Burl reviews Blood Work! (2002)

 

You have the right to remain reading! Ha ha, it’s Burl here, ready and willing to review another movie for you! It’s Clint Eastwood doing a cop thriller again, one very much in the vein of Tightrope and other one-offs (The Gauntlet, The Rookie, In the Line of Fire) where he plays an iron-nosed cop not named Harold! In this one he’s an “FBI profiler,” but he acts just like any other cop, though his iron-nosedness, or at least his ability to act on it, is compromised by a serious heart condition! Ha ha, the movie is called Blood Work!

Eastwood, who of course is well known from Tarantula and many other fine films, as well as from bad films like City Heat, plays Terry McCaleb, who in the opening scene is investigating a mystery murderer who not only likes to kill, but, in the traditional late-90s/early-oughts style, is fixated personally on McCaleb in that taunting, teasing way such serial maniacs have! McCaleb spots a suspect, gives chase, and the next thing you know is collapsing of a massive heart attack!

Two years later McCaleb has a new heart, is retired, and is rusticating on his cabin cruiser docked at the marina in Long Beach! This Quincy-esque lifestyle is interrupted by the reemergence of the killer, who still carries a McCaleb fixation, and by the appearance of a woman called Graciella, played by Wanda De Jesus from Robocop 2 and Ghosts of Mars, who reveals that McCaleb’s new heart came from her sister - who was one of the killer’s most recent victims! This is a pretty good hook, and the movie settles into a laid-back investigative groove, with McCaleb enlisting his slacker boat-neighbour Buddy, played by Jeff Daniels from Speed and Arachnophobia in full Jimmy Buffet mode, to be his driver!

Meanwhile McCabe’s heart transplant doctor, played with plenty of finger-wagging by Anjelica Huston from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, admonishes him not to do any investigations lest his new ticker explode; and he also gets static from the cops on the case, played by comedian Paul Rodriguez and Dylan Walsh, the blando from Congo! But he has a cop ally too, played by Tina Lifford, and we get hints that they were once something more! Ha ha! As all this is going on, McCabe clutches his chest a lot and falls for Graciella, and the twist ending becomes as obvious as a panda in a swimming pool!

The movie takes a tone and a pace that matches up with the yachtsman’s lifestyle enjoyed by its leads, and while this is perhaps not the optimum approach for a putative thriller, it’s just that old leatherbag’s way! He makes his movies in that same relaxed manner, so they say - practically keeps bankers’ hours! Ha ha, never let it be said that Clint Eastwood ever kept a grip from having his dinner at home!

In any case, while Clint has made some memorable movies, this is not one of them! It’s a fairly stolid piece, competent but never exciting, perfectly watchable but as ephemeral as an episode of TV! I saw it at the dollar theatre with my friend Pellonpaa, and at the end of it we both agreed we’d seen a movie! Ha ha, and when I watched it again recently, my takeaway as the credits rolled was about the same! I give Blood Work one and a half notes written on the wall in, you guessed it, blood!

Burl reviews Singles! (1992)

 

Hello, hello, hello, how low, it’s Burl, rocking out Seattle-style! Ha ha, I’m here to review a movie that grapples with the lovelives of the youth while exploring the musical culture they enjoy, and it all comes from the fellow who wrote The Wild Life! You know what movie I’m talking about, because it is and could only be Singles!

Ha ha, Singles! Yes, though I’m a little younger than the characters were meant to be in the picture (and a lot younger than the actors who played them, ha ha), I went to see the movie in the theatre because it was marketed as a Movie Of Our Times if you were in your early twenties, as I was! I mean, one look at the poster with its black-and-white imagery and its typewriter font tells you how documentary-accurate the movie intends to be! Of course it’s a music-oriented picture set in Seattle just as the grungy Seattle sound wave was breaking over the world, but the picture was shot well before the big Pearl Jam or Nirvana records were released! So at the very least, one can’t accuse the movie of being a coattail rider as much as one can the marketing!

