Burl reviews The Avengers! (2012)

Hi, Burl here to review another summer blockbuster type of picture, the second one after Prometheus! This one is about super heroes, and that of course is a very popular genre just now! It has been for years – remember how popular Superman and Batman were in their respective days? – but over the last decade or so it seems that every second big-budget movie has someone in a cape or tights, sometimes both!

You get capes and tights in this picture, along with a computerized tin-can costume and the magically expanding purple shorts! Yes, this is a multiple-hero picture, and to someone who doesn’t know comics at all, it might seem like a completely random assortment of capéd wondermen, ha ha! Well I used to read comics when I was a youth, and the group still seems completely random to me! I guess there’s a reason for these particular heroes to be banded together, and not just because they all work for Marvel!

Anyway, this movie is a sort of climax to the rash of hero pictures of the last couple of years! The only ones of those I’ve seen are the two Iron Man movies and that one Hulk picture that was, bafflingly, made by Ang Lee! I remember kind of liking that one! But I’ve not seen Thor or Captain America or whatever movie Scarlett Johansson’s character was in, and I don’t even remember them making a Green Arrow picture! It’s funny, the Green Arrow is in this movie, shooting his never-ending supply of arrows, but they never call him the Green Arrow, he doesn’t sport a blonde van dyke, and he doesn’t wear a stitch of green! I’ve heard of superhero revisionism, but this is ridiculous!

So without all this background I was a little lost from time to time! I think seeing Thor might clear up a few things for me at least, given that Loki, the bad guy in The Avengers – whose methods are anything but low-key, ha ha – was imported directly from that particular Kenneth Branagh joint! “I am burdened with glorious purpose,” he tells cyclopean Director Nick Fury, but, though evil, he’s considerate enough not to share the specifics of that burden with us! I figured out that he wanted to conquer and rule Earth, but why? All he can talk about is how puny and insignificant it is! Ha ha, surely there’s a better, more challenging and rewarding planet out there to conquer!

And to effect his conquering, he hires an army of space orcs from some guy with a black cape and a meatloaf face! How powerful are these interstellar warriors? Local Earthlings, even those without apparent superpowers, are able to best them in combat, so it would seem Loki got a bad deal, or maybe went bargain-hunting when he shouldn’t have! Surely there are better, more competent armies available out there in the boundless universe!

When I wasn’t puzzling over all this, I was wondering about the heroes themselves! I guess at some point, maybe in the 70s, the comics industry decided they had to just keep raising the stakes – batarangs and wrist radios and punch-ups with Nazis weren’t doing it anymore, and so both the heroes and the villains had to get more and more powerful until they were more or less gods! (Maybe that actually started with Wonder Woman, now that I think about it – she was some kind of goddess, right?) And when you’ve got gods joining the battle, what dramatic toehold can a mere mortal get? Not much! The action scenes just seem sort of weightless, far removed from any human experience!

Then you have The Hulk, who used to be just a big strong green angry guy, but now seems absolutely invulnerable and unlimited in his strength! What suspense is there in watching him? None, because it always ends the same way! And in one action scene he’s just a complete rage monster from the id, and in another, when he needs to be, he’s rational and purpose-driven, even taking basic orders from others on his team!

I won’t go on about it, because poking logical holes in a movie like this is a fool’s errand, and quite pointless! But still, having gone in completely willing to get caught up in the action-drama, these bafflements were uppermost in my mind through most of the picture! Oh well! There are still some good gags – the punchline of the Galaga joke was my favourite moment in the picture – and some appealing performances, mostly by the Hulk in his human form! There's also a great cameo appearance from Harry Dean "Repo Man" Stanton! That any of the movie makes sense at all is some sort of accomplishment I suppose, so I’m going to go ahead and give The Avengers two blood-soaked trading cards!

