Burl reviews The Children! (1980)

Ha ha and rug rats, it’s Burl, here to review a movie about scary kids! You know, there’s a lot of talk about that Spanish picture from the 1970s, Who Can Kill A Child?, a lot of chatter about how taboo-flaunting it was, and that’s true! But the picture I’m discussing today, The Children, seems to me just as outrageous, though of course it came along a few years later and is not nearly as well made, so I guess that’s why people don’t give it as much credit for its transgressions!

The picture begins with a pair of lazy nuclear plant inspectors shirking their duties and going to hoist a couple of cold ones instead! Soon a yellow cloud of radioactive gas is traveling the countryside, leaving unaffected the adults who travel through it, but when a schoolbus full of kids drives through the fog, they become black-fingernailed zombies with the power to frizzle-fry anyone they touch! Soon they’re wandering the countryside delivering killer hugs to their parents and any other adults unlucky enough to encounter them!

On their trail is Sheriff Billy, played by Gil Rogers of Eddie Macon’s Run, and John, the father of one of the kids! Ha ha, John looks a bit like Jason Miller, and his wife, who is very pregnant in the movie, is played by none other than Gale Garnett! You might be familiar with her from the band Gale Garnett & the Gentle Reign, or maybe from her strange little folk song about a prism, which is how I myself got to know her work! Anyway, I had no idea she acted, and it sure was a surprise to see her in this movie! But it’s a real shame what happens to her family in the picture! Terribly sad, in fact, and I almost had to turn the movie off!

For you see, I’d watched this movie before, but the last time was long before I became a father myself! Needless to say, it has a different impact now, and the scene with the little boy in his bedroom is very hard to watch! But I persevered, knowing it was all a fiction, and that the goopy burn makeup might have been as hard to wash off as it looked to be, but it was still only makeup! When they realize the only way to stop the kids is to chop off their hands, it gets even more gruesome for the kidlets, and by the end we even see one little girl get completely chopped into cordwood, Friday the 13^th part V-style! (And speaking of Friday the 13^th, the score for this one will sound very familiar if you’ve ever seen one of those Jason Voorhees pictures!)

There are plenty of fry-ups in the movie, enough so that it gets to be a bit repetitive! Two idiot slapheads, one of whom is played by Peter Maloney from The Thing (he’s Bennings, ha ha!) help the sheriff out at one point, but strangely we never see these two particularly deserving specimens get the atomic hug! I guess just because we don’t see it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, ha ha! And whatever happened to that weirdo in the limousine? And what about Miss Button?

It’s an okay little rural horror picture: goofy, to be sure, but grim as well; crudely done, but spiced with effective moments, like the death of the old shopkeeper lady! It could have used a bit more pep and a little more profundity in its approach, but I’ll give The Children one and a half Superman posters!

Burl reviews Frankenstein's Daughter! (1958)

Ha ha and monster makers, it’s Burl, here with a review of another of the Four Cunhas! That is to say, another one of the quartet of movies made by Richard Cunha in 1958! I’ve already reviewed Giant From the Unknown for you, and today it’ll be Frankenstein’s Daughter! (Ha ha, She Demons and Missile to the Moon will come along sometime in the future, I’m sure!)

This one is maybe not the best of them, but it’s got a certain something! Our story is set in the house of a scientist, an elderly German called Carter, the type of kindly scientist who’s trying to perfect a serum for the good of mankind! But his assistant, Oliver Frank, has a different sort of project in mind! Oliver is nightly turning Carter’s niece Trudy (played by Sandra Knight from The Terror, the future ex-Mrs. Jack Nicholson) into a monster, in which form she roams the streets scaring her friends with booga-booga! Oliver spends much of his time either gaslighting Trudy or clumsily macking on her, and her boyfriend, played by John Ashley from Beach Blanket Bingo, unwittingly helps the bad guy out! Frankly the boyfriend does not seem like the swiftest boat in the fleet, ha ha!

Oliver Frank, who's an especially prickish bad guy, abuses his goblin-like assistant and says things like “From here on in I decide what’s evil!” Of course he turns out to be not Oliver Frank but Oliver Frankenstein, and soon he's constructed a monster out of some of Trudy’s friends! There’s a rampage, some biffing and bashing and some pretty stiff neck-twists, and finally rough justice is meted out when Oliver Frankenstein gets a face full of acid!

