Burl reviews Hog Wild! (1980)

 

Like open pipes at midnight, it’s Burl crying vroom vroom vroom! Ha ha, remember the Quebec-shot comedy I watched about the bunch of jerks and their girlfriends who play a lot of pinball and get into an escalating prank war with a motorcycle gang? You’ll probably say “Sure Burl, ha ha, that one was called Pinball Summer!” Well, you’d not be wrong, but that description also snugly fits a picture known as Hog Wild!

It seems a military cadet called Tim, played by an apple-cheeked Michael Biehn from Aliens and The Abyss, gets himself deliberately tossed out so he can go to a regular high school! On his arrival at the new alma mater, he finds the place run by a half-goofy, half-dangerous motorcycle gang called the Rustlers, who are very much in the mode of the Pinball Summer organization, or the Nazi dunderheads from Any Which Way You Can!

The leader of the gang is Bull, played by Tony Rosato from SCTV and The Silent Partner! (Of course he was also in a lot of those bad, weird, middlebrow Canadian comedydramas, like Nothing Personal, Utilities and Improper Channels!) Much like Bobcat Goldthwait’s incoherent screaming character from movies like One Crazy Summer, Bull is unable to speak like a normal person, so his mumblings are interpreted by his loyal factotum Ben, who is well played by Angelo Rizacos from Nightstick! Rizacos does it as well as he possibly can, but this translation routine gets tired well before the picture's end!

And Bull’s lady Angie is played by Bilitis herself, Patti D’Arbanville from Time After Time! When he lays eyebones on her Tim develops an instant crush, and this puts him at odds with Bull and the gang and thus begins the escalating and destructive prank war, which targets not just Tim but his little Archie Comics-like group of pals! Ha ha, at one point the Rustlers somehow manage to hoist Tim’s car up the school flagpole! One of them also cruelly crushes and eats a pet tarantula beloved by one of Tim’s friends, whose response to this outrage is surprisingly sanguine! Of course it all culminates in a race, as is almost always the case with these pictures, and in the last few seconds, as Bull watches his ex-ladyfriend stroll off with the victorious Tim, the movie attempts to engender some sympathy and even a little respect for the mush-mouthed hooligan!

The picture is jam-packed with familiar Canadian faces who also turned up in the contemporaneous Meatballs, like Matt Craven, whom we also know from Till Death Do Us Part and Happy Birthday To Me, playing a claw-handed biker called Chrome; Jack Blum, playing, as he so often did, a glasses nerd; and Keith Knight, who was also in My Bloody Valentine and here plays a portly imbecile named Vern who desperately wants to be a Rustler! There’s also Michael Zelniker, whose presence reinforces the many connections between this picture and Pinball Summer! Karen Stephen and Helene Udy, the girlfriends in Pinball Summer, are in here too, playing smaller background roles!

John Rutter, who was in Between Friends and played the laughing cop in Black Christmas, is also a cop here, but not in this case a laughing one because, ha ha, he’s impotent! Bronwen Mantel from City on Fire plays his frustrated wife, while Sean McCann from Starship Invasions and Tulips is Tim’s military-loving father, who likes to unexpectedly smash his son across the back with a pool cue, just to keep the lad on his toes!

It’s a pre-Porky’s picture, meaning that despite its oinker-themed title, Hog Wild’s antics are mostly free of the leering sexual aspect the teen shenanigan films developed after the runaway success of the Bob Clark pig picture! That gives it a bit of novelty; and, too, you can detect thematic and stylistic holdovers from an earlier era of Canadian youth movies: pictures like Rip-Off and Homer! All of this has Hog Wild sitting awkwardly athwart several genres and eras, riding sidesaddle as it were, ha ha, and so it never really gels as a fun or uproarious movie experience! And smushing that tarantula? That was uncalled for! I give Hog Wild one and a half slams across the back with a pool cue!

Burl reviews Up the Creek! (1984)

 

With a whitewater smile it’s Burl, reviewing another sophomoric rip-off comedy for you! Ha ha, can you imagine an 80s raucous beer ‘n’ boobs cacklefest so devoted to the form that it features not one or two but three actors from two entirely different previous raucous campus comedy hits in the cast? Well it exists! The picture I’m telling you about is called, quite simply, Up the Creek!

Yes it’s a river rafting picture, but naturally, given the previous experience of its cast, it is in a larger sense a collegiate shenanigan film! Two of the actors are familiar to those many millions who saw Animal House: we’ve got Tim Matheson from Fletch and Impulse in the lead role of smarmy Bob McGraw; and in the Belushi role of Gonzer is Stephen Furst from Silent Rage and National Lampoon’s Class Reunion! And they join forces with Dan Monahan from Porky’s as Max, the loveable horndog! The principal foursome is rounded out by Irwin, who’s played by Sandy Helberg from Spinal Tap, and who evidently represents an attempt to come up with a new collegiate comedy archetype: the nerd with a terrible drinking problem!

These four, the bottom four students at LePetomane University and therefore in the country, are press-ganged by their angry dean, played by the Royal Emperor of Snob himself, John Hillerman from Chinatown and Blazing Saddles, into taking part in some kind of annual inter-school raft race that supposedly has gone on for fifteen years! Of course the competition is a gallery of stock 80s characters: toffee-nosed bad guy Rex played by Jeff East from Deadly Blessing and Pumpkinhead, along with his three bleach-blond fascist pals; plus a random rich man called Tozer who wants the all-blondes to win for some reason and is played by James B. Sikking from Outland; and, for extra value, a quintet of crazed military nutcases led by a lunatic with a serious case of Resting Ernest Face called Lt. Braverman! There’s also a boatload of co-eds, non-snobby variety, of whom the most important is Heather Merriweather and is played by Jennifer Runyon from Ghostbusters; and then there are some cowboys who don’t really factor in at all!

