Burl reviews Night of the Howling Beast! (1975)

 

With a Spanish aroooo, it’s Burl, here to review some Iberian lycanthropy! Yes, ha ha, it’s our good and great friend Paul Naschy again, and here’s he’s playing his most beloved character, Waldemar Daninsky, just as he did in The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman, but didn’t in House of Psychotic Women! Poor Waldemar just can’t catch a break, and such is the case again in this picture, Night of the Howling Beast!

After an opening in which a gang of explorers in the Himalayas is attacked by a yeti who looks, sounds, and acts just like a werewolf, Waldemar is called in by The Professor to lead a follow-up expedition! He’s happy to do it, and happier still that The Professor’s comely daughter, and another beautiful science lady as well, will be participating! There are a few others in the party, including one fellow whose name is Lawrence Talbot, but who never comes close to becoming a werewolf himself, ha ha! No, he has to settle for merely being vertically impaled by Tatars midway through the picture!

On arriving in Nepal (played here by the Pyrénées), the party is split up, with Waldemar and the sketchy, perennially frightened local guide Joel heading off to find a pass through the snowy mountains! Joel runs off and Waldemar ends up in a cave inhabited by ladies who might be vampires or might be werewolves, but in any case they can’t keep their hands off the refrigerator physique of our hero, and this occasions much bum-wiggling sex! Once Waldemar realizes they’re flesh-eating creatures from beyond reality, he goes on an impaling jag; but before he can dispatch both ladies, one of them puts a chomping on his left tit! Ha ha, uh oh!

Now of course he’s a werewolf, and meanwhile the rest of the expedition is beset by the above-mentioned Tatars, who kill or kidnap everybody! Their leader, the Khan, has a skin condition on his back, and the witch in his employ is trying to remedy the ailment by peeling off other people’s backs and sticking it on the Khan’s! Yowch! Meanwhile there’s still a yeti, or yetis, running around, and Waldemar is periodically wolfing out, and what to do about these darn Tatars and their evil witch?

There’s a bit of a lull in the action around the middle of the picture while Waldemar and The Professor’s daughter hang out with a monk and his pal, but it’s nothing serious! There’s plenty going on at the Khan’s castle once Waldemar and the daughter arrive there, though! And the long-heralded battle between the yeti and the werewolf finally happens at the end, and it’s sometimes hard to tell one from the other!

As well, there’s time taken to give a happy ending in which the mystical flower is discovered by The Professor’s daughter right after the monster fight! Once she pushes a magic flower-blood combo into the werewolf’s toothy mouth, carefully, as you would, he reverse-pixilates into his Waldemar form and what’s more his wound seems to have healed! The last we see is the pair of them tromping off through the Himalayas in their leisurewear! Ha ha!

It’s pretty gnashy Naschy when all is said and done, and I enjoyed the picture, even if it gets a little sadistic here and there! Naschy didn’t himself direct this one, the better perhaps to direct his thespian attentions to the various ladies that want to “go ‘pon his bones for a touch of bohankie,” as they say! Yes, it’s solid Naschy, as solid as his own chest appears to be, and there's no doubt he knew just what his audience wanted to see, and gave it to them! Night of the Howling Beast is also known as The Werewolf and the Yeti, and by the end it earns that title, so I’ll give the picture two chomp marks!

Burl reviews The Capture of Bigfoot! (1979)

 

Fellow Rebaniacs, ho! It’s Burl here to review one of the Wisconsin auteur’s more polished works! Ha ha, do you know who I’m talking about? Can you name any famous filmmakers from Wisconsin? Well sure, there’s Orson Welles, but today I’m talking about Bill Rebane, who came from Latvia and settled in the snowy wastes of the Upper Midwest, and was never shy about showing off the area in all its wintery goodness in his films! And he does so in spades with this picture, The Capture of Bigfoot!

