Burl reviews Fear City! (1984)

Hey and hah-trayah, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m here with another review of a motion picture, once again plucked almost at random from my basement VHS collection! This one is an Abel Ferrara movie I’ve never seen before, and it’s called Fear City! It maybe should have been called Sleazeball City, but I guess Fear City works pretty well too! It's part of that micro-genre of movies that are partially about psycho killers but are also part of some other genre too, just like Delirium!

It’s also part of that category of movies whose raison d’etre seems to be making New York look like the most horrible, gritty, dangerous and generally unsavoury place ever! There are mainstream movies that work on this theme, like Cruising, and there are low-budget pictures that do it even more persuasively precisely because of their low budgets (Maniac and Basket Case would be good examples of these); but Fear City, with its cast of recognizable faces and reasonable budget, fits somewhere in the middle!

It seems that Tom Berenger, whom we know from such Hollywood bumkins as Someone To Watch Over Me and Last Rites, is an ex-boxer who once boxed his opponent into the grave, and so he quit pugilizing – though his flashbacks won’t let him forget the incident – and started up a stripper management business with his pal Jack Scalia! Well, wouldn’t you know it, as our story proper begins, one of those self-righteous maniacs on a morality crusade decides to clean up the streets by practicing his various martial arts techniques on random exotic dancers, at first just mutilating them with scissors and knives, but soon working his way up to brutal murders!

Since the first two victims work for the Berenger/Scalia Agency, an incredibly angry cop played by Billy Dee Williams from Number One with a Bullet decides these fellows must know something about the tragedies! Soon a mobster played by Rossano Brazzi from South Pacific gets involved for some reason; and there are lots of ladies about too, like Melanie Griffith as the exotic dancer Tom Berenger loves, and Rae Dawn Chong as the exotic dancer Melanie Griffith loves, and Janet Julian from Humongous as the exotic dancer everyone loves!

Of course we all know that even with all these characters and plot strands and flashbacks, it’s all going to come down to the killer boxer vs. the chopsocky maniac, and indeed that’s what occurs! Ha ha, the fight is pretty good, and it’s always satisfying to see one of these extreme social conservatives – and he’s a brutal murderer too, don’t forget – receive the harsh and painful pummeling they deserve!

Ha ha, Abel Ferrara is a pretty interesting director! I guess he’s best known for Bad Lieutenant and King of New York, but he’s done lots of other weird pictures as well, like his own (pretty good!) version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, just called Body Snatchers; a movie about Madonna and Harvey Kietel making love; and a movie adaptation of William Gibson’s New Rose Hotel! Fear City is one of his earlier productions, and despite running off madly in all directions plotwise, and presenting maybe too many scenes of exotic dancing, and featuring a lot more harsh, brutal violence against women than ol’ Burl is all that comfortable with, and losing its narrative thread like you would a worm in a bowl of rancid spaghetti, it’s not that bad a movie! I give it two long, wordless nun-chuck-a practices!

Burl reviews Malpertuis! (1973)

Well, it’s that time again! Time for ol’ Burl to grab the cinematic bull by the horns and wrestle it into the dirt – the dirt of critical evaluation! Ha ha, over my many years of movie watching, I’ve identified more than a few micro-genres, and have built up a pretty extensive taxonomy! One category of movies I like is the Expensive Arty Horror Picture, which consists of uniquely oddball, almost experimental genre movies that break some new ground in the field! Matango is a good example, and so are movies like Horrors of Malformed Men or Lisa and the Devil or The House with the Laughing Windows or Zeder! I guess you might toss Videodrome in there as well!

Today’s movie is another picture in the great artsy horror tradition! It’s Malpertuis, which was adapted from a weird surrealistic horror book by the pseudonymous Belgian writer Jean Ray! Ha ha, the movie was made by Harry Kümel, who also made a movie about nude vampire ladies called Daughters of Darkness, and in fact has made several other pictures that you never hear about! Or maybe you do if you’re of the Benelux nations, but not so much outside of that particular socioeconomic region!

