Burl reviews Hard Times! (1975)

 

Ha ha, Hard Times yes indeed! We’re all having them! Yes, it’s Burl, here to review a fine picture from the beard of Walter Hill, and in fact Hard Times was his very first film as a director! You can see that plenty of his traits were in place from the start, for instance his Hawksian dudecentrisim, or his way of shooting action in short, sharp, tough little bursts! He kept going with a string of such pictures before diluting his reputation a bit with movies like Brewster’s Millions and, later, Supernova!

But getting down to cases! It’s the Dirty Thirties, and Charles Bronson of Mr. Majestyk fame is Chaney, a rail-riding hobo on the bum in the Big Easy! Of course he’s handy with his fists, and soon he’s hooked up with Mr. Patman himself, James Coburn, well known from High Risk and The President’s Analyst, in the role of a street fight manager called Speed! Along with a hophead medico played by the great Strother Martin from Nightwing and Pocket Money, they cause a ruckus in the Deep South punchfight industry!

Bronson’s opponents are played by the big-boned likes of Nick Dimitri from City Heat, Robert Tessier from The Sword and the Sorcerer (whose fighter shtick is that he keeps a delighted grin on his face throughout the punch-up), and Fred Lerner from Endangered Species; and Frank McRae from Vacation shows up swinging a sledgehammer! Ha ha, McRae is playing your basic thug here, but he manages in his short screen time to infuse his hammerman with a three-dimensional humanity - there’s a pro for you, ha ha!

There are ladies too, played by Jill Ireland from Death Wish II and many other Bronson pictures - she was Mrs. Bronson, after all! - and Margaret Blye from Mischief, and they are perfunctorily drawn in what would become part of the Walter Hill house style! But Hill does a terrific job in many other respects, pulling off a picture that seems very much a part of the wave of quality sweeping through film at the time! And it feels very much not a typical Bronson picture, and as much as I may enjoy many a Bronson picture, I call that an achievement to be proud of, particularly for a first-time director!

Bronson’s character isn’t much of one, though, outside of being very Bronson-esque! Coburn is always a treat, but here he’s frequently acting like a big smug jerk! And when it’s all over you realize there wasn’t much of a story, or too terrific an arc for the characters! Ha ha, it pretty much ends back where it started with not a lot to show for things aside from a few bare-knucklesmen laid out on the concrete! But the journey to nowhere is an enjoyable one! I give Hard Times two and a half giant playing card posters!

Burl reviews Mr. Majestyk! (1974)

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

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

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

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

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

Burl reviews 10 to Midnight! (1983)

Cease to worry, because Burl’s on the case! Yes, it’s me here with a review of a policier starring that most expressionless of action heroes, Mr. Charles Bronson! We all know the Son of Bron from his appearances in pictures like Death Wish II, but here, in a startling twist, he’s playing neither a vigilante nor a cop! Ha ha, no, in 10 to Midnight he plays a vigilante cop!

Looks like Los Angeles is suffering through a murder spree again! A lady has been found knifed in the park, and Detective Charles Bonson, or Leo Kessler as they call him here, is on the case with his new partner, the earnest Paul McAnn, played by Andrew Stevens fresh from Massacre at Central High! Bronson’s daughter, well-played by Lisa Eilbacher (whom we know from pictures as diverse as This House Possessed and Beverly Hills Cop), stands on the sidelines, hoping to get closer to her old dad, and growing fond of the chainsmoking McAnn!

Now to be sure, this is no mystery movie, no whodunit! The killer is Warren Stacy, who is one of these incel guys we have now, only instead of shooting up the place or running people down, he’s working out his nasty misogyny by putting brutal pokings on the ladies he hates so much and is so roundly, and justifiably, and regularly, rejected by! Gene Davis, an actor I’m not familiar with, does a top-notch job of playing the killer as creepy and hateful and vile and repellent and completely without sympathy, while still somehow seeming like not a very good actor! Ha ha! But Warren Stacey is the murderer all right, stalking and killing his victims in complete dishabille, and Detective Bronson is so convinced of this even in the absence of any proof that he manufactures some bloodstain evidence to ensure a quick conviction! However, he does this so ham-handedly that everyone knows he did it, and when he confesses to the act in court, Warren Stacey is set free again!

From there it’s a quick trip to the nurses’ residence where Bronson’s daughter lives with her roommates, and Warren Stacey gets his kit off and picks up the old poking knife! Killing a dorm full of nurses seems an unnecessary speck of verisimilitude even for this unpleasant movie, but there’s no tawdry road down which this picture will not travel! The ending, in which Bronson’s character throws away any pretense of respect for due process, is thoroughly depressing! And among the movie's greatest offenses: a criminal waste of Wilford Brimley!