Of course the rivalry between Bob and Rex sharpens when Heather turns her affections to the insouciant hero Bob rather than the perpetually incredulous-looking Rex; this leads to a long exchange of dangerous pranks back and forth, but then, wouldn’t you know it, Irwin is kidnapped by the army guys and staked out naked on the ground! “We’ll find him even if it takes a hundred years,” McGraw vows! And all through this there is a long series of raft explosions – ha ha, truly, there are a lot more exploding rafts in this picture than you might ever guess – and ultimately it comes down to the final confrontation at the finish line, where Tozer conveniently keeps a riverbank summer house which may or may not be destroyed by raging waters!

Thinking of that summer house makes me remember that Up the Creek tries a lot of large-scale physical gags which it can’t always pull off – ha ha, this leads to plenty of reaction shots and astonished people getting covered with dust instead of the allegedly spectacular moments of destruction they’re looking at, which often happen off screen! Still, I give it points for trying that stuff with a mixture of miniatures and full-scale effects, insofar as they could manage it! It’s certainly one of the more ambitious of the collegiate sex comedies of that era!

As douchey as the frat guys are, our heroes, as is so often the case in these pictures, are no better! Bob is as smarmy as Matheson can make him, which is to say considerably; Furst’s character is a grotesque eating machine; the nerd drinks way too much and is kind of obnoxious about it; and Monahan especially looks too old to be involved in things like this, and in any case isn’t given much to do! Anyway, they’re all handily upstaged by a marvelous but oversensitive dog whose top-flight acting abilities are just this side of the furball charmer in The Boogens, ha ha!

In many ways the Platonic ideal of the R-rated 80s comedy, Up the Creek is lamely determined to hit all the bases but not exceed expectations, especially in, say, the screenwriting or acting departments! Still, the showmanship it musters now and then gives it a bit of personality! Of course it all seems to be occurring in a world in which the only authorities are university deans and rich guys who put on raft races, whose rule is so absolute that even army guys can only fume and fulminate uselessly against it; but if it’s plausibility you’re looking for, you’d better try Teen Lust or Goin’ All the Way or one of those! I give Up the Creek one and a half flume rides!

Burl reviews Killer Party! (1986)

Feeling somewhat the April fool, it’s Burl, here to review a horror picture that initially was called April Fool’s Day, but when that other April Fool’s Day came out, the non-slasher slasher picture which I remember the Three Dog Night version of Mama Told Me Not to Come was used prominently in the TV ads for, the title was changed to Killer Party!

The sentence above is a bit tangled and convoluted and difficult to decipher, I realize, but those are entirely apposite qualities for a review of this particular picture! It opens with a funeral scene, an EC comic story in miniature with a hateful relative and a vengeful corpse! But no, this proves to be a movie-within-the-movie being watched by a young couple at a drive-in, and when the young woman goes for popcorn, supernatural shenanigans occur and then a hair-metal band begins to play! We see now, thanks to a chyron, that this is a music video by a band called White Sister, and it’s being watched on TV by a loafing co-ed!

Finally the story proper can start, for the co-ed is one of three who serve more or less as our main characters! There’s Phoebe, played by Elaine Wilkes from Sixteen Candles, and Vivia, essayed by Sherry Willis-Burch from Final Exam, and there’s another one too, and of course they are for some incomprehensible reason trying to join a sorority house run by your basic bitchy sorority queen type! There is a lot of talk about goats, and a lot of goat noises, and everyone has to eat goat eyeballs of course! Pranks are pulled, including one involving a jar of bees and some ladies in a hot tub, and that seems to have no connection with anything except to continue the general atmosphere of prankishness!

In fact nothing seems to have anything to do with anything else, or not much at least! This disjunctive story was written by Barney Cohen, from whose quill also flowed Friday the 13^th part 4, and I think the established backstory and structure of the Jason pictures is what this particular scenarist requires in order to turn in a shootable story! The picture was directed by William Fruet, who brought us Spasms and Funeral Home, and usually (Spasms excepted of course), his movies are a lot tighter and more sensical than this!

Lots of other characters show up, but it’s often difficult to discern their narrative function! There’s a smoothtone called Blake played by Martin Hewitt from Alien Predators; a goony weirdo called Martin, played by Ralph Seymour from Ghoulies and Fletch; and an uptight English instructor named Professor Zito, played by the always-welcome Paul Bartel of Piranha and Chopping Mall and Rock n’ Roll High School! All these performances are perfectly adequate, but I for one missed the gallery of 80s Canadian actors who usually show up in these things – still, ha ha, we do easily recognize it as a Canadian film by the snowflakes that are often swirling past the camera lens!

The collegiate shenanigans take up more than an hour of screen time, and I think the beginning of the movie is meant to take place in the fall while the last part tries to justify the original title by occurring in the spring! This time jump, which many will miss, only adds to the dislocated feeling of the movie! But it seems there’s an old frat house where a frat brother was killed in, I want to say, a hazing incident? The sisters wish to hold a spring prank party in the manse, but the ghost of the frat boy, unable to abide anyone associated with the Greek letter clubs, possesses one of the ladies and there follows a series of bloodless slasher-style killings!

The picture was shot by John Lindley, a cinematographer who would go on to lens bigger-budget items like The Serpent and the Rainbow, Field of Dreams, Sneakers, Pleasantville and The Core, so Killer Party looks a little better than many such movies do! That only means that we get a better-lit look at impenetrable goings-on, however, so it’s not a great help! Also, whatever gore the movie had in its first condition – I remember shots in Fangoria of a trident-poked lady and a fellow with a chopped-off hand – has been ruthlessly excised as though by the killer frat boy ghost himself!

I’ll give it this, though: for a movie shot in 1984, it looks awfully 1986! Is that a compliment? I mean it as such – being a year or two ahead of your time counts as an accomplishment, I think! And though almost all of the scare scenes in the last act are poorly staged and free of affrights, there is one good shock moment in the last bit of it, concerning the surprise appearance of the possessed girl on a roof! The very end has some impact too, though it borrows that from Twilight Zone: The Movie! Otherwise it’s all pretty dire: poorly done, scattered, incoherent, sometimes boring, often stupid!