Malpertuis is also part of another micro-genre, the House Movie! These are pictures which take place mostly or entirely within the walls of a single house, and the house itself is more or less a character in the film! There are lots of haunted house movies in this micro-genre of course, like The Haunting, House, The Legend of Hell House, This House Possessed, The Evil and The Nesting, just to name a few, but there are also left-field weirdpics like Sunset Boulevard, Demon Seed, Guy Maddin’s Keyhole, and of course the Japanese insanity pepper simply called House!

Well, I guess I ought to tell you a little about Malpertuis, but I’ll keep it sketchy, because it’s one of those movies you might prefer to go in knowing only a little bit about! It seems that a pretty-boy sailor-man is on shore leave and looking for the house in which he grew up! It seems to be missing! He chases his sister and ends up in a nightclub free-for-all where he gets bopped on the head! He wakes up in Malpertuis, the house of his uncle Cassavius, who is played without even getting out of bed by Orson Welles himself! The house is filled with all sorts of other people, mostly petit bourgeoisie or resentful servants or weird hangers-on, who all seem to be waiting around for the bedridden Cassavius to croak!

There’s a strange atmosphere in the house, and an odd reluctance or inability on the part of its denizens to leave! All sorts of things happen, including gruesome murders and illicit sexual acts, and later on some much, much stranger events and revelations, some of these involving the gods of ancient Greece! By the time the young sailor discovers the secret of Malpertuis and those who dwell within its mildewed walls, the movie has mustered up an otherworldly feeling that stays with you well after the credits have rolled and the last strains of the Georges Delerue score have faded!

Many of the movie’s pleasures are visual! It was shot by Gerry Fisher, a British cinematographer whose eclectic credits include lots of Joseph Losey and Tony Richardson pictures, a bunch of late-period John Frankenheimer and Michael Ritchie works, and crazy movies like Billy Wilder’s Fedora, William Peter Blatty’s The Ninth Configuration, John Huston’s Wise Blood, and of course Wolfen and Highlander! Truly an interesting career! And, in concert with the production designer and Kümel he does a great job with Malpertuis, giving the house enough varied life and colour and flaming gas lamps to make it an expansive and multifaceted environment with personality to spare!

This is a picture well worth seeking out! There are a few different versions, and I watched the 119 minute director’s cut, which is what I recommend to you! I give it three and a half swooping eagles!

Burl reviews Carnival Rock! (1957)

Hi, Burl here with some early Roger Corman to chat about for you all! Ha ha, old Roger certainly has made his share of movies over the years, and for a producer he was an awfully prolific director too! I guess when you make a movie in three or four days, you can pack quite a few of them into a year! This particular one has a pretty bland title, so it’s better known around my house as No! Don’t Touch Me!

But though Carnival Rock isn’t one of Corman’s better-known pictures, it’s one of his more serious-minded efforts of those early days! Ha ha, it wasn’t all monsters and dragsters for that fellow! This movie was certainly intended as a drama above all else, but it was still ultimately a drive-in picture, so Corman salted it generously with the shakinest tunes of the day in an effort to keep the kids on the Southern ozoner circuit intrigued! There are numbers from David Houston, Bob Luman, The Shadows, and a groovy theme tune from The Blockbusters! The best musical interlude comes from The Platters – it’s a truly excellent slice of goodtime vocal pop, and a highlight of the movie!

But most of the movie is the story, and the story is as follows! It seems that on “the pier” – it’s never specified which pier, or where the pier is, and we never even see any remotely pier-like details, since Corman wasn’t shelling out for any location photography on this one – there is a nightclub establishment known as Christy’s! Christy, the owner, is a potato-faced Greek who, we are repeatedly told, is fifty years old! He’s desperately, passionately, completely in love with his star attraction, a lady singer named Natalie, played by Susan Cabot! He’s so be-smitten, in fact, that he’s completely neglecting his failing business, despite constant reminders from his stylish factotum Benny, a role essayed by the great, great Dick Miller, my very favourite actor!