Anyway, to the picture itself: it’s an ensemble affair detailing the romantic travails of a group of young, or anyway young-ish, Seattlites who mostly all live in the same Melrose Place-type apartment complex! For some reason the most boring and square of these characters get the most screen time: we have Kyra Sedgwick from Tai-Pan as a lady disappointed in love and Campbell Scott from The Daytrippers and Top of the Food Chain as a man looking for love, and the dull or contrived ups and downs of their relationship provide one of the picture’s major through-lines!

Slightly more interesting but more pathetic too are a would-be couple played by Bridget Fonda from Single White Female and Army of Darkness, and Matt Dillon, well known from Target; she’s a mousy fount of neediness while he’s a longhaired grungerocker with far less talent than he supposes, even though he’s backed by members of Pearl Jam! Sheila Kelley from Staying Together and Jim True from The Hudsucker Proxy play ancillary characters in this mutually orbiting gang, who frequently show up at the café Dillon and Fonda work at to serve as comedy relief from the romantic comedy; while Bill Pullman from Ruthless People and The Serpent and the Rainbow plays a boob enlargement doctor who briefly seems as though he’s going to become part of the story but never does; and James Le Gros from Phantasm II is a sensitive ponytail guy perpetually in the background because he’s so boring that even the boring characters find him boring!

These people go to shows at which bands like Alice in Chains are playing, or sit in their apartments discussing their problems with the camera, and they go to cafés and work in their office jobs, and sometimes they wear shirts with band or record label names on them to demonstrate how tuned in they are! There’s also a repeating gag involving remote control garage door openers - yes, the young peoples’ favourite! Ha ha, that’s pretty uncool, man!

There are some clever and amusing moments and there's some nostalgia value, and also some grafted-on peccadillos like the camera chats or the intertitles that pop up like book chapters and don’t really add much to the story or the themes! And I suppose the major theme is Love Is Hard In This Day And Age, and that rings true since I was that age back in that day, and love indeed was hard! But that was because we were all idiots, and speaking frankly, so are these people! I don’t begrudge them that, and I don’t begrudge Cameron Crowe for writing them that way, I just object having to watch it! And of course I don’t have to watch it, do I! Ha ha! Still, I did, first in the dollar theatre and then again on VHS the other night, so go figure! I suppose it did bring me back to those days in a strange way, but it really just brought me back to the experience of seeing Singles for the first time, probably with my friend Mary, and not liking it very much then either! In fact I was so offended by this and by its cousin-in-triteness Reality Bites that I made my own rebuttal feature film in response! Ha ha, that showed 'em! I give Singles one tucked-in band shirt!

Burl reviews Slithis! (1977)

 

Ha ha and boogle-boogle, it’s Burl, here to review low-budget monster mania! Like Bog, Terror in the Swamp, Curse of the Swamp Creature, The Monster of Piedras Blancas, Demon of Paradise, Humanoids From the Deep, so forth, it’s yet another regional rip-off of Creature From the Black Lagoon, though the region in question is the Venice neighbourhood in Los Angeles! The movie is sometimes called Spawn of the Slithis, but I know it simply as Slithis!

In a preview of tempos to come, the picture opens with a scene involving two children playing Frisbee in slow motion! They discover a mutilated doggy and run off, and this poor hound, it turns out, is only the inaugural victim of a portly fiend soon to become known as the Slithis! The people of Venice, the hippies and stewbums and freaks and goodtime weirdos, are increasingly alarmed as the murders continue, and one fellow in particular, a local science teacher called Wayne, takes it upon himself to find out what’s going on!

Wayne is married to a lady called Jeff, and they have a pal known as Dr. John, who’s a combo hippie/nerd and one of those general-purpose utility scientists you find in pictures like this! Wayne goes off and talks to the local hobos about the neighbourhood monster problem, and irritates the scraggly-looking police chief with his theories! Ha ha, the chief is wildly overplayed by Hy Pike from Hollywood High, Vamp, Hack-O-Lantern and, can you believe it, Blade Runner, and his performance gives the picture some extra entertainment value, if not verisimilitude!

