Burl reviews Moonraker! (1979)

Ha ha, it’s Burl, neither shaken nor stirred! I just watched a James Bond picture, and it was a bit of a nostalgia trip for me, because it was the first Bond picture I ever saw in the movie theatre! I was pretty young, and I recall it being a big deal at the time to go see such an adult movie!

Well, ha ha, it doesn’t look so adult now, except for Roger Moore, who looks a zillion years old! I mean, Daniel Craig is not looking like the springiest of chickens in Skyfall, but he’s got pep that Moore – as much as I appreciate him as a performer in pictures like ffolkes – never had! (I’ve never seen him as Simon Templar, the Spirit, and maybe it would cause a reappraisal if I did!)

It doesn’t help matters that he’s trapped in what I think might be the worst Bond picture ever made, or what would be the worst if not for Die Another Day! It’s much worse even than You Only Live Twice, which as you’ll recall had Sean Connery slathered in silly Coppertone makeup half the time! Moonraker starts well though, with a fairly thrilling skydive sequence in which Bond, ejected from a plane without a chute, zooms after the bad guy in order to claim his chute from him! But along whizzes Jaws, the silver-dentured giant, who ends up landing in a circus tent!

This impossible landing signals what’s to come! Ha ha, it’s goofy antics from Jaws, who finds romance with a Brazillian lady glasses-nerd; and even from Bond, who transforms his Venetian gondola into a motor-car and causes people, pigeons and dogs to do comedy double-takes complete with musical accompaniment! While all this is going on, Bond is doing his sexual maniac schtick, pulling open the robe-ties of his various female contacts! To Moore’s credit, beneath the leer he seems as put off by this ungentlemanly behaviour as anyone!

Eventually of course it all ends up in orbit, on a space station from which the bad-guy Drax is staging his nefarious plan to wipe out all of humanity and start again with his genetically (and racially?) pure specimens! Jaws turns good during this climactic encounter, belying all we’d previously known of his character! And the action somewhat recalls that of the climax of Thunderball, which is a good picture except for all the  s-l-o-w-w-w   m-o-t-i-o-n-n-n  underwater stuff! Here it’s zero gravity, and just as slow and boring! And let’s just say that the movie doesn’t put quite the same value on orbital verisimilitude as a picture like, say, Gravity!

On the plus side, many of the stunts and trick effects are actually pretty good! I recalled them as being shabby and fake, no more convincing than a television ad for Space Lego, but I was wrong! There’s plenty of great miniature work, and the John Barry score lends it an almost Kubrickian beauty at moments!

Otherwise it’s pretty dire, and unless you’re trying to entertain a child, almost any Bond picture would prove a better evening’s entertainment than this one! I’m going to give Moonraker one and a half super-speed centrifuges!  

Burl reviews Total Recall! (1990)

Ha ha, drive, chust drive! Yes, it’s Burl, here to review a sci-fi picture from the director of Robocop! It’s Total Recall, and it’s probably one of the smartest pictures – and one of the best too – that old Arnie ever made!

Arnie plays a Mars-obsessed construction worker in future-times, just another Larry Lunchbox! He decides to get an artificial Mars vacation memory implanted in his mind, but things go haywire after that! All of a sudden Harry from work turns against him, his loving wife Sharon “The Quick and the Dead” Stone is shooting at him, and Michael “Watchers” Ironside is trying to kill him with the explosive energy one usually reserves for important tennis matches! Ha ha, is it all for real, or is it just his secret-agent Mars vacation playing itself out? In either case, Arnie goes from Joe Punchclock to Johann Whupass pretty quickly!

The question of true reality recurs now and again throughout the picture, most effectively in a scene with a cringing executive who appears in his Martian hotel room and does a pretty good job of convincing Arnie (and us!) that he’s not on Mars at all, just gone loco while sitting in his memory implant chair! It would have been nice to have more such scenes, but because the hero is played by Arnie, there’s never much doubt that he’s really doing all the heroic acts he seems to be doing! Though, ha ha, it’s fun to consider that he has just gone completely bugs! The last act, existentially speaking, is quite extraordinary, as it chronicles the desperate attempts of a dreamed individual, Quaid, to assert his reality at the expense of the real person whose body he inhabits!