As the business pressures on Christy get heavier, his demented refusal to face reality becomes only more determined! Benny’s complete and unexplained devotion to him (perhaps Christy saved his life in the war?) is severely tested as Christy’s hard-headedness calcifies into looniness! And Natalie, a decent lady with no attraction to the Greek, is driven further and further away! Her fiancé Stanley wins the club from Christy in a simple game of high card/low card, and in a desperate attempt to stay near his beloved, Christy takes a job as the club’s baggy-pants comic! Ha ha, saddest clown ever! Well, when Christy finally goes over the edge and starts the club on fire (it’s the lowest-budget conflagration ever committed to film!), matters come to a head, and it’s up to the decent Stanley to save both his lady love and the cracked Christy! There’s a very bittersweet conclusion after that, tinged only ever so slightly with hopefulness!

Ha ha, it’s hard to say what the drive-in crowd would have made of this one! It’s very talky, so they would have had plenty of time to make out between the musical numbers! The romantic and business travails of a homely pentagenarian would not likely have interested them overmuch! But what do I know, maybe they were riveted! In any case, I say the movie is well worth a look! The performances and script are both strong, and the moody photography by Floyd Crosby (he shot F.W. Murnau’s Tabu and such prestigious pictures as High Noon and The Old Man and the Sea, and later on all the American-International beach movies) gives it some carnival atmosphere! And you know how much ol’ Burl loves a carnival picture!

And what a cast! You’ve got the excellent Dick Miller of course, and then in the role of Stanley there’s Brian G. Hutton, better known from his later action-movie directing career! He made Where Eagles Dare and Kelly’s Heroes and The First Deadly Sin, and then the 80s moustache picture High Road to China, before apparently chucking it all to become a plumber! Ha ha, weird! And there’s Susan Cabot, whom I’ve liked in all her roles, but she had a troubled life and came to a sticky end when her dwarf son clubbed her to death with a barbell while she was sleeping one night in 1986! That’s very sad, she was talented! And you also get Bruno VeSota from Attack of the Giant Leeches, and Jonathan Haze, Seymour Krelboyne himself, in supporting roles!

Maybe I’m just a sucker for a little good music, or for a Corman stock-company cast, or for a movie that tries hard! I know I’m a sucker for any Dick Miller performance I happen to run across! At any rate, all of this means that despite its cheap talkiness, I’m going to give Carnival Rock three skinny neckties!

Burl reviews Full Metal Jacket! (1987)

Hi, it’s Burl here, standing tall before the man! Today I want to talk about Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam movie Full Metal Jacket, which is a dilly of a picture! Kubrick had made war pictures before this, most notably Paths of Glory, and when you factor in films like Spartacus and Dr. Strangelove you get a pretty good idea of how the man felt about armed, organized human conflict! He thought it was ridiculous, ha ha!

Full Metal Jacket almost plays as a comedy at times! The bandy-legged, leather-bound drill instructor, Sgt. Hartmann, is so outrageously over the top that I think if I was one of the maggots under his tutelage, I’d have reacted to his rants like Private Pyle does, with a hard-to-conceal smirk! Ha ha, I’d have certainly received a punching or two from that beef-jerky of a DI!

Allow me to digress for a moment! Ha ha, I saw a special advance preview screening of this movie back when it was released in 1987, and I was so excited to see the movie that I got there early so I could catch the regular feature that had been double-billed with this one! This was in the days before the Internet, remember, so most everyday people had no idea the movie was coming, or what it was about, or anything! And maybe that’s why the theatre people decided that Full Metal Jacket should be paired up with none other than Ernest Goes to Camp! Ha ha, the theatre was full of families who were there to see the big-screen debut of Ernest, and who liked the idea of seeing a second mystery film for free!

You could sense the confusion from the audience as the seemingly endless shots of the recruits getting their heads shaved went on and on! They’d been primed to laugh by Ernest’s antics, so there was plenty of tittering, and more once Sgt. Hartmann started his profane bellowing! Ha ha, he was always threatening to poop on people’s necks, that crazy Sgt.! But one by one, as his threats and insults became more graphic, and the atmosphere chillier and less recognizably human, the families began to drift away! All except one devoted dad and his two eight-to-ten year olds! They stayed for the whole show, and I often wonder how he and the kids described their evening at the pictures to Mom later on!

