Burl reviews It Came From Outer Space! (1953)

 

Ooo-wee-ooo, cried the theremin! Yes, it’s Burl with a 1950s sci-fi classic under review, and one from one of my favourite directors of that form, Jack Arnold! Mr. Arnold seems to have loved the desert, and as I don’t live anywhere near a desert, or at least not one of any size, my own love for the desert is really a proxy love, constructed and prosecuted not by me but by Arnold! That may seem a lot to lay on a talented director of monochromatic genre movies, but I think it’s so! At any rate, like Tarantula, this fits right into the beloved sub-sub-sub genre of Sci-Fi Movies By Jack Arnold That Are Set In A Desert, and the picture is It Came From Outer Space!

The story begins in a terrific little desert house that contains article-writer and amateur astronomer John Putnam, played by Richard Carlson from The Creature From the Black Lagoon and Hold That Ghost!, and his visiting girlfriend Ellen, as portrayed by Barbara Rush from Bigger Than Life and When Worlds Collide! Ha ha, they see a fiery object crash land out of the sky, and when they investigate, John observes a strange spherical ship embedded in the crater! There’s an open portal in the side, but as he approaches the door closes up, as though the inhabitants were saying “None for us today, thanks!” Then a big earthslide covers the orb!

Well, ha ha, nobody else has seen the thing but John, and most of the next hour of the picture is people doubting John’s story, scorning him as a publicity seeker, or just relentlessly making fun of him! He’s dismissed in the popular press as a crank or worse, and Sheriff Matt, the local law played by Charles Drake from My Brother’s Wedding, who already seems to have something against our overearnest hero, possibly fueled by romantic jealousy, almost considers him a threat to the town’s moral health!

Finally events take place which at least slightly mute the snarky comments and side-eye! An oddball creature with fish-vision floats about the desert kidnapping people and occasionally adopting their forms, as might the alien from The Thing! But fortunately these are not malevolent aliens, though they don’t hesitate to rattle their sabres a bit to make sure they get their way!

When two telephone linemen of Putnam’s acquaintance - a pair of mugs called Frank and George, played by Joe Sawyer from The Killing and Russell Johnson from Rock All Night - are snatched by the aliens, matters reach a boiling point! The sheriff has had enough, an anti-alien mob is formed, and things look dire for all concerned! Ha ha, I won’t give away the end, but those who like images of awestruck townsfolk won’t be disappointed!

It goes without saying that the desert atmosphere is great here, and represents a major part of my appreciation for the picture! I was less taken with the character of John Putnam, who seemed too often in the helpless thrall of his own urges and emotions! He’s one of those characters who never quite say what you want them to say, but don’t surprise you either! It’s a Ray Bradbury story, and his touch seems evident; that’s all to the good as well! It’s a minor key story, told well, very theremin-flavoured, steely black-and-white with the best desert atmosphere since Them! How can you go wrong? You can’t! Ha ha, I give It Came From Outer Space two and a half Joshua trees!

Burl reviews Amityville 3-D! (1983)

 

Ha ha and picture windows, it’s Burl, here to talk haunted house sequels! Yes, it’s one of the Amityville pictures today, one I have a very specific memory attached to! Ha ha, I have specific memories attached to several of these movies, as it happens: when I was very young, a kid in my class had a birthday party to which everyone but me, it seemed, was invited! They all went to see The Amityville Horror, and the next day at the lunch table were all talking about how scary it was! Then, a few years later, my friend Dave and I went to see Amityville II: The Possession in the theatre, and that one, with its mixture of incest and demon possession and matri-parri-fratricide would surely have been a heady brew for a pair of 11 year-olds!

The devil’s fondness for the Dutch colonial building style is well documented, ha ha, and so today’s picture is Amityville 3-D, which I saw once again with my friend Dave! We biked to the video store one humid July day, rented this movie, and then got caught in a massive, pounding summer storm while biking back to Dave’s place! We later learned that some poor soccer player had been struck by lightning during that storm, yikes!

Well, the other day I revisited this picture, which of course builds on the malarkey presented by that Lutz family who made up that whole haunted house thing in the first place! This tale, in contrast to the first two movies, is entirely fictional instead of only 99% fictional, ha ha, and involves Baxter, a professional magazine skeptic played by Tony Roberts from Annie Hall, who, after debunking a pair of fake spiritualists who’ve been using the place as their base, decides to purchase the rambling Long Island spookhouse for himself! How Baxter does this on a magazine writer’s salary is left to our imaginations, ha ha - this picture abandons the household finance fixation that was the most frightening aspect of the first picture!

