Burl reviews Only the Lonely! (1991)

 

Hoch now, it’s Burl with a review for all the lonely people! Where do you all come from? Ha ha, just a little Beatles reference for you, but it should be said that the picture under review today is less a Beatles-type movie and more of a Roy Orbison joint! At least that’s where the title and the opening credits music comes from, and of course we can be talking about no other photoplay than Only the Lonely! (Ha ha, actually we could be talking about Pretty Woman or In Dreams, but nope, not this time!)

John Candy, so well known and loved from his roles in The Silent Partner and Volunteers and The Great Outdoors and many more, is Danny Muldoon, a Chicago cop who, alongside a partner played by Jim Belushi of Trading Places fame, has the job of transporting dangerous felons and also, mainly it seems, carrying away the dead bodies from the crime scenes! (The picture only very slightly explores the potential psycho-emotional ramifications of such a job, and there I think it might have missed a bet, although one scene is dedicated to plumbing its comic potential!)

Danny is a big friendly fellow who’s devoted to his mother, but not quite in a Norman Bates-y sort of way – though you can tell the relationship might be headed in that direction if allowed to fester, ha ha! Mother is played by flame-haired Maureen O’Hara, whom we recall from The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation, and who was here returning to pictures after a twenty-year absence; and it must be said that she hadn’t lost a step over that two decades of whatever it was she was doing instead of acting! And of course Mother is perfectly happy for her son to while his life away in service to her, and for his social life to comprise entirely of trips to the pub with her to hang out with Doyle and Spats, two barfly buddies nicely played by Milo O’Shea from The Purple Rose of Cairo and Theatre of Blood, and Bert Remsen from McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Lies!

There’s also a younger Muldoon brother, Patrick, essayed by Kevin Dunn of Marked for Death and Godzilla, and he’s the one who went to law school and got married and had kids (one of whom is that rapscallion Macauley Culkin, ha ha), and who catches a well-deserved punching from Danny in one of the picture’s more dramatic moments! But the big transformation in Danny’s life comes when he meets funeral home assistant Theresa Luna, played by Ally Sheedy from Blue City! She’s shy and mousy and can’t get dates because of her job, but of course to Danny, who handles corpses for a living, that’s no problem! Ha ha, her death-centric career notwithstanding, as someone who had a pretty big crush on Sheedy in the 1980s I did find it a bit unbelievable that Ms. Luna couldn’t get dates!

Mother, meantime, is an old-school bigot who seems to hate just about everyone who isn’t Irish – we hear all about her anti-Italian, and in particular anti-Sicilian, prejudices, and thanks to an amorous neighbour played by Anthony Quinn from The Guns of Navarone, we learn of her anti-Greek opinions as well! Of course she has many lilting objections when Theresa comes on the scene! As Danny and Theresa get closer, she becomes so desperate that she consults a “Polack priest” played by Marvin J. McIntyre from Fandango, who has no time for her nonsense! “I know you realize it’s the nineties, Mrs. Muldoon,” he tells her! “I’m just not sure you realize it’s the nineteen-nineties!”

So that’s the conflict: Danny is devoted to Mother and is constantly stopped in his tracks by alarming fantasies in which she meets a violent doom thanks to his distractedness; while Mother continues being nasty and spiteful and racist (we never hear her thoughts on, say, Jewish and Black people, which is probably for the best); and Theresa, for her part, quickly gets tired of her beau’s mommy fixation! The picture doesn’t always go exactly where you think it will with these dynamics, and that’s refreshing, though Sheedy’s character does seem to overcome her alarming shyness in unrealistically quick order! Candy is very much in Uncle Buck mode here, and one could argue that the performances are too similar, but on close inspection I found him to have an array of subtle techniques for individuating the two characters! So I feel grateful to Only the Lonely for helping me better appreciate the big man’s craft, an appreciation that I will admit took a hit after I saw JFK!

