Burl reviews Halloween Ends! (2022)

 

Ha ha and pumpkin guts, it’s Burl, here with a seasonally appropriate review for you! In Octobers past I’ve taken a look at the new version of Halloween from 2018, and its sequel, Halloween Kills, which came along a few years later! And now that the air is crisp again and the leaves are swirling through the air, landing crunchy and brown ‘neath the skeletal branches and grey clouds heavy with the coming snows, I’ve caught up with the third in this tributary of Myersania: the maligned Halloween Ends!

 

In part it’s maligned because it fails to provide exactly what a fan of these films expects and wants, which is to say many repetitive scenes of Michael Myers stalking and killing the people of Haddonfield! It shares this fake-out quality with an earlier production, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, and, to demonstrate its own self-awareness, and also perhaps a bit of wishfulness concerning its legacy, it also shares the opening title font, if not the computerized pumpkin imagery, with that now-celebrated picture! Ha ha, I must say, I was heartened when I espied that italicized, powder-blue lettering!

 

Though this series takes the position that none of the Halloween stories exist except the one told in the original 1978 Halloween, the second picture of the new cycle shares with Halloween II the aspect of taking up exactly where its predecessor left off, and now with Halloween Ends, although instead of telling a loopy story of warlocks and killer robots in a completely different town we’re still in Haddonfield, but a break from the contiguity of the first two is still indicated, because it’s four years after the events depicted in those photoplays! The effective opening scene, set in 2018 like the first two films, introduces us to Corey Creekmuir, a hapless and nerdy babysitter whose ill-fated charge turns out to be a bit of a jerk! This leads to a plummet-related tragedy for which Corey Creekmuir is blamed!

 

Then it’s four years later and Corey Creekmuir is a skulking pariah who is given the hairy eyeball by Haddonfielders and is outright hassled by the local marching band jerks! Meanwhile our favourite donkey girlscout, Laurie Strode, who in the earlier films was a wild-eyed survivalist hiding out in a trap-filled shanty, is now, unaccountably, an apron-wearing, pie-baking granny living in a normal house and writing what sounds like a preachy and unreadable memoir about her experiences with Michael Myers! Her granddaughter is now a nurse with her own set of problems, which Laurie tries to help assuage by introducing her to Corey Creekmuir! There follows a wildly improbable romance, during which time Corey Creekmuir also discovers Michael Myers hiding in a sewer and begins to fall under his baneful influence!

 

So for a while it’s sort of a romance movie and a buddy picture, and then it morphs into a revenge story with Corey Creekmuir using first Michael and then later just his mask and kitchen knife to exact rote revenge against his various enemies! Concurrently to all this there’s been a steady stream of tributes to John Carpenter, and not just to the Halloween-related works either! Corey Creekmuir watches Carpenter’s The Thing at his babysitting gig early in the film (just as Laurie watched the Howard Hawks version in Halloween); there’s a radio station as we saw in The Fog; and Corey Creekmuir works at a junkyard which strongly recalls the wrecker’s yard in Christine!

 

And that’s when we realize that this picture is not a remake of Halloween or even Halloween III, but of Christine! Corey Creekmuir shares much with Arnie from that 1983 release: a surname; an initial cringing nerdishness; Buddy Holly glasses which are broken by bullies, and whose absence signposts the character’s gradual de-nerdification; a cartoonishly angry and overbearing mother; a facility with automobile repair and a large industrial facility in which to practice it; a doomed romance with someone way out of his league; and a willingness to fall under the spell of an evil force in order to exact his revenge, at the eventual cost of his life! Once that finally occurs the movie can get back to half-heartedly portraying Michael Myers as a vaguely dangerous slasher with an unexplained grudge against Laurie Strode - or is it the other way around, ha ha!

 

The picture retains the impression set in the previous two films of Haddonfield as an infinite series of neighbourhoods, an endless, physics-defying expanse of landscape urbanism easily containing all the people, services, streets, overpasses, sewer systems, hovels, mansions and everything else the story may require! The performances from the veteran actors are good: Jamie Lee Curtis, whom we know so well from Grandview U.S.A., once again demonstrates her commitment to the character of Laurie, and Will Patton, famed from The Puppet Masters, once again plays Officer Hawkins, and here very touchingly so as he shyly woos Laurie!

 

I was pleased to see the picture try something different, but I was never sold that this was the best route to take, nor that Corey Creekmuir was the best candidate to take it with! Even more than ever, the movie is dramatically powered by human behavior that ranges from unlikely to downright bizarre; and though the conceit is that their years of fearing Michael Myers has driven everyone in town slightly bonkers (though, strangely, it has never diminished their enthusiasm for Halloween parties and costumes), this just results in a movie that offers no one with whom it is possible to latch on to as a surrogate or narrative helpmate! There are some effective scenes, but too many others that feel as though they were not so much directed as merely gotten over with! I’m glad they went in a weird direction, but I wish it was weirder - ha ha, some killer robots would have hit the spot! I give Halloween Ends two tongue-skipping records!

Burl reviews Dark Night of the Scarecrow! (1981)

With a rustle of straw, it’s Burl, here to talk to you all about killer scarecrows! Ha ha, we’ve seen them before in pictures like Scarecrows of course, and everyone remembers the eerie dancing man o’ straw from The Wizard of Oz, but still, when you bring up the subject, everyone’s mind will instantly conjure up images from a television movie more than forty years old – ha ha, yes, I’m talking about Dark Night of the Scarecrow!

The teleplot is simplicity itself! Our setting is a small town in what I believe is meant to be the American South, although it’s patently California! Bubba, a jolly but soft-brained man played by Larry Drake from Darkman and For Keeps?, is playing in the fields with his friend Marylee, a ten year-old girl! Watching from the sidelines is venal postie Otis Hazlerigg, essayed with narrow eyes by Charles Durning from Stick and The Hudsucker Proxy! Otis impugns all sorts of unsavoury motives onto Bubba, but of course he’s projecting in the Bell & Howell style, and in fact the friendship between Bubba and Marylee is completely innocent!

