Burl reviews She Demons! (1958)

 

To the beat of the jungle drums it’s Burl, returning to the land of Cunha! Ha ha, we’re all very familiar with, and fond of, his work I’m sure, particularly the Great Quartet of Fifty-Et, which includes Giant from the Unknown, Frankenstein’s Daughter, Missile to the Moon, and the movie I’m gabbing about today, the exotic, buxotic, quixotic She Demons!

The plot is largely lifted from Eyes Without A Face, or would have been if Eyes Without A Face hadn’t come out a year later, ha ha! It seems that there’s been a Gilligan’s Island-style marine mishap, and the castaways include spoiled debutante Jerrie, played by beauteous Irish McCalla, most famous for playing the title role in Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and who, a trivia, was born exactly the same day as the great Dick Miller! The boat captain and generic hero type is Fred Macklin, played by Tod Griffin, who had, after all, already appeared in She Devil so should have known what to expect on this island! There are a couple of crew fellows too: Sammy Ching, played by Victor Sen Yung, famous for his role as number one son Jimmy Chan in the Charlie Chan film series and who also appeared in movies like Moontide, Soldier of Fortune and The Killer Elite; and Kris Kamana, played by Charles Opunui, who had appeared, very briefly, as an “Eskimo” in The Thing From Another World!

After exploring the beach, which looks a lot like Paradise Cove in Malibu, they venture into the island’s interior, which looks a lot like Griffith Park! Unfortunately their buddy Kris suffers a mishap that leaves him chock full of spears, ha ha, and it’s soon revealed that the perpetrators are a group of goochy-faced ladies who like to dance around and attack anyone who happens along! And these ladies, instantly dubbed “She Demons” by our intrepid castaways, turn out to have been created by Colonel Osler, of course!

But who is Colonel Osler? Well, he’s played by Rudolph Anders, who’d essayed plenty of Nazis and other assorted evil Germans before this, and was Dr. Louis Dupont in The Snow Creature, and here he delivers a particularly rootin’-tootin’ performance as a Mengele type guy acting out of the usual maniacal uxoriousness, which of course he’s happy to drop as soon as he claps eyes on Irish! It seems Osler’s wife Mona, played by Leni Tana from Torn Curtain, was involved in a lava accident and needs a replacement face, and local island ladies figure in this treatment somehow, and whenever the procedure fails, as it constantly does, the result, somehow, is a She Demon! The filmmakers don’t really explore the medical whys and wherefores of this, however!

Of course Osler has his Igor figure, here called, imaginatively enough, Igor, and played by familiar face Gene Roth of Strange Illusion, Jet Pilot and Zombies of Mora Tau; he also has a number of generic sub-henchmen who all try to keep their faces in those frowny expressions Nazi henchmen always seem to wear in B pictures! Ha ha! And as the island’s volcano gets rumblier, and Fred and Sammy are captured and tortured while Jerrie is captured and wooed, and then everybody escapes with help from the bandaged Mona, who has finally recognized what a monster her husband is (and whose face, partly revealed near the end, is genuinely gross), and Osler rants and raves and grins and grimaces, and the She Demons keep dancing around, we come to realize just how long 77 minutes can seem!

Nevertheless, I liked this little movie! After all, it starts from a pretty solid foundation, because I’m naturally fond of these little 50s programmers and always enjoy the world of Cunha! In the first half of the movie Jerrie is a supremely annoying spoiled rich girl, but it’s rewarding as she transforms into a regular person! Sammy, for his part, is just a regular sidekick sort of a guy instead of the Asian caricature I was fearing, and that was good too! He’s goofy, but also resourceful and brave! And then it’s always nice to see Nazis on the receiving end of a lava shower, ha ha! It won’t make you change your religion or anything, but you’ll probably enjoy the movie, so I give She Demons two powder-blue cashmere shorties!

Burl reviews From Beyond! (1986)

Well slap my bucket, it’s Burl! Ha ha, remember how good Re-Animator was? Well, on the basis of that, I recall in the mid-80s becoming very excited at each new Stuart Gordon picture that got mentioned on Fangoria’s Terror Teletype: movies like Dolls and Robo Jox, and the sadly never-to-be made Gris-Gris, and of course the picture under consideration today: another H.P. Lovecraft adaptation, and therefore the most direct follow-up to the great Re-Animator, and therefore the most exciting of them all, From Beyond! Ha ha, I had a one-sheet for this one up on the wall of my teenage bedroom, and it was a prized possession indeed!

The picture begins with a long pre-credit sequence that dramatizes the entirety of the Lovecraft story the movie is based on! Ha ha, we meet young and earnest science assistant Crawford Tillinghast, played by the committed Jeffrey Combs from The Man With Two Brains and Cellar Dweller, and his boss, the voluptuary and radical sybarite Dr. Edward Pretorius, impersonated here very well by Ted Sorel of Basket Case 2 fame, and who, a trivia, was the nephew of famed Universal monster makeup man Jack Pierce! Pretorius has invented a machine, the Resonator, which opens up mutually accessible pathways to normally extra-perceptible dimensions that are populated by monsters!

When a flying eel puts a biting on Tillinghast he knows it’s all gone too far, but before he can destroy the machine Pretorius has his head chomped off, and after a neighbour lady’s dog finds the body and licks the head stump, Tillinghast is thought mad and accused of the murder! (The neighbour lady, it should be noted, is essayed by Bunny Summers from The Kid With the 200 I.Q.!) Cue the arrival of a comely psychiatrist, Dr. Katherine McMichaels, played by Barbara Crampton from Fraternity Vacation and Chopping Mall!

