Burl reviews Rumours! (2024)

 

Ha ha and holyoake, it’s Burl, here making a brief return to reviewing, and who knows for how long! I’m here to review a picture I saw recently: the latest project from Guy Maddin, who brought us Careful and several others, working here in concert with two brothers named Johnson! The picture is a bosky little number called Rumours!

 

That bosky quality, along with the limited cast populated with a few well-known ringers, a generally oneiric quality to the goings-on, and a formal approach that, for Maddin, is strikingly mainstream, all reminded me powerfully of one of the filmmaker’s most misbegotten projects, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs! Ha ha, the more I think about it, the more similar the two pictures seem, although Rumours is clearly the more successful!

 

The story has a late-period Buñuelian quality to it: that dreamlike feeling of never being able to eat your dinner! The setting is a G7 meeting somewhere in rural Germany, where world leaders have gathered to hash out an obviously meaningless statement in response to “the present crisis,” which of course remains undefined! The host leader is the German Chancellor, Hilda, played by Cate Blanchett, well known from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou; also in attendance are the Canadian prime minister, Maxime, essayed by swarthy Roy Dupuis, who has played such Canadian icons as General Romeo Dallaire and Maurice “Rocket” Richard, but whom I myself know best from movies like Jesus of Montreal and Screamers; the dozy American president played by the world’s most British man, Charles Dance from Alien 3 and For Your Eyes Only; the British prime minister, Cardosa, played by Nikki Amuka-Bird, who was in that crazy Jupiter Ascending as well as two of the more recent M. Night Shamalyan pictures; and the leaders of France, Japan, and Italy, played respectively by Denis Ménochet, Takehiro Hira, and Rolando Ravello! Alicia Vikander from Jason Bourne and The Green Knight and Zlatko Buric from 2012 also show up in extended cameo roles late in the picture!

 

The situation is this: they’re supposed to write, or rather “craft,” some kind of crisis-addressing statement, but can’t really get started with it, distracted as they are with romances, reminiscences, and the local jagoff mudmen! Ha ha! Every now and again someone will have a little brainstorm and jot a few things down, but nothing ever makes much sense and there’s no indication that it would be any help even if they could finish it off and present it to the world! Meanwhile the rest of the world seems to disappear and the leaders realize they’re on their own! A giant brain is discovered out in the woods, along with Alicia Vikander, who speaks in what is at first taken to be gibberish, but turns out to merely be Swedish! Unaccountably, the French President’s leg bones dissolve and he must be carried, or pushed in a wheelbarrow; meanwhile the Italian prime minister carries an inexhaustible supply of pocket meats! Their progress through the woods is as maddeningly slow, as pointless and seemingly circular as their efforts to write the statement; but in the end it all comes together in a glorious ejaculation of ineffectual nonsense!

 

Almost all of this takes place in dark woods punctuated with rock video lighting, and there is much gabbing and wry hilarity! One triumphant moment involving a rope ferry is scored to an Enya song, ha ha, and somehow the use of that song makes it one of the most amusing sequences in the whole picture! But of course there’s always a danger in trying to depict entropy and cyclical pointlessness in a movie: that the movie itself will become infected with these qualities; and it must be said that this is the case here, but, thank heavens, only occasionally! In the main it feels a bit like Maddin had the chance to remake Twilight of the Ice Nymphs but this time to make it more entertaining, and he, along with his Johnson brothers, made the most of this rare chance!

 

The analogies on offer are perhaps a bit broad, and the picture occasionally spins its wheels and could stand to dig in more deeply here and there, but it’s altogether a merry jape, well-acted by everybody, and is on balance a good deal of politically relevant fun! It’s not like much else you’ll see at the movies this year, and so I recommend it! I give Rumours three streams of two-century old urine! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Twilight of the Ice Nymphs! (1997)

 

With a cry of boodle-doo, it’s Burl, here to review arthouse! Ha ha, yes, it’s time to talk about another movie from that billet-doux of film directors, Guy Maddin! You’ll recall how much I enjoyed his mountain picture Careful, and now here’s a movie universally recognized as the very worst feature film he ever made, a star-studded superattraction entitled Twilight of the Ice Nymphs!

Now, ha ha, I say “star-studded,” but it’s all relative, isn’t it! In this case it means there are a few recognizable stars salted into the cast here – in fact, some actors I like very much! And of course, whether or not this being his worst movie (assuming that’s true) makes it a bad movie also hinges on a comparative relativity, since I do tend to like not just his movies, but also the old semi-silents that inspire him: movies like, oh let’s say, Eternal Love!

Anyway, the story here, liberally borrowed from a Knut Hamsen novel called Pan, has a newly-released political prisoner returning to his homeland, a country of perpetual sunlight called Mandragora! The prisoner, Peter Glahn, is played by an uncredited Nigel Whitmey, who later turned up in Saving Private Ryan; on the boat ride home, he meets a strangely gorgeous lady called Juliana, played by Pascale Bussières from When Night Is Falling and August 32^nd on Earth, who teases him silly! On arrival at the family ostrich farm, Peter is reunited with his spinster sister Amelia, played by none other than Shelley Duvall from The Shining and McCabe and Mrs. Miller! Amelia longs for the embrace of a local mesmerist and science doctor, Dr. Solti, played in high comic fashion and with a proto-Christoph Waltz accent by R.H. Thomson from Who Loves the Sun; she is also involved in a bitter feud with the farm’s hired man, Cain Ball, essayed by a grizzly-looking Frank Gorshin from Invasion of the Saucer Men and 12 Monkeys, a long mile from his days as Best Dressed Man of 1978!