The next thing you know the little girl is attacked by a yard dog and Bubba bursts in through the fence to save her, but initially he gets blamed for her injuries anyway, even though he protests that BUBBA DIDN’T DO IT! Otis rounds up a posse made up of good old boys like Harliss, played by Lane Smith from Night Game; Skeeter, who is Robert F. Lyons from Death Wish II and 10 to Midnight and other Bronsonfests; and Philby, essayed by Claude Earl Jones from I Wanna Hold Your Hand! (Ha ha, somehow I don’t think Claude is a part of the great Earl Jones acting dynasty, but as we know from pictures like A Family Thing, I may well be wrong!) The posse discovers Bubba hiding in a scarecrow and shoots the poor man to death, just before it’s revealed to them that he wasn’t only harmless but a hero for saving the girl!

Well, this hateful lynch mob is instantly acquitted in a highly unbelievable courtroom scene, and soon after this, the scarecrow vengeance begins! The stuffed anthropomorph appears in Harliss’s field and that night the beer-swilling redneck is chawed in his own wood chipper! It next shows up in Philby’s acreage and soon he’s found in his silo, drowned in grain! Panicky Skeeter gets a graveyard klonking from Otis, and there’s a pumpkin-crushing, pitchfork-poking climax wherein we discover that indeed it’s Bubba’s spirit inhabiting the scarecrow that’s behind all this vengeance! And a good thing, too – ha ha, what a disappointment if the killer had turned out to be a more corporeal presence, like the D.A., or the little girl, or Bubba’s rightfully angry mama, who’s played by Jocelyn Brando, older sister to Marlon!

Of course Drake played other soft-brained men in his acting career, most notably on the law show I never watched; and he also played a character called Bubba in his very first film role, in Herschell Gordon Lewis’s hicksploitation drama This Stuff’ll Kill Ya! He was a good actor, and he does fine work here – ha ha, he's a little broad here and there perhaps, but never unrealistic! And Durning is good too – he can play the most avuncular guy you ever saw in movies like Tootsie, but he has this way of just squinting a little bit and presto, he instantly looks evil and pædopheliac! Ha ha, and this is no small trick, given that Otis is for some reason always wearing his silly postal service outfit, complete with blue pith helmet!

So the movie has a couple of solid performances and some cornfield atmosphere (though it could have leaned harder into that I think), and there’s a Halloween costume-ball scene, which I always like in a movie – ha ha, remember Primal Rage? But it suffers a bit from a TV movie blandness, from the So-Cal locations, and also from the padding needed to fill it out to the length required of a movie in a two-hour broadcast slot! The affrights were decidedly muted this time around, but since it really did me a spook-up back when I was eleven, I want to give it some residual credit for that! Some added walking scarecrow action might have been effective, but since that one head-turn we get at the end really works, I’m not completely sure where I stand on that! So in the spirit of my somewhat confused and ambivalent feelings, I’m going to give Dark Night of the Scarecrow two flower leis!

Burl reviews Thunderbolt and Lightfoot! (1974)

 

Wacka-doo, snakecharmers, it’s Burl, here to review a picture I’ve long wanted to see but somehow never got around to until now! It’s a Malpaso picture from the 1970s, and you know what that means: Clint! And most of those movies, whether Eastwood directed them or not, have that Malpaso feeling: you watch them and just know that each take is the first or at most the second, and that whether it was directed by Don Siegel, who was Clint’s directing mentor, or James Fargo, whom Clint mentored in turn, or by Clint himself, in each case the same philosophies and work methods were employed! So there’s a sameness to these films, which isn’t unwelcome – in fact it’s comforting! Nevertheless, when you see one that’s clearly operating on its own principals, it’s pretty refreshing, and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is just such a film!

Of course we know Eastwood from such pictures as Blood Work and Tarantula, and here he plays a laconic vault cracker-turned-fake-priest known as Thunderbolt, and we meet him at the pulpit just as an angry George Kennedy from Creepshow 2 and Earthquake arrives at the church and tries to shoot him dead! In his frantic escape he hooks up with a young Jeff Bridges, not yet of Starman and King Kong fame, who has just stolen a roadster from a used-car salesman played by none other than Gregory Walcott from Plan 9 from Outer Space! Bridges, of course, is Lightfoot, and soon this pair of sillynames are bombing around picturesque Montana, being buddies and, in their masculine, mid-70s manner, falling in love!

Their first adventure together involves catching a ride from a completely insane driver played by Bill McKinney from Cannonball! Ha ha, this demento keeps a caged badger in the front seat and tears it up on and off the road, and after he’s barrel-rolled the auto it turns out he’s got a trunk full of live bunny rabbits, which he starts blasting at with a shotgun! Soon we get a taste of George Kennedy again, and it turns out that Kennedy is playing Red, an old partner of Thunderbolt’s who believes the craggy longuebönes to have stolen some ill-gotten loot! Red and his confrere Goody, played by Eastwood buddy Geoffrey Lewis, whom we’ll recall from Smile and ‘Salem’s Lot, first do some fisticuffs with and then enter into a foursquare partnership with Thunderbolt and Lightfoot in order to once again take out the vault Thunderbolt et al. had robbed the previous time!

So the gang is assembled and the plan is made, but first they all have to get jobs to buy the equipment they need to do the heist! Ha ha, we get all sorts of amusing vignettes featuring famous faces like Gary Busey from Silver Bullet, looking young and handsome; Burton Gilliam from Fletch, playing the sort of grinning good old boy he made his stock-in-trade; Dub Taylor from Creature from Black Lake just being Dub; and Luanne Roberts from Simon, King of the Witches as a stark naked housewife! Lightfoot has an encounter with a motorcycle rider who’s handy with a hammer, played by Karen Lamm from Ants!; and before the heist can be pulled off, the fellow monitoring the security alarms must be taken care of by a drag Lightfoot, and the security fellow turns out to be a chubby, girlie magazine-reading individual played by Cliff Emmich, who played another chubby security officer who gets hit on the head later on in Halloween II!