The next step, of course, is to have the putative axe-murderer Tillinghast released into the custody of good Dr. McMichaels so they can return to the Pretorious house and figure out what happened! This may seem an unlikely happenstance, but the authorities aren’t fools: for security they send along an ex-football player-turned-cop called Bubba Brownlee, played by Ken Foree, whom we remember so fondly from shopping centre-based pictures like Dawn of the Dead and Phantom of the Mall! The trio set up camp in the house, and as soon as dials are fiddled with and giant tuning forks start glowing purple, the extradimensional creatures show up, accompanied by a now-bestial Pretorius!

Things don’t go well from there – there are locust attacks, an encounter with bondage gear, and a giant lamprey eats off Tillinghast’s hair! Moreover, pineal glands start acting up and an officious doctor played by Stuart Gordon’s wife Carolyn Purdy-Gordon has her brains sucked out through her eye socket! Yuck! This is a scene which was depicted in the pages of Fangoria, but was cut out of all prints of the movie until fairly recently! I was glad to finally see it, but I have to admit the scene is gross!

And what of the movie itself? I like the creatures a lot, Combs is a nervous pleasure as ever, and it’s always terrific to see Foree on screen! Plus I like the pink-and-purple colour scheme (popular hues for Lovecraft apparently – remember The Color Out of Space?), and the craft across the board is very strong for a low-budget horror picture! And yet it doesn’t measure up to its predecessor! The story is fairly limp, the characters not terribly well-developed, and there are a few ropey trick effects! I don’t accuse the picture of being overly ambitious – ha ha, I admire ambition in low-budget pictures! – but they might have bit off a little more than they could chew with some of the dimensional effects!

Still, that’s not a big problem; the trouble really is the “That’s it?” feeling we’re left with at the end of the picture! It gets darker than I remembered – the conclusion has something of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre feeling, or maybe more of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 feeling, ha ha! But despite any shortcomings, the pleasures here are many; and if it’s not a revelatory experience like Re-Animator was, it’s nevertheless a fine chunk of 80s horror with some terrific monsters! I give From Beyond two and a half ill-fitting bald caps!

Burl reviews Deep Blue Sea! (1999)

 

Blub blub it’s Burl, here with more underwater action-horror for you! As you may recall, I have a fondness for such photoplays: the soggybottoms of 1989, for instance, like Deep Star Six and Leviathan and The Abyss! Movies that aren’t necessarily set at underwater complexes but feature water monsters are pretty good too, and the picture under review today, Deep Blue Sea, attempts to combine the charms of two such pictures, Jaws and Deep Rising! Ha ha, I’m surprised they didn’t call it Deep Jaws! And now I hear you asking: well Burl, did they succeed in grafting these two water movies into one satisfying cinematic concoction? Read on, MacDuck!

From Deep Rising they took the 90s-era digital monster effects, a little bit of tomato paste, a lot of goofy dialogue, a gang of non-characters, a big storm, and the word “deep!” From Jaws they took sharks! All of this is set at an underwater installation that differs from the above-named 1989 pictures in that it’s not at the bottom of the sea, but rather some small distance below the surface, with much of it floating like an artificial island! We explore this facility in the company of Mr. Samuel L. Jackson, known from such movies as Exorcist III and Die Hard With A Vengeance, who plays Russell Franklin, the millionairesman who funded the project!

Thomas Jane is a surly diver called Carter and Saffron Burrows is Dr. Susan; and other characters are played by Jacqueline McKenzie from Malignant, Michael Rapaport from Metro, LL Cool J from Halloween H2O (as “Preacher,” cook, parrot owner, and man of God), and of course Stellan Skarsgård from The Hunt for Red October and Dune Part One as The Doc! Their goal? Make sea sharks smart as a way of somehow curing Alzheimer’s! (Ha ha, strangely they ignore the fact that they already have an animal aboard their station that can talk, which is Preacher’s foul-mouthed parrot, so why not test on him!)

Ha ha, it’s a noble goal, but when the inevitable storm comes and wreaks havoc, and the topside portion of the facility is destroyed and the supersmart sea sharks released from their pen, the characters are left wishing maybe they hadn’t poked so much at the bitey fish! Ha ha, naturally the sea sharks want revenge, and they take it out mostly on The Doc, who gets his arm chomped off for starters, then when they’re trying to helicopter him out of there, a shark nabs him off the end of the cable, carries him around a bit underwater, then uses him as a battering ram to get through an underwater window! Oh, poor Doc!

But his hilarious death scene is not the most notable or memorable in the picture - ha ha, that honor of course goes to Samuel L. Jackson, and while since that time there have been many copycat sudden-death scenes to dilute the impact of this one, it still remains amusing, and I can assure you that it was a real gudukus in the theater back when it was new!

When I watched the picture again recently, of course the moment was not so incredible, and while one can’t blame the movie for that, one can blame it for the terrible script, the wafer-thin characterizations, the relentless borrowing from other, better pictures, and the lack of affrights! It’s one of those pictures that takes a while to get going, but once it does, it stays going, so it’s got that going for it! And it does have some moments sprinkled here and there - not many, ha ha, but some! So in the end, when all the bubbles have risen to the surface, I give Deep Blue Sea one and a half parrot-munchings!