Like Invasion From Inner Earth, The Demons of Ludlow, and several other Rebane movies, this one was shot in the dead of winter with the actors all wearing parkas, issuing plumes of steam with every exhale, and crunching through calf-deep snow! I don’t know why Rebane made so many of his movies in the winter, because it’s really hard to do - believe me, I know! Ha ha, I saw somebody go crazy on a winter night shoot once, just fall down on the ground and run in circles jabbering in tongues like Homer Simpson! I suppose Rebane just likes the look, or perhaps that was simply when people were available!

Anyway, The Capture of Bigfoot is a very snowy picture, and frankly a very enjoyable one as well! First of all it’s a Bigfoot movie, and you know how I like those! Ha ha, I made one myself once! Also, it’s got some pretty good small-town atmosphere and some moments of uproariousness, as when the bad guy, in response to a sasquatch-related setback, punches one of his henchmen right out of a window! You have to see it to properly appreciate it, ha ha! There’s also a terrific dance club scene with some truly wonderfully awful songs and a fire crackling merrily in the hearth! Snowbeast, for all its virtues, would have benefited from such a scene!

It takes quite a while to get to the titular capture, and while some viewers may consider self-administering a dose of strychnine as they wait, they would be wrong to do so! Getting there is half the fun in a Rebane movie, after all! Here we have a town made up of woodsmen in earflap hats, swingin' young folk, humdrum cops, and greedy businessmen, or at least one greedy businessman, who through the course of the narrative is driven mad by his own ambition! Ha ha!

It all begins with some loutish trappers who’ve caught a strange creature and have it in a box on their dogsled! But a big tall snowsquatch pops out of the bushes and tosses these fellows around like rag dolls in an SCTV skit, and it turns out that the creature in the box is a teenage bigfoot with a kindly-old-man face! The local robber baron conceives of a plan: recapture the cryptids, put them on display, and make bank! Ha ha, it’s a misguided scheme as old as Carl Denham, and of course it ends with explosions!

There are a few more recognizable faces than we usually see in a Rebane project! Stafford Morgan, who later appeared in Die Hard 2, plays the local lawman who ends up freeing the captured Bigfoot from the cave cage he's been put in! Richard Kennedy from Holy Wednesday essays the role of nasty Mr. Olsen, who just gets meaner as the picture goes on! Otis Young from Blood Beach and John Goff from The Fog, Alligator, and The Candy Tangerine Man are Olsen’s hapless henchmen, Jason and Burt! And of course the great George “Buck” Flower, well known from pictures like Teen Lust, Cheerleader Camp, and Pumpkinhead, is a sympathetic local oaf! As with so many regional genre pictures, the cast here skews to the older side, and while they’re not quite as elderly as we find in, say, Bog, they’re up there!

It moves at its own pace and to its own logic, but I enjoyed the picture! Maybe it helped that I watched it most recently just a few days ago out in the snowy winter wilderness, in an actual cabin in the woods with the dim outlines of snow-fringed pines receding into a dusky enfilade! Bigfoot might have peeked in the window at any moment, ha ha! But if you’re a Rebaniac, and I assume you are, you’ll enjoy the thing to some degree wherever you watch it! I give The Capture of Bigfoot two red jumpsuits!

Burl reviews Boggy Creek II ...and the Legend Continues! (1983)

Ha ha and hello true believers! Yes, we’re back among the Bigfeet today with an amuse-bouche from Arkansas’ own hitmeister, Charles B. Pierce! Ha ha, his first big success at the ozoners was his 1971 pseudo-documentary The Legend of Boggy Creek; and then by some mysterious circumstance a quasi-sequel that Pierce had nothing to do with, Return to Boggy Creek, came along a handful of years later! Ha ha, and then, after doing a couple of horror pictures and some outdoor extravaganzas, I suppose Pierce figured he may as well do his own sequel: so in 1983 there appeared today’s movie, Boggy Creek II … and the Legend Continues!

Now, many of you may have seen this picture, but with a fellow and two robots gabbing over top of it! There’s nothing wrong with that necessarily, not with a movie like this anyway; and indeed their mockery of the Pierce picture is fitfully amusing and generally on point! But all movies are worth giving a chance to without extraneous commentary, if only so you can provide your own!