There are some real 1950s delights on view here, like a boss pool party at where a clean-cut band keeps the groove, while enormous skewers are barbequed and the twentysomethings dance like apes! But we’re expecting the Frankenstein monster to rampage through the party and biff people into the pool, and it just never happens! There’s a lost opportunity for you, ha ha!

And speaking of the monster: this picture has taken a lot of grief for the gooper-faced makeup, even from Cunha himself, but you know what? I like this monster, and I even think it’s kind of scary! Ha ha, still, I can’t deny it’s a little chonky! But it’s chonky-charming, if you know what I mean! The acid-burn makeup and the monster-Trudy makeup (all fangs and heavy eyebrows) are less endearing though!

It’s a modest little picture, and it seems to go on forever, and it’s got some major missed opportunities too! But it also has the 1950s monster charm I love so well - the kind you find in pictures like Monster of Piedras Blancas or Monster on the Campus! I give Frankenstein’s Daughter one and a half swinging bookshelves!

Burl reviews The Young Marrieds! (1972)

Ha ha, it’s Burl here with an erotic mystery! Before we get to the review portion of this entry, I should tell you the circumstances which brought me to watch today’s movie, The Young Marrieds! It’s a little odd!

I found a videotape in my basement the other day, in a plain black box with no label, just the word PRON written on it in gold ink! Ha ha, I thought, what’s this! I have plenty of old VHS tapes, but I couldn’t remember ever seeing this one before! Well, out of curiosity, I put it on, and guess what! It was a picture called The Young Marrieds, directed by someone called Richard Trent, and, after a strange opening scene featuring bizarre narration describing the birth of mankind from the primordial ooze, the movie quickly revealed itself as a genuine pornoo! It was clearly a product of the early 1970s and the tape looked looked as though it had been Poor Man’s Transferred off the side of a smoke-stained rec room wall! I watched for a while, through scenes of a jerkish man suffering from severe homophobia who first watches a stripper, then, departing the club in his dune buggy, picks up a hitchhiker and is given whistle-dog by her in a remote forest location! Then I turned off the movie and went to my computer, curious to find out what exactly I was watching!

Well, ha ha, would you believe it! The Young Marrieds turns out to be the last feature film directed not by “Richard Trent,” but by none other than Ed Wood! I could hardly believe it! Not only that, but it had apparently been considered a lost film before a print was rescued from a falling-down Vancouver cinema in 2007! That’s odd, I thought to myself - I didn’t think I’d looked in that box of basement videotapes since sometime in the late 1990s! So could I have had my own tape of The Young Marrieds this whole time, before even the 2007 discovery? If so, where did it come from? Who had written PRON on there in golden ink? Very weird! Oh well, I thought, might as well watch the rest of it!

It’s the tale of a young husband, Ben, a total cras-cren-bon, who’s all bent out of shape because his wife Ginny (played by Alice Friedland from Cindy and Donna) doesn’t care to please him in the bedroom! So he receives whistle-dog from strangers and spends half his time in the strip club, and even when he’s at work he can’t keep his mind on things! One day Ben brings home a camera and starts shooting provocative pictures of his wife, and she starts to loosen up! Ha ha, she even performs whistle-dog on him!

Then he takes her to his co-worker’s house where a desultory orgy is in progress, and the wife returns to her chilly ways! But the bare-chested he-man she is paired with soon has her on the floor with his dominance, at least according to the flatly intonated narration! We then get more out-of-focus whistle-dog and various other oro-genital amusements, all set to a steady soundtrack wash of moans, groans, wet smacking sounds, and lounge music!

Then suddenly the orgy takes a turn to “another strata of sex play” which threatens to take Ben “through the gay veil!” The scene ends inconclusively, with Ben, evidently assailed by imbecilic doubt, imagining still images of himself kissing another man! Then we get some more shots of the ocean, and the narrator drones “Let us be patient, tender-wise, forgiving in this strange task of living, for if we fail each other, each will be grey driftwood relaxing in the sea!” Ha ha!