Burl reviews The Invisible Man (1933)

 

Mwa-ha-ha-ha and hello, it’s Burl! Am I here? Or am I over here! Ha ha, there’s no way of knowing, for I am completely invisible to you! Yes gumchewers, I’m here to review a classic of the cinema, the Universal Pictures production of The Invisible Man, directed by that giant mammal of cinema James Whale! And of course it features Claude Rains, well known as Nutsy from Moontide, in one of the most unusual debut roles any actor ever had - ha ha, his face is never seen until the last minute of the picture!

You’ve got to admire how this one gets going - not with a bunch of boring experiments that fail and must be tried again and again until success is achieved, but with the invisible man already invisible, already well on the way to homicidal madness, and seeking a place to set up his new lab and discover a way to un-invisibleize himself! After a wonderful set of edits showing the uncommonly translucent man arriving at the door of a pub, swathed in bandages and sporting overcoat, gloves, hat and glasses, he takes a room from landlady and professional screecher Una O’Conner, whom we know so well from The Bride of Frankenstein, and her husband, Forrester Harvey from Kongo, who later gets knocked down the stairs!

Naturally the invisible man, Jack Griffin by name, can’t get a lick of work done thanks to the constant botheration he suffers from the reluctant landlady and the nosy townsfolk, who are intrigued by his dark glasses and creepy bandages and haughty, demanding manner! Word of his unusualness spreads, and he must do a few jumpabouts and shock the simple country folk with his floating shirt routine! And then he must repair to the home of a colleague, Kemp, whom he terrifies into helping him with his experiments! Kemp is played by William Harrigan from Flying Leathernecks and Francis Covers the Big Town, and when he can take it no more and reports there’s an invisible man in his home, Griffin threatens to kill him at pre-cisely ten o’ clock the following night! And you know he means it, ha ha!

Gloria Stuart from The Old Dark House and Wildcats plays Flora, who had a love connection with Griffin back when he was visible and of more pleasant disposition! Her father, old Doc Cranley, is Griffin’s mentor, played by Henry Travers from Ball of Fire and Shadow of a Doubt, and of course he wants to help, but there’s no helping this transparency because he’s become a big jerk, a homicidal one at that, pushing people off cliffs and whatnot! He also likes to kick people in the bum! Clearly (ha ha!) he must be stopped, but even with a police force made up of ringers like Holmes Herbert from Tower of London, E.E. Clive from Mr. Moto’s Last Warning, Dudley Digs from The Hatchet Man, Harry Stubbs from Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, and Donald Stuart from Suspicion, it all comes down to a farmer who hears disembodied breathing in his barn!

Well, this one is a real crackerjack if you ask me! James Whale sure knew what he was doing, the trick effects are absolutely top-notch, the script and the performances are witty, and Rains has just the voice to play this part! He’s not just a voice of course - he does plenty of physical stuff when he’s in his bandages, and he’s good at that too! And most of the actors or even day players who have to react to being touched, jostled, or attacked by him also do pretty fine work! So it’s all very well done, and on top of that an invisible man is in some ways a much scarier entity than a vampire or a werewolf or even a Frankenstein monster! At least he is to me! My only regret in watching it was that I didn’t wait a few weeks, because it’s a pretty good winter movie! But it’s also a pretty great movie any time of year, and so I give The Invisible Man three and a half footprints in the snow!

Burl reviews Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man! (1943)

 

Ha ha and arooo, by the light of the full moon it’s Burl, here to review some Universal monster horror! This isn’t the best of the run, but it’s far from the worst, and like any of them it makes for some fine October viewing! The name of this picture is, and could only be, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man!

It serves more as a sequel to The Wolf Man than anything else, though by the end it plays as a standard Frankenstein picture! Our man Lon Chaney Jr., known from My Favorite Brunette, is the constantly anguished Larry Talbot, who, as the picture begins, reposes peacefully in his grave, not bothering anyone! In a striking sequence marvelously directed by Roy William Neill, who also brought us the delights of The Scarlet Claw, two foolish grave robbers decide to pilfer the Talbot family crypt, and on the night of the full moon no less! Ha ha, these two miscreants are soon weeping copious tears as the hirsute terror revives himself and goes full wolfman! (An interesting trivia is that one of the robbers is played by Cyril Delevanti, who later appeared in pictures like Son of Dracula, The Night of the Iguana, and Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad, played Johnnycake Jones in the Hudson’s Bay teleseries, and ended his career in Jack Arnold’s blaxploitation picture Black Eye, playing a character called Talbot! Ha ha!)

A hapless Welsh constable catches a fatal wolfmanning as well, and then Larry is found dazed and confused and human again, and having no idea how he ended up sleeping rough on the streets of Cardiff! He tracks down Maria Ouspenskaya, the old Gypsy woman whose son Bela put a biting on Larry in the first picture and turned him into a werewolf, but all she can do is point him in the direction of a certain science doctor she knows of! Well, of course this is Dr. Frankenstein, but when Larry arrives at the castle, he discovers two astonishing things: one, the doctor is dead; and two, the Gypsy woman’s son Bela, thought dead, has somehow been transformed into a Frankenstein Monster, and is reposing in an ice cave beneath the ground!