Candy Clark from The Blob plays Baxter’s partner at the magazine, who, after having a spooky encounter at the house and taking strange pictures of the realtor (played by John Harkins from Six Weeks) which make him look even more yoplait-faced than he really is, renounces her skepticism of the supernatural, does some investigating, and eventually comes to a remarkably sticky end while sitting in her car! Lori Laughlin of Secret Admirer and of recent news stories, is Baxter’s teenage daughter, who, along with a feisty friend played by Meg Ryan from Innerspace, D.O.A., and Armed and Dangerous, continually hangs out at the house against the wishes of Tess Harper from Flashpoint, essaying the role of Baxter’s angry ex-wife!

Robert Joy from The Dark Half and Land of the Dead is Baxter’s scientist friend, and he too comes to a bad end when a goochy demon monster reaches out of a bubbling water pit and grabs his face! Ha ha, there’s quite a body count in this picture, in fact - characters you don’t expect to become victims of the baneful dwelling are cut down as wheat before the harvester! Then one of Joy’s research assistants is blasted halfway out a widow by a door - ha ha, yes, you read that right! And all of this was filmed in 3-D, so of course there are many, many instances of items being thrust toward the lens, which will tend to confuse the viewer unaware of the movie’s tri-dimensional provenance!

Any affrights the movie has to offer come from the inherently spooky shots of the house, and even these are not as spooky as they are in the earlier pictures! (It’s still scarier than Amityville 1992: It’s About Time, though, ha ha!) It was directed by an old pro, Richard Fleischer, but he doesn’t seem to have had much interest in the goings-on! There’s an elevator scene, for example, that any truly engaged filmmaker would have excised at the script stage! Oh well - maybe Dino De Laurentiis made him keep it in, saying something like “Everybody heart stop when elevator drop! Everyone surprise when elevator rise!” I give Amityville 3-D one and a half smiling swordfishes, and that extra half a swordfish is really for the rainstorm that drenched me those many years ago! Ha ha!

Burl reviews The Hole! (2009)

Ha ha and holey holes, it’s Burl, with one of the newer Joe Dante pictures to review for you today! With the Gremlins-fuelled salad days of his career behind him by the early days of the twenty-first century, Dante was pulled back to the lower budgets of his early years; but hand-in-glove with that regression came a return to the more horror-oriented pictures he used to do, like Piranha and The Howling! Today’s review is of The Hole, which is a horror-fantasy with a youthful dimension, and of all Dante’s previous works it most strongly recalls his episode in Twilight Zone: The Movie!

The story is fairly simple: a single mom with two kids - one an unusually angsty male teen, the other a precocious younger brother - move into a new house in a small town, and, after they meet the pretty girl next door, she and the two brothers discover a heavily padlocked trapdoor in the basement floor! Of course they open it up to find a seemingly infinite void within! My first worry would be that my house was going to collapse into this cavern, but this apparently doesn’t cross their minds - all they do is continue to bicker and be rude to their mother!

But of course spooky things begin to happen, and it’s hard to say whether they’re borrowed more from Poltergeist or The Gate! Ha ha, I’m not accusing the picture of plagiarism, but there are a few remarkable similarities, namely the clown doll of which the younger sibling is afraid, and which comes to life and tries to strangle him, just as happens to the little brother in the Tobe Hooper picture! From The Gate we get material that is less specific, but more important: a back story of familial tragedy, parents who go away for the weekend, and a general horror-meets-After School Special sort of atmosphere!

Luckily this is a Joe Dante picture, and so we also get a cameo appearance from Dick Miller, who plays a pizza man! Ha ha, it’s a completely wordless part, measurable in single-digit seconds, and is perhaps the most desultory role of Miller’s sixty-year career! But we’re lucky he’s in it at all - the movie was shot mostly in Vancouver, with only a week or so of pick-ups in Los Angeles, which is where they shoehorned Miller in! Bruce Dern from The King of Marvin Gardens also shows up, playing a lightbulb-loving (or, more properly, a darkness-fearing) old crank, and his appearance is in a way even more desultory than Miller’s, seeing as how he’s so much more a plot device than he is a character!