Wandering amidst all this, through the extravagantly artificial forests of Mandragora, is Zephyr, a fish-widow played by an especially ethereal Alice Krige, an actor who's a great favourite of mine from movies like Ghost Story and that Star Trek picture where she plays a robot queen! Peter becomes involved with her, but then rediscovers Juliana, who turns out to be the ward of, and perhaps lover of, the limping Solti! Solti's gone gimpy because a statue of Venus he’s recently unearthed has fallen on and crushed his leg, and this statue will claim more victims before the story is through! So Peter and Juliana start an affair, which makes Zephyr jealous; while Peter himself becomes increasingly jealous of Juliana’s involvement with Solti, and Amelia, the smoke-dried stick, pines desperately for the mesmerist! At home the stakes rise in her feud with Cain Ball, and soon the melodrama – and it is melodrama: the Hammer Films-style musical score never lets up for a moment – includes assault, insanity, immolation, self-mutilation by shotgun, a nail pounded into a head, and a semi-mystical death-by-crushing!

Narratively it’s a lot like Careful in many ways: we have, for example, a scene in which the tragic final events are precipitated by the hero wrecking a female relation’s romance with a local nobleman! Here the difference is that the romance never would have happened anyway, so the import of the hero's act is greatly diminished! So, too, is the sense of place: Careful, as artificial as it is, has a few crowd scenes and a little town, and so seems to be happening in a world inhabited by other people; Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, on the other hand, is really just a half-dozen crazy characters wandering around a too-often scantily-dressed fake forest!

 

 

Ice Nymphs is a bigger-budgeted movie than Careful, but it seems the money went to the actors and the 35mm photography, and therefore the art department budget suffered; and, ha ha, now and again it shows! The acting can be a bit over the top occasionally, but this always seems deliberate, a calculated facet of the Reinhardt/Dieterle Midsummer Night’s Dream effect Maddin is shooting for! (No Joe E. Ross in evidence though, ha ha!) But the Shakespeare work it recalls most is The Tempest, and when Peter gets so outraged that he commands the trees of the forest to bend to his will and help him vanquish his enemy, and the trees actually sort of respond, the sense of an island powered by glitter and magic comes to a full boil!

I’ll have to agree that, of the ones I’ve seen, which is most of them, this is Maddin’s worst picture! However there’s lots of wonderful stuff here: for example, dialogue that's as rich and purple as a fine blood pudding, and filled with quotable gems! And one must admit there’s really nothing else out there that looks like it, and that’s very much a point in the movie's favour! And, too, it has ostriches, ha ha, plenty of ostriches, and those guys are mighty charming if you don't have to stand too close to them, or downwind! Shelley Duvall turns in a really fine and completely heartbreaking performance, easily selling the idea of someone driven mad by loneliness, heartache, and disappointment! It’s an underwhelming movie in many ways, but it’s also very much worth seeing, and I urge you to do so if the opportunity arises! I give Twilight of the Ice Nymphs two and a half night bogs!

Burl reviews Trucks! (1997)

 

Ha ha and double ha, it’s Burl crying vroom and giving you a review of a vehicular picture from the 90s! In fact it’s a remake of that sweet perennial from 1986, Stephen King’s one and only directorial effort, Maximum Overdrive! I suppose though that the producers of this picture might insist it’s not a remake, but rather a make of the original King short story! And to bolster their claim, the movie carries the same title as that story: Trucks!

Once again we have a little gang of people trapped by living trucks at a roadside choke-and-puke! The action allegedly takes place somewhere near Area 51, and there’s some theorizing about alien control, but otherwise we don’t get an explanation for the behaviour of these vehicles! Unlike the 1986 movie, it’s just trucks who’ve become sentient, not drawbridges, gas pumps, carving knives, video games, or bank machines, ha ha! So this effort is a little more straightforward than King's!

It’s an ensemble movie, but our putative lead is the ginger-haired owner of the little ramshackle rest-a-ree-a, Ray, played by Timothy Busfield, who’s well known from movies like Stripes and Sneakers! He’s got a teenage son called Logan, essayed by Brendan Fletcher from Violent Night and Ginger Snaps 2, and the sleepy, sloe-eyed townslady is Hope – yes, it’s Brenda Bakke from Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight! There’s Jack, a portly old hippie played by Jay Brazeau from Live Bait; bickering father-daughter duo Thad (Roman Podhora from Jason X) and Abby (Amy Stewart from My Winnipeg); an old counterman played as a Canadian cross between Donald Moffat and M. Emmet Walsh by Victor Cowie from Careful; and an amorous couple essayed by Sharon Bajer from Eye of the Beast and a fellow whose name I did not catch!

From many of these actors and their other credits, you might suss that this movie was made in Canada! It seems that in fact most of it was, but at some point they decided the trucks and the truck stop and all those characters I mentioned were not enough, so they shot some additional, slightly bloodier scenes in California, and these can be identified by the fact that they contain characters which have exactly nothing to do with the plot, and by the beautiful blacktop highways, which stand in marked contrast to the rough grey concrete, spiderwebbed with tarry cracks, that are found in the Canadian scenes! Ha ha! And while I’m getting into the production weeds, I should also make special mention of the work of Ina Hanford, who does a terrific job here!