Meanwhile the creature continues his depredations, including a fine scene where he makes a lunch of a boat-dwelling 70s swinger guy! But this is no ordinary swampy like the Creature or his offspring: this, according to Dr. John, and to a nuclear scientist with a casserole face whom they consult, is apparently a monster formed of living mud that has been zapped by radiation! Ha ha! Wayne recruits a fisherman/diver played by Mello Alexandria in another entertaining performance and they spend a good ten minutes of screen time searching for mud samples!

The monster attacks are entertaining, and I enjoyed eccentrics such as Dr. John and the skindiver guy, but most everything else in the movie - Wayne’s investigations, the endless chat, the pointless digressions -  seems as slow as a turtle race, and then the next thing you know, bam, they show us an actual turtle race! There’s pep here and there, but a lot more of it would have been appreciated! And in the bargain, the picture features the worst monster-vision ever, and remember - I’ve seen Bog! Ha ha!

On the other hand we get some good stuff swirled in there too, like a few observational moments accurately depicting how the cops would react to monster attacks, by hassling and rousting members of society’s lowest echelon! There are some well-mounted shots and random moments of effectiveness salted in as well! Wayne’s investigations and the 70s TV movie-style credits font give the impression of a fan-made tribute to Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and you can take this observation as neither criticism nor endorsement! If you like your low-budget monster movies, as I do, you’ve simply got to see it no matter what! Ha ha, I give Slithis one and a half turtle flags!

Burl reviews One False Move! (1992)

 

Ha ha, it’s Burl here to review crime drama! Yes, here’s a picture I’ve been hearing about for years, and hearing plenty of plaudits about, along with commentary in the nature of it being an unheralded gem! Ha ha, it seems plenty heralded to me! But still maybe not enough, because it turns out to be a very solid movie! The picture in question is One False Move!

If the movie ever makes the titular move it might be with the title, which is boring and meaningless! Otherwise we have some pretty good stuff here, and it all opens with a terrible drugs massacree perpetrated by Ray and Pluto, two vicious goons played by co-screenwriter Billy Bob Thornton, whom we recall from Hunter’s Blood and The Man Who Wasn’t There, and Michael Beach from The Abyss! Ray is your basic Billy Bob Thornton character, greasy, violent, touchy and dim, while Pluto wears elegant specs and is much smarter, but is bigger and stronger and even more brutal in his methods! The third leg of this little gang is Fantasia, a.k.a. Lila, played by Cynda Williams, and it’s evident that she didn’t think it was going to be a massacree, or at least had convinced herself that it wasn’t going to be!

The L.A. cops in charge of the investigation include Cole, played by Jim Metzler from Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat, and McFeel, played by Earl Billings from Con Air; and soon they’re tracking down a clue that leads them to Star City, Arkansas, a little backwater policed by a garrulous striver played in full cornpone mode by Bill Paxton, beloved of Aliens and Weird Science and so many others! This is one of his very best performances: his Sheriff, known to all as Hurricane for his constantly running mouth and inability to sit still for restaurant meals, is an annoying big talker who’s not a bad guy but just does not get it, ha ha! I don’t think many actors could have pulled the character off quite as well as Paxton, especially once things really start happening and we learn more about Hurricane and his secrets!

Of course our nasty bad guys are on their way to Star City, each for their own reasons, and the Arkansas constabulary is monumentally ill-equipped to deal with such human monsters! I won’t tell any more plot, ha ha, as the unfolding of the story is one of the movie’s major pleasures! Another is the acting, which is stellar all around; and yet another is the film’s subtly realistic portrayal of race relations! Half the characters are black and half white, some characters are half black half white, and while a big deal is not made of any of this, it’s a deal nonetheless, and few American films have grappled with the issue in quite this way! The film was written by white fellows and directed by a black man, Carl Franklin, and perhaps this racial bifurcation behind the camera is responsible for the elegantly worked-out theme before it! In any case, it’s something strange and unique!