Burl reviews Funeral Home! (1980)

Buh-buh-buh-buh-BOO, it’s Burl! Ha ha, scary, eh? Yes, it’s me, Burl, here to review a movie about a super-strength granny and an eerie guest house! It’s called Funeral Home, though it’s also known as Cries in the Night – its original title, actually – and it’s another one of those motion pictures that exert a strange hex over ol’ Burl despite not objectively being very good!

Ha ha, I’ll try to explain! Like Meatballs, this is one of my Early Summer Classics, movies which I watch all of, or, more usually, a small part of each June as a way to celebrate the coming of my favourite time of the year! That doesn’t mean it’s a particularly excellent movie, though in this case it qualifies as not too bad!

I guess it’s technically a slasher movie, or at least it sort of fits into that category! It’s a Mystery Slasher, meaning it’s one of the many acorns which have rolled from the mighty oak that is Psycho! In this case, story-wise at least, the acorn did not roll too far, and in fact seems to have tried its best to crawl right back up the tree again!

Young Heather has arrived in a small Southern Ontario town to help her granny transform the funeral home once operated by granny’s now-disappeared husband into a tourist home! Ha ha, the mechanics of the transformation are not spelled out, but the home brings in guests right away! There’s a friendly old duck who loves night fishing called Mr. Davis, played by Barry Morse from Bells, and also a middle-aged couple out for a dirty weekend! Can you believe it, the fellow in this illicit couple is played by none other than Morty from Meatballs! Anyway, pretty soon these guests start disappearing in mysterious ways! Morty and his ladyfriend get pushed into a quarry while sitting in their car at Make-Out Point! Mr. Davis, who had his own secret agenda, comes to realize just how dangerous night fishing can be! And what’s young Billy Hibbs doing during all of this? Ha ha, this slow-witted handyman is as pure as skim milk, and comes to a sticky conclusion at the business end of a trocar, just as we see occur in the movie Mortuary, if you remember that one! (And also like Mortuary it has a misleading poster that makes it look like a zombie movie! Ha ha!)

Well, Heather turns all Nancy Drew and after much creeping around the hallways and basement of the funeral home, helps to solve the mystery! Howard the jokester from My Bloody Valentine is in the picture too, playing a young cop, and he also is present for the rather underwhelming climax of the picture! But an overwhelming climax would be wrong somehow for a movie like this, so the one we get was probably the right way to go!

Because you see this is a slow-paced, uneventful and frankly rather dull movie! And still I must admit to liking it, to getting a sort of warm and comfy, delightfully summery feeling from it! There are some movies which seem able to make an art out of shots of waving, sun-dappled grasses, and this is one of them! There are movies which neglect to use whippoorwill calls on the soundtrack and those which take care to do so at every opportunity, and Funeral Home is decidedly in the latter category!

I also like Lesleh Donaldson in her role as Heather, the rather naïve heroine! She’s a little dim and has a terrible fear of cats, but she’s the perfect character to carry a movie like this! I give Funeral Home two bearded sheriffs!

Burl reviews Meatballs! (1979)

Ha ha, are you ready for the summer? Are you ready for the good times? Are you ready for the fireflies, the old two-ply and a whole lot of foolin’ around? Well then I guess you’re ready for Meatballs!

Boy, I don’t know how many times I’ve seen this one, because oh Killarney was it ever on TV a lot when I was growing up! And in the last couple of years it’s become a sort of early-summer ritual movie for me, and I try to watch it sometime in June if I can! I managed it again this year, so I thought I’d give you a little review of this summer camp classic!

Yes, summer camp movies are another favourite microgenre of mine! Sometimes there’s a killer involved, of course, and sometimes there isn’t, but they’re all remarkably similar to one another either way! Meatballs, for example, feels like it could turn into The Burning or Madman or Friday the 13^th part 2 at any moment; and other summer camp pictures, like Party Camp or Indian Summer or Chuck Vincent’s Summer Camp, feel like they should! Ha ha, a maniac would do those characters some good just where they need it the most! On the other hand, the summer camp slasher films usually have a half-hour stretch or so in which they might as well be summer camp comedies – someone should cut together the non-horror parts of all these movies and you might get a pretty good camp comedy-romance anthology picture out of it!