The California scenes are the movie's goofier ones, and are much less truck-centric; so points for eclecticism but debits for straying, even if slightly, from the theme! These scenes have a hydro man shaken by his boomtruck and electrocuted; a hazmat suit somehow filling with air and becoming an axe murderer; and goofiest of all, an enraged radio-controlled toy 4x4 bursting through a door and slamming a luckless postman to death! Ha ha! Meanwhile, in Manitoba, the motley group huddles in their restaurant watching a parade of about half a dozen belligerent trucks circle the place, occasionally taking out someone dumb, brave, or dumb-brave enough to venture out! All of this is shot without style or pep, is absent of wit or verve, and is certainly unburdened by affrights! The stars don’t seem to be trying too hard – Busfield comes off as a seriously slumming Paul Giamatti being forced to play the role at the point of a gun held just off camera, and Bakke appears to be heavily barbiturated throughout!

So if you thought Maximum Overdrive was pretty bad (if quite a bit of fun!) and that as a director Stephen King makes a pretty good book writer, you’ll be shocked at how much more poorly this story can be told! Trucks demonstrates this amply, having, as it does, the feel of a movie made in a gravel quarry by people with no appreciation of the genre they’re working in or, frankly, any love of cinema! I don’t wish to tar every crew member with this terrible brush, but I will spread disdain like a jam across the whole of the above-the-line personnel! Sure, there are some good movies about angry self-driving vehicles - The Car is terrific, and Christine is a near-gem too – but this is not one of them! Trucks is a cracknel biscuit and no mistake, and I award it one culvert!

Burl reviews Heads! (1994)

 

By all the rolling melons, it’s Burl, here to tell of a tale of small town decapitations! Ha ha, it’s time to consider a forgotten film - although forgotten would imply that it was ever known at all, which it wasn’t! No sir, the picture is called Heads, and I’d be a mighty surprised mandanfield if anyone reading this missive has ever heard of it!

Our setting is the small town of Dry Falls, and our protagonist is Guy, the copy editor at the little local gazette, played by Jon Cryer from No Small Affair and Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home! He hopes to become a reporter, and gets his chance when the fearsome editor of the Daily Document, played by none other than Ed Asner from The Wrestler, takes him along to a crime scene at which the paper’s crime beat man has been found lounging in a deck chair at poolside, and his head bobbing in the pool several feet away!

Further casaba-choppings ensue, and leather-jacketed Earl Pastko from The Sweet Hereafter is the chief suspect; but then again this town has plenty of suspicious denizens! Why, even Roddy McDowell from Doin’ Time on Planet Earth and Fright Night is lurking about as the local moneybags, a fey character in an ice-cream suit, totally beholden to his pet greyhounds! And the next thing you know Jennifer Tilly, whom we recall from Moving Violations and Remote Control, pops up and begins making strange overtures to our hero! Could she be the mad top-popper? Ha ha, maybe!

Severed heads show up on top of buildings, or else rolling down the street, or in farmer’s fields or what have you, but the movie somehow doesn’t make much of them! It might be fair to say, in fact, that the movie doesn’t really know exactly what it wants to be! Certainly it’s trying for dark comedy and murder mystery, and also it wants to be a kind of small town picaresque, but none of it gels very well! In any case, it’s hard to explain how a movie called Heads can make such small potatoes of what one assumes was meant as its chief attraction and major selling point! I suppose they didn’t want to be too lurid, ha ha, but it also smacks of timidity!

Guy is virtually the same character Don Knotts played in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken: a cringing ninnypants newshound whose only accomplishments come by accident! Ha ha, I’m sure they would have hired Knotts for the role if he was a little younger; though it ought to be said that Cryer is perfectly good in the part, even if his character is frequently annoying! Ed Asner is plenty of fun here though - ha ha, he jumps into his character and goes at it full-bore, not minding whose toes he steps on in the process! McDowell makes a tasty little snack of his brief role - ha ha, there’s a pro for you! - and Tilly does her baby-doll thing, but seasons it with sadness and regret!

It’s pulpy, but not to the degree and in the manner the makers intended! There are a few attractive shots thanks to cinematographer Alar Kivilo, who on this picture was forced to work, at least part of the time, with a broken light meter! It could have used a little more pep and dynamism I think too, and might have given us a more active and less enervating protagonist! Maybe the best thing you can say about it is that it’s something mostly all its own! Mercifully it doesn’t try to be Lynchian or Tarantinoesque, or Finchereuw avant la lettre, at least not in any recognizable way; it seems to believe it’s a parody of something, but of what? The small-town serial-killer newspaper picture comedy genre? Ha ha! I give Heads one and a half battered Airstreams!

Burl reviews And No Birds Sing! (1969)

 

Ha ha and hello, it’s Burl here! Today I’ve got a real obscurity for you: a short feature, or maybe a long short, ha ha, made by a university student’s union in the late 60s, shot in glorious black and white, minimalist in plot and only just over forty minutes long, but with plenty of groovy music, entitled And No Birds Sing!

It’s set in and around a university campus in the 60s, so that’s a pretty marvelous starting point! Our main character is a soporific nonentity called Joey, played as though mostly asleep by one-and-done actor Ian Malcolm! (Ha ha, no, he’s not the leather jacket professor played by Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park!) Joey, bereft of intellectual ambition, of vigor, or of character traits of any kind, is fixated on a fellow student named Virginia, played by Marsha Sadoway! He’s already got a girlfriend though, a perfectly sweet young lady, and though in his brief bit of narration at the beginning of the movie Joey allows that this puts him “in kind of a bind,” he seems to entirely lack any means to deal with it!