Of course Bela, the new Frankenstein Monster, is played by the great Bela Lugosi from Island of Lost  Souls! Replacing the departed doctor is a new doctor, Dr. Mannering, played by Patric Knowles from Another Thin Man! He quickly becomes obsessed with the secrets of life and death, which alarms Frankenstein’s daughter, Baroness Elsa, while down in the town the mayor, Lionel Atwill from Night Monster, tries to keep the increasingly anxious townspeople from lighting up their torches for a mob run up to the castle!

Ha ha, this mob is headed by the local malcontent, a large gentleman with a fulsome walrus moustache and a delightfully modern taste in shirts, who’s played by Rex Evans from Midnight Lace! And his gang includes the great Dwight Frye of Dracula fame! It all comes to a head just as Frankenstein Monster and the Wolf Man are finally throwing down for their climactic monstero-a-monstero, and while I won’t tell you who wins, I will say that the results are inconclusive thanks to a great wall of water unleashed by the constantly grousing Evans!

The bald fact is that if you like Universal monster movies, you’ll like this one, because it’s got just about everything you could hope for from the form! It’s a bit scary, a bit silly, and suffused with backlot atmosphere, and the tone does get a bit grim with Larry Talbot's constant hankering for the sweet release of death! This was the first of the monster-mash pictures, but not the last, and of course eventually the comedians would get involved and we’d have such works as Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff! But at this point they were still trying to be scary, and they halfway succeeded! I give Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man two and a half ice windows!

Burl reviews The Philadelphia Experiment! (1984)

 

Hurtling through a time tube, it’s Burl, here to review a four-dimensional film from my VHS-spent youth! Now, I’m not talking about The Terminator here, nor Time After Time! I’m not even talking about The Final Countdown, but rather a picture that might have passed that one going the other way in the time tube, a picture known to all as The Philadelphia Experiment!

This is apparently something that John Carpenter was gong to direct, and I’m sure that would have been enjoyable, but he ended up only as an executive producer! This fact puts the movie into a small little group: Mid-Budget Movies Of The 1980s That Carpenter Had Something To Do With But Didn’t Direct, and this is a group which includes Black Moon Rising and not a lot else - ha ha, maybe those cable TV Westerns he wrote that came along in the early 1990s!

Anyway, The Philadelphia Experiment begins in 1943 with a group of Navy men participating in a science experiment intended to make ships invisible to German radar! Instead the test ship is blasted into a time tube, and when two sailors, played by Michael Paré from Streets of Fire and Bad Moon and Bobby Di Cicco from I Wanna Hold Your Hand and The Supernaturals, leap over the railing, they land in Utah c. 1984! Finding an empty bottle of Löwenbräu has them worried the Germans might be lurking around, but on entering a café to discover Humanoids From the Deep playing on TV, they realize some crazy time travel must have occurred!

From here much of the movie is a chase, with an army base security chief played by Kene Holliday from No Small Affair pursuing them from the wastelands of Utah to the orange groves of California and back again! And here we have the root problem with the movie: for every scene in which the police or the Army security folks almost catch the two sailors, and there are many of these, we miss out on some potentially interesting time travel ramification scene! Oh sure, we get a few instances of Paré watching TV or goggling at modern miracles like the aluminum can, but the whole second act is just a big chase, with little scenes of Paré getting to know his new future friend Allison Hayes, who is not fifty feet tall, but is played by Nancy Allen from Robocop!

Along the way, for reasons never made clear, DiCicco’s character suffers fits and ends up disappearing back to 1943! Paré becomes terrified that this will happen to him too, but that's also confusing since I thought he wanted to go home! Still, it’s a good thing he doesn’t, because it turns out that what’s going on is that the scientist who did the experiment back in 1943, who is now elderly and played by Eric Christmas from The Changeling and Porky’s, is up to his old tricks again, and this time has tried to make a small fake town invisible to radar! Ha ha! But this has opened a time tube and all of 1984 is at risk of being sucked into it! Christmas somehow knows that the only solution is to put Paré into a space suit, pop him out the top of a tank and up into the time tube, and have him turn off the generator in the ship! Of course, ha ha, he doesn’t just turn it off, but smashes everything in the control room, especially the evidently critical array of time bulbs, because after all that’s more exciting and cinematic than just turning off a switch!

Louise Latham from The Sugarland Express shows up playing the oldlady version of a friend of Paré’s from 1943, and the picture also features an early appearance from Stephen Tobolowsky from Single White Female, back when he was still moderately behaired! He’s still a glasses nerd, though! But none of this changes the fact that the movie seriously mishandles the potential of its premise! It’s entertaining enough, and the fact that I watched this more than once back in the VHS days, and even had the poster up in my room, seems to confirm that; but you can’t escape the feeling that somewhere, in some dimension or behind some time portal, a much better and more thoughtful movie called The Philadelphia Experiment was made! I give this Philadelphia Experiment one and a half punk rockers!

Burl reviews Jason X! (2001)

 

Hi, it’s Burl reporting… from space! Yes, it’s Friday the 13^th, and therefore time to review another Friday the 13^th picture; and this is one I went to see at the theatre on a date with my then-new girlfriend who later married me anyway! Ha ha! It’s not a good picture, but it was a fun date anyway, because after all, who doesn’t want to see Jason in space! Of course only one picture fits that description, and it’s called Jason X!

Was it a good idea to send Jason into space? I can see the reasoning: ever since the original Friday the 13^th, he’s been skulking around the same summer camp, more or less: at the camp in part 2 and part 6; around nearby homes in part 3, part 4 and part 7; at a local halfway house in part 5 (and that wasn’t Jason anyway); and of course by part 8 they became hysterically desperate to find something different for the goochy-faced madman to do, so they put him on a boat bound for Vancouver! Ha ha! So where else was there for him to go but space?