Anyway, Meatballs! Yes, it was Bill Murray’s first major motion picture appearance, and yes he’s manic and unkempt and sometimes funny in his role as the Head Activities Director of Camp North Star, Tripper Harrison! He’s also strangely aggressive (that’s 70s and 80s comedy for you!) and has an oddly close relationship, scored to sap-dripping strings, with a waifish young camper played by Chris Makepeace! In the meantime he’s hot on the trail of an alternately huffy and bemused lesbian councilor, and spends a lot of time making announcements on his P.A. system like it was M*A*S*H or something!

We get a series of other small stories too, like the tender relationship between the tubby trencherman Fink and his best pal Spaz, as well as the kidnapping-based relationship between Crockett and Candace! And of course there are the travails of Morty, the head of the camp – ha ha, he’s played by none other than Harvey Atkin from Funeral Home! – and the brutal rivalry between slobby Camp North Star and snobby Camp Mohawk across the lake! We get a good sense of that early in the picture when some Mohawk ruffians dump Spaz’s K-Mart milkshake all over his head! There are other subplots too, but sadly we never get any closure on the story involving the little boy and his pet frog, Harry the Jumper! And by the way, why the heck is it called Meatballs, anyway?

It’s a completely plotless movie, rarely funny and veering awkwardly between PG-rated shenanigans involving bikini girls or hot dogs and the hard-sell sap of the Makepeace plot! Neither is particularly convincing, but it’s all delivered in such a good-natured and guileless way that, do you know what, It Just Doesn’t Matter! It Just Doesn’t Matter! It Just Doesn’t Matter!

Because in the end it’s just a summer camp picture, and I like those! I never went to summer camp myself so maybe that’s why! There always seems to be such a strange camaraderie between the campers who returned year after year and eventually became councilors-in-training and ultimately councilors themselves! That appeals to me for some reason! And this movie also contains some great advice on folding shirts, which I still use to this day and will pass on to my own son!

Ha ha, for its sweet campedness and summery Southern Ontario atmosphere, I give Meatballs two and a half fold sleevies! And I leave you with this bit of doggerel, apparently composed by the actor who played Crockett!

We are the C.I.T.s, so pity us!

The kids are brats, the food is hideous!

We like to smoke and drink and fool around

We are the North Star C.I.T.s!

Burl reviews The Nest! (1987)

Bug-bug-bug! It’s Burl! Yes, it’s me, Burl, here to review a movie that may well move you to embrace the human and put the insect aside! It’s called The Nest, and it’s all about what Washington, Barbarino, Horshack, Epstein and the gang used to call “cock-a-roaches!”

 

It takes place on an island that’s also a town, just like Jaws! The mayor wears a lot of cable-knit sweaters (and has a cable-knit brow) and has surreptitiously sold off half the island to some sort of experimental laboratory company! We only ever see one scientist though, and she’s in the Barbara Steele mould from Piranha, so that’s okay! Ha ha, it’s amazing this picture isn’t about some sort of killer fish though, because it really follows that template!

 

Well, in the meanwhile the sheriff is involved in a love triangle because his old ladyfriend, the proto-Polley Lisa Langlois, well known from John Huston’s Phobia and of course the rat picture Deadly Eyes, has returned to town! And in the meanwhile of all this, killer cucarachas have begun putting a biting on food, books, animals and folks clear across this benighted islet!

 

Homer the Pest Control Man gets involved, and eventually, after a scary encounter with giant disembodied testes, it is discovered that supposed victims of the roach horde have in fact become fused with it, becoming sort of bug zombies that transform further into insectomorphs as they roll awkwardly forward on their casters! Finally we meet the Queen, and find out exactly how the effects in John Carpenter’s The Thing would have looked if they’d only had a few bucks to put them together and Rob Bottin was busy that day!