This movie was a part of the great Vietnam Surge of the late 1980s, and initially I thought Platoon was the better movie! Platoon is hardly a bad picture, but, for me anyway, it’s become apparent that it’s more just an exercise in surface impact, and has less thematic follow-through than the Kubrick picture! There’s a generic feel to all the jungle creeping and yelling of Platoon, whereas Full Metal Jacket is and always will be its own unique thing!

A few random thoughts: The whole cast is great, but Dorian Harewood is especially good in the picture! He plays Eightball, and I thought he did a standout job! Also, that Colonel who shows up, the one who asks of his soldiers only that they obey his every command as they would the word of God, is Bruce Boa, the Waldorf Salad guy from Fawlty Towers! And whatever happened to Douglas Milsome, the cinematographer? He did a great job, and you’d think he’d have been set for a career shooting prestige pictures after this one! But the next thing you know he’s photographing killer Rumplestiltskin movies and Jean-Claude Van Damme direct-to-video cheapies! Weird!

Anyway, this is a singular picture and an extremely entertaining one! It’s brutal and funny, and even though you’re always conscious that it was shot on a backlot in England and they never went anywhere near either Parris Island or Vietnam, it has a thematic and emotional effect that bonks most other Vietnam pictures over the head! I give it four reach-arounds!

Burl reviews 8: The Mor-mon Proposition! (2010)

Burl here to review a documentary feature! This one details the machinations of the Utah Mor-mons who made it their business to interfere in the California proposition to ban gay marriage, which appeared on the ballot in November of 2008! I remember following this story and, frankly, making the assumption that the proposition wouldn’t come within a mile of passing; but I was wrong, and the lesson, I guess – and the lesson in this documentary – is not to underestimate how much organized socially conservative religious people are determined to interfere in other peoples’ lives!

So there’s an interesting and relevant story here, and with the recent judicial declaration that this proposition is unconstitutional, it’s timely once again also! So it’s pretty unfortunate that this tale is told in such a cheap, unimaginative and out-of-whack movie as this one! Let me give you an example of the movie’s approach! One of the interviewees is enumerating the elements necessary to influence a vote in a place as large as California! One, he says, is money! Cut to a shot of hands counting fake-looking bills! Two: volunteers willing to go door-to-door! Cut to a shot of someone knocking on a door! Three is something less tangible, like influence, and the filmmakers’ limited imaginations were unable to come up with a crashingly on-the-nose visual to go along with it, so they just show a shot of a building and leave it at that! Ha ha, nice try!

But I’m far from the ideal audience for this picture! It may shock you to learn this, but ol’ Burl is a fairly cosmopolitan guy! I live in a place where gay marriage has been legal for years, so I can tell you with cheerful certainty that it presents no danger to so-called “traditional” marriage or to the fabric of society! I don’t require documentaries such as this to endorse marriage for whatever consenting adults want it! I have friends who are in gay marriages and who are raising happy, well-adjusted kids, so I don’t need to be persuaded that these families are perfectly normal! The idea that anyone could think otherwise is what tends to surprise me! And I’m not in the least surprised to learn that Mor-mons were behind the big money push to influence the California vote! I thought it was common knowledge, but this movie presents it as though they’re unveiling a shocking and little-known revelation!

A gay couple whose marriage was rent asunder by these meddling Mor-mons are the default main characters, and most of their screen time is them telling us that they truly love one another and that they deserve to be allowed to marry the same as anyone else, and that it’s all about love! Since I take those things for granted, I was pretty much looking at my watch, waiting for the movie to go deeper! It could have presented all those things with some choice visuals, showing these guys at home or something, instead of having them repeat it over and over! But like I said, not much imagination at work here!