The picture begins in the Crystal Lake Research Facility, where Jason is being held in chains and being prepared for cryogenic freezing! In charge is an evil doctor played by none other than the director of Scanners, Fast Company, and so many more, David Cronenberg! Ha ha! I guess he was doing it as a favour for his buddy, trick effectsman Jim Isaac, who directed the picture (and who had earlier made The Horror Show)! Anyway, Cronenberg performs his silly lines with the requisite seriousness, then, when Jason escapes, tries to run away but suffers a flying impalement!

Jason ends up getting cryogenically frozen anyway, just like Walt Disney, and so does the science lady who’s been studying the masked killer since he was captured! Four hundred years later a spaceship visiting the now uninhabitable Earth retrieves the pair and revives them! As the ship is populated by a gang of students and their venal professor (played by Jonathan Potts from Body Count, ha ha!), the picture then becomes a spacebound retelling of part 8, with a revived Jason applying some futuristic killing methods (a face-freezing-and-smashing scene is perhaps the most memorable) as well as garden-variety pokings to the students and the crew!

There are some very 2001-era trick visual effects, by which I mean they’re not up to the standards set by the movie 2001 back in 1968, ha ha! The ship itself is very much the type that feels more like a studio in Toronto than an actual working craft, and there’s a distinctly Canadian feel to the whole production - yet another echo of the dire Jason Takes Manhattan! This maple leaf feeling is amplified by the presence of Potts and Cronenberg, as well as a cameo from Robert Silverman, whom we know from so many Cronenberg movies and also from his appearance as Mr. Sykes in Prom Night!

There are clever moments, like the use of the holodeck to recreate Jason’s usual campsite environment and thereby distract him! There’s a lady robot and some nanotechnology, and for whatever reason Jason is turned into a super robot version of himself! The whole is a dog’s breakfast of fan-fiction level ideas afflicted with the usual lack of affrights, though it’s all as slickly produced as any Friday the 13^th picture ever was! It was mildly fun to see it on the big screen, and though it’s bad, some pleasures remain, and so Jason X gets a rating of one and a half nanobots from me! Ha ha, and have a happy Friday the 13^th, everybody!

Burl reviews Scanners! (1980)

 

Bzzt bzzt, it’s Burl here, reviewing anew! Today I’m talking Scanners, which is to say the original Cronenberg brainbuster from way back when! Now I’ll admit I was a little too young to go see this picture in the theatre, but I do remember when it came out! Ha ha, there was a bit of a controversy about it up in the home and native land, because here was a Canadian picture, and yet somehow this upstart director had dared to include a scene with poor Louis Ciccone having his head exploded!* How could this be, cried the evening news! And me, I was hooked, and I’ve been a David Cronenberg aficionado ever since!

Scanners was Cronenberg’s attempt to clean up his act for mainstream tastes by removing the more twisted or upsetting elements from earlier pictures like Shivers, Rabid and The Brood, and at the same time was a thematic return to even earlier works like Stereo and Crimes of the Future! So we have down-and-outer Cameron Vale, played by Stephen Lack from The Rubber Gun, who gives a conniption to a nasty food court lady and then is plucked from the rubbish tip by science beard Dr. Paul Ruth! Dr. Ruth (ha ha!) is played by good old Patrick McGoohan from Silver Streak and Escape From Alcatraz, and he does an excellent job of walking the line between the avuncularity other actors would have given the character, and the coldness we’d have had from, say, Christopher Plummer, who I’m surprised never played one of these Cronenbergian scientist-gods!

Dr. Ruth (ha ha!) and the company he works for, ConSec, are only nominally the good guys: they’re recruiting Vale to fight against the evil scanner Daryl Revok, played by Michael Ironside from Watchers and, of course, Red Scorpion 2! Revok wants to breed a whole new generation of scanners and somehow take over the world! Meanwhile there’s an ill-defined group of hippie scanners led by Jennifer O’Neill from Futz and Summer of ’42! We never learn much about their purpose, and anyway they get fairly handily wiped out by Revok’s gang before we start to care too much!

There’s extra intrigue thanks to a ConSec security executive played by Lawrence Dane from Rolling Vengeance, using his talent for playing slimy types of uncertain loyalty to play just that here! And there’s a fine scene in which Lack encounters a crazed artist played by Mr. Sykes from Prom Night himself, Robert Silverman; and since it was Lack who later played the artist-madman for Cronenberg in Dead Ringers, one wonders whether he took notes from his scene with Silverman in Scanners!

Many, including myself, have taken issue with Lack’s lackluster performance in the picture, and his tendency to talk like a non-actor reading the dialogue for the first time off of cue cards! To be sure he never convinces as a societal outcast who’s been cleaned up and ordered into psychic battle - he never questions or resists his duty, and it seems like about a half hour of character development was omitted from the picture! But I’ve grown to appreciate Lack’s performance here - it’s robotic, and has the feel of an empty vessel filled with nothing but what is required to move the plot along, but there’s a strange appropriateness to it also, and the short history of indie-fringe Canadian film acting he brings to the movie (he was in Montreal Main, after all!) makes his casting in the picture seem another daring callback by Cronenberg to his experimental roots!