Franklin, whose previous picture was the Roger Corman submarine picture Full Fathom Five, does excellent work here, and though the picture has some rough patches for the more sensitive souls among us, the ultimate result is a hard-boiled crime delight in the spirit of Jim Thompson! It probably is underappreciated, but on the other hand it started Franklin and Thornton on fine careers and gave Paxton a marvelous showcase too, so it’s hardly unappreciated! Certainly not by me, anyway: I give One False Move three and a half shin kicks!

Burl reviews Little Shop of Horrors! (1986)

 

With a song in my heart, it’s Burl, here to review a movie musical! Here’s another one I saw in the movie theater, and when I think of this movie I think of my friend Jamie, whom I saw it with, and who is now deceased! So there’s always an element of melancholy connected with this picture, Little Shop of Horrors, but there’s delight too as I recall the strange adventures Jamie and I had the night we saw it! Ha ha, we witnessed a pair of toddlers speeding down the street at the wheel of a car, with nary an adult in sight! We saw a piece of garbage paper blown by the wind: it circled twice in the air then dove out of sight below a curb, emerging a second later as a living, flying bird! A cigarette butt blown along by that same wind struck Jamie in the chest and exploded in a starburst like a Tie fighter hitting the Death Star! Ha ha!

So all of these strange events, which are preserved not just in my memory but in the lyrics of a song Jamie and I wrote for our high school rock band, come to mind when I consider Little Shop of Horrors! Of course I was already a fan of the old non-musical Roger Corman version, because of course that one featured Dick Miller in a supporting role as the flower-eater Burson Fouch! I was slightly chagrined to see that the Fouch character had not been carried over from the original movie to the musical stage adaptation or the big-budget movie currently under discussion here; but thinking about it, I realized that the adaptors must have known they simply couldn’t find anyone as good as Miller to fill the role if they had maintained it! Of course they could have hired Miller himself, who was around and active when this movie was made, but I guess they didn’t think of that!

Still, the cast they ended up with is a pretty remarkable bunch of comedy superstars! Rick Moranis from Strange Brew and Streets of Fire plays Seymour Krelborn, the slightly-renamed nebbish working in the flower store and being constantly yelled at by his boss Mr. Mushnik, played by the aptly-named Vincent Gardenia from Death Wish II! Also working in the shop is the daffy spin case Audrey, played with great gusto by Ellen Greene from Wagons East!; and, as in the Corman original, one wonders how a Skid Row flower shop entirely bereft of custom can afford so many employees! Ha ha!

Further down the cast list comes a true galaxy of starpower! Steve Martin from L.A. Story and All of Me plays Audrey’s truly despicable boyfriend, a biker-dentist named Orin Scrivello! John Candy from The Great Outdoors does a marvelous job as a wacky radio host; Bill Murray from Meatballs shows up in the Jack Nicholson role of the masochistic patient; Christopher Guest from The Princess Bride does an excellent turn as a flower store customer – the closest analogue to the Dick Miller character, in fact; and Jim Belushi from The Fury appears without making much of an impact!

Of course the real star is Audrey II, the voracious monster plant Seymour discovers and begins feeding blood and bodies to! The trick effects used to bring the big flytrap to life are truly impressive, from the big reaching tentacles to the expressive lips; and the voicing, from Four Tops singer Levi Stubbs, is ideal! Almost as impressive are the three ladies who act as the story’s Greek chorus – ha ha, I thought they were terrific! And on balance I thought Frank Oz managed some fine staging on his Sesame Street sets, though a little more pep and dynamism wouldn’t have gone amiss!

But Frank shouldn’t have listened to those outraged preview audiences who detested the original apocalyptic ending of the story, in which the plant devours Seymour and Audrey, spawns equally hungry offspring, grows to immense size and goes on a Godzilla-like rampage! Ha ha, they must have been pretty angry audiences to convince a studio to dump a huge multi-million dollar sequence and replace it with a gormless happy ending involving a playhouse! It does a real injury to the movie, I think! I didn’t realize they’d monkeyed with it, not until I read an article in Cinefantastique magazine anyway, but I could still tell there was something missing! It’s never been restored, though you can watch it on the internet! And considering all this, I’m forced to give Little Shop of Horrors two and a half bandaged fingers!