Joey’s pal is Alvin, a straight-talking glasses nerd played by Michael Posner in the picture’s best performance! We see these fellows in their classes (one of them an English class taught by Victor Cowie who was in Careful, and who also wrote and directed this picture, in which he discusses the Keats ballad “La Belle Dame sans Merci, containing the line “And no birds sing”) and discover that Joey seems to have no interest in anything but the girl with which he is obsessed, while Alvin is more engaged in the subject at hand!

Joey is just as dissociated from his tolerant-to-a-fault girlfriend, and it only takes a scene or two of the couple conversing to convince you that she should really find someone a little more fun to be with! Ha ha, the guy’s a real drip, and besides, hey lady, Alvin's right there! Anyway, after some scenes on the campus, a bit of outasight nightclub stuff, and shots of Virginia running through the forest looking alternately coy and fearful (which I take to be Joey’s daydreams of his crush acting the dryad), we finally get to the big party scene, held in a house that looked somewhat familiar to me! The people certainly looked familiar - ha ha, I’ve seen photos of my parents attending just such parties!

This is a good, Canadian, Trudeau-the-Elder-era party, with plenty of stubby beer bottles and boxes of Old Dutch chips, and hippies lurking in the corners! Here, Joey manages to ditch his girlfriend, corner Virginia, and profess his devotion; but he gets a bit creepy, and worse than that boring, and ends up passed out on the coat bed! Ha ha! So much for his romantic quest!

The picture has exactly the feel of a movie made by a students’ union, ha ha! I didn’t much care for Joey, who I suppose was meant to be a Ben Braddock of the North, but I did like a couple of his friends and the places he went! Miscommunication seems to be the movie’s abiding theme, as characters frequently misinterpret, don’t understand, or simply don’t seem to hear what the others are saying to them, and again, Joey is the standard bearer for this! In the end it’s a classic example of a movie that follows closely a character who never comes close to earning such devotional scrutiny! I give And No Birds Sing two peace buttons!

Burl reviews Eye of the Beast! (2006)

Snip snap slurp, it’s Burl, back with more to review! It’s time again for a little cephalopodic horror: a freshwater squid picture called Eye of the Beast! Ha ha, this one was not only shot in Manitoba, Canada, which is about as far from any ocean as you can get, but it’s set there too! So how could there be a giant squid problem in this landlocked prairie region? Well your guess is as good as mine, because they never explain it!

Ha ha, I’m getting ahead of myself as usual! Eye of the Beast is one of those cheap creature features they were making back in the oughts, most of them rip-offs of Jaws, and this one perhaps most of all! For it purloins not just the underwater beastie, but the opening scene with a lady being et; the troubled cop, the visiting scientist and the crabby sea captain; the discovery of boat wreckage, the disbelieving townspeople, and initial diagnosis of a boating accident; and the bifurcated structure wherein the first hour takes place on land and the second hour (or half hour in this movie’s case) aboard a boat on the hunt for the beast! In fact it borrows everything but the final method of the monster’s execution, electrocution! That, it steals from Jaws 2! Ha ha!

From Humanoids From the Deep it takes a community conflict between white fishermen and the Indigenous people who’ve been accused of over-fishing the area! The bizarre fact that all this takes place in a lake in the middle of the continent goes virtually unmentioned! All I could think whenever the fisheries officer lady, Cat, and the scientist guy played by James Van Der Beek tried to persuade people there was a giant squid swimming around in large shallow lake, was “Ha ha, no wonder they don’t believe you!” But indeed there is, and it’s represented either by dodgy digital effects, or by one floppy and overworked mechanical tentacle, or, as in the final topside appearance of the monstrous calamari, by the kind of fiberglass novelty cover you might affix to a monster truck called “The Sqidinator!” That the squid appears more frequently as a green dot on a tracking monitor than it does in real life is perhaps the saving grace of the trick effects here, because you hardly get a chance to see them!

I know just what you’re asking, though! “Ha ha, but Burl,” you’re saying, “are there any shots of the squid’s sharp, snapping beak?” I’m sorry to say that there is nary a one, and it’s a truly unaccountable omission! That’s what we killer cephalopod enthusiasts live for - it’s the money shot! But, as in Tentacles, this critical aspect is virtually ignored! Most of the attack scenes are done with an economy of spectacle a small town community theatre would envy, so I guess a snapping beak was simply not in the budget! But it sure should have been! It should have been an over-the-line expense in fact!

Now I know this all sounds terrible, and mostly it is! But it’s not quite as bad as all that in the end! The acting is variable, but in general stronger than one might expect! Arne Macpherson does good work with the Robert Shaw role, here reupholstered as an uxorious husband whose love for his wife is matched only by his disdain for everybody else, and who displays an inexplicable tolerance for his two racist dimwit deckhands! The script, generally dogged in its effort to follow its brief of aping Jaws completely, salts in a few minimally clever lines or ideas here and there, but almost seems ashamed to be challenging the form in even this insignificant way!

The paucity of incident and the absence of affrights are bad, but the total lack of beak-snapping is unforgivable! I can’t in any fulsome way recommend Eye of the Beast to underwater monster fans, and for its sins I give it one severed tentacle!

Burl reviews Camera 32 27th! (199?)

Hello and welcome, it’s Burl here to review… well, not a movie exactly, but an unusual and unique VHS tape that I found lurking in my collection! The video in question has no title card, but there is a label on the tape reading Camera 32 27^th, so that’s what I’m taking as the presentation’s proper name!