 

Ha ha, Roger Corman must have surely had It Conquered the World flashbacks when he was introduced to this monster! Also good is the moment when they mayor’s cable-knit sweater bursts open to reveal his new Blattarian nature! And there’s a few moments of fake-looking but tasty gore too, like the head that gets chomped in two! Ha ha!

 

It’s not a good film, but it has a lot to admire! The acting is generally pretty good, with Robert Lansing a standout as the Mayor! It’s actually not a role completely without nuance, and Lansing pulls it off very well! Homer the Pest Control Man (the secret hero of the piece according to the director) is played by an actor who seems like a hormonally-created hybrid of Daniel Stern and Dennis Franz! If that’s your cup of tea, this may be the only serving of it available!

 

And I liked how much effort they put into the thing, with all those terrible special effects! Even terrible special effects are hard to make, and I’m sure there was no money and no time and very little staff available to do it! But they tried! It has a lighthouse like The Monster of Piedras Blancas, and there’s a tiny bit of small-town island atmosphere!

 

I’m an animal lover, so I can’t say I liked the scenes where first a dog and later a cat (and still later a cat zombie right out of Re-Animator) become roach food! And I’m never wild about seeing lots of bugs squished and killed in movies, even cock-a-roaches! Well, I’m a softie! Nevertheless, I’ll give The Nest two giant swinging ballsacks!

Burl reviews Prometheus! (2012)

Hi, Burl here with a review of a brand-new movie! It’s a prequel to Alien, which is a movie ol’ Burl is pretty fond of, and it addresses what to me was always one of the central questions of the original film: just who was that big guy in the chair, and what was his story? Ha ha! He was known as the Space Jockey, and it was always assumed that he and his race were just another bunch of hapless arrivistes on that desolate planet where the green eggs roamed! But there’s more to his story, or so Mister Ridley Scott would have us believe!

It seems that a couple of scientists have discovered some cave-painting indications that we ought to go to a certain planet and check it out! They happen to land exactly where the action is on this planet – don’t ask me how – and the next thing you know they’re checking out some caves as though they were characters in an early-80s Alien rip-off, like Horror Planet or Galaxy of Terror or something of that nature! Boy, they sure do spend a lot of time in those caves!

All of this takes place in a world that’s just as grey and bottle-green as you might imagine, so drained of colour that even the Rubik’s Cubes are monochromatic! The scientists and spaceship crew are not very interesting people on the whole, with none of the “we’re just doing a job” resignation seen in the Alien or even Aliens crew members - even though several times in Prometheus the characters explicitly talk about how they're just on the ship doing a job for the paycheque! What they need is Harry Dean Stanton and Yaphet Kotto on board, grousing to beat the band!

I couldn’t even figure out if the people of this future time (the year 2093, that is) had ever yet met aliens, or if their encounters with them in this movie represented a big first! Remember in Aliens when Hudson asks “Ha ha, is this just another bug hunt?” Right there in one line you knew that they were already familiar with aliens, but that humans were just a bunch of imperialistic jerks who would sooner fire their plasma rifles at an E.T. than get to know it!

But here we haven’t really got a clue how incredible this is all supposed to be! It's treated as pretty routine for the most part! There’s an old man along for the ride, or maybe a young man with putty all over his face, it was hard to tell; but he at least seemed pretty impressed with the alien contact! And there are a few different aliens who show up, some humanoid and others more tentacle-based! I won’t give too much away, but we do indeed see some thrashing tentacles in this picture! Ha ha, a part I didn’t quite understand was why the one fellow became a psycho zombie! That just happened so there could be an extra action scene I think, and also so we could get rid of some of these characters whose names we never even heard! In Aliens, even Wierzbowski was named for us before his untimely demise!

I will say this: I liked the robot in Prometheus! The robot was a good actor, and his love of Lawrence of Arabia was a nice touch! The captain was a pretty good guy too! Ha ha, I would have done just like him and straight up asked that Charlize Theron if she was a robot too or what! I won’t give away the answer here though, ha ha!