I watched the picture because I like Candy (ha ha, who doesn’t!) and want especially to see all the movies he starred it, with the possible exception of his final bow, Wagons East!, but frankly I wasn’t expecting much! It was a little better than I thought it would be, however, and while not particularly memorable and featuring too many instances of Candy's catch phrase "It's good to be a cop," it’s a solid showcase for the big man and demonstrates how good he could have been had he survived into his later years! (Ha ha, imagine his Lear!) Still, I wish the movie was better, and that it had a bit more pep and humour and grit and real complication! It’s not much more than a pale copy of Marty, but, mainly thanks to the cast, enjoyable enough while it’s on, and so I give Only the Lonely two breakfasts in bed!

Burl reviews Volunteers! (1985)

 

Good day campers! It’s Burl here with a bit of mostly forgotten 80s comedy that features some of the great stars of that period, ha ha, including such ringers as Tom Hanks from Dragnet and The Money Pit and John Candy, well known from Armed & Dangerous and The Great Outdoors! So how could a comedy movie with this sort of pedigree have been forgotten after only thirty-seven years? Well, mainly because it’s not very funny! And nobody went to see it in the theatre except me I guess, so there you go! The picture’s called Volunteers!

I still remember the experience of going to see it! It came out near the end of the summer (which might also help explain why it didn’t do very well), and just a day or two before I was to start my first day in high school! I recall feeling exactly neutral about it: it didn’t made me laugh, but I still derived some enjoyment from it, thanks mainly to the estimable Mr. Candy; and it mitigated that mild end-of-summer depression, which was the goal!

Well, I watched it again recently and it hasn’t improved much! Candy’s still good though, and it has a few bits I probably understand better now than I did then; and it still somewhat mitigates the anxieties of today’s world, which, ha ha, is the goal! It’s set in 1962, and Hanks plays a toffee-nosed fauntleroy just graduating from Yale and with all the attendant boorish manners thereby accorded; he’s a young man of privilege, a bounder, a snob, and a heavy gambler! He owes a chunk to his bookie, Allan Arbus from Damien: Omen II and The Last Married Couple in America, and if he doesn’t pay, Arbus's henchman, Ji-Tu Cumbuka from Out of Bounds (who had previously menaced Hanks in Bachelor Party, ha ha), will put a terrific pounding on the dinner jacketed lad! His rich dad, the ideally cast George Plimpton from L.A. Story, could help him out, but won’t!

The next thing you know, thanks to his roommate Xander Berkeley from Tapeheads, Hanks, or Lawrence Bourne III I should say, is on a Peace Corps plane overseas in the company of an amiable can-do character called Tom Tuttle from Tacoma, played by Candy of course, and a non-naïve idealist played by Rita Wilson from The Day It Came To Earth! “So this is hell,” moans Bourne! Peace Corps organizer John, played by Tim Thomerson from Zone Troopers, refuses to help send Bourne back, and so off he goes to the little Thai village with Wilson and Candy, where they are to build a bridge, and where the only fellow who can speak English is Gedde Watanabe from Vamp and Gremlins 2, and where in any case they don't want a bridge!

Others do, however: the local Communist soldiers for instance, and of course a drugs warlord played by Ernest Harada from Dreamscape, and a soon-to-be-revealed-as-maniacal Thomerson! Intersecting the story here and there are various characters played by such marvelous utility Asians as Clyde Kusatsu from Gimme an ‘F’, Professor Toru Tanaka from The Running Man, and Harry Yorku from Summer Rental! You’ll notice that none of these folks, as appealing a bunch of screen presences as they are, are even faintly of Thai extraction, but that’s how this movie rolls! After all, ha ha, it was shot in Mexico!

And it’s not terribly good! What it lacks most is pep, comedy pep! Maybe it’s just that Nicholas Meyer is not really a comedy director, though he managed some appealing lightheartedness in Time After Time! (I haven’t seen his other comedy, Company Business, but, ha ha, reports are not good!) Still, Ernst Lubitsch himself would have had trouble wringing comedy out of this script, which seems to put “laffs” about third or fourth down its list of concerns!

Another complaint: the period setting was every bit as convincing as the Thai locations, which is to say not much! The styling, the dialogue, the attitudes: everything seemed slightly off from where it should have been to place us firmly in the Kennedy era! And yet there are enjoyments to be had in the picture, and these, as earlier intimated, come mainly from the gangbusters cast! It’s too bad Candy gets kidnapped and brainwashed by Communists, and therefore drops out of the movie for a large chunk! At any rate, it’s probably not the worst thing either Candy or Hanks were involved with in the 80s, and there are bits and pieces I liked, so I give Volunteers one and a half college fight songs!