Ha ha, here’s the backstory to this… unusual tape! Some years ago I was invited by an acquaintance to help out his friend, whose parents owned a skid row pawn shop, by taking all their VHS tapes off the shop’s hands! They were free, but the catch was I had to take them all, not just the ones I wanted! Well, that was no real problem, and I ended up with a hockey bag and many, many cardboard boxes filled with VHS tapes of all kinds! This haul netted me gems like Action U.S.A. along with many others!

And buried in there was Camera 32 27^th! Yes, ha ha, I wondered about it, forgot about it, unearthed it, and then, finally, down in my basement VHS room, I watched it! Well, it turns out to be a tape made by, I presume, the employees of the pawn shop, and judging by the technology and fashions on display, I’d date it to sometime in the mid-1990s!

And what did they film, these amateur outsider cinema artists? Ha ha, backsides! Yes, they seem to have trained their camera on the behinds of every female customer who dared enter their den of iniquity! It’s quite creepy, and the occasional voice you can hear, for example a low murmur asking the cameraman “You got dat ass?,” or else a short Beavis and Butthead laugh, only sharpens the feeling of being party to something unsavory and wrong!

After a few seconds of flickering images showing different angles of the front and side doors of the place (evidently this was a repurposed security camera tape), the video proper begins as it means to go on: with a close-up shot of some unsuspecting young woman’s caboose! There are a few inelegant zooms in and out, and random reframings, and then we go on to the next victim!

The buttocks-obsessed cameraman will frequently drop to the floor to find the camera angle he desires, or when needs be he’ll go hand held! It’s a camera of the id, true first-person cinema, and we can almost read the shooter’s mind as he focuses on what is clearly the object of his every waking thought! And at another point we sense the peep artist’s frustration at one young lady whose bum is unsportingly hidden by her purse!

The perpetrators of this voyeuristic outrage worked as a pair, with one of them running the camera and the other occasionally coming out in front, casually pretending to browse, then at the right moment turning to make humping motions at the ass of whatever poor woman these cretins are filming! Mercifully, both filmmakers mostly remain behind the camera, ha ha! But all of this goes on for about fifteen or twenty minutes, and a dozen or so bums, then it's back to the cycling doorway security cam footage for several more hours until the tape is done!

It’s a shameful, leering catalogue of Peeping Tom-ism, more morally reprehensible than even Getting it On!, but as a record of this particular time and place, and of these particular jerks, it’s unbeatable! If one is able to temporarily forget the invasion of privacy aspect and take it as a Yoko Ono-esque experimental work, all the better for your peace of mind! This sort of found objet d'art is really something that goes beyond any one reviewer’s rating system, but I’ll just go ahead and give Camera 32 27^th one and a half pairs of lifeguard shorts!

Burl reviews East of Euclid! (2003)

Ha ha and holubtsi, it’s Burl! I’m here to review another low-budget, high-style swirling-snow picture from days gone by! It’s called East of Euclid, and I’ll wager you’ve not seen it, ha ha, because it’s a fairly obscure movie! But it’s worth a look for those who can find it!

East of Euclid is set in what appears to be a medium-sized North American city (cleverly built cardboard-box miniatures represent the city’s warehouse district), but almost all of its characters are Russian or Ukrainian, or in one case, Finnish, in origin! Their fake accents are not the only thing that mark them as Eastern Europeans: their monstrous appetite for pyrohy tells the tale as well!

Ha ha, our story concerns the murderous killer and gambler Vilosh, played by Michael O’Sullivan from Careful, and his eventual clash with Valeri, a dashing, lank-haired news photographer played by Brent Neale from The Editor! The whole thing is framed as a piece of journalism typed out by intrepid lady newshound Natalia, who loves Valeri: this is a role essayed by Daina Leitold with an accent borrowed from Natasha Fatale! Now, Vilosh, an alternately melancholy and malevolent figure, is in hiding from a his vengeful former employers, the KGB, and longs to start a new life in Atlantic City! But he’s also compelled to kidnap a Finnish hockey player, and also to jealously react when Valeri falls in love with Viloch’s mistress Alexandria!

After a long beginning, matters amp up when Valeri takes a photo of Vilosh, and, ha ha, the fugitive gambler doesn’t want that! So he and his thugs - including Mark Yuill from Crime Wave - invade the darkroom and beat poor Valeri to within an inch of Bokesville! Next thing you know, Valeri gets a false eye that’s also a camera, and he runs around the district maniacally taking eyeball pictures of everyone he sees! Then it’s vengeance time, and numerous attempts to rescue the kidnaped hockey player, who is kept roped up in the closet, having gained several suit sizes by being force-fed pyrohy; and a gang of East Side-style kids figures in somehow; and when the police finally start finding the corpses of Vilosh’s victims, which have been buried in snow, the chase is on! And Viloch is doing the chasing, ha ha, thundering after Valeri across rooftops until he reaches a ledge he dare not jump! 

Vilosh is caught and sent to prison, and his remaining henchmen are either locked in the briner or commit suicide by lying down on the pyrohy machine conveyer belt and being violently reformed into enormous pyrohy! Ha ha! But the 88 minute picture is not finished yet! Years later, Valeri and Natalia are a happy couple, the hockey player has become an ice-cracking butterball from his all-pyrohy diet, and Vilosh, released from prison, resolves to try jumping from the ledge he had chickened out on before, and crashes to earth four stories below!

All of this story unfolds at its own weird pace, and is photographed in a chonky black and white, surely 16mm! Ha ha, I quite liked the look, and was impressed, too, with many of the sets and props! As Action U.S.A. is clearly a movie made by stuntmen, East of Euclid is equally clearly a picture made by an art director!