There are some spooky sequences though, and Dante, grizzled Hollywood veteran that he is, keeps a sure hand on the tiller! The early bits with the discovery of the hole and the mystery of what it’s all about are probably the best, and the climax, which features some clever moments, is what most specifically reminds us of Dante’s segment in Twilight Zone: The Movie; but it also recalls the snake-man sequence from Dreamscape, which I guess is yet another picture this one borrows from!

The borrowings are more charming than they are anything else, and I don’t hold them against either Dante or his movie! I do wish the older brother’s angst could have been communicated without him being so unpleasant all the time, and I could have done without some of the 3D trappings that are nearly at the Jaws 3D level of flagrancy, but on the whole I thought the picture was reasonably effective, decently efficient 80s throwback! Ha ha, plus Miller’s in there, and also I guess I’m just a devotee of holes! So I’ll give The Hole two pizza deliveries!

Burl reviews Friday the 13th part 3! (1982)

Hi-hi-hi, ha-ha-ha! It’s Burl, here to review yet another entry in the ever-present saga of Jason and the pokings, the choppings, and the novelty killings! This is the third one, the 3-D one of course, and not much loved, I think! As with the Star Trek movies, this series suffers a bit from Odd Sequel Out syndrome, where the even numbered entries are more beloved than the odds! So, admitting the possibility of predjudice with that syndrome in mind, this installment has always seemed to me a bit of a valley between Part 2 and Part 4! But, ha ha, it’s certainly better than Part 5!

After replaying the climax of its predecessor, as though viewers required a detailed reminder of exactly what occurred in the previous film so they could progress through the new narrative without fear of bafflement, we meet the most miserable storekeeper couple in the world: a shrewish scold of a wife, and the fishfood-eating droopy-dog husband who, by his childish behavior, makes it impossible for her to operate any other way! There’s a bit of not-bad cat-and-mouse with the laundry hanging on the lines, and then these doughty citizens are sliced and poked! Then, finally, it’s on to the main body of the picture!

Dana Kimmell from Sweet Sixteen plays the weedy main girl, who has suffered through an earlier Jason attack but survived it somehow! Jason’s need to complete any task once begun means he’ll soon be after her and her terrible friends as they spend the weekend in a remote country house! Her boyfriend, who knows of her traumas, jumps out and scares her anyway, and then acts like a complete prig the rest of the time, at least until his head is squished and his eyeball shoots out into the audience, ha ha!

(Yes, you’re not allowed to forget the movies was shot in 3-D for long! Not just body parts and sharp tools are thrust into the lens, but baseball bats, yo-yos, juggling balls, joints, and dudes sitting on toilets, of which last this picture has no deficiency!)

Only slightly more tolerable than the boyfriend is Shelley, the tubby jokester of the gang! His inappropriate and ill-timed japes fill much of the picture’s running time or so it seems! There’s a stoner couple, with the man an eerie simulacrum of Tommy Chong! There’s a likeable Latina, and a blandly sexy couple unremarkable except that they always want to have sex with each other, and, in the rare moments when not talking about, preparing to, or actually making love, the fellow juggles and handwalks! Ha ha, your handwalking days are over, you showoff! And then there are special guests: a small motorcycle gang which takes a disliking to Shelley, and later makes the scene to get mild revenge on him for one of his earlier merry jests! All fall before Jason like wheat before the thresh, ha ha!

The sets in this movie fascinate me for some reason! They seem not to have been quite finished; there’s a stagebound unreality that makes it seem like a Lars von Trier warehouse experiment, with the sets just lines painted on the floor! The store at the beginning and the main house in which most of the murderin’ takes place look to be made of sheets of varnished plywood that have been leaned up against each other like an amateur’s house of cards! Ha ha, and the movie itself fascinates me a little! For me it's the one with the most mystique attached to it, which stems from the time a friend’s younger brother went to see it as part of a birthday party outing! This ten year-old’s retelling of the story and breathless descriptions of the murder scenes were more successful in selling the movie than the advertising was! (Though Jason’s knife poking through that curtain is a creepy image, at least to me!)

But the movie really isn’t very good! The direction is off and on, and the camera and lighting needs of 3-D make it sort of strange-looking, and the script tries to gin up drama with pranks and self-abnegation! It’s the only one of the Friday the 13th movies shot at a 2.35:1 ratio, and I like that; and there are some fun Special Makeup Effects; and there are some scenes where Jason is scary; and it’s of interest to historians of this sort of thing in that it’s the picture in which Jason acquires his famous hockey mask, stolen from Shelley no less! But that’s not much to hang a hat on, and so in the end I can give Friday the 13^th part 3 only one backup fuel tank!