The picture dwells less on the robbery details than most heist pictures do – perhaps because it’s not centrally a heist story but is organized more around buddy themes! Still, there is the unique aspect that the vault is broken into by means of a 20mm cannon, ha ha, and the use of this tool is what earned Thunderbolt his name! And then of course after the heist it all goes pear-shaped, and the tensions within the group are expressed physically (and boy-arr-dee, how great an actor is George Kennedy!), and we come to realize that a line delivered earlier in the picture (“Ate ‘im?”) was a case of Dramatic Foreshadowing!

Now, this is the first picture from Mr. Michael Cimino, who vaulted into the prestige picture business with his follow-up, The Deer Hunter! This one isn’t a prestige picture though – it’s a genre film with a higher-toned style and an almost defiant insistence on theme and subtext! The idea of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot as unconsummated lovers is not very subtle (although I’m not sure Clint was cognizant of it, Bridges was, definitely), and what it really is, once you factor in the other couple, Red and Goody, is a study in how well an all-male machine, each component having a few teeth missing from their gears, can operate; and the answer is, ha ha, not very well! I found the movie a splendid entertainment, wonderfully photographed and impeccably cast: an unsung gem of the 70s! I give Thunderbolt and Lightfoot three broken cigars!

Burl reviews Roadhouse 66! (1984)

 

With a jolly “paarp, paarp” on my motorcar horn, it’s Burl, arriving in town to do you a new review! Ha ha, we all love stranger-in-a-small-town movies, don’t we? It’s a pretty reliable microgenre, and maybe not so micro either, as, once you’ve tossed in Westerns, samurai pictures, and action movies from the 80s, there must be hundreds, nay thousands of these things! It’s a very basic formula, therefore theoretically hard to mess up, but one thing you learn when you watch a lot of movies with a critical eye: anything can be messed up! Ha ha, I wonder if that’s the case with today’s movie, Roadhouse 66!

Ha ha, I’m not going to make a joke about this being the 65^th sequel to Road House, because I expect that hoss’s been rode before! No, it’s the tale of a travelling fauntleroy called Beckman Hallsgood Jr., played by Judge Reinhold from Ruthless People and Gremlins in effete-nerd mode! Beckman is scion to a belly-bustin’ fast-food pork franchise and is driving his T-bird across the desert to scout locations or something, but as he approaches Kingsman, Arizona he’s set upon by the town goons, the result being his flivver disabled by gunfire! Luckily a wandering rockabilly who knows how to fix cars, played by Willem Dafoe from Streets of Fire and The Lighthouse, shows up to play it cool and help out Beckman in exchange for a ride into town! The rockabilly’s name, of course, is Johnny Harte, for how could it be otherwise!

Conveniently enough there are two beautiful sisters living in the town who are single and sell auto parts! Kaaren Lee from The Right Stuff and Remote Control is Jesse, the older sister with the incomprehensible past, and Kate Vernon from Pretty in Pink and Mob Story is Melissa, the younger and more impulsive one! But also in the town are the louts who shot up Beckman’s car: a fearsome triumvirate led by Hoot, a meatbones played by Alan Autry from Brewster’s Millions and House! His minions are a scabie little guy named Dink, played by Kevyn Major Howard from Full Metal Jacket and Alien Nation, and Moss, played by Peter Van Norden from The Best of Times, who looks like if Mike Starr had been removed from the oven twenty minutes early!

The whole middle act is an escalating campaign of harassment from Hoot and his boys directed at Beckman, who’s stuck in town until the ladies can order up a new radiator! Luckily Johnny Harte is around to help him out of trouble, and lucky too that they have a place to sleep in the junkyard owned by old drunken Sam, played by Stephen Elliott from Beverly Hills Cop; and later, of course, they take up with the two sisters: Johnny with Jesse, Beckman with Melissa! And that incomprehensible past of Jesse’s that I mentioned? Well it turns out she used to be married to Hoot, a thoroughgoing jerk with a drywall personality and the physique of Cousin Eddie from Vacation! Who’d have thunk it! But things come to a sticky wicket when Hoot and co. start a vengeance fire that turns fatal for one of the characters!

Meanwhile I know you’re asking “Ha ha, what about this roadhouse we’ve been promised by the title!” Well some of the action, including a fight between the two heroes and the gang, does take place there, but it’s not as central to the plot as you might assume! Erica Yohn, who was Madame Ruby in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and Selma in Amazon Women on the Moon, is the roadhouse proprietor, Thelma, who observes the goings-on with wry detachment, but is there for our heroes when needed! And the roadhouse itself is a pretty bland place, free of any atmosphere or style!

The climax of the picture, once we finally get there, is one of the least exciting car races ever filmed! It starts out promisingly when Hoot sticks a scorpion in Beckman’s car, but from there it’s mostly a series of static shots of cars rolling by at moderate speeds! Ha ha, at least that gives us a good look at the nice autos – a T-bird, a Chevy, a wonderful ’66 Mustang! I won’t tell you how it ends up, but we never really find out what happens to Hoot – who, after all, is an arsonist and a murderer as well as being a scorpion-dropping jerk!

I’ll wrap it all up by saying this: Roadhouse 66 is a pretty unmemorable and unexciting small-town meller, but if you like Dafoe and Reinhold and always wondered what it would be like if they teamed up, you may wring some enjoyment from it! But I myself had never wondered that, so I didn’t get a whole lot from the picture! I liked the cars though, and the small desert-town location! I’m going to give Roadhouse 66 one new radiator!

Burl reviews Cottage Country! (2013)

 

Ha ha and welcome to the cottage, it’s Burl! I had lake cottages I could visit while I was growing up – grandparents had one, uncle had one, some friends of course – but they were either far away or could only be visited occasionally, so I can’t say I really had the childhood cottage experience! But eventually I married into one, and now I do have it, and man is it sweet! It’s a lot of work, though! I’ve built additions, sheds, decks, docks, wooden walkways and garden boxes, and have done more tree-chopping, wood-splitting, outhouse-moving and various sundry other tasks than I ever thought I would! But if that sounds like complaining, think again: ha ha, I’m very grateful to have it!