Like just about any picture that strives to criticize the justice system from the point of view that criminals are simply afforded too many rights, 10 to Midnight is thick-headed and reactionary! It is so much so, in fact, that one is tempted to take it instead as a clever jab at exactly the kind of movie that it actually is, ha ha! With that immutable face of granite, Bronson seems calm, competent and in control, but his attempt to subvert the justice system is downright moronic, and leads pretty directly to the murder of the nurses!

But I can’t give this picture any credit for subversive cleverness! With its Junior Conservative Club message of “You liberals love criminals so much, but you liberals also say you love women, so how come you want a savage poker of ladies like Warren Stacey to be treated so fairly, huh liberals?” the movie tries for some kind of “Gotcha, snowflakes!” checkmate, but just comes off as idiotic and juvenile, figureheaded as it is by a particularly stupid hero! And the supposedly shocking flippy-floppy nude killer is just goofy, despite the effectively hateful performance from Davis! I mean, imagine if Michael Myers was walking around and you could see his bum all the time? I give 10 to Midnight one wad of gum!

Burl reviews Death Wish II! (1982)

Hi, Burl here, just looking for the ol’ wet-dry vac! Ha ha, actually I’m here to review a picture for you, and this time it’s one of those Charles Bronson Death Wish affairs, specifically the second one, Death Wish II! This is a movie that got terrible reviews, particularly from that old standby Roger Ebert! Ha ha, he hate-hate-hated it as I recall! I myself saw it many years ago when I was a young teen, or maybe even earlier, at the house of a friend whose family had just acquired laser disc technology! Ha ha, remember those? The darn things were a foot across!

I barely remember that viewing experience, but I did recall Ebert’s review! I thought, well, ha ha, maybe he was overreacting a bit! I mean, look at his review of Blue Velvet! Could be the same deal, I thought! I knew it was a kind of down-and-dirty picture, and moreover it was a part of the phenomenon I call Sophomore Slim! That refers to the strange propensity for the second entry in a movie series to be the shortest picture in their series, usually running about 87 minutes! You see it time and again: Friday the 13^th part 2 (87 minutes), A Nightmare on Elm Street part 2 (87 minutes), Exterminator 2 (89 minutes) and so forth! Death Wish II runs 88 minutes! Ha ha, but it's important to bear in mind there’s absolutely nothing remarkable about this phenomenon!

Anyway, as I’ve mentioned before, ol’ Burl is not a big fan of rape scenes in movies! It’s not because I’m a sensitive new-age fellow, though I am that, but mostly I just find them really unsavory! And perhaps it was watching movies like Death Wish II (which seems to be all rape all the time) and Savage Streets at such a young age that gave me this attitude, so maybe I should be grateful to them!

In any case, Death Wish II follows the same path as its predecessor! Bronson plays Paul Kersey, a former New Yorker who has relocated to Los Angeles, where, strangely, he seems to have become the in-house architect for a radio station! Tragedy befalls his family when a local rape gang steals his wallet, then goes to his house and performs one of the most hideously protracted sexual assault scenes outside of Irreversible on the poor maid! Then when Bronson and his daughter, who is still traumatized from her rape in the first picture, arrive home, they bop him on the head, kidnap the daughter, rape her too, then chase her out a window from which she plummets to a gruesome death by transfixion!

Ha ha, after that, the stone-faced Bronson dons a street-bum outfit and takes to the streets, where he very implausibly tracks down the gang members, and takes out a few extra muggers and another rape gang in the bargain! The cop from the first picture, Vincent Gardenia, follows him from New York, but then is blasted by the gangs! And it ends in a hospital where Bronson is helped out by a bearded orderly played by John Carpenter mainstay Charles “Halloween” Cyphers!

All of this is done very badly! The movie at once is a surprisingly realistically depiction of gang violence – namely, it’s messy, skeezy, disorganized and boring – and a boneheaded revenge fantasy that can’t even pull off its Neanderthal idea of catharsis! It goes without saying that the political nuance on view here is of the single-celled variety, but even in filmmaking terms, the movie is so inept it’s almost shocking! So, in short, Ebert was not overreacting to this one – ha ha, you had the right idea, brother!

I’ll refrain from saying more, because it’s just not worth it! Because Bronson has his own appeal, because some of the gang members are actual, decent actors (Kevyn Major “Full Metal Jacket” Howard, whom I always took to be the lost Howard brother, and Laurence “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3” Fishburne are among them) and because buried within the awful music by Jimmy Page, there is one halfway effective track, I’ll give Death Wish II one half of a cheesy glass cat! Bleah, stay away!