It’s a pretty violent picture! It’s one of those where the future guns don’t just make holes, but take big steak-sized chunks out of the people getting shot! And there are plenty of pokings also, and of course the hilarious Martian Head Expansions, complete with bulging eyes and fat, twitching tongues, all courtesy of the very talented Rob “Explorers” Bottin! (I thought some of the Mars mutants were a bit goofy looking, though!) All the other trick effects are well done too, and one shot, the secretary doing her fingernails, was a particular bafflement to my friend Sean and I when we saw it in the theatre!

It’s a fast-paced picture that along the way meditates on the nature of reality and of self; and it has a lady with three boobs! Ha ha, how can you go wrong? Arnold gets a chance to play happy hubby, and to also be a smarmy, cigar-chomping bad guy in a series of videos through which he entertains and enlightens his more quotidian personality! Lots of great faces in the cast – Ronny “The Beast Within” Cox does his usual great heavy, Robert “Matinee” Picardo does as good a Johnnycab as could be done, and Marshall Bell, the rubber-daddy coach from A Nightmare on Elm Street part 2, makes an excellent Mr. Kuato, or at least chauffeur to Mr. Kuato – and also a few that were never seen again (by me anyway!), like leading lady Rachel Ticotin or second banana baddie Mel Johnson Jr., the guy who plays Benny!

Even though it’s dumb in some places and goofily implausible in others, I consider Total Recall to be a pretty solid Hollywood space-action picture, and I’m going to give it three boobs! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Armed and Dangerous! (1986)

Ha ha, yes, it’s Burl here, once again catching up with a 1980s comedy movie I’d never before seen! This time it’s Armed and Dangerous, a buddy picture featuring two stars of the great SCTV show – possibly my all-time favourite television program ever produced!

John “Brewster’s Millions” Candy and Eugene “Cannibal Girls” Levy are the two buddies, but of course the poster makes it look as though it’s a one-man Candy show! Ha ha, he was certainly the larger star back in 1986! But it’s safe to say that, while this picture gives the big man some choice comedy moments, it’s yet another in the string of movies – Summer Rental, The Great Outdoors, Delirious – that failed to capitalize on the Canuck laff-laff genius he embodied!

Candy plays a cop on the beat who catches some fellow officers stealing TV sets! The tables are turned and it is Candy himself who is ejected from the force! Meanwhile lawyer Levy is disbarred for being not a very good lawyer! Neither of these fellows, it should be noted, are through-and-through bunglers – Candy even makes the claim that he was a particularly good cop! Still, they both end up working as security guards at an operation run by Kenneth Mac “Protocol” Millan, and staffed by his daughter, Meg “Innerspace” Ryan! Ha ha, it was a real confusion for me, trying to decide which of these two fellows would claim Ms. Ryan as his love interest! Eugene Levy, it turns out, in the most perfunctory romantic subplot of the year!

The action part of the story begins when the boys realize that the union they’ve been forced to join is run by crooks! Ha ha, the fact that Robert Loggia, well known from Psycho II and Over the Top, is their union boss ought to have been a tip-off! And the fact that a union is being represented at all in a Reagan-era mainstream movie ought to have been another! Ha ha, it wasn’t the most union-friendly era in American history, was it! But I wonder how all the brothers and sisters of the I.A.T.S.E. felt about working on such a flagrantly anti-union picture!

Anyway, in a comedy like this it’s just a plot mechanism and not to be taken very seriously! What the movie does try to take seriously is its action scenes, which are pretty generic, but more spectacular than I was expecting! The movie was directed by Mark L. Lester, who made Truck Stop Women and Roller Boogie, and before this had just finished Commando, one of the finest and most explosive Arnie pictures! So no wonder Armed and Dangerous has so many splosions of its own!

Ha ha, but do you want to know the most unexpected part? I actually found this picture somewhat funny! Yes, if you had been there you would have heard ol’ Burl give off a chuckle or two! I thought it would be a laff-free zone along the line of Moving Violations, but no! Candy and Levy both deliver solid performances and create actual characters; the supporting cast is strong (Brion “Blade Runner” James, James “Wolfen” Tolkan, Don “Explosion” Stroud and Tiny “Blue City” Lister are all in there, with a special friendly appearance from David “Swamp Thing” Hess! Ha ha, quite a gang!); and the picture is slick and well-paced! It’s hardly the greatest thing since graham crackers, but I’ll give Armed and Dangerous two Steve "Lifeforce" Railsback cameos!