But my place is a lot more rustic than the cottage seen in the movie I’m reviewing for you today: by name, Cottage Country! It’s a Canadian picture, and at times a very Canadian picture, so as a cottaging Canuck myself, I thought this picture might strike a chord! Well, maybe it did, but a fairly dull one with little resonance and not always the most pleasing of tones! Still, it proved better than I was expecting! Read on, sweet primate, and I’ll give you the particulars!

Tyler Labine from Tucker & Dale vs. Evil and Rise of the Planet of the Apes plays Todd, a milquetoast Toronto salaryman with a family cottage in the Muskokas and a blonde girlfriend who at first seems out of his league, and to whom, this magical weekend at what Ontarians call “camp,” he plans to propose! Malin Ackerman who played Debbie Harry in CBGB is Cammie, the girlfriend, and she does a good job at immediately situating the character as a very specific type, who later in the movie will evolve into a different, but related, specific type!

Anyway, after a brief encounter with a woods-hobo played by Earl Pastko from Heads and Land of the Dead and Roadkill and The Sweet Hereafter, Todd and Cammie arrive at the cottage, which is more like a regular two-story house; and before Todd can make his ill-considered proposal, even before Cammie can enact a prefatory session of whistle-dog, who should burst in but Todd’s obnoxious brother, whose name, improbably, is Salinger, along with his dour Eastern European girlfriend Masha, played by Lucy Punch from Hot Fuzz! This unwanted invasion sets up the big conflict of the picture, which comes to a head when Todd semi-accidentally puts the chop to his brother’s neck!

Things get a little Macbeth from here: Cammie turns out to be the sort of lady who won’t let anything get in the way of her personal happiness and the vision of her life which she has conceived! Ha ha, you know the type! Well, she’s soon browbeaten Todd into helping her murder Masha, and from there things get complicated with the chopping up of the bodies, the sinking of the parts, and the unexpected party which the brother had arranged before his axing! With increasingly suspicious guests – one in particular likes asking the hard questions, ha ha – the murder-happy couple’s desperation grows, and their willingness to kill, or at least Cammie’s willingness to kill, grows apace!

Eventually Todd and Salinger’s parents show up, played by Canadian acting veterans Kenneth Welsh, whom we know from any number of things including the latter-day Romero picture Survival of the Dead, and Nancy Beatty from City on Fire! They’re a pair of bickersons right out of Till Death Do Us Part, and the name “Salinger” becomes even more unlikely once these L7s appear, but the actors are talented enough that their worry for their missing son, and increasing suspicion about what might have happened to him, hits a genuine emotional note!

There are some hoser cops that include Jonathan Crombie from Bullies, and then there’s a car chase and the final dislocation between Todd and Cammie! Ha ha, in the last act the picture begins to recall the British killer-couple movie Sightseers, but it never fully commits to the heartlessness and black-comic violence of that picture! Still, there are casualties and things occasionally get bloody! The acting is pretty sharp all around, the locations pretty, and the rest of the show is perfectly functional! But it never really flies, and it never really lands either – it’s not scary and not all that thrilling, and if the intention is satirical, the targets (WASPy couples? Affluent cottagers? Families?) escape unscathed! But it has moments of sharpness, minor suspense, and gratifying humour, so it was hardly a total loss! I’ll give Cottage Country two pairs of expensive headphones!

Burl reviews Black Sheep! (1996)

 

Hoch now friends, it’s Burl here to review non-classic comedy from the 90s! As I’ve hinted elsewhere, in my review of Men at Work for example, there are an awful lot of bad and unfunny 90s comedy films, and it’s my sad duty to report that today’s picture is one of them! Why sad? Well, because the star of the picture never got to realize his full potential, and because the formula on view here had been used almost precisely in a previous picture, where it resulted in a movie that still wasn’t good but was at least watchable! That movie was Tommy Boy, and this follow-up stinker is known as Black Sheep!

Because Tommy Boy did reasonably well and attracted some goodwill, the Paramount/SNL moviemaking conspiracy decided to replicate it as closely as possible, but without spending extra money on heart, wit, and relevance! Once again we have a good-hearted bozo played by Chris Farley, whose presence we may recall from Dirty Work, paired with a banty and sarcastic foil essayed by David Spade, well-known from his role as the hot dog man in Reality Bites!

Farley is Mike Donnelly, who puts all his portly energy into helping his slickster, nice-guy politician brother Al, played by Tim Matheson – whom we know from Impulse and from Fletch, and who, on a busy movie set, once shoved me out of his way – become the governor of Washington! Wishing him out of the way, the campaign assigns staffer Steve (Spade’s part to play of course) to keep the oaf out of trouble by whatever means necessary! But because both Mike and Steve, but especially Mike, are stupid people, trouble keeps happening to them anyway!

The rival campaign led by Governor Tracy, played by Christine Ebersole from True Crime and Licorice Pizza, decides to make the most of Mike’s oafishness in order to derail Al’s candidacy, but they do so in a haphazard and unfocussed manner, which is how everyone does anything in this movie! Plenty of characters are introduced and not much is done with any of them: from a lunatic veteran who lives in a school bus, played, of course, by Gary Busey from Silver Bullet and Lethal Weapon; to Grant Heslov of Congo playing Mike’s cop friend; or Timothy Carhart from The Manhattan Project as Al’s unctuous political aide; or Bruce McGill from Into the Night as his opposite number on the Governor’s side; or, in the role of a sleazy photographer, Boyd Banks of Crash and Jason X!