Burl reviews The Kid with the 200 I.Q.! (1983)

 

With a demand to know whatchoo talkin’ ‘bout, it’s Burl, here to review a movie featuring that undersized imp of cinema and television Gary Coleman, whom we may recall from Dirty Work! Ha ha, he had a real corner on the precocious kid market back in the 70s and early 80s, and in the movie under discussion today, The Kid with the 200 IQ, he may have hit the absolute peak of precociousness!

His characters were always supposed to be smarter than other kids that were putatively his age, but here he plays a super-genius riding an academic scholarship into big people’s college, and how could the precociousness formula be more finely honed than that? It couldn’t! Coleman plays Nick Newell, who arrives at the college with his pleasant family and then must endure scene after scene of people doing double takes at him when he explains that yes, he is enrolled in the college! He lucks into an amiable roommate in his dorm, an athlete called Steve played by Dean Butler from Desert Hearts; and because the dorm is co-ed (Wink wink! Nudge nudge!), he gets to know a young journalism student named Julie, essayed by Kari Michaelsen from Saturday the 14^th!

It seems that Nick’s area of interest is astronomy, and he’s most excited about taking a class with the imposing Professor Mills, played by Robert Guillaume from Seems Like Old Times and Death Warrant! But Mills is one of the few not charmed by Nick’s exuberance, and in fact seems to resent the little fellow’s presence! And as the semester continues so do Nick’s troubles grow, presenting some real challenges to his 200 I.Q.! Ha ha, he bombs with an astronomy project for Mills’ class, he falls in love with Julie only to be heartbroken when he sees her getting friendly with Steve (whose advances she had initially resisted due to her hatred of jocks), and he endures very mild bullying and humiliation from a toffee-nosed frat bro after beating the older fellow in a game of Defender!

He has lots of friends, though: Mills’ daughter is a friendly cutie nearly as precocious as Nick himself; there’s a kindly caretaker called Debs played by Mel Stewart from Dead Heat; and Steve and Julie stick by him resolutely, sympathizing with his romantic travails! The climax is a Road Warrior-style chase scene in which all of Nick’s friends, including an abashed Mills and the reformed frat bro, chase after the Greyhound bus Nick has hopped to take him home and away from the university he no longer feels a part of! But of course it all ends happily enough, with Nick now Dr. Mills’ number one helper, welcoming to the pre-semester party freshman Crispin Glover, well known from Rubin & Ed and Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter, in the role of a newly-arrived astronomy student!

While we must admit that Coleman is not as adept at playing a super-genius as, say, Jason Segel in The End of the Tour, he’s nevertheless not bad, and packs a lot of charm into his diminutive frame! Guillaume is required to walk a tightrope between cold and stern on the one hand, and affable and avuncular on the other, and he does it well! The TV movie-ness of the whole thing is undeniable; though Coleman did some theatrical features (I remember seeing Jimmy the Kid at my local cinema), this was assuredly not one of them! It exudes a strange charm, though, as many artifacts do by virtue of their ability to evoke the past! Ha ha, I give The Kid with the 200 I.Q. two rounds of Defender!

Burl reviews The End of the Tour! (2015)

 

With a bookish hello it’s Burl, here to review a literary two-hander that came out a while back, and I’ve just now caught up with! It’s a tale of fellers who write books, and shows what can happen when two of them spend a few days in close company with one another! Yes, the movie is The End of the Tour, the tale of the meeting between a Rolling Stone reporter named David Lipsky and the bandanna-clad wordsmith David Foster Wallace!

Jason Segel from SLC Punk dons the doo-rag in order to play the celebrated author, and I’ll say right up front that I though his performance was terrific! I’m not familiar enough with the real DFW’s voice, look, and mannerisms to do a detailed comparison, but, ha ha, in any case impersonation is beside the point! Segel does an excellent job of creating the character of a shy, friendly, humble, prideful, whip-smart, uncertain, spiky, obliging, bewildered and ambitious man, no matter what his initials are!