The storytelling is not smooth, and the acting quality is variable, but these are not serious problems! It’s an eccentric picture and a singular one; it contains many of the tropes seen in earlier Guy Maddin or John Paizs films, and later in movies like The Goose or The Twentieth Century, but there is no sense of copycatting in any of these movies, just a shared inventiveness and mutual inspiration! Whatever city these movies all come from, it must be a weird and intriguing place! Ha ha, I give East of Euclid two and a half human pyrohy!

Burl reviews Careful! (1992)

Ha ha, and don’t put too much pepper on it! Yes, it’s Burl, here to review a movie I’ve liked for many years: Guy Maddin’s mountain picture Careful! This was Maddin’s third picture, I believe, and they say it was filmed on the great, flat plains of Manitoba, Canada! But I can’t believe that, because the movie patently takes place in the mountains! Ha ha!

It’s an odd movie, and delightfully so! We’re in the town of Tolzbad, a mountain town whose inhabitants are constantly, morbidly, appropriately, afraid of being swept away by an avalanche! Of course they also fear falling off of cliffs, and so everybody at all times behaves with the greatest restraint and propriety! In a word, they are careful!

Two brothers, Johann and Grigorss, are our heroes, sort of! Johann has a bit of a crush on his mother, sorry to say, and in such a repressed society as this, such feelings can only lead to a mouth-searing and some chocolate-sauce gore! A pair of sisters are also having trouble with incest, and this family too must lose a few members before things can be set aright on the mountain once again! In fact I’m not really sure things ever are set aright, but that’s the upper regions for you, ha ha! The thin air and tendency toward inbreeding makes the people a little bit stupid! Just have a look at Cliffhanger and you’ll see what I mean!

I don’t want to tell you how it ends, but practically everybody dies, ha ha! So it’s a tragedy, but it’s a very funny one, with deliberately crude special effects and wildly coloured cinematography! A few scenes are so overexposed that they hurt the eye, and I’m not one hundred percent sure that was the effect Maddin was going for, but who knows! And a few performances are a little flatter than I’m sure was intended; but on the other hand most of the actors are right on the mark! Vic Cowie, in the role of Herr Trotta, the libidinous papa, was especially strong!

I’ve not seen many of the mountain pictures that inspired this movie - things like Leni Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light, for instance, or the work of Dr. Arnold Fanck - but I can imagine them, and Careful appears to be a sincere and loving tribute to those great eruptions of Teutonic repress-o-passion! It’s packed with imaginative details and vivid sequences of high melodrama! Literally high, ha ha, because it’s mountains, and perhaps the makers of the picture were a little bit high too! It’s a florid work, and one I can cheerfully recommend! I give Careful three and a half condor eggs!

Burl reviews Crime Wave! (1985)

The top! Few reviewers ever reach it, but here am I, Burl, with a review of the movie Crime Wave for you! Ha ha! Now, mind you, this is not Sam Raimi’s sophomore picture, which I believe in any case is called Crimewave, but rather an earlier, cheaper, and even more eccentric picture made in Winnipeg, Canada, over several years in the mid-1980s by a fellow called John Paizs!

Even though the movie got its widest release on a VHS tape for which it was retitled The Big Crimewave, and indeed that was the tape that I watched, be assured that the movie is indeed simply called Crime Wave! The picture tells the tale of a struggling screenwriter who specializes in “color crime” movies; or, rather, he specializes in the beginnings and the endings of “color crime” movies, and the boring stuff in the middle is what he’s unable to write! So much of the picture depicts the different beginnings and endings he comes up with, and the rest is about his struggle to fill in the gap between!

So if you like struggling-screenwriter pictures, Crime Wave has got that covered! Our struggling screenwriter is called Steven Penney, and he’s played by none other than Paizs himself! He gets called “a quiet man” by his tweenage chum, and this is because he doesn’t utter a single word throughout the picture! No, not even when he meets the psychotic script doctor, Dr. Jolly, who’s played in a show-stoppingly demented performance by Neil Lawrie from Mob Story!

It’s a little like an Edgar Ulmer picture, specifically one of the weirder ones, Strange Illusion for instance, but with a dash of gore, nudity, weirdness and swearing thrown in! Ha ha, it was clearly done on a penny-poor budget, and is the more impressive for that! Plenty of imagination is ladled atop the story, and the occasional bum performance or sour mash on the screenplay is a small bird to pay for the many pleasures the picture offers! It’s got laffs: that you can bank upon, and real laffs in a motion picture are nothing to ka-choo at these days!

I’m very fond of this odd little movie, which sits awkwardly at on the bench at the side of the gym during the grade seven dance along with fellow weirdos Big Meat Eater, Lobster Man from Mars, and, sure, Sam Raimi's Crimewave! (Ha ha, The Human Mule wasn’t even allowed into the dance: the principal said she smelled whiskey on his breath!) I give Crime Wave three Greatest American Hero costumes!

Burl reviews Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group! (2017)

Ha ha, and ticket stub please! Yes, it’s Burl, here to review a documentary about a regional film club called the Winnipeg Film Group, which I recently happened to catch on the Kroger Channel! I like these local movie and moviemaking tales - the last such picture I reviewed was probably 2014’s Out of Print, the documentary about the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles!