Pierce himself writes, directs, produces, narrates and stars in the picture, ha ha! He plays Brian C. Lockhart, whose friends call him Doc: a university cryptozoologist trying to prove the existence of the Boggy Creek Creature! He goes on about how trackless and vast these southern Arkansas wildlands are, but really, how vast could they be? Anyway, Doc hears about a sighting of the monster and rounds up a crew consisting of a frequently shirtless skinnybones played by the director’s son, a pretty grad student, and the grad student’s best friend, a cracker princess forever looking for her blush!

Ha ha, eventually the big guy shows up! Doc has set up some kind of perimeter sensors, so the picture gets a chance to lift some beats from Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot! It never gets quite as tense, though, as that bipedal classic! Nor is the movie nearly as good as its close country cuzzin Creature from Black Lake, though there are some townie scenes that recall that marvelous picture! No, frankly, there’s no area in which you can point at Boggy Creek II and say “Ha ha, this is the movie that does that the best!”

Still, it’s a bigfoot movie, and that goes a long mile with me! Old Man Crenshaw, the heavily bearded river rat who shows up in the last portion of the picture, gives the picture a little more of the eccentric rural pep it needs, and to be sure, there is a scene in which the Bigfoot knocks a jet skier off his machine! I wish he’d et the guy too, though! In the end, when you tally it all up, Boggy Creek II is worth no more than an uncle’s promise, and I give it one headless deer!

Burl reviews Return to Boggy Creek! (1977)

Hi, Burl here with a bigfoot picture to review for you! There are a lot of bigfoot pictures out there of course, and many of them are – ha ha, how do I put this delicately – not very good! And yet most of them have their coterie of devoted fans! Ha ha, except this one, Return to Boggy Creek! Absolutely nobody likes this one!

As a bigfoot completest, I knew this was a movie I’d have to watch sooner or later! I was always kind of dreading it though, for every review takes care to mention how Return to Boggy Creek is a) a kiddie movie, and b) a mind-crushingly boring one! Yikes! And in the bargain, it’s not actually a part of the Boggy Creek series of movies, even though it shares a location (the swampy “bottoms” of Louisiana) with those movies, and a star (Miss Dawn Wells) with the work of original Boggy Creek auteur Charles Pierce! But it's certainly no Boggy Creek II... and the Legend Continues! Then again, what is? Ha ha!

The story places us in the middle of a swamp, where three kids, Evvie Joe, John Paul and mute little T-Fish, are pulling cod from the creek like nobody’s business! Turns out it’s part of a weekly competition, and at the fish market later that day the kids give a hearty ha ha to their nearest competitor, Bruno! Bruno is played by someone who is at once the worst and the greatest actor in the movie, and his line readings are one of the picture’s great pleasures! It makes me sad that all the other reviews of this movie, even that of my pal Bleeding Skull, characterize Bruno as simply bad! He’s so, so much more, ha ha!

As in that fine bigfoot picture Creature From Black Lake, there are also two grumpy old coots, who spend much of the film telling stories, making up the mysterious “catfish kool-ade” the kids use as bait, or getting bonked on the head! They also spend many minutes worrying about something called “Big Bay Ti,” who is the local apeman creature, and who one of the elderlies blames for the death of his son, which is to say Evvie Joe and John Paul’s father! A portly big-city shutterbug who becomes obsessed with photographing Big Bay Ti convinces Bruno to take him deep down the Boggy Creek just as a hurricane is about to hit, and for some mysterious reason the kids, previously characterized as sensible, decide to follow along!

The rest of the film takes place during the hurricane, which means a constant wash of double-exposed wind and rain over the image! Bruno and the shutterbug are clobbered by lightning and falling branches, and then they and the kids are all saved by Big Bay Ti, who also conveniently provides proof that he didn’t kill the dad after all! Then there’s a happy ending and Big Bay Ti disappears off into the swamplands! Ha ha!