The movie reminded me of Forbidden World in many ways if you want the truth, and you can take that however you like! But I will say that, in spite of the unbelievably sketchy characterizations, no matter that the thing falls apart logically at the slightest rational thought (the Space Jockey doesn’t even end up in the spot where he’s later found by the Alien crew, ha ha!), and forget about the fact that the musical score keeps threatening to become the Star Trek fanfare, this picture has some really enjoyable aspects!

It looks great, it sounds great and it has a gloomy atmosphere I thought was nicely antithetical to blockbuster summer success! I like that it tries to philosophize a bit, even if nonsensically! It’s a thinking man’s movie as made by morons, but at least it tries to be something other than An Efficient Thrill Machine! It’s a funny movie: the more I think about it, the more I liked it! It’s no Alien, but it doesn’t embarrass its host either, and when it comes bursting out from the 1979 picture’s gut this summer, everyone involved can stand tall and proud! I give Prometheus two and a half alien bongos!

Burl reviews The New Gladiators! (1984)

It's Burl roaring up to you on his customized dirt bike! Ha ha, I’m here to review an action picture by the famed Italian horror meister Lucio Fulci! Old Lucio was better known for his zombie pictures and, before those, his own crude takes on the giallo genre (The Lustful Duckling Winks Nine Times I believe is one of his!), but this futuristic effort takes him out of his comfort zone and puts him firmly in Death Race 2000 territory!

I guess technically The New Gladiators is meant as a cross between Death Race 2000, Rollerball, The Road Warrior and Blade Runner, but it most closely manages to rip off The Running Man, even though that movie hadn’t yet been made! And still it manages to get in some of Fulci’s trademark grue!

Ha ha, the year is 2072 and everybody likes violent TV! The best-loved show is a kind of jousting game called Kill Bike, but the popularity on that one is waning so the crafty, ratings-hungry robots that run the world decide they need an even bloodier game! Ha ha, they come up with The Battle of the Damned, which is also a motorcycle game, but played out by death-row convicts who have nothing left to lose!

A trio of whistling new-wave assassins set in motion a series of events designed to force Drake, the best dirt-bike warrior of the future, to take part in the games! Meanwhile Sam, the ruthlessly avuncular Big Brother type who runs all TV on the planet (or something!) has a nefarious agenda of his own! And then Fred Williamson shows up just like he did in Warriors of the Wasteland, here wearing an even more outlandish outfit!

I’ve got to say, this is a silly picture! But it sure is entertaining! The many shots of the futuristic cityscape, which are meant to look like Blade Runner but come off more like a particularly ambitious ad for model toys, get a lot of grief in the reviews, but I loved them! Sure they look fake, but there’s a strange beauty there and a conviction of its own effectiveness that carries the day! And there are many other visual tropes that give this picture its own special look – ha ha, why use a four-point star filter when a eight-point one will do!

As I mentioned, there’s lots of blood and gore, with dummies in white jumpsuits suffering many decapitations (remember Eye of the Tiger?) and impalings! There’s also a fellow with a melty face who reminded me of the Robert Joy character in George Romero’s Land of the Dead! (Maybe Romero thought “Ha ha, that Lucio has taken enough from me over the years, now I’m going to borrow something from him!”) But where the movie stumbles for this reviewer is in its action scenes! Ha ha, there are many more exciting ways to shoot motocross duels than what Fulci comes up with, that’s for sure! There’s no particular excitement, and the participants are all pretty anonymous in their jumpsuits and helmets anyway!

It’s too bad, because this could have been a modern classic of camp! It’s halfway there at least, so it’s certainly worth watching for the discerning viewer! I give The New Gladiators two magic palm-rays!

Burl reviews Alien Predators (1987)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burl reviews Zone Troopers! (1985)

Hi, ha ha, it’s Burl to review one of those Charles Band productions from the 1980s! I actually saw a few of these things in the theater if you can believe it, pictures like Ghoulies, The Dungeonmaster and of course Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn! Looking back it seems incredible that such cheeseball little movies ever saw the light of a cinema projector, but these were different times!