Some folk like it though, and I want to acknowledge them! Me, I can’t find much in it to love, ha ha, and with its pathetic shenanigan-to-carnage ratio it reminded me of Cheerleader Camp: an unforgivable crime! There’s also a theme song that will tend to make your ears bleed! But I liked Vivia, or was it Phoebe, and how she was half sexy goodtime girl, half glasses nerd! I guess I’ll give Killer Party one and a half guillotines, which I’d say is a pretty generous rating, but hey, it’s spring!

Burl reviews How I Got Into College! (1989)

 

Ha ha, rapscallions, it’s Burl here with a new review for you! This one is the last part of what I’ve always thought of as a loose trilogy, but which in fact is not a trilogy at all – it’s just three movies made by the same guy! That guy is Savage Steve Holland, and the not-a-trilogy I’m talking about is Better Off Dead, One Crazy Summer, and the picture under review today, How I Got Into College!

Of course the first two feature John Cusack, and this third picture does not, so you might debate its place in this nonexistent triumvirate! I myself, as a teen, was a big fan of Better Off Dead and a much lesser one of One Crazy Summer, but never did bother seeing this one until just the other day, so I guess I myself also discounted its place in the Savage Steve oeuvre! But I’ve always been aware of the movie and very slightly curious about it, so when I ran across a used DVD of the thing I thought to myself “Ha ha, now’s the time!”

And the plot? Ha ha, it’s pretty much right there in the title! Our protagonist is a high school lackwit named Marlon, played by Corey Parker from Friday the 13^th part V: A New Beginning; an amiable enough sort, but almost aggressive in his disinterest in any intellectual pursuit! His overriding passion is for a pretty, sociable, smart girl in the school, Jessica Kailo, impersonated by Lara Flynn Boyle from Poltergeist III! She’s friendly, on the order of a character like Diane Court from Say Anything (the picture Cusack did instead of this one, I suppose), but is only vaguely aware of Marlon's existence, despite the constant creepy pining for her he does over all the years of high school!

The plot and title kick in when it becomes time to apply for a college! We follow Marlon and Jessica separately as they try for a fictional athenaeum called Ramsey College, and also meet the Ramsey recruiting squad, which includes one called Kip Hammet, played by top-billed Anthony Edwards from The Sure Thing, and also the picture’s nominal antagonist, a dapper dan named Leo, essayed by Charles Rocket from Fraternity Vacation! And there are other Ramsay candidates, like a football player (Duane Davis from A Nightmare on Elm Street 4) and a girl who works at McDonalds (Tichina Arnold from Little Shop of Horrors)!

Being a moron, Marlon’s biggest challenge is passing the SAT, which is apparently some kind of test you need to pass to get accepted to an American college! Marlon employs a pair of coaches to help him, and these are played by Nora Dunn from Shake, Rattle & Rock and the always-welcome Phil Hartman from Small Soldiers! Meanwhile we get the debates of the recruiting committee, some jousting for the deanship, the worries and tribulations of the various students, the growing (though unrealistic) potential for romance between Marlon and Jessica, and little imaginary scenarios involving the hypothetical A and B of the SAT word questions, who grow increasingly resentful of Marlon for his idiocy! (One of these hypothetical fellows is played by noted eccentric Bruce Wagner, a screenwriter who wrote David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars and appeared as an actor in Wes Craven’s Shocker!)

We also get a long parade of familiar faces in the cast, including Philip Baker Hall from Three O’Clock High as the dean of recruitment; Bill Raymond from C.H.U.D. as the recruiter who accidentally accepted a pig; Brian Doyle-Murray from Vacation as a coach; Robert Ridgely from The Wild Life as Jessica’s dad; Richard Jenkins from The Witches of Eastwick as Marlon’s dad; Bill Henderson from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai as another coach; O-Lan Jones from The Right Stuff as a secretary; Curtis Armstrong from Revenge of the Nerds in a cameo as a bible college recruiter; Diane Franklin from The Last American Virgin as Marlon’s comely stepmom; Helen Lloyd Breed from Funny Farm as Jessica’s mom; and Taylor Negron, who played a mailman in Better Off Dead, is again a mailman here – ha ha, maybe the same mailman! Plus it ends with a cameo from Bob Eubanks of Johnny Dangerously fame, here riding majestically in the back of a pink Cadillac filled with pretty girls!

Phew, ha ha! There are a lot of balls kept in the air for a 90 minute comedy, and the picture pulls the multistory element off surprisingly well! As a procedural story about the difficulties of getting into college it’s only sporadically interesting, and relies far too much on fantastical characters, like Edwards’s beneficent cool-dude recruiter, and unlikely scenarios to reach its resolution! Marlon is a fairly annoying personality, but I liked that the movie focused just as much on Jessica, makes her a human instead of a puppy-love object, and occasionally interrogates her alleged perfection – it’s very like Say Anything in that way, and in several other ways as well!

Just about everything in the movie is serviceable, and the picture as a whole is good-natured, but it rarely rises above that – laffs are sprinkled here and there, but it never gets very uproarious! I thought it was ok, but not much more, so I give How I Got Into College two plaid jackets!

Burl reviews Zapped!! (1983)

 

Bzzzztt, it’s Burl here with some science psycho-pervations for you! Ha ha, here we have a precursor to the science wizard pictures of the mid-80s, like Weird Science and My Science Project, or the more reality-based (and better) The Manhattan Project; and of course a descendant of the Dexter Riley movies of the decade before, of which The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes is an example recently reviewed! But here we have a movie that started out with the innocence of a Dexter Riley movie, or even a Flubber and Shaggy Dog-era Disney picture, but, in the wake of Porky’s, was garnished with some extra boobs and bums to bring it up to 80s code! Yes, I’m talking about Zapped!!