Still, I learned a few things! I’d never heard of this loathsome Senator Buttars guy before, and I could have gone through life quite happy never to have heard of him I guess, but now at least I can picture his horrible face as the proposition he so unctuously championed is undone by the very constitution he presumably would have had to swear allegiance to at some point! So maybe that made watching this thudding and ponderous doc somewhat worthwhile!

I certainly wish this had turned out better, because as I say, it’s an interesting story! Perhaps, as the story is ongoing, there is a more ferocious, more stylish and more dynamic effort yet to come! I give 8: The Mor-mon Proposition one single easily-pressured Mor-mon!  

Burl reviews National Lampoon's Class Reunion! (1982)

Ha ha, it’s Burl here to review a comedy! Or at least a movie that supposes it’s a comedy! I’m talking about the slasher movie parody National Lampoon’s Class Reunion! I guess that’s the official title, but if I was Mr. National Lampoon, I’d maybe keep my name off the poster of this particular effort! Ha ha, stick with possessiveifying Animal House and Vacation, Mr. Lampoon, that’s my advice!

Let me tell you right up front: this movie stanks! It stanks so hard! There were a number of slasher movie parodies made around the same time as this, pictures like Student Bodies, Wacko and Pandemonium! Now I haven’t seen all those movies, but I feel pretty sure that they must certainly be better than Class Reunion! They could hardly be worse!

The movie starts out a lot like that old favourite Terror Train! At a graduation party, a hapless class dweeb is tricked into an unpleasant assignation with a supposed sure thing! But instead of a dismembered corpse as in the railroad picture, the bagheaded certainty with whom the dweeb is coupled turns out to be… well, that’s the twist! Wouldn’t want to give it away, ha ha!

Well, okay, I will: the dweeb turns out to be making sweet love to his own twin sister! By garr! No wonder that ten years later at the class reunion he shows up with a bag on his head and a mission to kill! And here is a group worth killing: you’ve got Gerrit Graham as the BMOC who masterminded the cruel prank; Stephen Furst, the flounder from Animal House, playing the gross-out king Hubert and applying whatever he learned from John Belushi to his part; Art Evans from Fright Night as a mind-stoner, which is funny because he usually seems to play a cop; and many more! The great Michael Lerner shows up as a mystery doctor, and he provides a special surprise later on!

Now, these are not untalented people! And the script for this movie was written by John Hughes, and whatever you think of his teen angst pictures, he’s usually good for a few bon mots! On top of this, behind the megaphone was the portly director Michael Miller, who, the very same year he made this bumkin of a movie, made the enjoyable Chuck Norris-vs.-Frankenpsycho picture Silent Rage! (Ha ha, I’ll try to review that one pretty soon!) So why did Class Reunion end up as such a feeble cruickshank of a movie?

Things just fall that way sometimes, I guess! There are some okay bits – Anne Ramsey, well known from Deadly Friend, plays the lunch lady, and she has a fairly hilarious kung-fu battle with the killer! And Chuck Berry provides some fine musical entertainment, but he’s apparently finished and gone before the killer begins his violence work! But the rest of it is almost aggressively unfunny, and not in a Neil Hamburger way! The filmmakers probably didn’t think that, for example, a blind crippled lady crashing into things was inherently funny, but they sure fooled themselves into thinking other people would find it funny! I liked the idea that one of the students was a vampire for some reason, but he never did anything particularly vampiric, and he had the worst attempt at a Bela Lugosi accent ever! Ha ha, I thought anyone could do Bela! Even Martin Landau from Without Warning did a pretty good Bela!

Well, this movie is the worst kind of daffodil, and I can in good conscience give it no more than one half of a girls’ convenience!

Burl reviews Tower of Evil! (1972)

Ha ha! You know who it is? Burl! Yes, I’m here to review another picture for you, this one straight from the foggy shores of Blighty: one of those early-70s British pictures I was talking about in the review of Scream… and Die! It’s Tower of Evil, also known as Horror on Snape Island, and I think it’s got some other titles too! But let’s keep things simple and call it Tower of Evil!

This movie doesn’t get the recognition that it—well, I don’t want to say deserves, but that I’d expect it to have! I suppose it’s an older movie, and the mayhem and nudity are all wrapped up together in one crazy few moments of motion picture rather than being spread out to make a more memorable moviegoing experience overall!