This one is called Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group, which is a riff on the title of the first feature by one of the Group’s most famous acolytes, Guy Maddin! That picture was called Tales from the Gimli Hospital, and if you haven’t seen it, ha ha, I recommend it! In fact I recommend all of Maddin’s work, particularly a picture called Careful!

Maddin is one of many interviewees in this talking-heads doc: he speaks of playing many hours of ping pong at the film club’s offices, and of his creative debt to fellow film club member John Paizs, the camera-cranker who made a very amusing picture called Crime Wave! Paizs himself is not interviewed for some reason, but much footage from his films, Maddin’s films, and the cinematic efforts of many, many others are excerpted! Ha ha!

There is also some footage of many of the moviemakers at work, using all manner of fascinating techniques to produce their films! There are vintage photos from the club’s early days in the mid-70s, so, ha ha, we get some good outfits and facial hair! The fact that it was largely a bastion of white male enterprise is addressed, and we see that the club has lately expanded its membership to include ladies, people of colour, the queer, and even some Indigenous folk! Better late than never, I suppose!

Of course it all takes place in Winnipeg, that famously remote and chilly city on the plains! It seems an interesting place, and in fact I know it is, having spent some time there myself! Their film club is among the most famous and accomplished in the land, ha ha, so on that basis alone, this documentary production is of interest! Those who are fans of the great Canadian films of the 1970s, from Goin’ Down the Road and Black Christmas, to Between Friends and Rip-Off, to Homer and Paperback Hero, will find themselves hooked!

There are plenty of tangents taken and amusing stories told in the course of the movie, but the unfortunate thing is that this film about filmmaking rarely sings as a filmmaking exercise itself! The editing seems too frequently arbitrary - you can see where the filmmakers have inserted shots simply because they need something there! Ha ha, the wallpapering is at times pretty egregious! And there are far too many literal gags: if someone mentions fire, we see a shot of fire! If the floor is mentioned, there’s a shot of the floor! Ha ha, having so many miles of other people’s films to choose from was perhaps not the advantage the makers of this doc supposed it was!

So at times one wishes this was better made, but mostly the subject matter is compelling enough to make you forget that! I’m glad the picture was made, and would hope to see other such histories from other cities! I give Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group two and a half jumping cats!

Burl reviews On the Edge of Crazy! (2007)

Hi, Burl here to review a movie I’ll characterize as “not very well-known!” It’s a romantic comedy shot almost a decade ago in a small town somewhere, and it’s called On the Edge of Crazy! Ha ha, and how did it fall into ol’ Burl’s hands? It’s too long a tale to tell! But you can watch it tonight if you wish, for it is available on the Internet!

The picture’s tagline truly says it all! Indeed, all they wished for was a quiet romantic evening, and double indeed, instead all they received was the exact opposite! Ha ha, the picture tells the story of a doughy fellow named Leland Leonard who has trouble in the dating department! His mushmouthed narration brings us to the present moment: he has thus far in his young life dated only weirdos and harpies, and hopes to someday find a normal lady he can love! He meets a cheery young lass called Beverly, and eventually manages to make a date with her! But their evening falls into chaos as Leonard’s brother, a would-be wrestler; and a beret-wearing individual, ostensibly a pornoo-movie director, with an unplaceable, ever-shifting accent; and a particularly unpleasant ex-girlfriend; and other such parties, invade their townhouse and make romance impossible!

Thus does the plot, or “plot,” unfold! Ha ha, I guess the atmosphere being striven for is the one-thing-after-another chaos of After Hours or other such pictures, but the situations are a bit too contrived for that to be brought off; and the humour alternately ham-handed or obvious! Some of the gags do come off well though, and when that’s the case it almost always arises from the more felicitous performances!

This is an amateur production, so I’m not going to complain too much about performance issues, ha ha! But it must be said that the director, Ryan Souter, probably would have been better off casting someone other than himself in the lead! He makes a game effort, but can overcome neither his physical unsuitability for the character, nor the essential passivity of his role, nor the fact that his mind was obviously more on his directing than his acting! On the other hand, the fellow who plays his hen-pecked buddy is really quite good, and a number of the other performances give some nice moments!

But the direction upon which Mr. Souter was lavishing the bulk of his attentions is pretty uninspired, I must say! Certainly I understand his position: keeping control of such an enterprise is, or in the moment at least feels like, a feat in itself! But the movie is bereft of any style or interesting flourish that might give it some individuality! It’s too bad, because with a little more pep and gumption, this might have stood out a little bit!

It tries to be weird, but the weirdness is mostly of the off-putting variety; and the picture is laid over with an outdated, juvenile men-are-from-Mars-women-are-from-Venus sensibility! Actually, even worse, the men are from Earth, supposedly, while the women are from Beta Centauri or some such far-flung alien place! Ha ha! It’s trying to be When Harry Met Sally, but comes off more as When Harry Met Bzwai-9!

There’s not too much more to say about such a picture! I myself watched it on DVD, but as I say, it appears to be available for viewing online if you’re so inclined! And by all means, if you have a taste for backyard comedy or the sincere efforts of amateurs, you might find some genuine enjoyment! I will say that I appreciated it a great deal more than many slick and professional rom-coms I’ve seen! I’m going to give On the Edge of Crazy a robust one and a half wrestling capes!

Burl reviews The Editor! (2014)

Well hello, it’s Burl here, with a review of a neo-giallo called The Editor! Ha ha, here we have a movie clearly made by fellows who’ve watched a lot of movies, and while that’s a common enough situation, these particular fellows have made something oddball and loonytune enough to be interesting! Not wholly successful, mind you, but interesting and compelling!