Well, it’s an odd denouement, but entirely keeping with the oddness of the thing entire! And it’s not just the windy pronouncements of the narrator: this picture has sexual politics so bizarre as to be alien, even for 1972! The virulent homophobia of the main couple is pretty off-putting, and the long scenes of whistle-dog are just boring! Ha ha, I zoomed them, I must admit!  

Sexcula notwithstanding, I’m not really a great one for pornoo - watching other people make sweet love is like watching other people play Pac-Man: you’d really rather be doing it yourself! But as pornoo goes, I suppose The Young Marrieds is compelling enough just for being so weird, and that it was old Eddie’s last picture makes it of historical interest! I have no idea where I got this tape, but I’m going to give The Young Marrieds one little falling-down framed picture! Ha ha, can you prove it didn’t happen?

Burl reviews Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice! (1992)

Great cobs of corn, it’s Burl, here to review another sequel! This one is Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice, and of course it’s the Final Sacrifice in the same way as Friday the 13th part 4 was the Final Chapter! Which is to say, ha ha, there were a thousand more brain-dead sequels that came after the supposedly final one!

I have an unreasonable fondness for this ol' cronker, though, and I’ll tell you why! Certainly it’s not because the movie is any good - it’s not! - but more because of the circumstances in which I first saw it, way back in 1992 or so! My then-girlfriend and I were driving back from somebody's wedding, I remember, and we saw a movie theatre with that long title on the marquee! So we stopped the car and, still dressed up in our fancy weddin' clothes, strolled in, bought some popcorn and settled back to watch this opus! We had a great time and it’s a pleasant memory!

But that’s about where the fondness stops, ha ha! If you’ve seen the original Children of the Corn, or read the Stephen King story, you’ll know that it involves the murder of every adult in town by the children of Gatlin, Nebraska, who are under the influence of a pagan corn god known as He Who Walks Behind The Rows! This picture, which came along eight years after the first one, takes things up as the outside world discovers the bodies and tries to figure out what to do with the children!

Into the world of Gatlin, and a neighboring town called Huppleburg or something, comes a tabloid reporter called John Garrett, played by husk-y Terence Knox from Lies, in the company of his near-adult son Danny, who looks a little like Emilio Estevez and with whom John endlessly bickers! Ha ha, this bickering quickly becomes tiresome, and the murder scenes with which the picture is punctuated are great respites from it!

The two Garretts have many adventures among the maize! They each find love: Garrett the Elder with Rosalind Allen from Ticks, while the Younger meets cute Christie Clark from A Nightmare on Elm Street 2:Freddy’s Revenge! An ingratiating fellow named Frank Redbear teams up to help out with the mystery, pointing out that the corn is moldy and might be making the children crazy! He equally suspects the involvement of an evil corn god, however, as well as a problem with the koyaanisqatsi! Meanwhile, there are murders: flying corn products take out two newsmen; a house squashes an old lady; a doctor is poked by knives and needles; a random fellow gets the world’s worst nosebleed thanks to some voo-doo; and a whole mess of townsfolk are incinerated in a meeting hall! Most of these crimes are committed by the children, but the cornfields themselves take on some of the work as well!

The picture proceeds on the same theory as its predecessor: that if you cast a young adult as a teenager, put him in an Amish outfit with one of those flat hats and caution him never to smile, he’ll automatically turn creepy! Also like its predecessor, He Who Walks Behind The Rows is represented by a traveling furrow of earth, as if it was the gopher in Caddyshack turned bigger and meaner! It’s too bad we don’t ever get to see this corn demon, which shoots blue lightning at people before either killing them or possessing them! We do get a brief look at a corn-demon pizza-face on the lead corn-child, Micah, before he gets swallowed up by a big corn husking combine!

The picture offers too much filial bickering; a bit of gore here and there; some squirmy, silly murders; and a happy, strangely touching supernatural ending for Frank Redbear! Altogether it’s not a great movie and not a good one, but it’s an acceptable autumn time-filler that, I can tell you from experience, plays a lot better on the big screen! I give Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice one and a half cobs of stupid old corn!

