Burl reviews City Slickers! (1991)

 

Yee-haw girls and boys and all points in between, it’s Burl, here with a tale of city-slick friendship and cowpunching! Ha ha, I recall that this was a big fat hit when it came out back in June of ’91, but, as with Backdraft, Point Break, and The Rocketeer, movies released that same summer, I didn’t bother seeing it for years and years! I didn’t go to see all that much that summer, as I believe I myself was working on a movie through pretty much all of July and August, but I did make it out to see such gems as Barton Fink, Terminator 2, Slacker, The Commitments, and What About Bob!

All of this is just plain beside the point, because the movie we’re talking about is City Slickers! It’s the simple tale of three New York buddies, each with their own problems, who take two weeks and join a dude ranch cattle drive led by a stern and leathery trail boss! Ha ha, and guess who plays the boss? Well, he won an Oscar for it I guess, so you probably remember that it was none other than Jack Palance from Without Warning!

The middle-aged trio are played by Billy Crystal, whom we remember from the time he was slathered in oldman makeup for The Princess Bride; Bruno Kirby from The Young Graduates and Between the Lines (and of course both Crystal and Kirby were in When Harry Met Sally together); and Daniel Stern from Get Crazy and C.H.U.D.! Stern’s problem is that he has a monstrous wife and that he might have impregnated Yeardley Smith from Maximum Overdrive; Kirby’s conundrum involves resolving whether to settle down with his latest girlfriend and have kids, or continue his life as an aimless, unlikely stickman; and Crystal is, at forty (ha ha!), feeling old and used up and, in the words of his long-suffering wife, has “lost his smile!”

After a long New York build up, she commands him to go and find his smile with his buddies on this cattle drive caper, and then the string of incident begins! Other dude ranchers on the trek include Helen Slater from The Secret of My Success, as the lone pretty lady; Tracey Walter from Repo Man, in charge of the chuckwagon; Josh Mostel from The King of Marvin Gardens and David Paymer from This House Possessed, playing ice cream brothers modeled on Ben and Jerry; and Bill Henderson from Silver Streak as a dentist on the outing with his adult son; and the ranch is owned and operated by Noble Willingham from Butch and Sundance: The Early Days!

The trip is full of gaggery and straight talkin’ 90s man discussions, and the script tries hard to be relatable and sometimes even comes close! There’s also some death and a cow birth and a stampede and assorted other such stuff! Ha ha, I just made up a term for movies like this, which have all the trappings of Westerns but really aren’t themselves Westerns: we’ll call them “faux-ters!” As in oaters, but faux! Do you think the term will catch on, and we’ll soon see it used in all the new academic stuff as well as on random blog posts? Well anyway, it’s a professionally put together comedy movie, quite likeable despite its whole “it’s tough being a straight white guy” vibe, occasionally funny, sometimes cheesy, but for all that, pretty entertaining! Nothing about it is great (though the cast is pretty exceptional) and nothing about it is surprising, and it could have jacked up the Palance a bit, but it’s okay! I’m going to give City Slickers two smiley-faced moons!

Burl reviews The Cabin in the Woods! (2011)

Burl talking on you again! I’m here to review a newer picture that I’ve just finally caught up with, The Cabin in the Woods! I’d heard it was an enjoyable meta-horror lark, and indeed it lives up to that billing quite handily!

Most of the people reading this have probably already seen it, but in case that’s not true I won’t go into the whole nuts and bolts of the plot, because it’s more enjoyable the less you know! But I will say that it starts off like so many other movies, particularly The Evil Dead, with five young people heading out for an unlikely vacation at a remote cabin in the forest!

Once there, strange things begin to occur! A trapdoor opens and they head down into the cellar, where many curious and eldritch items await! I saw what was going on in this scene, more or less, and found it most amusing indeed! After this, it’s time for zombies, monsters, blood and gore, and of course the huge scientific complex that exists beneath the cabin!