Burl reviews Jaws 3-D! (1983)

Dumb-dumb, dumb-dumb, it’s Burl approaching from the starboard side! I’m here today to review one of the dumber of the Jaws pictures, Jaws 3-D! Ha ha, has there ever been a series of pictures with a steeper downward slide than these fish movies? I think not! Look at Jaws, which is so great, and then have a look at this gobbler, and you’ll feel your gorge rise as though you’re on the downslope of the world’s biggest roller coaster!

Jaws 3-D was directed by the production designer of the first one, Joe Alves! I’m afraid he learned nothing about filming effective shark attack scenes, as there aren’t any of them in this movie! Oh sure, there are shark attack scenes, but they’re really just someone getting faked out, and then the next time they turn around, there’s Jaws! Cue the bubbles and the bluh-bluh-bluh!

And in this picture, cue the things that are supposed to stick out into the audience because it was originally in 3-D! I recall the 3-D being pretty effective, but on home video we just sit and puzzle at all the instances of fish heads and spear guns floating, thrusting and poking toward the lens! There’s one nice gruesome bit with a floating severed arm, but that’s not much to hang your hat on! It’s no Parasite, ha ha!

Our setting is Sea World in Florida, owned and operated by flashy slapheaded impresario Louis Gossett Jr.! Working for him he’s got Bess Armstrong, last spotted taking the High Road to China, and Dennis Quaid, whom we know from Dreamscape and Innerspace! When a big shark comes to threaten the waterski pyramid, everyone knows something should be done, but nobody knows quite what!

Well, Simon MacCorkindale, the poor man’s Michael York, whom we know well from The Sword and the Sorcerer, has an idea! So far as I can tell he’s playing a sort of bloodthirsty Jacques Cousteau, and he wants to blast the shark with grenades! Quaid and Armstrong are of a different mind, and Louis Gossett Jr., well, he’ll go with whatever sells the most tickets! But the big shark turns out to be just a baby, and the mother is roaming around the underwater hamster tubes of the artificial lagoon!

It all builds to some hilarious scenes of MacCorkindale being eaten and a fantastically terrible trick effects sequence of the shark busting her way into the underwater control room! Poor Fred, the affable technician, is eaten, but then later somehow the previously munched-on MacCorkindale is partially regurgitated back up past Fred so that his hand, clutching one of his grenades, is lifelessly waving within Quaid’s reach! Ha ha, you can guess the rest!

It’s all exquisitely terrible in the way only a 1983 release can be! With the sea park setting, the flamboyant Gossett Jr. performance, the 3-D and the terrible script, it should be so much more entertaining than it is! I give Jaws 3-D one game of stand-up, whatever that is! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Parasite! (1981)

Hi, it’s Burl comin’ at ya! Ha ha, yes, I’m here with a review of a movie, and this one goes by the name of Parasite! It’s an early picture from the mind of the man with the miniature obsession, Charles Band, the auteur behind Head of the Family and so many others! In his day, Band was a sort of late-model Roger Corman, and though I’ve never cared much for his pictures, I admire the fellow nonetheless!

Parasite, in its theatrical release at least, was a 3-D picture, and Band later followed it up with another dimensional epic, Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn, which I’ll review for you if I can ever find a copy to watch! Ha ha, haven’t seen that one in years! Both of these were a part of the early-80s 3-D boom which brought us Jaws 3-D, Friday the 13^th part 3, Silent Madness and Treasure of the Four Crowns, among others!

Parasite opens with a dream-flashback sequence which fools you into thinking it’s going to be a much more interesting picture than it actually is! A perpetually-sweaty scientist played by Robert Glaudini (the playwright who would later script Jack Goes Boating) has created a pair of parasites, which look like someone put a snake and Mayor McCheese into a telepod! A lab accident leads to one of them nestling inside his abdomen; he packs up the other in a thermos and hits the road! He drives a stolen ambulance through the desert and ends up in a little town called Joshua!

Joshua’s population consists of one elderly café proprietor; a gang of punks led by a featherhair named Reekus; a grumpy pump jockey; a farmer played by Demi Moore (later to become famous in No Small Affair and other films); and Miss Vivian Blaine, who plays an ex-showgirl innkeeper, and whom you might recall from the alien zombie picture The Dark!