Ha ha, it’s always nice to review a movie that comes with its own exclamation point! Zapped! is the story of nerdly-but-dreamy school science wizard Barney Springboro, played by Cha-Chi himself, Scott Baio, well known for being The Boy Who Drank Too Much, and, more recently, for being a bit of a right-wing loon! As the movie opens he’s got mice swimming around in diving suits for some reason, and we learn that he’s growing special orchids for the school principal, played by Robert Mandan, the super familiar-looking guy from The Carey Treatment, and growing special mary-hoo-wanna for his best buddy Peyton, played by crinkle-haired Willie Aames from Paradise! Peyton is a strange amalgam of types: a horndog party animal who’s also a spoiled rich kid, and also, I gather, supposed to be sort of an unpopular nerd! I guess they just had him be whatever they felt was convenient for the movie in any given moment, ha ha!   

Felice Schachter is a nosy teen newshound called Bernadette who always wants to report on whatever Cha-Chi is up to with his science! What he’s most recently up to is falling victim to a lab accident that gives him Carrie-style psychokinesis, and when Peyton finds out about the power, he immediately enlists Cha-Chi to help him win first a baseball game, and then against the frat house boys in casino gambling! This causes complications and confusions, because at the same time, Cha-Chi and Bernadette are becoming fond of each other, and Bernadette strongly disapproves of the gambling; while meantime Peyton is trying his best with Jane, the randomly flatulent queen of the campus played by Heather Thomas from Red Blooded American Girl, who is dating Greg Bradford from Lovelines, the usual blond BMOC quasi-fascist and head of the casino frat house! Ha ha, phew, it’s a situation so complicated I had to use a run-on sentence to describe it!

Also meanwhile, Miss Burnhart, played by Sue Ann Langdon from Without Warning, is trying to make time with the principal and also to bust Cha-Chi for weed cultivation! And Cha-Chi’s prune juice-guzzling dad, played by Roger Bowen from M*A*S*H and Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home, is sleeping through everything, and his mom, essayed by Mews Small from Sleeper, stays awake, terrified, believing her son possessed by the devil and recruiting priests to exorcise him after his powers have been revealed to her in the form of a flying ventriloquist’s dummy!

Barney’s other friend is Dexter the baseball coach, played by the great Scatman Crothers from The King of Marvin Gardens and The Shining! Ha ha, it’s always nice to see him! LaWanda Page from Mausoleum plays Dexter’s wife, and is the main antagonist in an insane hophead dream Dexter has when he’s exposed to big billows of pot smoke from the furnace: he goes bicycling with Albert Einstein and chatting about relativity, until suddenly his wife comes thundering along in a chariot, dressed as Attila the Hun, bellowing threats and firing pork products at him from a bazooka!

Ha ha, and there are plenty of other familiar faces in the margins! We get Jewel Shepard from Raw Force and The Return of the Living Dead; “Boof” from Teen Wolf makes a small appearance; and there’s even a walk on from I Wanna Hold Your Hand’s Eddie Deezen, who wears a driving cap, a cardigan, a bowtie, and a shirt that reads “God’s Gift to Women,” and only sticks around long enough to accuse his friend of constant masturbation!

It sounds like I’ve been describing a parade of nonstop delights, but I’ve got to report the shocking truth: it’s not a good movie, ha ha! Sure, Cha-Chi makes dresses fly up and cardigans come apart with the power of his mind, but on the other hand Cha-Chi makes dresses fly up and cardigans come apart with the power of his mind, and it’s just all so stupid! The character of Peyton, meanwhile, is so smarmy you could spread him on toast! My goodness, what a self-satisfied, smirky, misguidedly entitled nougat he is! But you can’t argue with that supporting cast, and it does seem like a Dexter Riley movie with sleaze, which is in theory a really appealing concept! But of all the Zapped!s you could imagine might result from that concoction, the Zapped! we got would be well at the low end of those expectations! I give it one tiny scuba suit!

Burl reviews The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes! (1969)

 

Beep-boop, it’s Burl, here to make remarkable progress on reviewing one of those very special Disney pictures you might recall from some Sunday night of your youth! It’s the first in a small series of films featuring Kurt Russell, whom we know from The Thing and Breakdown and so many more, in the role of Dexter Riley, an averagepants student at good old Medfield College! Yes, as you’ve no doubt figured out, the movie is The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes!

Dexter is none too smart a fellow – ha ha, he’s meant to be average, as I say, but in fact he comes off as a bit dim, which gives the story more of a Flowers For Algernon feel than the makers maybe intended! He’s an amiable sort though, and he hangs out with a group of pals whose favourite gang activity is, for some reason, listening in on Medfield College administrative meetings! They overhear pennypinching Dean Higgins, played by Joe Flynn from The Rescuers, telling their beloved science professor Professor Quigley, essayed by William Schallert from Matinee and The Man from Planet X, that the college can under no circumstances afford a computer!

But the students have an idea: hit up local gangster and occasional philanthropist A.J. Arno, played by Cesar Romero from Springtime in the Rockies, for the donation of his own slightly used concubator! Well, he goes for it and the next thing you know, Dexter gets electrocuted by the room-sized device and, by a well-known scientific process, himself becomes as smart as a computer! He instantly becomes a world celebrity who does well on quiz shows and will, Dean Higgins hopes, help Medfield cruise to victory in an intermural trivia contest sponsored by Encyclopedia Britannica! But he’s not counting on the predations of a rival dean, nor Dexter’s own equivocal feelings about his downmarket alma mater! 

On the downside, so far as Arno and his bumbling lieutenant Dick Bakalyan, whose mug we know from The Errand Boy and Von Ryan’s Express, are concerned, is that Dexter’s vast new knowledge includes leftover codewords, facts, and figures from the numbers racket in which they trade! So pretty soon the gangsters are after Dexter, and, rather strangely for a Disney picture of this era, make plain that they intend to violently murder him, stuff his corpse in a trunk, dump it into a lake, and then take the opportunity to go fishing on that lake while they’re there! Ha ha, yikes!

But of course there are plenty of monkeyshines involving Dexter’s friends posing as house painters to rescue him from his predicament – though they can't do this without causing our collegiate Charly a head bonk that dwindles his brain wizardry! Then there's a big car chase with flying bullets and rolling paint cans, and the pals take all these risks despite the fact that, thanks to his incredible world fame, Dex gets a bit full of himself and forgets his old friends! Ha ha, there’s the moral lesson for you, kids - friends who are friends are real friends!