Those who consider scenes like Vale scanning the ConSec computer to be ridiculous simply aren’t on Cronenberg’s wavelength: he doesn’t care what’s feasible or not, so long as it serves his themes, and so long as, within the ‘drome of his fictional science concerns, it seems feasible! Ha ha! On the other hand, even if it misses the point to believe the plot and computer science of Scanners is goofy, that doesn’t mean it isn’t goofy! Apparently the picture was rushed into production thanks to the vicissitudes of Canadian film financing in that era, and clearly Cronenberg didn’t have time to address all the script issues before rolling his camera! I sympathize with that! Scanners is Cronenberg-lite, of that there is no doubt, but with its general braininess and solid action beats I like it anyway, and give it three Atlanta Rhythm Section posters!

 

* A word of clarification for non-Canadians: Scanners came out only months before the debut of Seeing Things, a Canadian TV show about a psychic newshound called Louis Ciccone, played by mustachioed slaphead Louis Del Grande, who played the psychic headsplosion victim in the Cronenberg picture! Ha ha! I like these little cultural echoes that happen sometimes!

Burl reviews Darkman! (1990)

 

Biff, bash, bang and boom, it’s Burl, here to review a comics-based superhero picture! But it’s not your everyday superhero picture, thank the business! No, this is a Sam Raimi picture, and not the Raimi who made all those Spider-Man pictures either! Though, to be fair, it’s not the Raimi who made The Evil Dead, either! No, this picture is more from the Raimi who made Army of Darkness, and yes, ha ha, I’m talking about Darkman!

I had a good time at the movie theatre with this one, as I recall! Like Army of Darkness it’s a studio picture, but it has lots of the stylistic quirks we remember and love from pictures like Evil Dead 2 - the zooms and tilts and the weird montages and all of what have you! But you also get a cast of familiars, like Liam Neeson from Next of Kin and Taken 2 as the driven scientist looking for a way to make artificial skin, but frustrated because it always goes bloop at the end of ninety-nine minutes when exposed to the light!

Meanwhile, his lawyer girlfriend, played by Frances McDormand from Moonrise Kingdom, gets mixed up with gangsters through no fault of her own! These baddies, on the quest for an incriminating document, invade Neeson’s lab, kill his assistant, and blow him and his research sky-high! He ends up floating in the river with the complexion of a well-done coppa steak, an uncontrollable grumpy streak, and an inability to feel pain! The front-line bad guy responsible for this is Durant, played by Larry Drake of Dr. Giggles and Dark Night of the Scarecrow! He’s the sort of heavy who for some reason likes to collect the fingers of his victims, which he chops off with a cigar guillotine and keeps in a cigarette box - ha ha, presumably he takes these severed digits home and smokes them in the privacy of his den after his family has gone to bed!

Colin Friels, who returned to the dark later in Dark City, plays the bad guy behind the bad guy, dancing among the girders of a skyscraper under construction! But leading up to this is Darkman’s journey from crispy, wounded scientist to a rage-filled superhero wearing false faces as he disrupts the business affairs of the Detroit mob!  There are some fine action scenes in here, climaxing in a grand helicopter war, and several henchman expirations along the way!

All sorts of familiar faces show up in the movie’s margins, from Jenny Agutter, of An American Werewolf in London, as a heartless, pin-poking doctor, to Julius Harris from King Kong as a gravedigger, to Professor Toru Tanaka of Dead Heat as a Chinese warrior! And we get more director cameos than in a John Landis movie, including one from John Landis himself, along with William Dear, who directed Timerider, William Lustig, who directed Maniac Cop, and both Joel and Ethan Coen, who directed many fine pictures like The Hudsucker Proxy! Producers like Sean Daniel and Stuart Cornfeld also get a look in, as do Raimi cronies like Josh Becker, Scott Spiegel, and of course Bruce Campbell, who appears at the end as a Final Shemp!

There’s no wasted time in this scrappy picture, and though disbelief must frequently be suspended throughout its running time, the viewing experience is fun enough to make that effort both worthwhile and painless! Ha ha, it’s safe to say I’m a Raimi supporter, though I never have seen his baseball picture, nor his Oz sequel neither! Maybe one day! And although Darkman is not my favourite of his works, I did and do enjoy it, and so I give it a robust three dipping birds!

Burl reviews Link! (1986)

Chee-chee-chee it’s Burl, here with a bit of monkey business for you! Ha ha, actually it’s ape business today, and what I’m talking about more specifically is a picture from Richard Franklin, who directed Psycho II and Cloak & Dagger, and then followed these works up with another Hitchcock-inspired photoplay called Link!

In a story that seems like a dream you might have after reading the Thornfield Hall segment of Jane Eyre and one of the chimp books by Jane Goodall on the same night, we have yet another Jane, an American anthropology student in the UK played by Elizabeth Shue from The Karate Kid, who goes to work for monkey professor Terence Stamp, whom we well remember from Alien Nation, at his large Cornish seaside mansion! Stamp also employs a trio of apes: two chimps, Imp and Voodoo, and a sour old orangutan in a morning coat called Link! I suspect Link is meant to be a chimp too, but he’s all orang, baby!

Stamp’s relationship with the simians is well drawn, but unfortunately this means our neo-Rochester is doomed to be their victim! After he mysteriously disappears, amid a lot of frenzied hooting and screeching from the apes, and the body of Voodoo is found, Jane very slowly comes to realize that all is not right, and she must choose to face either the wild dogs that roam the surrounding moors, or the increasingly demented Link!