Burl reviews Little Shop of Horrors! (1986)

 

With a song in my heart, it’s Burl, here to review a movie musical! Here’s another one I saw in the movie theater, and when I think of this movie I think of my friend Jamie, whom I saw it with, and who is now deceased! So there’s always an element of melancholy connected with this picture, Little Shop of Horrors, but there’s delight too as I recall the strange adventures Jamie and I had the night we saw it! Ha ha, we witnessed a pair of toddlers speeding down the street at the wheel of a car, with nary an adult in sight! We saw a piece of garbage paper blown by the wind: it circled twice in the air then dove out of sight below a curb, emerging a second later as a living, flying bird! A cigarette butt blown along by that same wind struck Jamie in the chest and exploded in a starburst like a Tie fighter hitting the Death Star! Ha ha!

So all of these strange events, which are preserved not just in my memory but in the lyrics of a song Jamie and I wrote for our high school rock band, come to mind when I consider Little Shop of Horrors! Of course I was already a fan of the old non-musical Roger Corman version, because of course that one featured Dick Miller in a supporting role as the flower-eater Burson Fouch! I was slightly chagrined to see that the Fouch character had not been carried over from the original movie to the musical stage adaptation or the big-budget movie currently under discussion here; but thinking about it, I realized that the adaptors must have known they simply couldn’t find anyone as good as Miller to fill the role if they had maintained it! Of course they could have hired Miller himself, who was around and active when this movie was made, but I guess they didn’t think of that!

Still, the cast they ended up with is a pretty remarkable bunch of comedy superstars! Rick Moranis from Strange Brew and Streets of Fire plays Seymour Krelborn, the slightly-renamed nebbish working in the flower store and being constantly yelled at by his boss Mr. Mushnik, played by the aptly-named Vincent Gardenia from Death Wish II! Also working in the shop is the daffy spin case Audrey, played with great gusto by Ellen Greene from Wagons East!; and, as in the Corman original, one wonders how a Skid Row flower shop entirely bereft of custom can afford so many employees! Ha ha!

Further down the cast list comes a true galaxy of starpower! Steve Martin from L.A. Story and All of Me plays Audrey’s truly despicable boyfriend, a biker-dentist named Orin Scrivello! John Candy from The Great Outdoors does a marvelous job as a wacky radio host; Bill Murray from Meatballs shows up in the Jack Nicholson role of the masochistic patient; Christopher Guest from The Princess Bride does an excellent turn as a flower store customer – the closest analogue to the Dick Miller character, in fact; and Jim Belushi from The Fury appears without making much of an impact!

Of course the real star is Audrey II, the voracious monster plant Seymour discovers and begins feeding blood and bodies to! The trick effects used to bring the big flytrap to life are truly impressive, from the big reaching tentacles to the expressive lips; and the voicing, from Four Tops singer Levi Stubbs, is ideal! Almost as impressive are the three ladies who act as the story’s Greek chorus – ha ha, I thought they were terrific! And on balance I thought Frank Oz managed some fine staging on his Sesame Street sets, though a little more pep and dynamism wouldn’t have gone amiss!

But Frank shouldn’t have listened to those outraged preview audiences who detested the original apocalyptic ending of the story, in which the plant devours Seymour and Audrey, spawns equally hungry offspring, grows to immense size and goes on a Godzilla-like rampage! Ha ha, they must have been pretty angry audiences to convince a studio to dump a huge multi-million dollar sequence and replace it with a gormless happy ending involving a playhouse! It does a real injury to the movie, I think! I didn’t realize they’d monkeyed with it, not until I read an article in Cinefantastique magazine anyway, but I could still tell there was something missing! It’s never been restored, though you can watch it on the internet! And considering all this, I’m forced to give Little Shop of Horrors two and a half bandaged fingers!