But we don't watch these pictures for moral lessons, but rather the cozy, homely feeling they radiate and the shenanigans they promise! Both of these qualities are present in the picture, but not in any great quantity I’m afraid! The storytelling is slapdash, and there’s a feeling of opportunities missed – why have a character become the smartest guy in the world and then waste his talents on a quiz contest? The picture would have benefitted from a lot more pep and energy and a tighter, funnier script! Ha ha, this was the first of the Dexter Riley trilogy, so maybe they get better as they go along – I’ll have to watch Now You See Him, Now You Don’t and The Strongest Man in the World to find out, I suppose, though I’m not especially anxious to, ha ha! I guess this one is not without its pleasures, but I still can’t get too enthusiastic about it! I give The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes one and a half applejacks!

Burl reviews The Faculty! (1998)

 

Saved by the bell, it’s Burl, manfully attempting to review a very, very, very 1990s horror picture! It’s maybe not the most 90s horror movie – that might be Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer, or one of those sorts of things – but the very, very and final italicized very still apply! After all, it was written by that meta-horror specialist Kevin Williamson, directed by 90s wunderkind Robert Rodriguez, and produced by that slab-lipped, pock-faced date-rapist Harvey Weinstein, so after all, it’s pretty 90s! It’s The Faculty!

Our setting: High School U.S.A.! As in Dazed and Confused, there are different groups: jocks, criminals, brainboxes, and a put-upon freshman (not played by Wiley Wiggins, but Wiley is in the movie, ha ha, lurking in the margins), and foot-ball is the local religion! In the opening sequence we see the iron-nosed foot-ball coach, played by Robert Patrick from Die Hard 2, being approached by… something; then the coach, now possessed by… something, stalks Bebe Neuwerth in the role of the school principal; and the principal seems to be saved when she runs into colleague Piper Laurie from that classic high school picture Carrie, but then Laurie turns into… something!

So, something’s clearly up at this high school, ha ha! The student body includes Elijah Wood as Casey, the oft-abused nerd; Clea DuVall from Ghosts of Mars as Stokely, the tough loner girl; Laura Harris from It putting on the mint julip as Marybeth, the new Georgian transplant; Josh Hartnett from Halloween H20 as Zeke, an insufferable jerk who sells homemade drugs to the younger kids; and a few others, including a quarterback who may not want to play foot-ball any more, just like, again, Dazed and Confused! It seems to take an age, but eventually these characters get together and face the threat, which is the same sort of parasitic takeover aliens we saw in The Puppet Masters!

Because this was written by the same fellow who wrote Scream, it’s packed with winking meta-humour and would-be cutting edginess! It’s trying its best to be a hip and with-it high school version of The Thing, but mostly it’s trying too hard! It wants to give the same sense of pod-people menace as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but there’s rarely if ever any question about who’s who, and in any case, once the parasite leaves the host, the people come back to normal! So it’s not very scary or particularly disturbing, and it's packed with mediocre music, or mediocre covers of good music; but the picture stays afloat with a cheerful 90s-ness that makes it an artifact of its time, and a reasonably entertaining one at that!

And the cast is strong! The faculty itself includes Salma Hayek from Desperado as the school nurse; Famke Janssen from Goldeneye and Deep Rising as the shrinking violet teacher; and people like Jon Stewart and Daniel Von Bargen; and Christopher McDonald from Grumpy Old Men plays Casey’s dad! It’s a very derivative movie, but it’s frequently fun and occasionally gory! I hated the character of Zeke and was glad to see him suffer a terrible public humiliation, but mostly the picture is a good-natured romp in the classic 90s style, so I give The Faculty two collapsing bleachers!

Burl reviews Dazed and Confused! (1993)

 

A happy Bicentennial to you, from me, Burl! Yes, I’m here to review a picture not made in, but rather set in, the American bicentennial year of 1976! Unlike many another period picture I could name, this one sets itself in its chosen time with the utmost conviction and credibility! Yes, it’s none other than Richard Linklater’s sophomore exercise in filmmaking, in which he tells a tale of not just sophomores, but of seniors and freshmen too, in a picture called Dazed and Confused!

Linklater’s earlier film Slacker is a great favourite of mine, and it’ll probably come as no surprise that I dig this one too! Ha ha, I find it endlessly rewatchable, and a most groovy updating of the Crown International pictures of the 70s, principally The Pom Pom Girls! And of course he followed it up later with the “spiritual sequel” Everybody Wants Some!!, and that was enjoyable too!

Anyway, we know where we’re at here: High School U.S.A., somewhere in Texas, on the last day of school, 1976! It’s an ensemble piece with different groups of students: the soon-to-be seniors doing their end of year shenanigans, and the middle schoolers on their way to becoming freshmen! The big activity for the older kids is to find the freshmen and humiliate or beat them in some way, and this is where the picture seems to me a document from some alien culture, because where I grew up, we had nothing like this at all! Ha ha, nobody around here cared about foot-ball or paddling kids on the fandini, but in this Texas town it’s an overriding and all-consuming obsession!

Luckily there are other obsessions too, like drinking beer and smoking weed! Those I can relate to, ha ha! And of course there are the cars, which are fantastic – the opening shot is a real dream for casual lovers of the 70s muscle car - and the music, which is not necessarily what I might have listened to if I was in high school in ’76, but is entirely the right stuff for this picture! I don’t think Linklater got exactly the music he wanted, but he did pretty well!

Linklater did a lot of things right with this movie, but one of his greatest accomplishments was assembling this cast! And I’m not just talking about the guys who became really famous, like Matthew McConaughey (from Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation) as the chickenhawk Wooderson, or Ben Affleck (from Gone Girl) in the role of the overall-clad bully O’Bannion! No, the whole cast is good, or at least ideal and effective, in their roles: Adam Goldberg from The Prophecy as one of the more intellectual students; Sasha Jenson from Halloween 4 as a playful jock; Milla Jovovich from Two Moon Junction in a near-silent role as a decorative girlfriend; Wiley Wiggins from Computer Chess as the main frosh on the run; Parker Posey from The Daytrippers as a bitchy, demanding senior; and Nicky Katt from Gremlins as a violent greaseball!