It’s the future, apparently – 1992, ha ha! – so everyday things like gas pumps and coffee makers have little Plexiglas accoutrements stuck on them; but otherwise Joshua seems pretty resolutely stuck in the early 1980s! Glaudini flashes his ingratiating smile around town a bit, then sets up shop in Miss Vivian Blaine’s rooming house! After this there’s trouble involving the gang, a Lamborghini-driving bad guy, and, too infrequently, the parasites!

It would be great if there were more parasite attacks and much less dialogue like “Maybe a little rattlesnake tea will loosen your tongue a little!” It’s a very badly-directed production, but there are at least some comfortingly familiar faces in the cast! Rainbeaux Smith, from The Pom Pom Girls, Massacre at Central High and others, appears as a topless lady at the beginning of the picture, and we also get an appearance from Cherie Curie of The Runaways and Twilight Zone: The Movie! Reekus the gang leader is played by Luca Bercovici, who later directed the pretty terrible Gremlins rip-off Ghoulies!

The best thing about the picture is a sort of amorphous 80s quality you can’t pin down or properly explain, but only feel! The grainy, layered quality of the photography is appealing somehow, and the parade of objects or slimeballs launched into the camera make me wish I could see it in its original three dimensions! But it’s really a pretty terrible movie in the end: a plodding, repetitive, badly-written expansion on the dinner scene in Alien! I give Parasite one and a half pipe impalements!

Burl reviews Silent Madness! (1984)

Burl! It’s Burl! Ha ha, another slasher movie to review for you today! I know that many of my readers enjoy these pictures above all! And this one, Silent Madness, appears to be especially loved by a small but dedicated contingent of motion picture admirers!

Some of you may recollect that one of my ongoing projects on this blog is to create a proper, if loosely organized, taxonomy of these slasher pictures! Mystery killers, faceless killers, deformed killers and motive-driven killers all ought to have their own comfortable categories in which to loll and plot their mayhem; movies which use the science and art of gore should be segregated from those which for some reason refuse to do so; and good movies must be separated from bad!

Where does Silent Madness sit in all this? Ha ha, well, let’s have a closer look! The plot in its broadest outlines is fairly scrupulously recycled from Halloween, actually: we have an escaped lunatic, a dedicated mind-doctor on his trail and a group of unwary goodtime gals directly in his path! There are a few victims along the way and a sheriff who refuses to believe the threat is real! From there, however, the two movies diverge pretty completely!

It seems that a pasty-faced individual named Howard Johns is released by mistake from a New York bughouse! He makes his way without delay to the small college town where, almost twenty years before, he’d been driven haywire by a brutal spanking inflicted on him by some sorority sisters! He’s never forgotten that bum paddling, nosirree, and he’s back to inflict revenge on all the current-day sisters of Delta Pi or whatever! (Ha ha, it’s all Greek to me!)

Feisty Dr. Lady is on his trail, and she in turn is pursued by a couple of incredibly sleazy and horrible orderlies from the hospital, who have been mandated by bughouse officials to kill Howard Johns and turn the doctor into a mental vegetable! Other characters mixed up in the action include the aforementioned sheriff played by skeevy Sidney Lassick from Carrie, Alligator and The Unseen; a soap-star type newspaper editor whose heroics consist of getting bonked on the head, tied up and locked in the back of a van; and the house mother played by the great Viveca Lindfors from Creepshow! Ha ha, it’s a pretty good cast actually!

Meanwhile Howard Johns has gone murder-happy, using a variety of relatively imaginative methods for his killing! He does a head-crushing in a vice, steams someone to death, tosses an animated hatchet and inventively uses a barbell, a rope and a window at one point as well! Some of the killings are fairly (almost uncomfortably) gruesome, and there’s a bit of actual gore here and there as well, and that treat for any slasher viewer, a credit for Special Makeup Effects! Ha ha, there’s also a special appearance by that great video game of days gone by, Dragon’s Lair!

Well, I won’t say too much more about this picture, except that it was made in 3D, so there are some things tossed, pointed and otherwise aimed at the camera lens! (The light-hungry 3D process also ensures that this is the rare slasher movie which takes place entirely in the daytime!) Also worth noting is the East Coast atmosphere, so different to the discerning viewer from the California or Midwest ambiances so often found in these things! And I must say it again: Viveca Lindfors! This is far from her greatest role, but I’ve always liked her, and her presence put me in mind of a picture called Last Summer in the Hamptons which I remember enjoying at a film festival once! Maybe I’ll watch it again and review it here sometime!