Burl reviews Incubus! (1981)

Ha ha, Burl here with a movie that doesn’t exactly offer a lot of laughs! It’s a Canadian picture from 1981 called Incubus, and while you will find sources that claim it’s from 1982 and is called The Incubus (and the poster really pushes that article, ha ha), don’t believe them! My information comes from the credits of the movie itself, which I consider the final arbiter in such matters! And under no circumstances should you confuse it with Incubus, the 1966 picture with William Shatner wearing tights and speaking Esperanto!

These minor matters aside, we’re here to discuss the picture itself, and how good it is! The answer is, ha ha, not very! The picture is set in a small town called Galen, and the lazy autumnal days of life in this cornball burg are interrupted by a horrific series of rapes and murders committed by some inhuman thing! The town doctor, played as a near-crazy person by John Cassavetes, discovers awful internal damage to the rape victims and, now and again, great quantities of unusual sperms!

John Ireland, well-known for appearing in Gunslinger, The House of Seven Corpses and Satan’s Cheerleaders, plays the town cop who seems to have some kind of relationship with each victim! “I’ve known them since they were babies!” he cries at the demise of a pair of teens; or, at the scene of another outrage, “She’s my wife’s cousin!” Meanwhile, Kerrie Keane from Spasms plays a new-in-town newshound, and her reportage on the incidents occasions the worst prop newspaper I’ve ever seen! Keane, who immediately becomes the object of Cassavetes’ sexo-romantic obsession, gives one of the most unpleasant performances I can remember in a female lead! She acts as though she’s trying to be unlikeable, and maybe that’s how she was directed to act! Ha ha, I can’t say!

The cast is fleshed out with a number of faces who will be familiar to anyone conversant in Canadian cinema! There’s the local teen Tim, played by Duncan McIntosh from Bells, who’s having terrible dreams that are connected with the attacks in some way! Helen Hughes from Visiting Hours and Blue Monkey plays his crabby grandma, the matriarch of the town’s first family who is trying to keep the lid on an old scandal! Even Harvey Atkin, extremely familiar from Meatballs and Funeral Home and so much more, gets in on the action as the mayor of poor benighted Galen!

The meat and potatoes of this depressing picture are the attack scenes, and while there’s a bit of grue to liven things up (especially in a farmer-killing scene where, unfortunately, the graphic (fake) pitchforking of a dog is also shown), and a great, if briefly-seen, monster in the Incubus itself, thanks to makeup artist Maureen Sweeney, when you get right down to it there's way too much rape in this movie! Any rape is way too much as far as ol’ Burl is concerned, so having an entire picture built around such scenes is not my cup of tea! And the whole thing wraps up in a dark and depraved twist ending! Actually it doesn’t wrap up so much as it just ends!

The picture was directed by John Hough, one of those workaday filmmakers who could turn in good work (The Legend of Hell House, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry), or stinkers (Howling IV: The Original Nightmare), or, mostly, so-so stuff somewhere in between, like Escape to Witch Mountain or Twins of Evil! Well, Incubus, with its dumb dialogue, antisocial performances, lack of atmosphere and general skeeviness, hews much closer to the stinky end of things I’m afraid! I give it one Lil’ Red Express Truck!

Burl reviews Mr. Majestyk! (1974)

Hi, it’s Burl here, just getting the ol’ wet-dry vac! Yes, I’m here to review yet another picture featuring that carved-in-granite grandpa, Charles Bronson! This movie, Mr. Majestyk, is one of his better pictures, ha ha, and perhaps the only one in which he plays a vigilante watermelon farmer! It’s based on an Elmore Leonard book, and Leonard wrote the screenplay too, so you know it’s starting off with a pretty solid foundation!

Bronson is Vince Majestyk, and truly he is majestic in his zeal to get his melon crop in! But hoods, from the penny-ante variety played by Paul Koslo - yes Roy Boy from The Annihilators - to a sullen big-leaguer essayed by the gone-too-soon Al Lettieri, keep getting in his way! When, in a fabulous but heart-rending scene, they blast his melons to bits with shotguns, that’s more than enough for Majestyk! He’s taken all he’s going to take, ha ha, and with the help of his yellow pick-up, his lady sidekick and a shotgun of his own, he rights the wrongs done to him, and in the process proves himself a true melon farmer!