Burl reviews The Witches of Eastwick! (1987)

Ha ha, let us briefly consider the career of George Miller! No, not George “The Man From Snowy River” Miller, the other one! (It’s amusing that both these Millers are Australian, ha ha!) The Miller we’re concerned with today started out as a doctor, they say! Then he made a terrific car crash picture, Mad Max! He followed that up with an even better car crash picture, Mad Max 2, better known as The Road Warrior! Then he took a brief detour and made the best segment in the Twilight Zone movie, and after that paired up with another director named George (Ogilvie, not the other Miller for some reason) and made yet another car crash picture, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome!

Ha ha, so there he sits, the Car Crash King from Down Under, waiting for Hollywood to come a-knocking! And they did, probably with car crash scripts under their arms! But what Miller ended up doing, strangely enough, was the picture ol’ Burl is reviewing for you today, The Witches of Eastwick!

I remember thinking at the time “Ha ha, that’s weird!” But I dutifully went to see the picture anyway, being that I was a fan of the car crash pictures and had been assured by Fangoria magazine that the new movie contained Special Makeup Effects by a master of that art, Rob “The Thing” Bottin! And indeed it did! But first there was a whole lot of Battle of the Sexes satire – a big thing in late-80s cinema, ha ha – and showcase moments for Jack Nicholson in his role as the devil! You can practically see the cast and crew moving furniture out of the way to make room for Jack to do his thing, and flashbacks from The Shining are a distinct possibility!

The picture takes place in the button-down New England community of Eastwick, where three divorcées (or widows in one case) are, unbeknownst to even themselves, either straight-up witches or just possessed of a feminine power that allows them to cause strange happenings when they all concentrate together! Of course the three ladies are played by Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer, because who else at that time could have played those roles? Oh sure, Glenn Close, Kelly McGillis and Daryl Hannah might have done fine, but, ha ha, would they have played tennis quite as well?

Anyway, they conjure up Jack one rainy night, and he seduces them one by one, and then they all live together for a time in a state of bacchanalian bliss, and the townsfolk, led by the slowly-going-insane Veronica “Alien” Cartwright, turn against them; and then the third act is filled with trick effects as the ladies try to get rid of their new friend!

It’s a reasonably sprightly picture, generally very pleasant to look at, and Miller does a good job of directing it! There’s even a car chase, ha ha, and some good trick effects! Nicholson becomes a giant creature of some kind, and then turns into what can only be described as a bugchild! And there are some solid actors in the margins: outside of Cartwright, who gives a very game performance, you have Carel Struycken, well known from his performance in The Prey, as the manservant Fidel, and Richard Jenkins, looking pretty much the same as he would in The Cabin in the Woods, Killing Them Softly and Jack Reacher twenty-five years later!

But it’s also got a lot less going on than it thinks it does, and if it ever did have an edge to it – I believe it was thought to back in the 80s – then the passage of time has sanded it off! As well, as other reviewers have pointed out, every scene seems to repeat itself three times out of the equal-billing-and-screen-time contractual obligations that came with the three starlets! It gets a bit much, and the picture seems overlong as a result! You sure can't accuse The Road Warrior of that, ha ha! So after some thought, I’m going to give The Witches of Eastwick two broken voo-doo dolls!

Burl reviews The Bat People! (1974)

Chp chp chp, it’s Burl, here to review a 1970s bat picture for you! Ha ha, no, not Nightwing – I did that one already! No, nor Bats, which was a 90s picture anyway! This one is called The Bat People, but despite that title, there’s really only one bat person in it!

It’s another non-wolf shapeshifter movie, very reminiscent of The Beast Within (and in fact the two pictures were paired up for a DVD release I believe!) or The Blood Beast Terror or The Vulture, but with a distinctly 70s TV movie vibe! It wasn’t a TV movie, but it sure feels like one, and with its frequent ski resort scenes and POV attacks, it feels like Snowbeast in particular!