I don’t know what sort of theatrical release Zone Troopers got, but I don’t think it ever made it to my neck of the woods! I didn’t even bother catching it on video ever, so when I recently spied a VHS copy for sale in a Times Square video shoppe – ha ha, I was just there for the regular movies, I swear! – I snapped it up! (Turns out the movie just got some kind of on-demand DVD release or something, so maybe that’s why someone dumped their VHS!)

It’s a WWII story, set in Italy in 1944 during the hard-fought Allied campaign up that benighted peninsula! There’s a big Wehrmacht assault at the beginning which thins the squadron of Yanks down to four: The Sarge, Mittens, Joey and a newly-arrived war correspondent named Dolan! This is pretty much our cast for the rest of the movie, though there are some Nazis (with a special appearance by Hitler, ha ha!) and some aliens. And of course there’s the main alien, who’s been trapped by the Germans and who looks like a mime with the head of a spider! And he eats cigarettes for dinner!

The doughboys save him and manage to reunite him with his alien friends (who don’t have bug heads, but certainly possess frosted tips), and they get some help in vanquishing the Wehrmacht! Not all of these old boys make it through the adventure, though, so the ending is bittersweet!

This movie is pretty beloved in some circles, and I guess it has a nice pulpy feel, a modicum of ambition and a little more wit and intelligence than your average cheap programmer! Certainly it outdoes most of the other Empire pictures of the day! I was prepared to really like Tim Thomerson’s performance as the Iron Sarge, since he’s perfect for the role and also is someone I’ve met and hung out with, and who was a nice guy, very funny! But he overdoes the squarejaw routine here, and his performance is pretty lifeless, never conveying the legendary aura the Sarge is clearly supposed to have!

I actually preferred the performances of the guy who played Dolan, the correspondent – he was a doughy middle-aged guy, but he had an appealing surfer’s drawl that I thought fit the part well! You believed he might be a writer! The fellow who played Mittens was good too, and the scene where he slugs Hitler in the jaw is pretty delightful! The alien, meanwhile, is kind of forgettable, and not a terribly good trick effect! It was created by John Buechler, but it’s no Cellar Dweller, ha ha!

The movie’s certainly not unenjoyable, but there’s not that much to it! It’s hard to rate a movie that rises above expectations but falls short of possibilities, so I’ll just give it two Kilroy drawings and leave it at that!

Burl reviews Death Moon! (1978)

Ha ha, it’s Burl here with another TV movie for you! Boy, I’ve never watched so many TV movies as I have since beginning this movie review blog! I don’t know why, but I’ve really been enjoying the suckers! I suppose it recalls a time in my life when movies like Curse of the Black Widow and Cruise Into Terror and This House Possessed and Snowbeast were about all I could watch, since I was too young to go to the movies by myself and there were no VCRs yet!

Unlike those other movies I just mentioned, Death Moon is not a picture I recall from the heady days of my youth, even though it was apparently broadcast in late May of 1978, which should have placed it right in my prepubescent crosshairs! Perhaps it simply wasn’t broadcast in my region! Or maybe the tumblers of fate weren’t going to click into place until I was good and ready to accept the full, fierce beauty of the movie’s concept: a Hawaiian werewolf!

Ha ha, you read that right! Robert Foxworth, whom we know so well from Prophecy and – well, that’s about all I know him from, besides his small role in Damien: Omen II and maybe his appearance in that other TV movie It Happened at Lakewood Manor, a.k.a. Ants! – plays Jason Palmer, one of those overstressed businessmen who’s always waking up shaking and sweating from accursed dreams involving a fearsome tiki! His sawbones recommends a vacation, and the next thing you know, Jason Palmer is in Kauai, wearing a tiny blue bathing suit and gamely seeking some relaxation!