The slow pace of this realization comes thanks to the Shue character being about as clever as a sack of wet mice! And, just to invoke yet another famous Jane, Link begins to see himself as her Tarzan, and he saves her from the dogs and from one of the professor’s more unsavory acquaintances! But all ape really breaks loose, in a reserved, Cornish sort of a way, when Jane’s boyfriend and his two doltish buddies come driving up to find her, and on arrival they suffer the full-throated wrath of the monkeybutler! Ha ha!

Shue is not a bad actor, but here she radiates all the wit and intelligence of a size nine shoe and from start to finish wears an expression suggesting somebody just asked her to explain relativity! Ha ha, her character’s greatest ambition, she earnestly explains, is to run an island preserve where chimps and badgers might run free! Stamp is good though, giving the performance of an actor who knows what’s going on, and the orangutan who plays Link is excellent, outmatching Shue in every scene they share!

This cocktail of Brontë, Goodall, Hitchcock and Poe is an odd cup-a-soup to be sure, but I retain a fondness for it! Ha ha, I saw it in the theatre with some pals, maybe that’s why! I also appreciate that Franklin was trying something eccentric, and knew it could easily tip into goofy, so sort of leaned in to that while still trying his best to make a straight suspense picture! And there are a few bad special effects, like Link’s final cigar-in-hand death plummet, and it could have used some extra pep, a little tomato paste, and a better coda; but on the other hand they did a decent job of turning Scotland into Cornwall, ha ha! I give Link two and a half impromptu mail slot widenings!

Burl reviews Night of the Lepus! (1972)

With a hippity-hop it’s Burl, here to review a tale of bunnikin terror! Ha ha, of course I’m talking about Night of the Lepus: aside from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and maybe that Arch Hall epic The Nasty Rabbit, I can think of no other killer bunnies on film! And perhaps - I only say perhaps - that’s for the best! If you’ve seen Night of the Lepus, you’ll probably have formed your own opinion on that point!

Aside from having the cottontail horror angle all to itself, Night of the Lepus fits into a number of other microgenres of which I’m fond! I’ve always enjoyed what I call Southwestern Horror: genre pictures set in the wide desert expanses of that part of North America! I’m talking about The Car and Nightwing and The Devil’s Rain, or even lesser stuff like The Ghost Dance and Track of the Moonbeast! At the same time, with its cast of heroic grayhairs, Night of the Lepus, like Bog, comes off at times like a nursing home stage production put up to showcase the talents of elderly performers!

Thanks to some sort of serum, the specific nature of which the script doesn’t even try to explain, a test rabbit released into the wild sires a band of bunnies as big as moocows! Ha ha, and these guys are hungry and aggressive, and apparently nocturnal, which I didn’t realize rabbits were! Anyway, a loosely-knit group made up of scientist Stuart Whitman from The Deadly Intruder, his wife and helpmate Janet Leigh from Psycho and The Fog, rancher Rory Calhoun from Motel Hell, and concerned moustacheman and Star Trekker DeForest Kelly (quite able here to discern DeForest from DeTrees, ha ha), work on rabbit-ridding strategies while dodging the slow-motion hops and tempera paint-smeared incisors of the creatures!

Perhaps because the oversized hares are so inherently goofy, there is plenty of blood used in the killing scenes, and they do ruthless things like mutilate entire families! Ha ha, mostly it’s just the same bright red blood smears seen in pictures like Grizzly, but, also like that picture, there are some severed limbs as well, with one victim sectioned like a butcher’s wall chart! No, a rabbit’s foot does not mean good luck to these unfortunates, ha ha! The fuzzy bunnies also rampage through a produce warehouse, which you’d think would satisfy them, but they’re eventually attracted into a trap by the headlights of some good people who were attending a drive-in screening of Every Little Crook and Nanny, and as a consequence the beasts run afoul of an electrified train track and are fricasseed!

As in Tentacles, we mostly get shots of normal-sized rabbits filmed to look large, at least allegedly! They hop through some nice miniature sets, and there are also a few quick shots of people in rabbit suits, which are worth pausing to get a better look at! If you’re a rabbit lover you may want to steer clear of this picture however, as it does include plenty of documentary footage of actual rabbits being rounded up and terrorized! Otherwise it’s a pretty good time at the movies, with lots of fun badness on offer and a few pretty shots of the barren Southwest! Anyway, it’s unique! I give Night of the Lepus one and a half panicky farmhands!

Burl reviews The Rejuvenator! (1988)

By headbulbs, it’s Burl! I’m here to review another gloopy monster mess from the 80s, ha ha, that breed of picture I love so well in some strange way! These rubber classics usually have a lot of goo in them, a little to a lot of blood, and maybe a creature or two! From Beyond might be the exemplar of the form, or maybe Evil Dead 2, but there are lower shelves too, where you find The Kindred and The Outing and Night Beast and C.H.U.D.!

Well, I’d seen all those in my teenage movie watching years, but never caught up with The Rejuvenator, which is the picture I’m talking about now! I've always been a bit curious about it - the fact that it had a credit for Special Makeup Effects on the VHS cover was, I believed, an auspicious omen! And indeed, Ed French, who got the makeup effects credit, certainly must have put in some extra hours  on this one, so bra-zos, French and crew, bra-zos!