Well, there’s plenty of swampy atmosphere here, though not as authentic as we find in genuine backwoods productions like Terror in the Swamp! T-Fish has a wide array of hilarious scared faces, busting out a new one whenever the monster shows up; and there’s also some pretty nice swamp photography in the picture! On the other hand there are plenty of longueurs, a marvelously literal song that outstays its welcome, and not nearly enough Big Bay Ti action! But I’ll tell you this: I’m not sorry I watched the movie! I enjoyed its unhurried pace and its country-fried jocularity, and if you’re in the mood to hang out with some rural kids and their bigfoot pal, you may feel the same! I give Return to Boggy Creek two bottles of catfish kool-ade!  

Burl reviews Snowbeast! (1977)

It’s Bur-r-r-r-r-l! Yes, I’m here to review a winter picture, a TV movie called Snowbeast that spooked me royally when I saw it as a youngster! It was hyped for weeks in commericals, or so it seemed, and I knew I had to see it! Ha ha, I actually sat and watched it as my parents fiercely debated the wisdom of allowing me to do so in the next room! I thought it was a pretty great movie, better even than This House Possessed!

I watched it again recently, and I still think it’s pretty great, ha ha! Maybe that means I haven’t grown up in all the ways I should, but I prefer to think that I was simply able to recognize quality when I saw it, even at such a young age! I remember that it was broadcast in the summer, which made its snowy winter setting all the chillier somehow! Because winter can kill you on its own, never mind the bigfoots!

There’s a great bigfoot here, a shaggy white-furred guy who looks remarkably similar to the intentionally fake Bigfoot in Shriek of the Mutilated, ha ha! To tell you the truth, after all these years I didn’t think he’d still be scary – yeti totally was, ha ha! He rips off faces and grabs people by their heads and just mutilates as fast as he can! He’s the worst-tempered bigfoot in movies, with the exception of the one in Night of the Demon, of course!

As has been noted many times, the movie plays like one of those kiddie re-creation movies, not of Raiders of the Lost Ark this time, but of Jaws! Trade the ocean for a ski mountain, and sim sallah bim! Once again, three guys are after a monster who’s cutting into a seasonal community’s tourist trade; this time there’s a lady along too, calling to mind Jaws: The Revenge! (And there’s a love triangle, which brings to mind the original Peter Benchley book!) We have the grandson of the ski lodge owner, the deflated ex-Olympian ski guy who’s asking him for a job, and the skier’s wife, who loves them both! Add Hoss-voiced Sheriff Paraday to the mix, and you have the Yeti’s greatest nemeses!

It’s not just a movie for sasquatch lovers – fans underwhelming of ski footage have plenty to cheer about too! The theory I developed watching all this ski footage was that it was included so that different stations could cut more or less of it out to fit it into their commercial schedules without interfering in the plot! And one of the movie’s greatest assets: Sylvia Sidney, the smoker’s voice queen, as Carrie Rill, the matriarch owner of the lodge! I feel really bad for her when the Winter Carnival is interrupted by the rampaging beast, and the Winter Princess’s crown is trampled before it can even be bestowed!

There’s some fine thespian action here aside from old Sylvia – Bo Hopkins, the towering Man of Blond, is great as the depressed ski champ! He gets a fantastic redemption arc! The sheriff, played by Clint Walker after all, is fine too, and really gives it his all when he first meets up with the creature!

It could use a few more attacks and a little more footage of the creature and less of skiing! There are a few eerie shots of the bigfoot moving through the trees, but I guess they didn’t think it looked too good, so you really get only one or two glimpses of it! It’s still a scary movie, though! I give it three fades to red!

Burl reviews Terror in the Swamp! (1984)

Ha ha, Burl here! It’s been a while since I reviewed a swamp-monster picture (remember Bog? Creature From Black Lake?), but here we go with another one, an old classic (ha ha!), the poster for which I had hanging in my room when I was but a teenager! Yes, that’s right, we’re talking about Terror in the Swamp!