Jesse Eisenberg from Adventureland and Zombieland enters Wallaceland in the character of Lipsky, assigned by Rolling Stone to accompany Wallace on the last stop of his Infinite Jest book tour! This last stop turns out to be Minneapolis, which is a city I’m pretty familiar with, so that was nice! The requisite Fargo-ness comes in the person of Joan Cusack from Grandville U.S.A., their perky tour guide and driver, but the city is otherwise portrayed as the bastion of NPR-level mainstream sophistication that it is, for the white, college-educated set anyway!

The bulk of the picture involves these two Davids getting to know one another, mostly in a mellow way but interrupted on occasion by neuroses and jealousies! It’s a pretty male movie, but there are ladies: Anna Chlumsky from Uncle Buck appears in a nothing, mostly phoned-in part as Lipsky’s girlfriend; while in Minneapolis Mickey Sumner from Frances Ha and Mamie Gummer from The Ward show up as Betsy and Julie, two DFW pals with whom the Davids hang out and, in a delightful sequence, go to Mall of America and catch a screening of John Woo’s Broken Arrow!

At several points in the picture, when Lipsky gets upset, Eisenberg pulls out one of his acting staples: a hurt, about-to-cry face that makes me want to jump up and run away whenever I see it! I didn’t care for that, nor for his amateur-hour smoking (it looks practiced, but fake), but on balance I think Eisenberg did a good job in his role! It’s a real pleasure sometimes to watch a movie about intelligent people having intelligent conversations, and this one hit me at just such a moment; and on top of that it’s solidly directed and features unexpected treats on the soundtrack! Ha ha, there are some 80s tunes and some Alanis to shore up Wallace’s contention that he has the musical tastes of a thirteen year-old girl, but R.E.M., Pavement, and Brian Eno all get a look in too, plus there are a couple of Tindersticks tunes, and most unexpectedly, a Tindersticks cover of a Pavement song! Ha ha, weird!

It’s necessarily limited in what it can do, but the movie is smart enough to know that, and so it just cruises along in its pleasant and competent way through appealingly familiar territory! I enjoyed it, though of course the ultimate fate of DFW made me sad! Still, this was a supposedly fun thing that I might very well do again, and I give The End of the Tour three pop tarts!

Burl reviews Signs! (2002)

 

Ha ha, I’ll admit it: I’ve never taken to the hushed self-seriousness of M. Night Shyamalan’s pictures! I do however think he’s often a clever writer, and that his technical chops are strong, and I certainly appreciate that! I should say that I’m not someone who tends to guess twists, because I don’t try to, and also I’m not very good at it! But I guessed the twist in The Village simply by seeing the trailer, and the one in The Sixth Sense surprised me only once I realized it was meant to be a surprising twist - ha ha, I thought we were supposed to know what was going on the whole time! His twistmeister reputation does his talents a disservice, though, and I think that’s especially the case with Signs, the picture under review today!

Mel Gibson from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome plays a farmer and former friar feeling fragile from the fateful freak misfortune that befell his family! His brother, an ex-ballplayer enacted by Joaquin Phoenix from Inherent Vice, lives on the farm too, and they are fairly remarkable farmers in that they never seem to do any farming! Ha ha! Anyway, one day the crop circles turn up in their cornfield, and Gibson’s two children, well played by Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin, start acting strange; though one gets the impression this strangeness began long before the start of the story or the arrival of the aliens, or even the death of the wife that caused Gibson to remove his cassock and toss away his collar!

The picture details an alien invasion from a single rural perspective, which is a daring gambit that mostly pays off! Sure, there are plenty of questions: why would the aliens invade this particular corner of the world when they seem otherwise to hover over major cities? Are the corn circles necessary for orienteering purposes, as is speculated, and if so, how is the lack of cornfields in big cities a factor in the aliens’ plan? Of course the biggest question is a callback to The War of the Worlds: how could the aliens have skimped so much on researching the planet they’ve invaded?