But as Jason begins his program of relaxation by squiring about a blonde businesslady, and as Rick, a ladies’ man hotel detective, chases a burly room thief, the werewolf attacks begin, and people are being torn apart all over the place, a fresh outrage each night! Ha ha, it goes on for a week or so, and that’s a lot of full moons! The house dick (who with his Ken doll face and receding hairline looks like a perfect telepod cross between Crown International superstars Bill Adler and James Daughton) begs the local cop to be allowed to help solve the murders, but everyone tells him to concentrate on catching the room thief! But when the room thief becomes a werewolf victim, Rick is able to turn the full force of his investigative prowess on the case!

The unfortunate room thief, by the way, is played by Charles Haid, whom we know from Ken Russell’s great Altered States! It’s funny: Haid is so good at playing a bigmouth blowhard, and here he is in a role which gives him no lines at all, until his werewolf encounter anyway, and then he only screams! And he’s the most unsubtle sneakthief ever, too! Ha ha, he wears loud shirts, smokes a stogie and weighs about two hundred and fifty pounds, and you have to consider that Rick might be a bit of an idiot not to have been able to catch him!

He also doesn’t think there might be a werewolf loose despite coming face-to-face with the leisure suit-wearing fiend in the movie’s finest scene! Ha ha, it only lasts a second, but it’s worth a rewind on the ol’ VHS to see Rick’s lycanthrope encounter one more time, I can tell you!

The trouble with Death Moon is it’s nowhere near as good as we all want it to be, given the fantastic concept and the era in which it was made! There’s not much Hawaiian atmosphere, and if I didn’t know better I’d say it might as well have been filmed in Southern California! And Robert Foxworth without a beard is a little strange – his curly hair and weasel face put him in the Marjoe Gortner category, almost! But still, you can’t argue with the idea of a Hawaiian werewolf no matter how direly executed, and I give Death Moon one and a half fake gurning tikis!

Burl reviews Piranha! (1978)

Hi, Burl here to review a fine old classic about munching fish! Ha ha, I’m talking about Piranha, the great original that was such a marvelous rip-off of Jaws that Steven Spielberg himself apparently championed it when Universal Pictures was mulling an infringement lawsuit!

But Piranha is its own thing, most definitely! It’s a Joe Dante picture, and you all know what that means: Dick Miller is in it! He plays a good, meaty role, essentially the Murray Hamilton part from Jaws, but with a lot more humour and dimension! Ha ha, he’s as great as ever, and his reaction shots to the things his glasses nerd assistant says are priceless!

It seems that a scientist played by Kevin McCarthy, who was in almost as many Joe Dante movies as Dick, created the mutant piranhas to destroy any ‘Cong who dared dip a toe in the waterways of Vietnam, but they were never used! I guess they’ve been languishing around in this strange swimming pool for years! And then two teens get the Big Munch, and our heroes turn up and immediately manage to release the fish into the river! Ha ha, they never really apologize for that one, but at least they try to help!

I could go on about the cast of this movie! Dick Miller is there of course, and McCarthy, but we also get the great bellowing deaf man Keenan Wynn whom you’ll remember from The Dark; the spooky Barbara Steele from Shivers and of course the hero, Bradford Dillman, whom we know from that fine 70s classic Bug! The fate that befalls old Keenan is particularly gruesome and has stayed with me every time I sit on a dock and let my feet dangle in the water!

A lot of people object to the strange little monster seen in the laboratory, but I think it’s a marvelous addition to the picture! I’m also pretty fond of the piranha fish themselves, who seem whipped up into such a frenzy that you’re afraid they’ll just wiggle themselves into a heart attack or a stroke! And they make a funny noise: rrrrrrrrrrrr! You have to hear it to know what I’m talking about!

Anyway, Piranha is a fine little picture with its heart in the right place, and I’ll always be glad it was made! Thank you Joe Dante, John Sayles and Roger Corman and everybody else too! I give Piranha a solid three disintegrating rafts!

Ha ha, a little note! Sorry I haven’t been putting up too many reviews lately! I’ll try to step it up a bit! Thanks for sticking with me, everybody!