Some fishermen arrive on foggy Snape Island, a bleak and inhospitable promontory, honeycombed with caves, upon which perches a decrepit lighthouse and be-rubbled house! Well, they start finding corpses, and the next thing you know a naked lady runs screaming at them, managing to give one of them a pretty thorough poking before catching a bop on the head from the other!

Because one of the murder weapons was an ancient Phonecian spear, some artifact historians become involved and head to the island to see what’s up! In the meantime, the naked lady has been given some clothes and is being hypnotized by a nine-light covered with multicoloured gels! The idea is to lift her out of her funk so she can explain what happened on the island!

Flashbacks to these events, which involve a bunch of British youths trying to sound American, are salted in as we follow the relic hunters to the baneful islet! The surviving fisherman, a mysterious detective and a dimwitted treasure-hunting tightpants are along for the ride! Altogether they make up as petty and nasty a bunch as you could ever hope to find, and all of them dumber than a box of dead crabs in the bargain! It quickly becomes clear even to this unleavened group that they’re not alone on old Snape Island, and soon there are corpses a-plenty littering the rocky ground! Heads and hands are cut off, faces chopped and torsos poked, and screaming victims plummet from the top of the lighthouse!

The thing about this particular group of people, and the real downside to this picture, is that they’re ready-made victims who may as well have been groomed in some behavioralist’s operant chamber to act in just exactly the way that would best guarantee a domino-like mass demise! They’ll wander off alone for no reason at all, ignore obvious danger signs, and disrobe for sexual intercourse in the middle of a desperate fight for survival! Ha ha, they’re a bunch of dim quilvontics, and no mistake!

 

There’s one scene that stands out for sheer stupid behaviour! Someone hears a scary noise, and the men of the group go out to investigate! “Ha ha, stay right here,” one guy tells the ladies! Of course while the fellows are out, one of the ladies gets the chop! Instead of offering abject apologies, the guy is all like, well, nothing we could have done to prevent that! And later, when another scary noise is heard, the remaining lady says “Ha ha, you’re not going to leave me alone again!” The guy responds in a tone suggesting she’s a child who’s just asked the stupidest question in the world: “Of course not! Get your coat!” Sorry buddy, but you’re the idiot here!

It’s pretty enervating! But the rest of the movie is fairly enjoyable! You might be wondering who’s doing all the killing? Well, usually in movies like this – Raw Meat, for example – the killer turns out to be a disheveled, giggling madman with a big shaggy beard, and that’s the case here! He’s got some pretty spooky scenes, I can tell you! I give Tower of Evil two and a half model lighthouses!

Burl reviews Secret Admirer! (1985)

Well, again, it’s Burl reviewing at you! And how fun it is to do it! Yes, another comedy about the hormones of young people for you today! This one is a pretty mainstream example of that marvelous genre, and what it might lack in go-for-broke teen raunchiness it makes up for with its fine cast and reasonably strong script!

This one is called Secret Admirer, and it’s got a fairly gimmicky plotline that might sort of remind you or The Earrings of Madame de… or something along that line! It seems that C. Thomas Howell is one of those young high schoolers who’s got a good female friend who is also gorgeous and has an obvious crush on him, but whom he doesn’t consider romantically attractive for some reason! Instead C. Thomas has the hup-hups for a blonde girl played by Mrs. John Travolta! It’s similar to the dynamic we see in the same year’s Teen Wolf, where “Boof” is the neglected but loving pal! Ha ha, I guess 1985 was a big year for this sort of confusion!

Well, a love letter is written and passed anonymously to C. Thomas, and when his gaggle of pals find it tucked inside his arithmetic book, they convince him that it certainly must have been written by Mrs. Travolta! Well, confusion sets in all around the neighbourhood after that, spreading to anyone – kids, parents, other parents – who accidentally discover the letter or one of its follow-ups and immediately jump to a faulty conclusion!