Burl reviews Nothing But Trouble! (1991)

Ha ha and ham candies, it’s Burl, here to review one of the stranger Celebrity Dream Projects ever to have been made: Dan Aykroyd’s Nothing But Trouble! Ha ha, I’ve been consuming information about this thing for years, but until yesterday I’d never seen it! Everything, but everything I’d heard was bad, though; and Aykroyd is by all accounts an unusual fellow, so the prospect of a weird-looking movie written and directed by him, and of course featuring him as some sort of bloated, scab-covered old man, was a daunting one! I was prepared for a truly terrible movie-viewing experience, ha ha!

The picture’s original title was Valkenvania, and I maintain that whatever timid, unimaginative studio exec decided it should instead be called Nothing But Trouble did both the picture and its legacy a grave disservice! Ha ha, what’s in a name you might say, especially if the film itself is as inept and pointlessly grotesque as people say it is! But movies, even bad ones, are fragile and finely-wrought creations, like pixies or unicorns, and so with them everything matters, and the slightest misstep can be like coughing on a house of cards!

There’s a strong comedy cast: not just Aykroyd from Ghostbusters, but also Chevy Chase from Vacation, who must have got along with Aykroyd when they worked together on Spies Like Us, and John Candy, with whom Aykroyd co-starred in The Great Outdoors! Demi Moore, well known from her role in Parasite (the original; accept no substitute, ha ha!), is in here too, along with familiar faces like Taylor Negron (with whom I had lunch once, and who was a garrulous and maximally entertaining dining companion) and Brian Doyle-Murray!

Chase plays some sort of Manhattan financial player who meets his new neighbor Moore, a lawyer, and almost immediately offers her a ride to some kind of event in Atlantic City! With two annoying faux-Brazillians tagging along, they detour through the town of Valkenvania, where they run afoul of local constable Candy! He escorts the BMW full of yuppies to Valkenvania’s reeve, an ancient crank played by Aykroyd in leperous maquillage, who entraps them in his mansion/junkyard/funhouse and torments them with conveyer belts, pop-ups, and piles of bones!

Malefactors whom the reeve likes even less are sent immediately to Mister Bonestripper, a big machine that grinds people into skeletons! Ha ha! Meanwhile, Moore is stuck with two enormous, filthy diaper babies, one of whom is also played by Aykroyd! Ha ha, with all that time in the makeup trailer it’s amazing he had time to direct the movie! But direct it he did, and while I won’t say he did a great job, I can say I’ve seen worse! The busy production design and experienced cinematographer (the portly Dean Cundey, who shot The Thing and many other fine films was behind the camera here) certainly help the picture seem professionally made!

It’s really just an elaborate comedy version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (which already had its elaborate comedy version, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2), but merely the fact that it was this story and no other that Aykroyd wanted to tell in his directorial debut is simply delightful! Ha ha, it’s true that Chase puts in a particularly low-key, possibly even lazy performance, and it’s true the narrative is shapeless and deflated, like something I might have written in high school, but I nevertheless found plenty of laffs in the picture! It’s weird and gross and goofy-bad, but it's undeniably ebullient, and I felt very much that I was on its wavelength, that I was picking up whatever it was Aykroyd was laying down! (I sort of wish I’d been wearing gloves though, ha ha!)

The big diaper babies alone make it an irresistible treat! There are some extremely annoying characters you wish could take a trip through Mister Bonestripper post-haste, but there’s also an obliging hip hop crew who perform a number and who are freed by the reeve possibly because one of them, like the reeve himself, wears a false nose; and there’s a second, mute performance by Candy as a lady with unearthly strength! I wasn’t expecting to like this picture, but I did! I give Nothing But Trouble, alias Valkenvania, three cans of Hawaiian Tropic!

Burl reviews Planes, Trains & Automobiles! (1987)

Ha ha and best of Thanksgivings to my Yankee Doodle friends! Yes, here for you is one of the quintessential American Turkey Day movies, Planes, Trains & Automobiles, which has no particular holiday resonance for me, being Canadian as I am, but is a perfectly enjoyable picture simply on its own merits! I like it better than Uncle Buck, anyway, ha ha!

Anyway, a viewer looking for Canadian content need look no further than John Candy, who alone provides a great deal of content, ha ha! This beloved comedy star, admired for his appearances in pictures like Summer Rental and Armed and Dangerous, and of course that other holiday classic The Silent Partner, plays shower curtain ring salesman Del Griffith, who travels around hawking his wares and making friends everywhere he goes! Meanwhile, uptight Chicago ad man Neal Page, in New York for a presentation, wants to get back to Chi-town to be with his picture-perfect family for the holiday! Neal is played by silver-domed Steve Martin, famed for roles in All of Me and ¡Three Amigos!