I’m perfectly happy to let all these questions go, ha ha! I mean, you can pick apart any story if you’re determined to, and it’s pretty clear that this is a movie less about aliens than about faith: losing it and finding it again under extreme circumstances, as though faith is like the fabled bump on the noggin that first obliterates memory and when applied again, restores it! But right from an early shot of the outline of a removed cross on the wall (which suggests some truly heroic cigarette smoking in the house at some point), the picture is determined to handle this theme with oven mitts on! An irritatingly binary orthodoxy reveals itself, and then pounds us on the head like a hammer in one boring, pushy dialogue scene; and of course by the end Gibson’s requests not to be called “Father” have ceased and he’s back in the uncomfortable-looking cassock and collar! And of course he’s another sort of father once again to his presumably renormalized children!

So all that stuff, along with the usual barbiturated acting and general portentousness of Shyamalan, bugged me a bit; but on the other hand we have sharp lensing from Tak Fujimoto, the terrific cinematographer who shot Last Embrace and Grumpier Old Men and so many other good-looking pictures; good work from composer James Newton Howard; some nice opening credits; some fine cornfield atmosphere; welcome dashes of humour; and well-tuned suspense and spookshow sequences from the talented Shyamalan! It’s quite possible to watch this picture concentrating on those aspects rather than the exasperating thematic porridge, and I recommend doing just that! On balance I admire the film because it does the cinematic genre stuff well, and even though I don’t like what it tries beyond that, and think it does it badly, at least it tries something! I award Signs two and a half bar-b-que forks!

Burl reviews The Return of Frank James! (1940)

 

Yodel-ay-hee-hoo, it’s Burl, presenting a new movie review for you! Ha ha, today it’s a review for a sequel to a movie I’ve never actually seen, 1939’s Jesse James! But of course I know the story in its broad strokes - don’t forget, it was covered in the more recent picture The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and you only need to read the title to get the gist of it, ha ha - and so I was never at a loss during my recent screening of The Return of Frank James!

Henry Fonda, well known from Tentacles and City on Fire, plays Frank, just as he did in Jesse James! The picture opens with Jesse’s killing at the hands of the coward Robert Ford, who here is played by the terrific John Carradine, whom we recall from pictures as diverse as Sunset Cove, Man of Grey Testes, The Boogey Man, and many, many others! His brother Charlie is played by Charles Tannen from Gorilla At Large! Frank, living the quiet life on his farm along with his pals Pinky and Clem, hears about the killing of his brother, straps on his six-guns, and heads out to get ram tough like a rock on those Ford boys!

Nothing, but nothing, will dissuade his little buddy Clem from tagging along, and Pinky later becomes a very important factor in the story too, though what the poor man must have gone through is not dwelt upon and his heroism is mainly implied! Lovely Gene Tierney from Heaven Can Wait plays a newspaper baron’s reporter-daughter Miss Stone, and Frank and Clem’s attempt to use her to spread a counterfeit story of Frank’s demise only brings a shady but persistent detective onto their trail! Ha ha, and the detective is memorably played by J. Edward Bromberg from Strange Cargo!

Henry Hull from Werewolf of London plays old Major Cobb, Frank’s excitable old pal! (I have to admit that for a while I thought the actor was Frank Morgan! I was certainly wrong about that!) Ha ha, Frank engages the old Major as his lawyer in the courtroom finale, and for a time one is not convinced that choosing to be defended by an apparent crazed hayseed was Frank’s best call; but it turns out that James truly is being judged by a jury of his peers: they all belong to the bumpkin class just like him!

But is Frank James really a bumpkin? Fonda, in some ineffable but fundamental way that is in no sense his fault, is ill-suited to play an old west character, whether an outlaw and gunfighter or the humble man of the soil he is at the beginning of this story! He does it well however, and somehow becomes the character in a different and more oblique way than that which we commonly associate with good acting! It’s like seeing The Elephant Man on stage with the actor wearing no makeup: you know he’s not physically an elephant man, but you watch the performance instead and the makeup becomes wholly unnecessary!