I won’t detail these confusions, but the movie is pretty much divided equally between the confusions of the kids and the confusions of the adults, all of whom come to believe that their partners are up to some adulterous no good! If these adults hadn’t been cast properly – Fred Ward and Dee Wallace are among them, just to give you an idea – then these parts of the movie would have been a complete waste of time! So thank goodness for lively actors!

As for the young people sections of the picture, they’re more naturally successful because that’s where the movie’s heart lies, after all, and that is the crowd the picture-makers were presumably catering to! Here again, the performances help out! C. Thomas is okay I guess, with a few good moments here and there, and his gal-pal is really good, I thought! Mrs. Travolta is fine too, and doesn’t hesitate to disrobe when the narrative arc calls for it! C. Thomas’s gang of pals are okay as well, and one of them wears businessman clothes and carries around a briefcase, which I thought was a nice touch since I seem to recall a guy in my own high school who did the same thing!

My favourite scene in the picture, actually, involves all these pals – it’s in a treehouse or something, and they’re in there drinking beer and hanging out because they’ve just finished school for the year! Ha ha, always an exciting day! There’s nothing special about the scene – it’s where they discover the letter, blah blah blah – but it’s just a pleasant bit of hanging out, and I liked it! Ha ha!

The movie looks slick and professional, which isn’t always the case with this sort of picture, and it has a score by Jan Hammer, the guy who did the Miami Vice music! There are clever bits in the script, a few likeable characters (the ostensible “bad guys,” like the apeish boyfriend of Mrs. Travolta’s character, are given little empathy-inducing soliloquies) and a highly unlikely final scene! All this equals a reasonably enjoyable, if instantly forgettable picture! I give it two and a half tumbling grandfather clocks!

Burl reviews Fraternity Vacation! (1985)

It's Burl talking! I’m sure you all know and are fascinated with Stephen Geoffreys, the fellow who played Evil Ed in the original Fright Night! Ha ha, if you’ve ever seen this delightful individual, you can hardly have forgotten him! And did you know that along with his supporting part in Fright Night and his role as the handsmith in Heaven Help Us, he had a few starring roles in other pictures? Yes, it’s true, and although many of his roles were in movies not likely to get discussed here, Fraternity Vacation seems like a pretty good candidate for a review from ol’ Burl!

There’s a black and white prologue, which is pretty unusual for a movie like this! It’s a Wizard of Oz thing I guess, because it starts out in Iowa during the winter and then the bulk of the movie is in Palm Springs, and that part of course is in colour! It seems the very nerdly Wendell Tvedt, played by Stephen Geoffreys of course, is a rich pig farmer’s son, and his father, played by ALF’s dad I think, is paying not just for his trip to Palm Springs but for his prospective frat-mates Mother and Joe also! Mother and Joe are willing to tolerate Wendell because of this, but only barely! And Mother is played by none other than Tim Robbins!

Well, there are some rich guys from a rival frat in Palm Springs also, and they’re pretty rotten fellows, as rich blond frat guys always are in these pictures! Quickly a rivalry develops between Wendell’s quasi-friends and the other guys, and the main contest is who can make gentle love with a particular beautiful lady first! Wendell is a sweet-natured guy who just wants to meet a nice girl, so he has nothing to do with any of that!

The movie proceeds in episodic fashion from there, with lots of partyblasting and shenanigans enacted by a pretty interesting cast! You’ve got Stephen Geoffreys and Tim Robbins of course, but there’s also Geoffreys’ Fright Night castmate Amanda Bearse; Barbara Crampton from Re-Animator and Kathleen Kinmont from Bride of Re-Animator; Britt Ekland from Endless Night; Nita Talbot from Island Claws; ALF’s dad, who of course was the health inspector in Grumpier Old Men; and in the role of the angriest police chief ever, none other than John Vernon! Wow, ha ha!