This picture was originally called Nutriaman: The Copasaw Creature, but New World Video rightly thought they should probably translate that into English for general North American release! It takes place in the deep, deep, deep south somewhere – it’s a magnificently regional picture, ha ha – in some swamplands where the people who don’t make a living from moonshinin’ do it by trapping fur-bearing rodents called nutrias!

The local game warden is played by a mustachioed individual named Billy Holliday, who bears no evident relationship to the blues singer! He discovers a man whose face has been covered in tomato paste by some creature or another, and almost right away the coroners and police realize they’re dealing with a monster nutria! In the meantime, two behemoth swamp brothers and their unpleasant swamp pappy find that nutria or nutrias unknown have been messin’ with their trapline! They recruit a buddy to help track the black beast to its lair, but don’t get much further than downing a few jugs of shine before tragedy strikes!

The giant nutria has also been scaring old ladies and pulling other hapless parties into the swamp! But when I really knew this movie was the real deal was when the two citified science-fellers responsible for the beast showed up! Ha ha, one is even more citified than the other! They’d been trying to breed giant nutrias for fur companies, so it would take only one of them to make an entire coat, but of course the experiment has gone awry! Ha ha, always awry!

Well, there’s plenty of excitement with the game warden, the police, the scientists, the overall-clad brothers, a general mob of swampbillies and a four-eyed, ratty-faced ex-Green Beret correctly dubbed by Joe at Bleeding Skull as “John Ramboo” all after the poor nutriaman! Of course dynamite comes into play, and several lives are lost in the fray! But all is rendered safe again in the swamp – or is it?

Ha ha, this is a picture I can really get behind! It’s poorly made for the most part, but has a few nice shots of the swamp and of the creatures who dwell within it! Of the two brothers, Jesse and T-Bob, T-Bob is both the fatter and the better actor! (Though it was Jesse who ended up in Fandango!) His performance is actually quite good! You can’t say that about too many of the other thespians, but they try gamely, and in the case of Billy Holliday, game wardenly! There could be a bit more of the red stuff for my taste – a few heads coming off and that sort of thing – and it’s not very scary, but overall the movie has a swampy, regional flavour that can hardly be beat! I give Terror in the Swamp two and a half burbling nutrias! 

Burl reviews Watchers! (1988)

Hi, Burl here, and today I’m taking a walk on the iron side! Yes, Michael "Total Recall" Ironside is in this picture, and as usual he’s playing a nasty fellow on the wrong side of the law, totally bereft of any common decency! Ha ha, he’s so good at playing those guys that I sometimes wonder if he ever regrets being born with a bald head and a hawk face! But I guess he’s made a few bucks off it, ha ha!

This picture is called Watchers, and it’s the story of a lab that suddenly blows up and of the experimental creatures which escape the conflagration! One of them is a hyper-intelligent golden retriever and the other is a hairy humanoid monster with an ape face, a jaws mouth and a taste for human eyeballs! There’s yet a third escaped creature, but to explain that one would be to give away important third-act story points! Oh okay, the third lab creation is Ironside, who’s been genetically monkeyed with to be crazy and have no conscience! But we knew that already because, Ironside!

The dog hooks up with Corey Haim, of all people, the fellow from The Lost Boys, Secret Admirer and Silver Bullet; and he might have been able to live out his doggy life free and easy from there, but for the fact that the ape creature has been trained to kill this particular hound – it’s some sort of experimental weapons system, or some bunkum and honeydew of that sort – and also that he’s being chased by the ruthless Mr. Ironside! Corey Haim dubs the dog “Furface,” and there are many scenes of the dog showing off his incredible intelligence and trying to convince Haim and his mother that danger lurks nearby!

Of course the ape creature, who is somehow able to stroll through suburban neighborhoods and high school hallways without being noticed, is, in a series of unexcitingly-filmed killing scenes, brutalizing people in the area and stealing their eyeballs! A pot-smoking hobo, a janitor, an Australian appliance repairman (if you know what I mean, ha ha!), a computer teacher, a deputy, Jason Priestly – everyone is fair game to this voracious monster! Finally Haim gets the message that he and his single mom might be in jeopardy, so he beats feet up to a cabin in the woods where he and his pops used to go hunting!