Of course we know Bronson from grotesqueries like Death Wish II and 10 to Midnight, but here, in the rocky open-air environs of the Great Divide, in his sporty cap and throwing melons like a pro, he’s a lot more appealing! This picture came out the same year, in fact the same month, as the first Death Wish, and it’s interesting to think what his career might have been like if this rousing adventure with its solid politics had been the picture that would define the rest of Bronson’s career, rather than the squalid, reactionary urban drama of Death Wish! Had that been the case I bet there would have been a lot more Indian Runners and a lot less Evil That Men Dos through that last quarter-century of his career! Ha ha!

But Mr. Majestyk remains a high point! It’s pretty clear that Leonard did his research into the world of melon farming and itinerant pickers, and his sympathies are with the underdogs all the way! Majestyk is no racist and doesn’t care where his pickers are from, nor what their status might be, so long as they pick a clean melon! And against this background we get some good rough-country car chases, some violence fights, some gun battles and some tragedy, and a lady named Wiley played by Lee Purcell from Eddie Macon's Run! It’s got that great clean look we find in many 1970s action-dramas, and the cars look and sound terrific! Ha ha, it’s one of those movies with auto manufacturer sponsorship, so everybody drives a Ford!

As ever, the Son of Bron is only able to muster a very limited array of expressions, but he manages to be likeable and believable! Mr. Majestyk is a solid if minor 70s crime adventure, and I give it two and a half watermelons!

Burl reviews The World's End! (2013)

Ha ha and hallo sailor, it’s Burl, here with a ha’penny’s worth of English behavior and hard drinking! Yes, today’s picture is one of Edgar Wright’s chumedies, which is to say one of those pictures he made with his pals Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, whom we know from The Adventures of Tintin and Paul! This one is The World’s End, which begins as a funny but otherwise garden variety pub crawl picture, and halfway through becomes an alien invasion extravaganza! Ha ha!

Pegg plays Gary King, a middle-ager who at one time, in his younger days, was the big man in town, the cool dude with the rad crew, all of whom participated in a legendary evening of drink and debauchery in their home town of Newton Haven! But now, in his forties, Gary is a dissolute old hidebag who’s never been able to move on from that night of glory! And the hometown pub crawl was never properly finished, so, through a combination of subterfuge, wheedling and naturally persuasive charisma, Gary manages to round up the old gang to have a go at it again!

And yet the old home town seems to have changed in some indefinable way! Bartenders look the same from one pub to another, the pubs themselves have been homogenized, everyone gives them side-eye or the outright hairy eyeball, and almost nobody in town seems to remember them! The lads run into their old teacher, Mr. Shepherd, played by Pierce Brosnan from Dante’s Peak, who does remember the quintet! Ha ha, he gives one of his finest Pierce Brosnan performances here, I must say! But of course, along with most of the townsfolk, he’s one of them!

And just what are them? Ha ha, aliens of course, of a particularly patronizing and supercilious variety! Their methods are explained over and over, but somehow never really become clear; but the upshot is that many in the town have been replaced by hollow automatons (they resent being called “robots”) with particularly fragile bodies filled with blue printer’s ink! And as the fivesome - well, the sixsome once they hook up with the equally bewildered Rosamund Pike, whom we may recognize from Jack Reacher and Gone Girl - continue their bar crawl, they must deal with more and more of these alien drone-people, before the movie more or less lives up to its name, ha ha!

Like all of these Wright/Pegg/Frost pictures, from Shaun of the Dead to Hot Fuzz and beyond, The World’s End is fast-paced and amusing, and clearly the work of people who watch and love a lot of genre movies! But there’s a self-awareness too, of course, embodied in the character of Gary! He has a few moments which might hit home to those of us around the same age; those of us who may not have grown up completely; those of us who may like a glass of beer now and again! But there’s a comfort there too, because - and I’m speaking only for ol’ Burl here, ha ha - we’re nowhere near as far gone as he is!

For its obvious and heavy-handed, but no less true message; for its frequently uproarious Englishness; for its veneration of the good old pint; for its apt-too-apt soundtrack; and for that moment when Brosnan claps his hands, snaps his fingers and says “Pretty cool, eh?” in that tone we’ve all heard from teacher, I give The World’s End two and a half old mix tapes made for you by a friend!