Our story begins with a young (-ish!) married couple on a combination honeymoon / chiropterological outing! Yes, Dr. John is interested in taking organized cave tours so he can look at bats, while his wife Cathy would prefer to have a regular honeymoon! But they go to the cave anyway, and while looking for a comfy place to engage in married persons’ ponky, Cathy blunders into a bughole! Dr. John blunders on after her and the result is: batbite! Ha ha!

Naturally this has some unpleasant consequences! Dr. John has personality shifts where he turns into a big jerk for no reason at all! Then come the spaz-outs, and then the floppy rubber hand stage, and this is followed by homicidal bat-mania! The little town, which seems perched at the edge of a dimensional gateway between the Carlsbad Caverns and a Northern California holiday mountain, is soon the scene of bat-mayhem, with nurses, pot smokers and stewbums all on the menu! A local moustache cop played by Michael Pataki suspects Dr. John from the very beginning, and dogs him unmercifully for the rest of the picture!

Speaking of moustachemen, I forgot to mention the ponky moustache doctor who takes on Dr. John’s case near the beginning of the movie, but the whole time he really only wants to go skiing! Ha ha, he sports a fulsome beauty of a chevron, and I guess he does his best medically, but he really isn’t very helpful with the bat problem! However, taken as a pair with the cop (who sort of takes over ‘stache duties for the picture’s second half, and whose personality is distinctly opposite to the doctor’s) the two make a nice pair of bushy bookends!

One thing I’ve always shied away from in my drama movies is stories where one half of a previously happy married couple is possessed and is mean for no reason! This picture has a lot of that, and I didn’t like it! It also has a tremendous amount of chatter, and though it’s only 95 minutes long, it seems to last forever! Ha ha! There’s lots of creeping around in dark places too, and when the monster does strike, the attacks usually take the form of lame fisheye chases right out of Bog!

But there were some scenes I liked! The bat-man steals an ambulance at one point, and a pretty good chase ensues! The opening scene with the bugs and bats is creepy, as is the scene where the cop visits the wife and suddenly turns aggressive and tries to make sweet love to her! (He comes to a pretty horrific end, a little disproportionate to his crimes, I thought!) The scene with the stewbum is strong too – he pulls off his own transformation from comedy drunk to desperate depressive, and thence of course to bat chow! And there’s a remarkable scene in which Dr. John, well along in his batmorph, finds the time to make sweet love to his wife; and he does a pretty good job of it too with those scrabbling claws and chittering teeth!

Finally there’s the ending, which I confess came out of left field, but satisfied! Still, even with all of these positive elements, it can’t be denied that this is a pretty boring movie that fails to live up to its potential! You may enjoy it if you like Curse of the Black Widow and TV movies of that ilk! I’m going to give The Bat People one and a half pug nosed bat masks!

Burl reviews Only God Forgives! (2013)

Biff bang boom, it’s Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to review another picture for you – a particularly garish picture, all blood reds and aquarium blue! It’s a picture from the famed Scandinavian stylist Nicolas Winding Refn, who brought us Drive and Bronson and Pusher and other single-word productions, most of them pretty violent! Only God Forgives is no exception!

Ha ha, I expected it would be violent, but it was even more so than I’d thought! It’s right up there with The Mutilator and other Special Makeup Effects productions like that! It seems there’s a family of American drug dealers who’ve set up shop in the neon section of Bangkok, using a boxing club as their cover! There’s Billy, the oldest brother, Julian, the taciturn younger brother, and Mom, who holds her cigarettes like she’s watched too many Joan Crawford pictures!

The story begins when Billy, who is apparently crazy, murdering a teenage girl! An unprepossessing policeman, Chang, allows the girl’s father to take his delight in Billy, which in this case means clubbing the young psycho to a pulp with a table leg! Then Chang metes out a little more rough justice on the father, who was also his daughter’s pimpsman! And then comes Mom’s retribution for her son’s death, after which further bloody events take place! Ha ha, it’s Chang who retains the upper hand and commits most of the mayhem!

At one point, Julian, whom we assume to be a real punch-artist, challenges droopy-dog Chang to a fight! Well, ha ha, the young roundeyes lands not a single blow, and the elderly Thai puts such a punching on Julian, ha ha, such a punching! Chang then doles out more of his signature punishment (some of it quite welcome!), and by the time he’s done, there aren’t many characters left, and those who remain are short a limb or two!