Silent Madness more or less delivers what anyone watching it deliberately might hope for, and though there’s an excess of plot and it gets a little chatty here and there, I’ll still give it two sudden nailgunnings!

Burl reviews Gorilla At Large! (1954)

Hi, it’s Burl here to get something straight with all of you pals: I love carnival movies! That is to say, pretty much any movie set in a carnival, and the seedier the better, will get my attention! Freaks, Carnival Rock (starring the legendary Dick Miller), Carnival of Blood (starring Burt Young), The Funhouse – they’re all great! Ha ha, I even didn’t mind that recent coming-of-age picture Adventureland! And please, don’t confuse carnival movies with circus pictures! An entirely different genre, ha ha!

Now that we’ve got that settled, let’s talk a little about another fine carnival movie, Gorilla At Large! I first saw this one on TV many, many years ago, when it was the big Television Event of the season! They were broadcasting it in 3-D, and you could get the glasses down at 7-11! Boy, was it exciting! I’m not sure why they picked this particular film, which came along toward the end of the original 50s 3-D boom – I guess it was more easily-licensed than better-known pictures like Creature From the Black Lagoon or Dial M For Murder!

I like gorilla pictures nearly as much as carnival ones, so having them doubled up like this is a real treat! Cameron Mitchell (of Without Warning) plays a barker/aspiring lawyer in Raymond Burr’s circus! Burr’s vampish wife Anne Bancroft is the trapeze artist who swings over the head of the mighty gorilla Goliath, who apparently went bad after somebody fed him a loaded banana! It took me a while to realize that Goliath was supposed to be a real gorilla and not a guy in a suit, but once I figured that out, it was no problem! Anyway, there’s quite a bit of behind-the-scenes intrigue going down at the carnival: a blackmail is in progress, Bancroft’s loutish ex-husband is giving everybody the hairy eyeball, Burr is uptight, and an amiable midget cadges cigars!

When the murders begin, it’s time for rumpled cop Lee J. Cobb, pretty much playing his Lt. Kinderman chracter from The Exorcist, to begin an investigation, aided by that other great Lee of cinema, Lee Marvin! It’s pretty charming to see the two Lees go toe-to-toe, with Cobb shouting “Ha ha, you’re a cop, not a ballet dancer!” at the gangly Marvin! And Marvin is pretty good in his minor role, but frankly you’d never guess from it that he was ever going to become a star!

Everyone assumes it’s the gorilla who’s going around giving people some pretty stiff neck-twists, but Gorilla At Large has a few tricks up its sleeve! I can’t say I didn’t see them coming, though – I’m not usually too proficient at guessing twists, but after they make a big deal of Anne Bancroft’s brute strength, which she’s apparently gained from years of acrobatics, I had it pretty well sewn up!

There’s plenty of weird stuff in this picture, and near the top of the list would have to be Anne Bancroft’s taste in men! He ex-husband is a scowly, slobby apekeeper, her new husband is Raymond Burr (a fine-looking man but frankly no sex symbol) and she puts some heavy moves on ginger-headed Cameron Mitchell, who’s a well-built guy and a lot younger here than we usually see him, but still basically looks like Cameron Mitchell! Ha ha, Mrs. Robinson groping the Toolbox Murders killer makes for a bizarre moment in cinema, I can tell you!

The gorilla is pretty good too! The costume will look familiar to anyone who’s seen Robot Monster, or any of a million other gorilla pictures (White Pongo being an exception, of course!), and it includes what I call the Gorilla Skirt: a strange, furry fringe that hangs down around the monkey’s knees! This particular simian isn't a chest-beater, but he grunts a lot, and at one point he hides in a bathysphere! Naturally he ends up at the top of a roller coaster with a lady slung over his shoulder, and when he’s shot down, he falls like a bag of dirty laundry! The movie doesn’t try to wring any King Kong-style pathos from the moment, but I found it pretty sad anyway! That gorilla didn’t hurt anyone!

I really enjoyed Gorilla At Large, from the carnival setting to the incredible cast, and I think you’ll like it too! I award it three loaded bananas!