Burl reviews A Bay of Blood! (1971)

Bueno bueno it’s Burl! Ha ha, a funny thing about ol’ Burl is that I tend to rank Italian horror movie directors according to the gentility of their work! Essentially my taxonomy is based on what some may call the tastefulness of their productions, or the lack thereof, but it's not a rating system and has nothing to do with my estimation of their talent or how much I like their movies! So Mario Bava strolls with quiet dignity near the top, with Dario Argento somewhere beneath, Lucio Fulci further beneath that, and Joe D’Amato and Ruggero Deodato lurking on some still lower rung!

Today’s movie, which I’ll refer to as A Bay of Blood though it has many other titles to choose from, comes from that upper-ranker Bava; but it is, nevertheless, one of the goriest, meanest movies ever made by any of the pastaland blood-slingers! I mean, ha ha, it’s no Anthropophagus, but still! It’s got head choppings, slow strangulations, pokings of all kind, including a sexual transfixation; face slicings, shotgunnings and squid bitings! It’ll be no surprise to you that this picture is considered the old grandpappy of the slasher genre! Certainly it was a hefty influence on Friday the 13^th part 2, ha ha!

The setting is a picturesque little bay which seems to be populated exclusively by murderers! An old countess is noosed right off her wheelchair, and the perpetrator of that crime, her husband, is straightaway poked at with a stabbing knife! We learn that the carnage is all because of the titular cove, which is, ha ha, coveted by everyone who lives on the bay, and by all of their relatives too! A quartet of feckless youths fall victim to the monstrous desire for seaside real estate as well, or at least to the desire others have to keep the area for themselves!

Bava started as a cinematographer (his first work was the Rossellini short The Bullying Turkey, which I hope to see someday just based on that title!), and he shot many of his own pictures, including this one! So it’s a little strange that it’s one of his less visually striking works - it’s got some lovely shots, but movies like Planet of the Vampires, Hercules in the Haunted World, Hatchet for the Honeymoon and Danger: Diabolik all seem brimming over with striking imagery, whereas this one is a little more fast and loose! Maybe it was simply a lower-budget picture with a quicker schedule than he was used to!

As brutal as the killings are, and as misanthropic the theme, A Bay of Blood is nevertheless a pretty entertaining satire! Once you realize that everybody is just killing everybody else, it becomes genuinely uproarious, and the last few minutes serve as the cherry on top, ha ha! Though future slashers would fail to take this or some equally clever approach, you can't deny the movie's influence on everything from Friday the 13th to The Burning to The Dorm that Dripped Blood to The Mutilator! For its transgressive jocularity, its historic importance and its full-colour carnage, I give A Bay of Blood two and a half cable knit sweaters!

Burl reviews The Scarlet Claw! (1944)

With extreme logic, it’s Burl, here to get Sherlockery on you! Ha ha, today’s picture is The Scarlet Claw, a Rathbone/Bruce special from the 1940s, and I have to tell you, I enjoyed it a great deal more than something like Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows! Now that may seem an unfair sort of a statement, given how genetically perfect Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce were in their respective roles as Holmes and Watson, but quite frankly there’s no more delicate way to put it! Mssrs. Law and Downey Jr. will simply have to cope somehow!

In The Scarlet Claw, we find Holmes and Watson in Canada, of all places, attending a conference on the o-ccult! (Ha ha! Why would superrationalist Holmes be at such a thing?) As a Canadian myself, I was quite pleased at this choice of locale; but that’s as nothing to how I felt in the picture’s closing moments - but more on that later! The conference is being held in some city - Toronto? Ottawa? Montreal? - but soon the detectives find themselves in rural Quebec, in a small village that resembles any small village in any Universal picture set in Eastern Europe or England or wherever! It seems a fiend has ripped open good Lady Penrose’s throat with some kind of clawlike garden implement, and Holmes and Watson accompany the bereaved Lord Penrose from the occult conference back to the little town of La Morte Rouge! Local murmurings have a clawed phantom as the culprit, but Holmes suspects a flesh-and-blood killer! Of course he’s right, but who among the many shifty people in town could it be, and where did he get that marvelous glow-in-the-dark suit? Ha ha, one of the most atmospheric sequences in this wonderfully atmospheric picture involves the killer aglow, bounding through the foggy fens like a galloping ghost! I tell you, it’s fun stuff!