There are tributes to the obvious suspects, namely Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, and also to filmmakers you might not expect, like for instance David Cronenberg! Yes, they squeeze a breathing Beta tape in there, and while this might cause a few readers to exclaim “Beta?!?,” please note that the mere presence of this wheezing cassette, whichever format it might have been, is as incongruous as it might sound! Ha ha!

Because, yes, again, this is a tribute to the giallo form; but its brief is broad enough to include the crazy supernatural aspects found in the more fanciful works of Argento, Fulci, Bava, so forth! So within its putative story, that of Rey, a wooden-fingered film editor (at one time one of the greats, but now working for an abusive producer on schlock pictures) who is caught in the middle of a series of murders at his studio while in production on yet another nonsensical, violent drama, we get increasingly bizarre instances of quasi-Surrealist pingo-pango, with characters disappearing into netherworlds, or surviving clearly fatal injuries, or maybe never existing at all! Ha ha! And of course there is a never-ending series of call-outs to giallos both great and not-so-great! Ha ha! While at least we don’t have any killers talking in Donald Duck voices,  I do have a feeling the idea was considered!

The picture, which was made on a pretty tight budget I’m sure, looks pretty good, and the music, which includes a contribution from Goblin’s own Claudio Simonetti, is effective enough, and the acting, particularly that of Rey and of his devoted assistant, is surprisingly strong; and we do get a cameo appearance from the great Udo Kier; but, speaking critically for just a moment, I do think the editing is one of the picture’s weakest points, ironically enough! Scenes end abruptly, transitions are awkward, and nothing holds together as well as it should, even for a parody-pastiche like this!

Moreover, the picture lacks the formal elegance one may reasonably expect from one of the better giallos! There are many scenes of spectacular (though frequently rubbery) gore, but nothing which earnes the name of “setpiece;” whereas something by Argento is composed almost entirely of setpieces! Think of the killer’s demise in Deep Red! Here the murderer is dispatched by, I think, fire – ha ha, big deal!

There’s a lot of slapping of ladies in the movie, which is played for laughs but sat a bit ill with me! Far better are the moustaches, which seem real, and are perhaps in the end the most genuine things the picture has to offer! Though I don’t doubt for a moment that the lads of Astron-6, who made the movie (and who brought us the great Cool Guys), have a true, deep and heartfelt love of the genre they’re playing fiddlesticks with here! Anyone with a similar admiration will find a lot to enjoy in The Editor, and I give the picture two Steenbecks and a hearty tousle on the top of the head! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Trancendental Hopheads! (1988)

Ha ha, it’s Burl again, here to review the last of the home-made movies I found on VHS tapes that were languishing in a bin just inside the doorway of a long-gone video store on Bathurst Street in Toronto, Canada! You’ve already read about Attack of the Flesh Eating Tree!! and Attack of the Killer Squirrel; now prepare yourself to hear the fantastic tale of Trancendental Hopheads!

First of all, yes, that is how the title is spelled! The next thing to note is that this movie is a lot longer than either of the Attack films – in fact, it’s close to eighty minutes! Ha ha, and on an amateur production from the late 1980s, each minute feels like at least two or three! Also unlike the Attack pictures, this one can be precisely dated, as the unusually comprehensive credits claim it was produced in 1988!

The Attack pictures both had fairly straightforward plots; Trancendental Hopheads does not! The narrative is extremely abstract! Nevertheless, I shall manfully attempt to wrestle it into some comprehensible form for you! It seems there is a group of youths living in a town, and a separate group of youths who are trying to lure them into a kind of devilish coven, and are murdering them in gory ways when they fail to be so lured! Then, in a manner that reminded me somewhat of a recent  picture called Bad Meat, the movie ended suddenly in the middle of an action scene!

But it did not actually end there; would that it had! What happens then is that two teenage “movie reviewers,” who sport sunglasses, fake moustaches and fey, lisping voices, appear, sitting on a couch, to criticize the movie they themselves are apparently an extension of! They also attempt to clarify story points (a valuable service, and the only way I was able to offer a plot précis myself) and screen some additional scenes! This potentially clever meta-device is drastically undercut by its ineptitude and gross overextension!

Ha ha, there are a few funny little scenes in the picture, as when one of the so-called “miscreants” decides to send some totemic warning to Gorman, one of the “innocents,” and so drills a hole in his own forehead, plucks out a morsel of brain, seals it bloodily in an envelope and scrawls GORMAN across the front of it! Ha ha, that will teach Gorman all right!

But gems like this are buried in a muddle of criminally overlong improvised scenes, disconnected dream sequences, flat-footed gore setpieces, action scenes filmed in near-complete darkness and dialogue scenes pointlessly filmed in bright light, in which eighty percent of the spoken words are unintelligible! And it goes on and on and on, and by the time you get to the movie reviewers, who are obviously the same fellows who made the picture, you just want to strangle them! Ha ha!

It’s not a good picture, and it bears no promise of future brilliance, but I’m glad to have found and watched this movie nevertheless! For it serves as an indication of how many backyard productions must be out there, striving, seeking for the light! I am glad to be of some help in providing a little exposure to pictures like Attack of the Flesh Eating Tree!!, Attack of the Killer Squirrel and, yes, even Trancendental Hopheads! (In that precise spirit, my pal Bleeding Skull provides a look at the works of David “The Rock” Nelson – ha ha, check out his reviews of same!) In the meantime, I give Trancendental Hopheads one and a half c. 1988 Super Big Gulps!