Ha ha, one of the few places where the movie falters is in trying to have a tiny scrap of a plot: something about a foot-ball player pressured to sign some kind of pledge form and deciding whether or not he even wants to play foot-ball at all! Otherwise the picture is mostly a series of highly entertaining vignettes which occur over the fifteen hours or so covered by the picture, giving equal weight to the concerns of the jocks, the stoners, the brainboxes, the proto-teens, the second-wave feminists, the ex-hippies, and more! (Ha ha, I’d have liked some art-punks in there, but you can’t have everything!) Even if you weren’t around or fully sentient in 1976, the odds are you’ll connect on some level with the goings-on: coming in so late from a night out that it’s early, for example; or fighting a bully; or scoring beer when you’re still under eighteen; or smoking your first joint! The picture never makes a big, After School Special-type deal out of any of this, but treats it with just the sort of nervous, pleasurable excitement I remember feeling myself!

It’s a tremendous sophomore feature: not perfect maybe, but nearly that! I enjoyed it in the theatre and have enjoyed it every time since, and plan to enjoy it further in the future! Yes, Dazed and Confused is one of the good ones, and I’m pleased to give it three and a half green things every day!

Burl reviews Talking Walls! (1987)

 

Ha ha, it’s Burl - sheep room activated! Unfortunately, to know what that means you have to have seen Talking Walls, and you probably haven’t! That may be for the best, but I’ll be happy to tell you all you need to know about this curious picture so that you can decide for yourself!

Why is it curious? Well, first of all, it comes from a director whose previous picture, released almost a decade earlier, was a sort of gritty, downmarket On Golden Pond/Death Wish mash-up featuring Lee Strasberg and Ruth Gordon as an elderly couple trying to survive in a rapidly de-gentrifying Bronx! It was called Boardwalk, and in no way by watching it could you have predicted the coming, only nine years later, of Talking Walls!

Our alleged hero in this newer picture, Paul, is played as a real weirdo by Stephen Shellen from Gimme an ‘F’; and no wonder, because the character is indeed a big old motel-living, emotionally adolescent weirdo! He’s a sociology student trying to complete a PhD on “personal relationships” or some such bumblefuzz, and proposes to his professor, played by Barry Primus from Boxcar Bertha, that he gather his data by peeping on the various guests populating (on an hourly basis) the motel he lives at!

To this end he cuts through the motel walls and floors with a demented pervert’s energy, waving a skilsaw around and laughing maniacally as he installs his two-way mirrors and cameras! He records a parade of yolk-faced fartmongers as they play bohankie with ladies (some professionals, others not) in the various theme rooms! Yes, there’s a sheep room, and the theme in there appears to be sheep, but not erotic garter-wearing sheep as we saw in Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (but were afraid to ask)! There’s also a car room, a shoe room, and some others I can’t rightly remember!

So he observes, but is such a poor scholar and abjectly stupid person that he learns absolutely nothing, for which his professor regularly upbraids him! “But I have all the latest equipment!” whines Paul! “It’s got to tell me somethin’ about how people are feelin’!” Meanwhile, the motel guests keep up their performative erotica for the benefit of Paul’s cameras and thermographs, and the picture turns into a series of sexual skits, like If You Don't Stop It... You'll Go Blind!!! or one of those kinds of movies!

There are some familiar faces in the theme bedrooms! Sybil Danning from Howling II, Karen Leigh Hopkins from The Running Man, June Wilkinson from The Bellboy and the Playgirls, and Sally Kirkland from Hometown U.S.A. are just some of the ladies; and the fellows include Don Calfa from Return of the Living Dead, Hunter Von Leer from Halloween II, Peter Liapis from Ghoulies, Mickey Jones from Starman, and Richard Partlow from Alligator! Ha ha, it’s quite a gang!

Finally Paul tries dating a real woman, who turns out to be a Pac-Man playing French lady he finds attractive! Her name is Jeanne, and she’s played by Marie Laurin from Creature, and there’s a long montage of them kissing in picturesque places to the sounds of the worst softrock song of all time! Ha ha, bleargh! Of course the relationship goes south when he won’t let her see his place, because then she’ll know what a desperate pervert he is! The old man who owns the motel – my favourite character by a long chalk, ha ha! – counsels flowers, so Paul steals the ones the old man had just bought his wife, and books the cloud room for his anticipated bohankie! But there’s a twist ending, and it drives Paul mad and has him huffing from a big glass pipe and hallucinating a sort of music video that declares him to be on “The Losing Side of Love!”

It’s a weird movie when you get down to it! The protagonist seems so daft and damaged, and his oddball nature infects the entire picture! He videotapes everything, so much of the movie is literally from his perspective, and it's not a perspective any sensible person wants! There are unexpected intrusions of actual craft now and then, but these only make the whole thing weirder, and in any case nothing could possibly overcome the intolerable character of Paul, a petulant, whiny sociopath who wears leather pants for a scene of dramatic climax, then ends up driving the streets yelling “FIND HER! FIND HER! WHERE IS SHE!” There's more after this - ha ha, it seems to go on and on - but it all eventually wraps up in what I suppose was meant to be a happy ending!

The picture feels about eight times longer than it really is! It’s an extremely curious and off-putting thing, with only the charming old man and the weirdness to make it even worth a mention! I can’t say for sure that it was worth watching, but, as with other bizzarities like Mid-Knight Rider or The Worm Eaters, once it's over you know you’ve seen something most other people never will! I give Talking Walls one recalcitrant Coke machine!