All of this is enacted with a rather hilarious air of self-seriousness, but also a great deal of pictorial beauty! There was not much ol’ Burl could hang his hat on as far as emotional engagement went, which was clearly by design! Ryan Gosling, who plays Julian, could have stirred embers with his facial expressions, and he speaks hardly a word through the whole picture!

It’s a gaudy, sleazy, nasty and frequently gorgeous world the young Refn has created, but one with about the half-life of good latte art! It’s pure and unashamed genre pulp, which is what I liked about it, but it was missing the energy one associates with the form, and that I didn’t like so much! And the puffery was a bit too much! It almost fits into that category in which I place movies like Enter the Void and Holy Motors, a category I call Ha Ha, How The Heck Did This Ever Get Made??? But it’s rather a thin broth compared to those, so I’m going to give Only God Forgives two and a half horrible pokings!

Burl reviews The Gorgon! (1964)

Oh ho and by garr, it’s Burl again! Yes, I’ve got another Hammer picture for you today! It’s The Gorgon, which is one of their better efforts in ol’ Burl’s opinion, and which in many ways, not least its green-skinned female antagonist, greatly resembles The Reptile! Ha ha, in fact, the particularly intelligent screenplay was written by The Reptile’s director, John Gilling! He didn’t direct The Gorgon, though – Terence Fisher did, natch!

Instead of a small Cornish village, we have here a small Central European village! It’s dominated by a sinister castle which no one dares approach, because over the last half-decade, a number of people have been found dead! And not just dead either, ha ha, but completely turned to stone!

There are a lot of characters involved, and almost every review I’ve read, even Phil Hardy’s venerable Aurum Encyclopedia of Film: Horror, gets the details wrong! I’ll try to get it straight for you here: it seems a young bohemian by the name of Bruno is romancing a lady in the little village of Vandorf! But soon enough both Bruno and his beloved have met fateful ends – the young lady calcified and Bruno left hanging from a tree! Well, Professor Heitz, Bruno’s father, is soon in the village, protesting that his son, upon whom the blame for all the murders is being placed, is just a convenient scapegoat! But soon Professor Heitz too is hard as a rock!

In the meantime Professor Peter Cushing from Island of Terror, playing one of his mean-doctor characters this time, is removing brains at the local sanitarium, and his assistant, the beautiful Klara, is troubled! Who is turning everyone to stone? Why is the whole village, and in particular Dr. Cushing, being so secretive about it? Ha ha, and why does she herself disappear for walks in the night which she later can’t remember taking?

More characters show up: Bruno’s brother Paul, who demands answers, and also his mentor, yet another professor played with great gnashing of teeth by Christopher Lee! Ha ha, the movie’s a particular pleasure whenever Lee is on screen, because he tells it like it is! After Paul gets partially calcified after seeing the deadly Gorgon in a reflection, he claims to merely be ill! “Ha ha, ill?” Lee thunders! “You look as though you’ve been in your grave and dug yourself out!”

It’s a terrific picture, because it doesn’t rely on the same old monsters, dear as they are! The same tropes are all present and accounted for of course, but Megaera, as the Gorgon is named, is actually quite eerie, because unfamiliar! Fisher does his usual bang-up job, and Gilling’s script, as mentioned, has a braininess about it that helps immeasurably!

Where the picture disappoints is in the makeup when Megaera is finally revealed! I didn’t mind the fakey snakes so much, but her face, which is meant to be bone-chillingly hideous, looks more like someone trying out as a backup singer for an Aladdin Sane-era Bowie! Too bad! Roy Ashton, the makeup artist, usually did a fantastic job, as can be seen in The Reptile and any number of other Hammer pictures!

Well, it’s hardly the end of the world! The picture is still an enjoyable dilly, even given the ending where, after a misunderstanding-based swordfight, almost everybody dies! On the whole, I recommend it! I give The Gorgon three unctuous coroners!

Burl reviews Sexcula! (1974)

Wink wink, nudge nudge, ha ha, say no more, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m here to review a rather daring picture for you today, a motion picture decidedly for adult audiences and not for the tots! Yes, it’s Sexcula, a horror-pornoo picture that was made in Vancouver all the way back in the hairy, scary days of 1974!