Nothing is done with these people because nothing is done with anything! The overwhelming feeling is of a movie being made on the fly with an unfinished script by people who would rather be doing something else! There are very few jokes and none of them are funny, so far as I can recall! I’m fairly sure I saw this in the theatre back when I was a semi-professional reviewer of films, but until I re-watched it more recently, I couldn’t remember a thing about it except that it was bad! It turns out that’s the only thing to remember about it, ha ha!

I’m sorry to be so negative here, but, though I can’t say I’m a big Chris Farley fan, I do think he had some comedy chops and a central core of appealing sweetness, and he had the potential to become something greater! But he was ill-used like so many of the tubby comedians were, and Black Sheep is a shining example of a near-criminal waste of talent! Its summery atmosphere, Pacific Northwest locales and essential good-naturedness are about all it has going for it, so I give this forgettable puctulation one half an appearance by Mudhoney!

Burl reviews Cold Pursuit! (2019)

 

By krim-kram and by the flurries of winters past, it’s Burl, here to review yet another picture featuring an aging Liam Neeson carrying vengeance in his heart! He’s done this oh so many times before – look at movies like Next of Kin and Darkman and Taken 2, and there you’ll see that old familiar figure of Liam Neeson with vengeance reliably lodged in his heart! And the picture under discussion today is more of the same, and it’s called Cold Pursuit!

This is not just a vengeance picture but also belongs to that subset of movies which are remakes of movies made a year or two earlier by the same European director who made the original, and usually the remake is the filmmaker’s entrée into Hollywood studio picturemaking! Think of The Vanishing, (and, ha ha, then forget it – the remake, anyway), or Funny Games! Cold Pursuit is a remake of the Danish-Norwegian comedeo-vengeance film In Order of Disappearance, which I’m pretty sure I’ve seen! And like all these remakes, bar, I think, none, the original is the better one!

Old Liam plays Nels, which seems like, but isn’t, an anagram for “Liam!” Nels is a solid citizen in a little Colorado mountain town: he’s the man who keeps the roads clear with his big shed full of plowing equipment, and for this he’s being recognized as Local Man of the Year, for which his wife, Laura Dern from Blue Velvet, is proud! But then we see how their son, played by Neeson’s real-life son I believe, has, through his airport baggage job and the shabby offices of a disreputable pal, become mixed up with a drugs gang, and thanks to a misunderstanding, is kidnapped and given a fatal overdose by the gang!

Neeson and Dern each react to this in their own way: Dern takes off for parts unknown and is never seen again, while Neeson becomes vengeance-crazed, turning to his retired-gangster brother, played by William Forsythe from Smokey Bites the Dust and Extreme Prejudice, for information and advice! The tone turns blackly comic as Neeson kills his way up the Denver crime hierarchy, and with each new notch on the belt comes an intertitle memorializing the dead party and listing his gangster nickname! Ha ha, this is a bit on the cutesy side – I recall it working better in the original, where the humour was allowed to be as dry as it needed to be and the little titles didn’t stand out as much as they do in this more studio-tooled, focus-grouped remake!

The nicknames are another running gag, with a puzzled Neeson quizzing his brother about them! But, like the obituary intertitles, this aspect seems nothing more than ornamentation added later to purfle the border of an otherwise ordinary crime thriller! Ha ha, but there are a few details which seem a bit more organically integrated, like the rival gang of Indigenous mobsters! And there’s a subplot involving the son of the main bad guy, a boy-faced mob boss called The Viking, who lacks any evident Viking qualities beyond a general ruthlessness; this subplot has a mild wackiness to it, and lends the picture a bit of dualism which, for the movie’s running time at least, serves as an acceptable substitute for complexity!

The revenge part works well enough, familiar as it is, though I was disappointed that Nels didn’t use his snowplow more! It figures into the last act a little bit, but not enough to make this picture anything more than a mildly eccentric and otherwise unmemorable crime picture, more notable for casting a shadow over the original foreign iteration than for any qualities of its own! Neeson does this stuff with an appealing stolidity, but he could pull that off in his sleep, and in several scenes seems to be doing so here! I say stick with the original version, or maybe Fargo, which did snowbound crime eccentricity better than any other picture I can think of; but I’ll give Cold Pursuit two Fruity Pebbles anyway!

Burl reviews The Dark Half! (1993)

 

By the squirrels of autumn it’s Burl, here to give you a new film notice! Yes, we find ourselves once again in the company of the great Beardsman of Pittsburgh, the zombie maestro who brought us excellent films like Dawn of the Dead, along with some less excellent but still perfectly watchable works like Monkey Shines! It’s Mr. George A. Romero of whom I speak of course – ha ha, sadly I never met Mr. Romero, but I did once get to see him introduce a  movie close to his heart, Powell and Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffman! One fails to discern the Archers’ influence on the picture under review today, however: The Dark Half!

It’s a Stephen King tale, based a little bit on his own life and how he was outed as the maniacal overachiever who wrote so many books that he had to publish some of them under the name Richard Bachman! (I read Thinner when it was still unknown that Bachman was King, and thought to myself “Boy, this guy sure writes a lot like Stephen King!”) Timothy Hutton from Turk 182 stars as the King stand-in, Thad Beaumont: here not a gargantua-selling horror novelist but one of those cartoonishly “serious” writers King features so often, and somewhat longingly, in his stories! And yet Beaumont has a sideline in writing punchy pulp novels under the name George Stark, featuring an amoral killer as a hero, and, after Stark is revealed to be Beaumont and Thad conducts a mock burial of the pseudonym, it’s this aspect of Thad that starts to make trouble! 

Amy Madigan from Streets of Fire plays the wife who wonders what’s going on, and Michael Rooker from Cliffhanger is the cop-acquaintance who suspects Thad when the Stark persona corporealizes somehow and starts killing people in gross and violent ways! Ha ha, the parade of victims start with Robert Joy, whom Romero used again in Land of the Dead, and who plays a sleazy guy who tries to blackmail Thad about his double identity! The carnage continues with the magazine writer of the story, essayed by Kent Broadhurst who’d Kinged before in Silver Bullet; Thad’s literary agents, played by Rutanya Alda from The Stuff and Tom Mardirosian from Trading Places; and then some old geezer with a false leg! I feared for the lives of Julie Harris from The Haunting, playing Thad’s university colleague, and Royal Dano from The Right Stuff as the local gravedigger (named, of course, Digger), but needn’t have as it turns out!

