter Paisley!) And even if the picture as a whole has almost no relation to reality, it’s a pretty good time capsule of the era! But otherwise it’s a pretty bland concoction, although you can tell it tries to be, and believes itself to be, bold and daring! It seems more like one of those Rock-and-Doris pictures with all the charm hoovered out and smarmy, sniggering jokes stuffed in its place! But if the form interests you as much as it does me, you should go ahead and give it a watch; just be warned that it’s a pretty poor ungarian! I give The Last Married Couple in America one and a half fur coats with nothing on underneath!

Burl reviews A Bucket of Blood! (1959)

Hi, it’s Burl to review one of my all-time favourite movies starring probably my all-time favourite actor, Dick Miller! Ha ha, don’t expect this review to be very balanced or dispassionate – I’ll tell you right up front that it’s a rave!

The great Miller, well known from Carnival Rock and other fine films, stars as Walter Paisley, the slightly slow-witted busboy at the Yellow Door café! The Yellow Door is a beatnik haunt run by a beret-clad fellow named Leonard and presided over by the haughty, bearded poet Maxwell Brock! (The poems he recites are works of satirical genius from the manic pen of Chuck Griffith, from which flowed the entire wonderful script!) Walter’s only pal is Carla, a friendly girl-next-door upon whom he’s got an unreciprocated crush; and there are other assorted beatnik artistos sitting in various corners of the place! Music is provided by Paul Horn on the sax or, at other moments, Alex Hassilev from that great group The Limeliters!

Well, poor awkward Walter wants nothing more than to become an artist, just as the people whose cups he carries away nominally are! Ha ha, he chooses the medium of sculpture, but proves to have as little talent at that he’s got at clearing tables! An oddball accident involving his landlady’s cat becoming stuck in the wall (the 1995 remake pointlessly wastes several lines of dialogue to make the situation more “believable”) leaves Walter with a dead cat on his hands and the means – clay – to cover it up! His sculpture is hailed as the weirdest, wildest, like, wiggiest thing ever seen, man!

But to stay cool he needs to make more statues, so from there events naturally spiral out of control! You’ve got to know murder is involved, ha ha! Also plenty of marvelous music and some amazing bon mots, all of it revolving around a fantastic performance by Dick Miller! He plays the role to perfection, becoming a wild-eyed, poetry-spouting killer without ever losing audience sympathy! And all the other actors – pretty Barboura Morris, bushy Julian Burton, slimy Anthony Carbone, extra-large Bruno Ve Sota from Attack of the Giant Leeches – are note-perfect as well, the Fred Katz score is great, and we must extend kudos to Roger Corman for some fine direction – it boggles the mind that he made this picture in a mere handful of days!

I can’t tell you how much I enjoy this picture! I’ve seen it time and again, and it just never gets old or wears out its welcome in the slightest! I’ve even staged it as a live theater piece, and let me tell you, it was a hit! I give A Bucket of Blood four and a half zen sticks, my very highest rating! See it as soon as you can, cool cats!

Burl reviews A Bucket of Blood! (1995)

Hi, it’s Burl here to review the remake of one of my favourite movies of all time, Roger Corman’s 1959 classic A Bucket of Blood! This remake, which generally goes by the same title but is also known with admirable prosy as The Death Artist, is not, I must frankly say up front, quite a match for its inspiration!

That’s the case despite the fact that they’ve almost used Charles Griffith’s original script word for word! They’ve added a few more mock performance pieces, such as might be found in a movie like Cellar Dweller or Head of the Family, but otherwise there’s not been much deviation from the Corman picture! That’s sensible as far as it goes – ha ha, why mess with success! But success is messed with in other ways, ways I will enumerate for you shortly!

For those of you who don’t know the story, canonical though it is, the action takes place at a beatnik café, here called the Jabberjaw instead of the Yellow Door, at which a slow-witted busboy named Walter Paisley labours unhappily, watching all the artists around him stewing in their pretentions, wishing desperately that he too was a creative soul! His desperation leads, as it inevitably must, to murder! Ha ha!

Well, it’s kind of odd that this picture was remade at all, since it contains no monsters and only a few murders! But remade it was, with great fidelity as I’ve mentioned! Anthony Michael Hall, famous for having gone Out of Bounds and doing some Weird Science, steps into Dick Miller’s very sizeable Walter Paisley loafers, and comes up wanting! It’s a tough job setting yourself up for comparison with the man Corman himself once called “The best actor in Hollywood,” and I guess Hall’s willingness to do so shows just how desperate his career straits were at the time! After all, it had been almost a decade since Out of Bounds!

Despite overplaying both Walter’s pathetic self-pity and his murderous aggression, Hall is not too bad in the role! Justine Bateman’s take on Carla, however, is a little weird! She chooses to do some kind of Eastern European accent and wear art-doyenne glasses, which pointlessly changes her character from the girl-next-door she was in the original! That’s why Walter fell for her in the 1959 version after all: she was the only island of apparent normality in that sea of jaundiced pretension; but in the remake she’s just another fauxhemian!

Some of the actors in the remake are good (ha ha, Will Farrell is great as a background hanger-onner, and David Cross has a few marvelous moments in the role of The Bearded Sycophant; and can you believe it, Shadoe Stevens more or less pulls off the role of poet Maxwell Brock), but none of them are as good as the Corman company players in the original! There are more naked ladies in this new one though, that’s for sure, and it does pull off a sort of quirky out-of-time comfortableness that’s within shouting distance at least of the Corman/Miller classic! I give the remake of A Bucket of Blood two bottles of Yugoslavian white wine!