Ha ha, the movie has many funny moments and performances – Richard Jenkins, from Killing Them Softly, is particularly uproarious as one of the boffins who work in the subterranean cavern! The filmmakers were smart enough to hire Peter “Evil Dead 2” Deming to do their cinematography, so the picture doesn’t just look good, it looks good in the way it ought to!

I do have a few complaints, however! I noticed a giant spider lurking in the margins of one shot, and I was disappointed that we never saw it in action! Giant snakes are okay, but they’re just not the same! Also, the movie isn’t quite as scary as it could have been, and that’s too bad, because what a wonderfully rounded picture it would have been if it had managed some bloodcurdling between laffs!

The movie was produced by the fellow who made The Avengers, and so it’s a pretty slick piece of work! It’s almost too slick; it could use a little grunge in the early scenes, it seems to me! But that’s really a minor bit of nit-picking! I very much enjoyed the picture, and if this review is a little on the short side, it’s because so many others have had their say about it already, and I don’t want to reveal things to whomever out there hasn’t had a chance to see it yet! So I’ll just say that The Cabin in the Woods is a peppy picture, and I give it three mermen! 

Burl reviews Alien Predators (1987)

Hi, Burl here! I remember watching Alien Predators way back in high school! I probably watched it with my good friend Doug, and if I remember correctly, we both thought it was boring and uneventful! I couldn’t remember much about it, except that someone got a head shaped like a football, and that there was an RV in it!

That’s why I even bothered watching it again: the RV! Ha ha, I love an RV movie, especially when there’s a siege scene, or at least a scene of menace! I’m sure you’ve all seen that terrific picture Race With the Devil – that’s more or less the model for this microgenre as far as ol’ Burl is concerned!

This picture, which was directed by the son of the guy who made Vanishing Point, takes place in Spain for reasons I never figured out! But the main cast, three young people driving around the country in a rented RV, are all American, and three more annoying people you’d be hard pressed to ever meet! Ha ha, there’s two fellows and a girl, and it’s kind of a friendly romantic triangle that never turns into the Jules et Jim situation that would have made it more interesting! No, they’re all stuck in the aggressive flirtation stage of their isosceles, and something about the way they prosecute it makes them seem kind of dim-witted! At any rate, it takes up way too much screen time!

The actual plot is supposed to be about an alien virus which crash-landed on Earth along with Skylab, and now, some years later, has infected the citizens of a small Segovian town, the very town our troika of heroes is fun-truckin’ their way through! A Spanish NASA scientist explains all this to the kids, and informs them that head-bursting is part of the infection process! Yes, we do get to see a head bursting right at the end of the picture, and it’s not too bad! Really adds some spice to the thing, and spice is something this movie desperately needs!

An exotic if perplexing setting, some head-bursting and an RV – those are the ingredients for a magic sauce! But this picture is no magic sauce – it’s barely worth a hucklebuck! It encourages lots of questions, though! Ha ha, who is the fellow in the neat-looking truck? Is he meant to be an alien-possessed madman? And why is there a big NASA laboratory in Spain? Don’t they do all their work in Florida or Texas, somewhere like that?

There’s a bit of a siege against the RV, but it’s limited to a short bit involving an ugly alien crab chattering at the window, like a lost scene from Without Warning or something like that! Ha ha, it could have been a lot more exciting, and you can say the same for the entire movie!

I feel like I’ve been down on a lot of movies for the same reasons of late: namely, that they’re sadly deficient in eventfulness and action! I really should seek out some pictures that Deliver The Goods, which is what I always hope for when I sit down to watch a movie like this! Well, there are some goods delivered – what special effects there are, and what can be made of them through the murky photography, appear to be pretty good, and come courtesy of Mark Shostrom, the man behind the trick effects of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 and The Supernaturals!

Otherwise I don’t have a lot of marvelous things to say about Alien Predators, and I guess I’ll give it one irritating venetian blind shadow!