For this is by all means an effects picture, or at least it becomes one rather late in the game! Our situation is simple: an obsessive scientist and his assistant are working on a youth serum in a lab filled with TVs, and the TVs and everything else are funded by a rich Norma Desmond-type lady, who declares she’s sick and tired of waiting around in her big richlady bed and she wants the operation NOW! The doctor, who exhibits slightly more principle than most mad scientists of this type, warns of certain dangers, but an angry dowager ultimatum is made! (The old version of the lady is played by Jessica Dublin, who played a similar rich lady who gets her head chopped off by a bulldozer in that unpleasant Greek picture Island of Death! She was also in Fellini Satyricon, Visconti’s The Damned, and several Troma films! Ha ha, what a career!)

Of course the operation at first appears to be a success, and the elderly doyenne emerges from her bandages as a pretty younger lady! In celebration the rejuvinatrix and her doctor enjoy a romantic date in which they dance to circus music as first petals and later sparkles rain down upon them from the sky! Then the doughy doctor gets a boob-grabbing love scene with his patient, ha ha, as the vaguely Germanic manservant, the sort of butler who wears a nightdress to bed, glowers in the corner!

But right away after it’s back to the lab for the doc! “We’ve got to find a way to synthesize the serum!” he cries several times to his ladynerd assistant, Stella! (Stella is tall and serious, and talks to herself a lot, and of course nurses a crush on her fiveheaded boss; and by the third act I was a bit in love with her! Ha ha!) The rejuvinatrix regresses, but she doesn’t turn back into the old lady, but into a brain munching creature! For you see, the serum comes from human brains!

The story ostensibly comes from Simon Nuchtern, who brought us Silent Madness, but really it comes from Roger Corman's 1959 picture The Wasp Woman! Ha ha, it’s not an original tale! But it’s told with some occasional style, thanks to the blue gels the cinematographer was sure to include in his kit, and to some nicely chosen locations! Opportunities for real suspense and horror are largely squandered however, and the picture spins its wheels for a long time, with repetitive scenes of the doctor working in his lab or receiving unwelcome visits from Dr. Germain! Dr. Germain is played by an actor who might be the poor man’s Edmund Purdom or Dan O’Herlihy, but still delivers one of the most on-point performances in the picture!

By the last act the carnage begins! The rejuvinatrix goes out to a club to see the Poison Dollys (an all-girl band, like L7 if L7 were terrible!), where she dances and develops a case of grosshand! Next thing you know she grows a giant purple brain and goes on a rampage: slashing a nurse, ripping through an orderly, twisting the head off a nosy security guard and popping the top off of Stella’s head as though she were a bottle of cherry soda! Finally her big head goes slimy-berserk and starts firing pus everywhere! Ha ha!

It’s a picture that suffers from many debits: poor scripting, hacky editing, mostly indifferent direction, a pep-free first hour! But it livens up toward the end, and there’s some ambition on display throughout, for which the filmmakers are to be commended! It couldn't be more a product of 1988 if Dan Quayle had a cameo, and I give The Rejuvenator one and a half inflating faces!

Burl reviews Boggy Creek II ...and the Legend Continues! (1983)

Ha ha and hello true believers! Yes, we’re back among the Bigfeet today with an amuse-bouche from Arkansas’ own hitmeister, Charles B. Pierce! Ha ha, his first big success at the ozoners was his 1971 pseudo-documentary The Legend of Boggy Creek; and then by some mysterious circumstance a quasi-sequel that Pierce had nothing to do with, Return to Boggy Creek, came along a handful of years later! Ha ha, and then, after doing a couple of horror pictures and some outdoor extravaganzas, I suppose Pierce figured he may as well do his own sequel: so in 1983 there appeared today’s movie, Boggy Creek II … and the Legend Continues!

Now, many of you may have seen this picture, but with a fellow and two robots gabbing over top of it! There’s nothing wrong with that necessarily, not with a movie like this anyway; and indeed their mockery of the Pierce picture is fitfully amusing and generally on point! But all movies are worth giving a chance to without extraneous commentary, if only so you can provide your own!

Pierce himself writes, directs, produces, narrates and stars in the picture, ha ha! He plays Brian C. Lockhart, whose friends call him Doc: a university cryptozoologist trying to prove the existence of the Boggy Creek Creature! He goes on about how trackless and vast these southern Arkansas wildlands are, but really, how vast could they be? Anyway, Doc hears about a sighting of the monster and rounds up a crew consisting of a frequently shirtless skinnybones played by the director’s son, a pretty grad student, and the grad student’s best friend, a cracker princess forever looking for her blush!

Ha ha, eventually the big guy shows up! Doc has set up some kind of perimeter sensors, so the picture gets a chance to lift some beats from Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot! It never gets quite as tense, though, as that bipedal classic! Nor is the movie nearly as good as its close country cuzzin Creature from Black Lake, though there are some townie scenes that recall that marvelous picture! No, frankly, there’s no area in which you can point at Boggy Creek II and say “Ha ha, this is the movie that does that the best!”

Still, it’s a bigfoot movie, and that goes a long mile with me! Old Man Crenshaw, the heavily bearded river rat who shows up in the last portion of the picture, gives the picture a little more of the eccentric rural pep it needs, and to be sure, there is a scene in which the Bigfoot knocks a jet skier off his machine! I wish he’d et the guy too, though! In the end, when you tally it all up, Boggy Creek II is worth no more than an uncle’s promise, and I give it one headless deer!