There are several gruesome murders and some spooky scenes (one of which Brian DePalma appears to have borrowed for Dressed to Kill, which, strangely, is also the title of a completely different Sherlock Holmes picture), and to me it took the old deerstalker quite a little while to put the pieces together; and when you get right down to it, you have to admit Watson falls into the bog a lot! The bog, of course, looks just like the moors in The Hound of the Baskervilles, and I do admit that this story is slightly derivative of that Conan Doyle original! But, ha ha, de rien, as the Quebecois say! It’s still a terrific little photoplay with a properly maniacal killer!

Once the mystery is solved and Holmes and Watson are pushing off, they share a conversation about Canada that really baffled me, with Holmes declaiming about the critical position the country holds in Western history and culture! I thought at first this was a manifestation of something called the Canadian Co-Operation Project, a shameful agreement with the Americans in which Canada essentially agreed not to have a feature film industry in exchange for the occasional promotional mention of Canada popping up egregiously in American films! That’s what happens here, with Holmes sounding bored and enraptured at the same time, rhapsodizing about the joys of Canada! But this picture was made in 1944, four years before the Canadian Co-Operation Project took hold!

As I say, it’s a mystery! But it’s merely quaint and bizarre now, and serves as the cherry atop this most delicious little mystery programmer! Ha ha, I give The Scarlet Claw three glowing suits!

Burl reviews The Virgin of Nuremberg! (1963)

Ha ha, it’s Burl here with a little Italian Gothic! Yes, this picture, The Virgin of Nuremberg, is set in Germany and trades in some pretty German story points, and it has a particularly international cast, but it’s an Italian picture through and through! It’s very much a pastaland cousin to the Poe pictures Roger Corman was making around this same time, stuff like The Premature Burial! Ha ha!

But this is a touch more gruesome, sadistic, and horrible than the Corman movies, and that's saying quite a bit considering the Poe pictures include The Pit and the Pendulum and Masque of the Red Death! To give you an idea of where this picture's heart lies, the titular Virgin of Nuremberg turns out to be an iron maiden-type torture device, inside of which, in the opening minutes of the picture, an unfortunate young lady is found bloody and punctured!

The picture takes place almost entirely in and around an old house-castle, naturally! Mary Hunter, the young wife of Max Hunter, who I guess is a baron or something, has just moved in, and she spends the bulk of the film wandering the halls and staircases of the castle, discovering terrible things like that dead lady, and trying desperately to convince her husband that such dreadful happenings are occurring in his barony! But, ha ha, neither Max nor anybody else believes her - or, at least, they don’t seem to!

But of course there are secrets aplenty in this castle! There’s a legendary hooded torturer from the castle’s history, a Mickey Hargitay type more or less, who may have returned after hundreds of years’ absence! And why is Max acting so suspiciously, and why does the score thunder so menacingly on the soundtrack when he’s just sneaking up to give his wife a little kiss? And what is a disfigured Christopher Lee, that legendary heavy metalsman from Gremlins 2 and Starship Invasions, doing lurking around the castle’s museum of torture implements? And ha ha, why does the castle have a museum of torture implements?

Of course the secrets are revealed in the end, and there’s Nazi shenanigans involved! The actual killer is very creepy looking when he’s revealed, but is almost the sympathetic sort of monster we recall from movies like Raw Meat! And naturally, as in most of these tales, there’s a conflagration to cap everything off!

It’s a solid tale of Gothic creepsterism, enlivened by nice art direction and yucky trick effects engineered by director Antonio Margheriti himself! (Ha ha, Margheriti, who frequently worked under the name Anthony M. Dawson, took on the trick effects a lot in his pictures, even unto later works like Yor, Hunter From the Future!) On the downside, The Virgin of Nuremberg offers a slightly boring script, an overly bombastic musical score, and a general lack of common sense! But for those who love this sort of picture, these things are part and parcel of the package, and they - we, ha ha! - won’t mind much! I give this picture two and a half face-loving rats!