The other notable thing in this movie is the weird fake-out with Amanda Bearse! She plays the daughter of the psychotic police chief, and she seems like a very sweet and innocent young lady, but then Wendell thinks he’s detected that she’s secretly mean, and he decries her as such in an impassioned speech which briefly brings a feeling of reality to the picture! But just as quickly something about that speech and some subtly oddball elements to Bearse’s performance conspire to make it seem like Wendell’s just managed to escape a looney-tune of the sort seen in movies like Play Misty For Me and Fatal Attraction or even Swimfan!

And by the end of the movie, united by their oppression at the hands of the maniacally belligerent Vernon, all the frat guys are friends, and all of them like Wendell! Since Animal House it’s rare to seen the Snob half of the classic opposition turn over a new leaf and become decent chaps! But it happens in this one, and that sort of leaves you with a good feeling about humanity at the end of the movie! That and all the mooning!

 

Ha ha, it seems like I’ve been finding good things to say about fairly dire movies lately, but I guess I’ll just continue on this positivity jag for at least one more review! I enjoyed Fraternity Vacation for much the same reasons I enjoy any of these movies in the winter: because watching them is like taking a tiny micro-vacation yourself! And the cast and occasional strange efforts to replicate actual human behaviour bring it up a couple of pegs from there! I give it two and a half exposed human buttocks!

Burl reviews Bells! (1981)

Ring, ring! Hi, it’s Burl calling! Ha ha, did I scare you? Today I’m going to talk about the movie Bells, in which all telephone calls take on an aura of menace! If you ever missed the hearty ring of an old telephone, this is the movie for you! The sound effects department certainly didn’t skimp on that particular noise!

Bells is better known under its video title Murder By Phone, but that version is truncated by a full fifteen minutes! For the full effect you have to watch Bells, my friend! You’ll meet a dedicated environmentalist science professor played by Richard Chamberlain, whose prize student gets zapped by a subway platform payphone one night! How? Why? That’s the mystery! Chamberlain travels to Toronto to figure it out, and hooks up with his old mentor John Houseman, whom we know from The Fog and Ghost Story, and who taught him everything he ever learned about environmental activism!

But in a startling coincidence, Houseman is now working for the phone company as an environmental consultant, “behind the fence,” as he puts it! And the phone company knows something about the phone-zapping incident! Meanwhile there are further zappings, all of them a great pleasure to watch! One lady gets zapped and her Mickey Mouse phone is spattered in blood! Another fellow catches the zap while seated in his office chair, and he flies out the window and down ten stories and onto the top of a car, lounging in his chair all the while! Another lady is doing the dishes and the whole sink explodes as she flies back across the room!

So what’s the story on all this zapping? Since Chamberlain is an activist who’s hit the barricades many times in his struggle for environmental justice, and is naturally (and justifiably) suspicious of big businesses, I thought the answer would involve a corporate conspiracy, but it only does in the most minimal way! It’s kind of disappointing actually, to find that a lone maniac is behind it all, killing for mostly fairly petty reasons! The initial killing that sets off Chamberlain’s investigation was merely a test, it seems, and the fact that the victim was a student of a man whose friend is closely connected with the deadly events is a remarkable coincidence never remarked upon in the picture! Ha ha!

I like the world presented by this movie, in which there’s a great history of what used to be called ecological activism and a codified system of protest in which long-time players achieve infamy in corporate circles! Also, this movie seems to assume that of all corporate practices, those of the phone companies are the most fiendishly destructive! I also was glad to see Houseman in this picture, even though he gets a glasses-shattering zap scene of his own! And frankly there are some pretty effective suspense sequences, in which the heroine, a muralist played by Sara Botsford, is tele-stalked by the nebbishy maniac!

The zap scenes are pretty good, as I mentioned, but I thought they could have sprung for at least one exploding head! That would have been totally appropriate! But we get some exploding eyeballs and a semi-crushed head, so it could have been a lot worse! I kind of like the drab look of the movie; and the chattiness of the script, especially in the full 94 minute version, is perfect for a movie about talking on the phone!

Bells is a massively, goofily, cheerfully silly picture, there’s no doubt about it, but I still thought it was a pretty good time at the movies! I’m going to give it two and a half ominous shots of Royal Bank Plaza, which is actually a lot fewer than the movie gives itself!