Ha ha, do you like grimy, ill-lit shots of hairy, heaving buttocks as they thrust and grind and gyrate in a castle laboratory set? Then Sexcula is the picture for you! The story begins as a young lady and her fullback-sized date journey to a busted-up house she apparently has inherited from an old granny or something! There she discovers granny’s diary, and then the couple repair to a field for a pic-nic lunch and a reading of the diary! Oh, and for reasons of her own, the young lady takes off all her clothes!

The bulk of the picture is diary flashbacks! It seems the granny was named Fellatingstein, and she of course was a Modern Prometheus in the vein of our good friend Udo Kier in Flesh for Frankenstein! Her creation, Frank, is a fey individual who can do anything but the act he was specifically created for! No, he has no interest in sex at all! So Fellatingstein must call in her good friend the Countess Sexcula, recognized across Eastern Europe as an expert in such matters!

Sexcula and Fellatingstein embark on a program of sexual encouragement! This involves fondling; co-ed bathing; a carriage ride with a prostitute wearing a Rose-from-Golden Girls wig; and finally a scientific gambit involving the fluids of love purloined from men engaged in the act! And somehow a wedding officiated by an elderly Mennonite which devolves into what I might call a sort of slumber party – and rest assured, the elderly Mennonite preacher gets involved, and if you have ever wondered what an elderly Mennonite preacher looks like in dishabille, you will find out here – becomes a part of it all!

Ha ha, some of the narrative twists and turns here are a little confusing! Perplexing too is the question of exactly whom this picture is meant to, ha ha, turn on! Maybe nobody, maybe everybody! Maybe it was just meant to be weird, and in that it certainly succeeded! Thankfully ol’ Burl likes his movies weird!

I’m not a great consumer of movies in the pornoographic genre, though I have nothing against them either! Still, based on what I have seen – Pretty Peaches, Little Girls Blue, pictures like that, thanks Dave’s mom! – Sexcula is strangely chaste for a pornoo! Perhaps it’s exactly what you would expect from a pornoo movie made by a bunch of youngsters who’d never done anything of the kind before and couldn’t fully commit themselves! That’s kind of what I like about it - that and the weirdness! I also liked the lab set, and that the fellow playing the gorilla pulled off some very simian moves, nearly worthy of Charles Gemora! Ha ha, it should be mentioned too that there's a hefty, mealy-faced hunchback right out of an Andy Milligan movie, or maybe Cannibal Girls, and at one point I believe the gorilla rapes him! It’s hard to tell for sure - some of the scenes are a little murky!

But there are some nice looking scenes too, and if the men all seem rather, ha ha, inadequate for pornoo stars (could be my limited experience showing here), the ladies are game enough! There are a few funny comedy moments too, though despite its horror trappings, only the hunchback is scary, and then only when he’s naked! I give Sexcula two and a half cases of bumne, and a hefty part of that is for merely existing at all! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Gravity! (2013)

Burl to Houston in the blind, ha ha, I’ve got a movie review for you! Yes, it’s of a new picture, Gravity, a rocketship movie that gives you the mindboggles thinking about how they made it! I heard that someone interviewed the director just after it came out and asked him in all seriousness whether it had been difficult making a movie in space! Ha ha!

It’s easy to think that this person must have been a real simple simon, but for great stretches the space setting is pretty convincing! The story is uncomplicated: two astronauts are floating above the Earth and are doing some work on a satellite, and suddenly some debris destroys their shuttle and they’re left floating around with their oxygen supplies dwindling and no immediate means of terrestrial return! The rest of the story is about trying to get back home, natch!

It’s a pretty popular movie, so I won’t say all that much about it! I was certainly impressed by the trick effects, though it’s my prediction that some of them, mostly the action bits like the shower of debris and the return to Earth, will look fakey and dated in a few years’ time! The smaller-scale stuff, like the spacewalking and the scenes indies the spacecrafts, will hold up just fine! That’s ol’ Burl’s prediction!

The acting will hold up as well, I suppose! I’m no great fan of young Miss Bullock (though of course she was excellent in Demolition Man), but I have no complaints about her here! Now that I think about it, I’ve only seen about five of her movies: The Vanishing, The Net, Speed, Speed 2 and of course the aforementioned Stallone picture, and now Gravity! That makes six, and looking through her filmography, there’s not many others I’d even consider watching, ha ha!