With a supporting cast that includes Donald Meek from Love on the Run (not playing aptly to his surname, for once), Russell Hicks from Hold That Ghost!, and of course Jackie Cooper in the role of the puppy-like Clem; along with several exciting gunfights; nice colour photography; and solid direction from none other than Fritz Lang, who later brought us Human Desire, it’s an entertaining and well-paced oater! It doesn’t stand out in the way of other Lang Westerns, most notably the terrific Rancho Notorious, but it’s a darn good show anyway! Ha ha, I’ll have to look out for the original Jesse James, but in the meantime I give The Return of Frank James two and a half plummeting dummies!

Burl reviews Komodo! (1999)

 

Ha ha and lizard lips, it’s Burl! I’ve got a review of a picture that seems much like many other direct-to-video creature feature of the late 90s and early 00s, but unlike many of those, this is a picture I actually had the pleasure of seeing on the big screen at the Toronto Film Festival! I say pleasure not because the movie is particularly good, but because frankly it’s a pleasure to see any low-budget genre picture on a big screen and with a good crowd! The quality of the movie is not irrelevant, but is much less an issue! And this was the case when I saw Komodo!

I watched it again recently, and can report that in most respects it’s your basic animal attack story! There’s a brief preamble set in 1980, in which a filthy, van-driving hippie is offended by the smell of the eggs he’s transporting and dumps them in the mud of some Eastern seaboard island! (Ha ha, the movie was actually filmed in Australia, and though there are few obvious tells, this fact is nevertheless somehow apparent in every frame!) Nineteen years later, a family made up of a mom, a dad, a teenaged boy and a little dog arrive on the ferry to spend time at their summer home! All are chomped by creatures unknown except for the boy, who is traumatized!

The story proper opens with a lady psychiatrist played by Jill Hennessey from Dead Ringers bringing the boy back to the island in order to face his trauma! Ha ha, of course no one believed his story about giant lizards, but they believe him soon enough when the creatures, created by a combination of CGI and practical animatronic effects, show up and begin anew their program of chomping! Meanwhile there are a couple of fellows employed by the nasty oil company which is the island’s only other denizen; they’re tasked with hunting and killing all the komodos, which it turns out the oil company is well aware of but were trying to keep secret!

There’s some back story to the main oil company guy, whose wife was chomped in some earlier encounter and is now being forced by the firm to do their dirty work; but in the main the screenplay is careful to keep all its characters as one-dimensional as possible: flatter, indeed, than the hungry dragons prowling the area! Ha ha, at least their motivations are clear!

For a low-budget movie of the late 1990s, the trick effects are impressive! The digital komodo dragons seen in Skyfall are a bit more convincing, it’s true, but still, these ones are not bad! The picture was directed by a trick effects fellow, Michael Lantieri, and while he’s not the best trick effectsman-turned-director out there (Stan Winston’s Pumpkinhead is a lot better), he’s not the worst, either! (Ha ha, remember John Bruno’s Virus? Stink, stank, stunk!) And for a PG-13 picture, there are a few moments of pleasingly goopy gore, too! Not much, but more than the nil I was expecting!

The picture is fine enough for most of its running time, though unremarkable and largely tension-free! The ending hobbles it particularly: there are opportunities for a big climax, but they clearly didn’t have the dosh for it so the movie just kind of ends! The evil oil company fellow, whose entire role thus far had been delivered over the telephone, finally shows up on the island, but we’re denied any meaningful closure with this jerk! Ha ha, it would have been nice to see his head crushed in the jaws of a komodo, but no!

I can’t say it’s much more than what many would call a time-passer (a term I don’t care for, though one up from “time-waster” at least), and in no category does it ever rise above the level of acceptable! I still carry some residual pleasure from seeing it on the big screen, however (I would imagine I’m one of the few to have done so, for what it’s worth), and it was a nice experience this time around too, watching it with my family with a fire in the fireplace and a frosty beer in hand! Given all that, I award Komodo one and a half shattered doggy doors!