Burl reviews Back to School! (1986)

 

Ha ha and howaya, it’s Burl! Today I’ve got a Rodney picture for you - Rodney Dangerfield that is, the man who could get no respect! We’ve seen the old collar-puller before in pictures like Caddyshack, but this movie, Back to School, is probably the closest he came to actually getting some respect in any of his cinematic forays! This or maybe Natural Born Killers, ha ha!

I remember having a good time with this one when I saw it in the theatre, and, just as Roger Ebert tends to give an extra star to movies set in Chicago, I automatically apply an extra layer of retroactive fondness to movies I saw on the big screen, which is why, when appropriate, I add a tag to that effect at the bottom of the review! I additionally admit to a baseline enjoyment of any movie that takes place on a college campus, be it comedic, horrific, dramatic or science fictional! So take my praise for Back to School with a grain of salt, won’t you? It’ll be pretty mild praise in any event!

Dangerfield is Thornton Melon, a rough-hewn business magnate who decides to finally get a college degree, and to that end joins his mild-mannered son at Great Lakes University! Melon’s son is Christine’s old pal Keith Gordon, and while this casting  doesn’t on the face of it seem particularly apropos, it turns out, somehow, to work perfectly! The junior Melon, Jason by name, has a kooky friend played by Robert Downey Jr. (perhaps most famous from Weird Science), whose character seems an aggregate of about seven different campus-movie clichés; and the easy-going literature professor Thornton falls in love with as soon as he sees her is played by the recently deceased Sally Kellerman from Moving Violations, who’s very charming here!

The salutary casting continues! Melon has a chauffeur/pal/bodyguard played by Burt Young, whom we all recognize from Blood Beach, and who tells a horrifying tale of the time he put his son through a wall! Of course Ned Beatty, the actor we know so well from Silver Streak and Rolling Vengeance, plays the dean, Dean Martin (ha ha!); the ever-delightful M. Emmet Walsh from Blade Runner is the diving coach (diving is Jason’s chosen sport, a skill he inherited from his bugeyed pa); and naturally William Zabka from Just One of the Guys plays the blond preppy frat bully who cramps up mysteriously at the end!

Even the bit parts are often filled with delightfully familiar faces! Severn Darden from The Mad Room plays an amiable ape professor; Adrienne Barbeau of The Fog is Thornton’s bitchy ex-wife; and there are appearances from Edie McClurg of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off fame, Robert Picardo of Matinee, Jason Hervey of The Monster Squad (playing the young Thornton), and of course Kurt Vonnegut, playing himself! Ha ha!

On the one hand, the movie seems to simply make up the structure, protocols, and general reality of college life (at least as I remember it) as it goes along; but on the other, the location was well chosen and well used, and so, visually at least, the place feels like a real college! The movie itself is surprisingly bereft of Animal House-inspired college tomfoolery (even though Harold Ramis was one of the writers on both pictures), and the stakes are so low as to be non-existent! Will Thornton pass his exams, or will he get booted out of college? He’s a rich and jolly bonvivant either way, ha ha, so who cares!

Yet he’s a likeable old cuss for a’ that, and we do hope for him to succeed! I didn’t care much for his dirty-old-man routine while he sings a pretty gruesome version of Twist & Shout, and the way the movie tries to have it all by making Thornton both fabulously wealthy and a man of the people doesn’t fully pass the plausibility test, but Dangerfield manages a comradeliness that overrides all that! And of course he provides many of his patented zingers, tossing them out like the pro he is! Back to School is a solid if not outstanding 80s comedy, and I’m pleased to give it two and a half crushed napkin caddies!

Burl reviews The Sure Thing! (1985)

 

Hello everybody, it’s Burl here, driving with a load not properly tied down! Yes, I’ve got a tale of young romance for you, a picture that was declared a worthy successor to It Happened One Night, but with the hip stars of today instead of Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert! Here in fact we get John Cusack from Tapeheads in his first big starring role, and Daphne Zuniga from Last Rites and The Fly II in her first big non-slasher role, and the picture is quite simply called The Sure Thing!

It’s a Christmas picture, or at least a Christmastime picture, so it’s appropriate to review at this time of year, ha ha! Of course Zuniga was already an old hand at Christmas pictures, having appeared in The Dorm that Dripped Blood, and Cusack would later return to the Yuletide well with The Ice Harvest! It’s also in large part a road picture, and I usually like those! Along with Fandango, this was a VHS road trip movie favourite among my pals and I. though never as revered as director Rob Reiner’s previous picture, Spinal Tap; but I think that ought to go without saying! And it was part of quite a run for Reiner - Tap, this, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, and Misery, all in a row! That’s a lot of middlebrow quality!

Cusack, for his part, had a knack for discovering that sweet spot between cool guy, average guy, and nebbishy loser: he did that in Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer and Say Anything and even Hot Pursuit, and he does it here, possibly for the first time! He plays Gib, a semi-playa in his first year of university, who is invited by his buddy Lance, played by Anthony Edwards from Gotcha, to travel for the winter holiday from his snowy Northeastern campus to the sunny beaches of California, where he is assured by Lance that a Sure Thing, which I gather means a beautiful lady who will put out, will be waiting for him!

This is the dubious premise of the movie and of Gib’s westward trek! First, though, he tries his luck with brainy gal-next-door Alison, played by Zuniga, but his false-pretenses ploy backfires and she takes a strong dislike to him! The next thing you know they’re carpooling out west together, in the company of a showtune-loving couple played by Tim Robbins from The Hudsucker Proxy and Fraternity Vacation, and Lisa Jane Persky from When Harry Met Sally!

Familiar 80s faces along the way include big fellas Joshua Cadman, who was Bronk in Goin’ All the Way, and George Memmoli from Lunch Wagon; perennial dowager Fran Ryan from Stripes and Quiet Cool; the always-Grandpa Richard Hamilton, who gramped it up in Protocol and Heaven Help Us; sad sack Larry Hankin from Planes, Trains and Automobiles; John Putch from Jaws 3-D; Garry Goodrow from The Prey; and of course an appearance by Carmine Filpi, the man who made a career out of playing drunks, winos, cork-pulling hobos and barrel-scraping stewbums in pictures like Escape From New York, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, and The Wedding Singer!