The young Bullock is the main show here, but the rest of the teeny cast is fine too! You’ve got your George “The Descendants” Clooney portraying the merry space trucker who keeps his head about him and comes to a very Dark Star conclusion; and in a clever move, the voice from Mission Control is played by Ed Harris, who of course is best known for his role as Hank in the ‘Father’s Day’ segment of Creepshow! Ha ha!

That’s about all I have to say about Gravity! I enjoyed watching it, thought the hole-through-the-head guy was a nice touch, and was pleased that it clocked in at a tight 90 minutes – a very rare running time for today’s space epics! For technical daring and innovation, for not ignoring the small moments, for defiantly ignoring studio executive dictates, and for successfully promoting the act of theatergoing (because the reviews correctly stated this was a movie to be seen on the big screen), I’ll award this picture three Marvin the Martian cameo appearances!

Burl reviews Protocol! (1984)

With a ditzy smile and a wave, it’s Burl, here to review a Goldie Hawn movie for you! Ha ha, I don’t think I’ve seen many Goldie Hawn movies, and certainly none from her 80s batch! Nope, never seen Private Benjamin, never seen Overboard or Bird on a Wire or Swing Shift, never even seen Wildcats! I think I saw Foul Play once, and maybe Best Friends for some reason, and at some point in the future I’ll probably have a look at Seems Like Old Times! Still, considering what a big star she was, there’s not much Goldie in my movie-watching history!

That’s why I thought I’d tackle Protocol! Ha ha, I’d never heard much of anything good about it, but occasionally, as with All of Me or The Money Pit, I’ll watch a mid-80s comedy for just no real reason at all! So I put it on and let ‘er unspool!

Well, Goldie plays some kind of sexy waitress at a jungle-themed Washington, DC, strip club, one of those PG-rated strip club where no one actually strips! One evening she accidentally saves an emir from assassination, and her grateful government gives her a job in the protocol office! This is all very contrived of course, but that would be forgivable if, as is the case with a similar picture from the same era, Spies Like Us, it was just a tiny little bit funny! But it’s not, ha ha! It’s not funny at all! The only time I came close to chuckling was when Goldie decided to host a party for the emir at her old peeler bar, and the club owner put up a banner reading “Welcome Amir!”

When I saw in the credits that there were some experienced character actors in the cast, and that the screenplay was by Snyder himself from Grumpy Old Men, Buck Henry, I thought maybe I was in for an unheralded treat! Nope! It’s a dreary, laffless exercise! Pondering this, I thought maybe it was actually a clever and pointed political anti-Gipper satire in disguise, some kind of Iran-Contra analogy perhaps! Nope again, I’m pretty sure! I sought in vain for an Ollie North stand-in, or a lightly disguised Sandinista!

But like I say, there’s at least a solid supporting cast! The emir is played by Richard Romanus from Mean Streets, and his buddy, a party animal guru, is André Gregory, André himself from My Dinner With André! Chris “Fright Night” Sarandon is the love interest with whom Goldie has absolutely no chemistry! Cliff De “Secret Admirer” Young is doing his besuited slimeball thing, which requires, and gets, no effort from him; and we also get both Kenneths: Kenneth “For Keeps” Mars and Kenneth “Dune/’Salem’s Lot/Malone” McMillan! Plus there’s a secret cameo from another future Fright Night alumnus, Amanda Bearse, playing a soap opera actor, and familiar faces like Archie “Innerspace” Hahn and Paul "The Devonsville Terror” Willson as T.V. newscasters! And don’t forget a friendly appearance from Al “Die Hard” Leong as a cook!

I suppose I’m itemizing the (mostly wasted) supporting cast this way because, ha ha, there’s not much more to talk about! It’s also a way to offer you links to better and more interesting movie reviews! This is a lousy picture: it’s boring, it’s repetitive and it has a grindingly abrasive party scene that feels as though it will last forever! Grasping for something on the plus side, I’ll say that the treatment of Goldie’s gay roommates was refreshingly mature for the period, and it's always nice to hear dotty-Ronnie jokes! Anyway, I give Protocol one half of an exploding electric toilet!