Of course the premise is utterly goofy (though not the goofiest in King’s canon – ha ha, The Mangler, anybody?), but I don’t blame King, because after all the idea was designed for print, not film, and it’s much more palatable, not to mention thematically apt, on the page! Putting this concept in a movie significantly exposes the utter impossibility of it, and in response the cast all work extra hard to sell it! Rooker in particular expresses how he’d be more likely to believe the culprit was a ghost rather than a name that never was! Romero also treats the premise seriously, perhaps too much so; but now and again, as in some nice scenes early in the picture involving birds and brain operations, it pays off!

As King/Romero collaborations go, it’s no Creepshow, and Creepshow isn’t even all that great I guess! Don’t get me wrong, it’s a highly enjoyable omnibus horror picture, but it’s just no masterpiece! The Dark Half is a few rungs below that, though it has elements to recommend it: some strong autumn atmosphere (I’ll admit that I watched – or rewatched, since I first saw it in the theatre way back when – the picture this past October and am only getting around to reviewing it now, and the fall miasma struck a sweet chord at that time); nice photography from the most unlikely of cinematographers, Tony Pierce-Roberts, who usually shot highbrow British stuff like A Room With A View and Howard’s End; and a strong cast! It’s got some effective moments, but, like its antagonist, lacks the cohesion necessary to triumph! I give The Dark Half two black pencils, freshly sharpened!

Burl reviews Phantoms! (1998)

 

Ha ha and sweet goofballs, it’s Burl, here to review a tale of underground gumphries! You might say to yourself “Ha ha, Burl, what the heck are underground gumphries?” No, I don’t know, because whatever the monster is in this picture, it may as well be called an underground gumphry as anything else, because it’s one of the vaguest creatures ever to come down the pike! And the movie in which it is featured is called Phantoms!

The picture is much like Deep Rising, with which it shares an amorphous creature, some dodgy digital effects, some refreshing gloop and gore, an approximate release date (January 1998), and at least one actor, Clifton Collins, who here plays an ill-fated general! The story is laid in a small Colorado mountain town as two bickering sisters, played by Joanna Going from The Tree of Life and Rose McGowan from Scream, drive into town for a visit and wonder at the total lack of human activity on the streets! Ha ha, but when they start discovering things like disembodied hands clutching at a rolling pin, they twig that something terrible has happened to the townsfolk! They run into some equally bewildered cops led by Sheriff Ben Affleck of Dazed and Confused and Gone Girl fame; in his company are a pair of deputies, one played by Nicky Katt from Gremlins, and the other, a giggling snickering jerky-jerk and an obvious madman from the moment he steps on screen called Wargle, is essayed by Liev Schreiber from The Daytrippers!

They find the desiccated corpse of Linnea Quigley in a hotel room, and Wargle, whose complex of pathologies includes being a pervhound, seems to want to have relations with it! Ha ha, and shortly thereafter he goes completely boo at the zoo and has his face eaten off by a giant moth! At this point in the review, if you haven’t seen the movie or even if you have, you’re probably wondering just exactly what it is menacing the town! Is it a giant moth? Is it the revived corpses of some of the victims, including Wargle, who pop up now and again? (These, I take it, are the phantoms of the title!) Or is it something else, aliens perhaps? Well, ha ha, it’s hard to say!

Clarification, or as much as we’ll ever be granted, comes from a character preposterously called Dr. Timothy Flyte, who is played by none other than Peter O’Toole, most famed from his role in Club Paradise! Flyte is napped by a pair of agents played by Bo Hopkins from Tentacles and Rob Knepper from Wild Thing, who deliver him to the beleaguered town, tip their caps, and are never seen again! By this time the army has become involved and there’s a mobile laboratory that I was heartened to see! Flyte, once he’s hooked up with our gang of protagonists, compares the malevolent entity to a petroleum jelly, so I guess that’s how I’ll refer to it to, because, much like most of the film’s characters, I never really had any idea what they were up against!

I did appreciate such background as is provided: Flyte calls the creature the “Ancient Enemy,” and spins vaguely Lovecraftian tales of how this ageless jelly occasionally rises up from the earthen underworld in which it dwells to wipe out entire towns or civilizations! I like that kind of thing in a movie, but they don’t do a lot with it here! When it’s not a moth or a zombie, or shaking down The Thing by incarnating as a dog and then bursting forth from within it, the jelly resembles a sort of fudge, or a putty of sorts, or maybe just a big shmoo! Its powers are ill-defined, its goals unclear (it seems to crave publicity, of all things), its weakness implausible and its inspirations obvious! But, ha ha, on the other hand it will occasionally telephone the characters and scream at them through the receiver!

O’Toole and the rest of the cast take all this as seriously as they’re able, and I have to admit they didn’t do a bad job of it! This being a Miramax production and featuring Rose McGowan in a leading role, one gets the creeping willies thinking about that horrible Weinstein brother and his monstrous treatment of McGowan and who knows how many other women – in fact, there’s a moment when Wargle tries out some of his perv-dude talk on Sheriff Affleck and is promptly shut down; one wonders if this was meant as a sort of proxy dramatization of real-life Weinstein-Affleck conversations, with Affleck in the role of the righteous hero and the slobbering madman rapist standing in for Weinstein! Well, who knows!

But it’s a real lombego, this movie! I saw it in the theatre, so I’m feeling that extra bit of affection I carry for such pictures, and the simple fact is I do like a monster movie, and I really like The Thing, which this is trying to be! But ha ha, that it sure ain’t! The dialogue clangs about like a collapsing church organ and the goofnugget level is off the charts, but there are a few effective scenes if you let yourself get into it! It’s dumb and it’s derivative, but the things it’s imitating are mostly fun and interesting, so it benefits from the echoes! It reminds me of a bigger-budget version of something like The Kindred, or a lower-budget simulacrum of the 1988 The Blob, and it receives additional credit for possessing, more or less, that spirit! It’s bad and nothing can change that, but you might find it entertaining! I give Phantoms one and a half phone calls!