Meanwhile Michael Ironside is causing his own havoc, and when people get in his way he just kills them and plucks out their eyeballs so people will assume the monster did it! Ha ha, very clever, Ironside! It all comes to a fiery climax at the cabin, with everything taking place pretty much as you expect it will; except that in a quiet moment before the final donnybrook the dog challenges Corey Haim to a game of Scrabble; it’s left to us to decide who would have won!

This is not a good picture! It’s a real daffodil: never scary or exciting, and there’s no character to root for aside from maybe the dog, and even he’s not that sympathetic because he just gloms onto people even knowing he’s putting them in danger by doing so! But he’s still by far the most sympathetic character in the movie! The monster is pretty much a particularly vicious Bigfoot, and it’s never explained why he likes eyeballs so much!

Ahh, I hate to sound overly judgmental, but this movie’s not really worth a cruickshank! Because I like Ironside, and because the mom was a little weird, and because after all it’s a little bit Bigfooty, and you know how much I love Bigfoot, ha ha, I guess I can muster up one half of a curiously flammable video cassette for this bumkin of a picture!

Burl reviews Creature From Black Lake! (1976)

Hi friends! Burl here to talk about one of my all-time favorite movie genres, the bigfoot picture! There were lots of these movies released in the 1970s, and Creature From Black Lake was one of the best of them as far as I’m concerned! It’s a close cousin to the Boggy Creek pictures in many ways, but I think it’s better, and you better believe it gets pretty scary by the end!

It starts off with an old Louisiana swamp rat and his buddy checking their trap line for nutriamen or whatever it is they’re trying to catch! But wouldn’t you know it, the traps are empty, and then a monstrous, hairy arm reaches up from the water and drags the poor buddy down! Ha ha, it’s a pretty shocking opening for a 70s bigfoot movie, as those guys were usually portrayed as benevolent animals who might be scary, but really just wanted their privacy! This guy is the missing link between the gentle giants of such pictures as Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot (1977) and the badass devil-beast of Night of the Demon (1980)!

Two students from Chicago, Pahoo and Reeves, hear about this horrific incident and make their way down to Oil City, ‘weeziana, to investigate and maybe to bag themselves a bigfoot! But they don’t reckon on the closed-mouthedness of the townsfolk and the difficulty of pinning down the wild-haired old swamp rat, who is played by the great Jack Elam! Also, they get some hassle from The Man, in the form of a local portly police chief! But finally there’s a breakthrough: a local family who had a fatal encounter with the legendary monkeyman are grudgingly willing to tell their tale, which eventually leads to Pahoo and Reeves’ own scary encounter!

The great thing about this movie is the cast! Almost everyone is either really good or perfectly cast, or both! Pahoo, who wears a great baseball shirt with “Pahoo” emblazoned across the back – and you can actually order one of these for yourself on the internet, which I did a few years back and still wear proudly! – is played by Dennis Fimple, a very likeable guy who sadly died in a car wreck some years back, but not before becoming a very familiar character actor in movies like Truck Stop Women and the 1976 King Kong! Ha ha, that guy was always having trouble with apes! But Pahoo, your memory will live on!

Dennis Fimple is great, and the guy who plays Reeves is pretty good too; and there are some fine performances from a couple of old jaspers, the aforementioned Jack Elam and also Dub Taylor as the crotchety finger-lickin’ grandpa! And whoever played the bigfoot creature was no slouch either – he was pretty spooky, and his costume was not half bad!

Overall, even though I watched the movie last night on a crappy VHS tape (don’t get me wrong, I love VHS!) and I’d still like to see this movie in its proper widescreen format someday, I give this fine bigfoot picture three hamburgs, fries and large Cokes! Ha ha, track it down like the legendary beast it is, and enjoy!