Gib fantasizes about the nameless Sure Thing played by Nicollette Sheridan from Spy Hard, while Alison exchanges telephone calls with her incredibly boring boyfriend Jason, played by Boyd Gaines from Porky’s! They catch the boot from Robbins and Persky, try their luck at hitchhiking and the ‘Hound, and eventually pull a ride with Hankin’s hangdog trucker, during which Alison overhears Gib talking about the Sure Thing! “All my life, I never had a Sure Thing,” moans the trucker, as though a Sure Thing was really a Thing! And when Gib finally reaches his destination, finds his pal Lance and is introduced to the Sure Thing - who seems congenial enough but about as sharp as a bag of wet mice - we wonder what he will do! Ha ha, a fade to black keeps the answer unknown for the nonce!

I have to take a paragraph and ask just what’s up with this plot! The characters all talk about a Sure Thing in capital letters, like it’s a known and revered phenomenon instead of just a way to call a woman a brainless, agency-free life-support system for a vagina! Even in my teens I thought this was weird and off-putting, and I wasn’t an especially sensitive teen! It might have worked if the Sure Thing had subverted our expectations in some way, but she doesn’t! She turns out to have every bit of the personality and self-possession that her name, or title, or whatever, would indicate, and all the other characters, even Gib, treat her abominably!

Even though Gib ultimately fails to exploit this woman’s legendary surety, or claims he does, the last act of the picture and the overriding concept leaves a bit of sour paste on the brush! Ha ha, but there are plenty of delights: funny lines from Cusack, a general amiability (Gib is uncommonly gentlemanly for an 80s dudebro), and that terrific cast! (Viveca Lindfors, a favourite of mine from Creepshow and Silent Madness, plays the English professor for whom Gib writes his clunky middle school-level compositions!) The romantic aspects, I will admit, hooked me as a teen, and that part of it, along with all the road trip stuff, still has great appeal! It’s got its problems, but on balance I’ll give The Sure Thing three green duffel bags!

Burl reviews Dortoir des grandes! (1984)

 

Eh bien, bonjour les gars et les gamines, c’est Burl! Ha ha, today I’m reviewing a French picture for you, and how very French it is! Way back in the mid-80s, when this movie was new, my friend Doug somehow managed to tape most of it onto a VHS cassette, which we then watched over and over again! But the beginning of the movie was missing, and we didn’t know the title, so we referred to the picture as Dormitory F!

Of course the movie was packed to the brim with naked ladies, which accounted for the bulk of its appeal, but it also featured a scene in which the ladies visit a punk club and listen to a catchy song we called “Ansari Anse!” For years since then, I sought out both Dormitory F and that catchy punk song, but being as how I didn’t know the proper titles for either of them, this proved difficult! But once again Doug came to the rescue: once again by mysterious means he found the movie, put it on a little flash drive instead of a VHS tape this time, and gave it to me, and now it’s my pleasure to reveal the proper title of the picture: Dortoir des grandes!

That translates most directly to Senior Dormitory, but I believe the standard English title for it is College Dormitory! In any case, I was excited to see this movie again after so many years of it living (and growing and mutating) in my imagination! It turns out to be the tale of a girl called Adeline, who, her father being dead and her mother who knows where, lives with her stepmother and the stepmother’s creepy doughboy sweetheart! When these two start getting cozier with her than she would like (pulling her into the bathtub, spiking her drinks, double-teaming her in her bed, that sort of thing), Adeline’s superhuman equanimity finally fails her and she demands to be sent to a private school for girls!

The bulk of the picture plays out at this academy! The other girls are reasonably welcoming, with the only holdout being Juliette, the bad girl, who becomes jealous! Good-natured Mowgli, who I guess is called that because she’s black, becomes Adeline’s good pal, and all the girls are pretty cuddly with one another when you get right down to it! Fanette, the dean, is a very pretty lady, but a grouchy and insecure one who is prone to having affairs with her students! Her current objet d’amour is Juliette, and boy does Juliette get steamed when Fanette’s interest shifts to Adeline!

Instead of a plot, the movie simply features scenes of the girls doing stuff! They take group showers of course, and massage one another, and play little pranks on their teachers, and at one point they lock the dean in her room and have a dorm party with some invited boys and a poster of Rocky watching over them! Of course the highlight is the visit to the grungy basement punk club, where a band called Les Porte Mentaux play a song not called “Ansari Anse,” but rather “Ah ca ira!” Ha ha, I can’t tell you what a pleasure it was to finally see this scene again after all those years, and hear that catchy song! And the scene is just terrific all around, and brought back memories of my own visits to grungy basement punk clubs! Though I don’t recall the punk ladies taking their tops off and dancing around as happens in this picture, and also the bathroom seen here is the nicest punk club bathroom anyone ever heard of, ha ha! Normally you feared for your life in those bathrooms, and if you were smart you stayed out of them altogether! (It was the germs you feared, mind you, not your fellow punks, who by and large were a pacific bunch off the pogo floor!)

So all that was great, and it’s nice that in the last quarter of the film, after a suicide attempt that nobody seems to worry overmuch about, the location shifts to the Caribbean, where Adeline accompanies Mowgli for an erotic holiday, and then the arrival of Fanette complicates matters slightly, and the whole thing takes on a Melody in Love sort of a vibe! But otherwise I must admit that the movie is fairly desultory, with no art and precious little craft in evidence! The script is very piecemeal and the characterizations extremely confused! It’s mainly a series of scenes in which people grope and snog one another for a while before they invariably cut abruptly to a new scene! I’m not sure if more explicit stuff was snipped out, but I don’t really care either because, naked ladies notwithstanding, the bohankie scenes get boring and repetitive as always seems to be the case with pornoo, or near-pornoo! Still, I enjoyed it because it brought me back to those days when movies like this were a big deal! Ha ha! I give Dortoir des grandes, the former Dormitory F, two posters of Ator the Fighting Eagle!