Burl reviews Who Has Seen the Wind! (1977)

 

From out on the windy prairie, it’s Burl, here to review some coming-of-age Canadian cinema! Ha ha, this is the sort of movie Canada did really well in the 1970s, and the wintery, Francophone version of it would be the excellent Mon Oncle Antoine! But films like this were not considered very cool while I was growing up – they were the sorts of things occasionally shown in classroom situations, movies to be endured rather than enjoyed! Ha ha, I remember a class outing to the cinema to see one called Mario! But it turns out that some of them, perhaps even most of them, possibly even all of them, are really good! Case in point: Who Has Seen the Wind!

 

This is exactly the kind of movie that, done wrong, would instantly become what my pal Evan calls “Canadian with a K!” Fortunately it was done right, ha ha! It’s all set on the plains of Saskatchewan in dust bowl times, and of the massive cast of characters, the one hewn closest to is a ten year-old boy called Brian O’Connel, played by Brian Painchaud in one of the best kid performances I’ve ever seen! Sadly, young Painchaud died aged only twenty, so whether he would have been a good adult actor too will always be unknown!

 

All the kids in the movie are really good! A very Sammy Snyders-esque youth, Douglas Junor, plays The Young Ben, a mostly silent lad with a blonde bowl cut; a figure of pathos and mystery for much of the picture! His father, The Ben, is played by the movie’s requisite superstar American import: none other than José Ferrer from The Sentinel and Dune! Ha ha, it’s amusing and unusual to see the cultured, Puerto Rico-born Ferrer playing a rough-hewn slab of prairie hardtack: the local brewer of illegal moonshine whose still blows up in the church basement and who keeps a caged owl both as a hard-won pet and as the movie’s principal figure of obvious symbolism! Who knows why the caged owl hoots, ha ha!

 

As you’ve probably figured out, the picture is a tapestry of life in this small Saskatchewan town, as seen largely but not exclusively from the perspective of Brian! The large number of characters, played by a large number of familiar Canadian actors, include a kindly school principal played by Thomas Hauff from Millennium and Bells; a nasty schoolteacher played by Patricia Hamilton, who later was the ill-fated Mabel in My Bloody Valentine; pious jerk Reverend Powelly, a vaguely Norman Fell-ish presence played by David Gardner, the detective from Prom Night; old bitch Mrs. Abercrombie, essayed by Charmion King from Shadow Dancing and Last Night; Dr. Svarich, the town sawbones, played by Cedric Smith, whom we recall as Gary “The Blacksmith” Black in Fast Company; and others, like a philosophy-disdaining shoe salesman, an unctuous barber/mayor, a Chinese family, and a bible-crazed prairie hobo who dwells in a sturdy piano box! And Les Carlson from Black Christmas and A Christmas Story appears just long enough to drive a cart and sing a scatological horse song!

 

Brian’s dad, town pharmacist Gerald O’Connel, is a nice guy played by The Rowdyman himself, Canadian icon Gordon Pinsent, known internationally from pictures like Blacula and The Thomas Crown Affair; and from the first moment we see him, buttoning up his shirt after a doctor’s examination, we know he’s doomed! “Is it true your dad turned yellow?” Brian’s friends are soon asking him! Brian’s mom is Chappelle Jaffe from Terminal Choice and The Dead Zone, and her big moment comes in facing down the nasty schoolteacher who punished Brian by making him hold his arms up for hours, until he faints!

 

The replacement schoolteacher, Ruth Thompson, is played by Helen Shaver from Starship Invasions, and she’s much more pleasant than the sadistic one lately booted from the position! But in a pattern established early in the film, nothing good can happen for Brian without something bad following it up! After his dad – kind, beloved, but not much use in discussions about feelings – dies, Brian goes to live with his salty-tongued Uncle Sean, a role for Gerard Parkes, who also played an uncle in Isabel and was a cop in Spasms! Sean’s hired limpy-man, Ab, is essayed by Hugh Webster from Rip-Off and Between Friends!

 

The movie seems to be about life and death; imprisonment of various kinds and the necessity and the means of escape; culpability, blame, and forgiveness! It’s a lot to fit into 103 minutes, especially when you consider the very many characters, the general eventfulness of the film, and the need for a climactic, near-disastrous windstorm! The picture is impressively put together, nice-looking, well-acted, understated, and real! The musical score is not bad, but it’s too bombastic, and too often tries to comment on the action in a film that everywhere else resists melodrama! A warning, however: this movie is not for gopher lovers! I give Who Has Seen the Wind three one-way train rides to the Mayo Clinic!

Burl reviews Edge of the Axe! (1987)

 

¡Hoy! ¡Hoy! It’s Burl here to review an Iberian/Californian co-production slasher picture from the venerable Spanio-English director José Ramón Larraz, who of course also brought us Scream…and Die! His pictures from the 1970s had a certain sleazy something, but by the late 80s he was taking a different approach, and that’s all too evident in his slasher picture Edge of the Axe!

The action is set in the woods of California, though some of the killing scenes were clearly shot later, probably back in Spain, because they involve characters and locations that are never part of the main action! But the first murder is set in a car wash, and I have to say that one is not badly done, though it’s competently shot enough that you can easily see how it might have been done better still! Ha ha, is that churlish? I hope not! But the scene serves to show us what the deal is in this picture: a white-masked axeman giving the chop to seemingly random ladies!

From there we meet our two main characters, who also serve as our two main suspects! We’ve got computer nerd Gerald, played by Barton Faulks from Future-Kill, and Page Mosely from Girls Nite Out as an exterminator called Richard Simmons! He’s married to an older wealthy lady named Laura, played by Patty Shepard from The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman, and she’s worried, quite rightly, that her vermin-killing husband might be playing bohankie with other ladies on the side!

In fact he is carrying on with another lady, and taking her on motorboat rides in fact, while meanwhile Gerald has met Lillian, played by Christina Marie Lane from The Allnighter! He presents her with a computer, upon which she immediately pastes a picture of Dudley Do-Right, and hooks her up to a proto-Internet so they can play games together and communicate in a sort of email system that reads aloud all their messages in a hollow, echoing, affectless voice! During all this the chop crimes continue, and law enforcement in the town is represented by the crustiest, least helpful sheriff in slasher movie history, played by Fred Holliday from Airport, who, after four or five axe murders, remarks that this could develop into an ugly situation! Ha ha, this fellow is like the angry Far Side version of Chief Newby from My Bloody Valentine!

While the exterminator and his new girlfriend sort of fade from the story, faces familiar from Iberian horror pop up throughout the film: Alicia Moro from Slugs, Jack Taylor from Pieces, and Conrado San Martín from The Awful Dr. Orloff all make appearances, and more often than not get the chop! As more and more townsfolk are forced to undergo the major barbarisms, and corpses pop up everywhere, sometimes literally, it’s easy to forget that this axe murderer also counts among his victims a pig, a dog, and a fish! The dog in particular made me sad – he looked like a nice little guy!

The end has more twists than a chimp’s beanbucket, or anyway seems to, and I’ll confess that between the muddy VHS sound and the forced air furnace of my home some of the dialogue was lost, and I didn’t always follow what was what and who was who in that climax! But I know that Lane’s performance as Lillian was a pretty good one, and that’s maybe in part a testament to Larraz’s years of experience too! But apparently he thinks of this one as his worst picture, and ha ha, I’m in no rush to challenge him on that! I'll commend him, though, for including a few actual Special Makeup Effects in his movie, mostly in the form of corpses discovered later, but there are a few chopped fingers and such too! All in all, I give Edge of the Axe one and a half Color of Money posters!

Burl reviews Lady in White! (1988)

 

Hello and a happy post-Halloween to you all! Just a few days ago, and for the very first time, I watched a movie I’ve been aware of for years and years, something I saw on the shelves of the video store I worked at and the ones I patronized! I never did pick it up, because although it was a spooky picture and I like those, it seemed a bit too much like a kiddieshow! Ha ha, it was the same with The Monster Squad! But having a kid myself now, who's the same age as this film's protagonist as it happens, it seemed the perfect time to finally sit back and take in The Lady in White!

The opportunity to see the picture came from the director himself, Frank LaLoggia, who posted a link to his director’s cut on a social media! I downloaded it toot sweet and watched it with my family, it being a family-type movie more or less! It’s a flashback sort of a story, a childhood memory caper like Stand By Me, and so it’s appropriate that it begins in the present day with the main character as an adult, a Stephen King-type horror writer played by LaLoggia himself, being ferried to his old stomping grounds by a cab driver played by Bruce Kirby from, yes, Stand By Me! Ha ha!

The young version of this character, Frankie Scarlatti, is played by Lukas Haas from Witness, Mars Attacks! and Who Loves the Sun! He dwells in a small upstate-New York town with his dad, Alex Rocco from Gotcha, Stick, and Herbie Goes Bananas, his brother Geno, played by the talented Jason Presson from Explorers, and his old country bickerson grandparents! Life is good for jug-eared Frankie except for the fact that his mom has recently died, and he must occasionally suffer some older-brother ribbing from Geno!

Also there’s a pair of mean kids in his classroom, and one evening close to Halloween they lock him in the cloakroom at his school! There he sees the ghost of a little girl who was murdered a decade earlier, and then a rather more substantial presence: a man with a hooded face who comes into the cloakroom to find something, and, realizing he's not alone, starts to strangle poor Frankie! Yes, it seems the town has been suffering a series of child murders, and Frankie, having survived his encounter, realizes he’s got access to clues that might help him find the killer, and that another ghost, the legendary Lady in White, might be a further key to the mystery!

But he only comes upon these realizations gradually, for Frankie is no precocious boy detective but a refreshingly real kid who gets scared and doesn’t always do the right thing! And the movie itself is not a fast-paced, Goonies-style kids’ adventure, but a more meditative memory piece that moves at its own tempo, bringing on characters like a family friend played by Len Cariou from One Man, The Four Seasons, and Executive Decision; the local crazylady, Katherine Helmond from Time Bandits and Brazil; a storytelling postie well played by Sydney Lassick from Alligator and Silent Madness; and Lucy Lee Flippen from Summer School as Frankie’s teacher! And then of course there’s the poor school janitor, blamed for the killings mostly because he’s black; and his poor wife, left alone with her children to suffer the wrath and scorn of the town; and the grief-stricken racist lady, mother to one of the dead children, who gets a mad look in her eye and plots revenge against the wrongly-accused janitor!

Between the child murders and the racism it gets kind of murky for a family film, but some tonal equilibrium is maintained thanks to the heavy filter of nostalgia, the antics of the grandparents, and, since the story unfolds over a period of months, the inclusion of both Halloween and Christmas scenes! The narration, delivered by LaLoggia, is pretty ropey and is probably best ignored, which the poor sound mix on the director’s cut I watched made easy to do; and some of the optical trick effects are silly in both conception and execution! Also, at 122 minutes, the movie, or at least the director’s cut, might be a tad overlong, ha ha! The cliffside climax does tend to linger like the last guest at a Halloween party!

But it all comes straight from the heart, and that’s a virtue not to be airily discounted! LaLoggia took his own history - that of a horror-loving kid named Frank growing up in an Italian family in upstate New York - and married it to an established local lady-in-white legend and an invented serial killer story, and the result is a heartfelt if minor spookshow! I should also mention Rocco, who so often played a hard case but here is warm and kind as the anti-racist father! It was nice to finally catch up with this little movie, and I give Lady in White two and a half squirrel hunting jackets!