This picture is the story of their trouble-filled journey from Wichita, where foul weather forces them to land, to Chicago, and of course there are many delightful happenings along the way, and strong performances from both Martin and Candy! Ha ha, in fact, I think this may be Candy’s best work! Alongside the delights there are plenty of patented John Hughes moves, like the ascension of minor inconvenience to high tragedy when the victim is a white upper middle-class fellow; the absolute fealty to bourgeois family ritual; sudden sledgehammer blows of sentiment; and the use of horror movie tropes like musical stings and oblique cinematography to introduce working class characters, who are supposed to be naturally terrifying, I guess, unless they’re founts of wisdom like Carl the janitor in The Breakfast Club! Ha ha!

It’s a two man show for the most part, but Hughes sprinkles in plenty of cameos and familiar character faces! Kevin Bacon, well known for his appearance in Friday the 13th, shows up as a young businessman trying to get the same cab as Neal; Michael McKean from D.A.R.Y.L. turns up near the end as a highway patrolman; Larry Hankin from Escape From Alcatraz is Doobie the cabbie; Richard Herd from Summer Rental and Gary Riley from Summer School are in there too, along with plenty of others! There are even familiar voices, like that of Chino ‘Fats’ Williams, who is an unseen bus driver here, and was one of the old boys in the blues bar in Weird Science!

Anyway, we all know the story and we all know the jokes, and probably most people feel Planes, Trains & Automobiles is as much a comfy blanket to put on in a cold season as it is a movie! Ha ha! But it raises a lot of questions, too - things that are maybe explained by the rumoured four-and-a-half hour original cut, ha ha! I wonder if that wouldn’t have been a bit much? Anyway, I wonder how it works out after the concluding freeze frame on John Candy’s face: did Del stay for Thanksgiving dinner? Did the in-laws all accept him? Where did he go after that? Who paid for the destroyed rental car? Ha ha, I give editor Paul Hirsch a lot of credit for putting it all together and leaving room for all the comedy smash cuts Hughes was so fond of!

Well, it’s a solid little picture, not beloved by me, but I admit it has a comfy feeling to it! I saw it at the theatre, maybe on not exactly a date but one of those little co-ed gang outings that sometimes happened! Ha ha, I saw The Breakfast Club that way, too, which was apt! In any case, it gave me a fondness for both these Hughes works that I might not have otherwise, and so I give Planes, Trains & Automobiles two and a half pillows!

Burl reviews Vacation! (1983)

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, it’s Burl here taking a ride on the Vacation kick! Ha ha, holiday road! Yes, you’ve got to know that I’ve just watched that famous film Vacation, or as it’s more formally known, National Lampoon’s Vacation! It’s an 80s comedy film I’ve always mildly enjoyed, and this time around I mildly enjoyed it once again! Ha ha!

I think on the whole Christmas Vacation gets more love from the people, but I prefer this installment myself, in part at least because of the summery setting! But I’m also fonder of this one because I enjoyed it as a youth, and never bothered seeing the Christmas one until much later, ha ha!

Anyway, the plot is pretty straightforward: family man Clark W. Griswold takes his lady-wife and two children on a road trip from Chicago to Los Angeles in order to visit Walley World, the famous amusement park, but encounter many difficulties along the way! Ha ha, that’s it! But it’s not a narrative-driven picture, after all, and never claims to be! It’s a film of moments, some of which are funny, some of which are lamely xenophobic or ethnocentric! But it has a carefree tone throughout that keeps it pretty fun, and also features the multi-headlighted Family Truckster, a made-up car, which is something I always like to see in a movie! Ha ha, this particular auto is a bit more benign and a bit less resilient than The Car, but not much!

Chevy Chase, a.k.a. Fletch, plays the dad of course, and Beverly D’Angelo of The Sentinel is his lady-wife! These two did of course stick through the whole series, but, ha ha, the kids changed every dang time, because of, you know, puberty! Here the small fry are Anthony Michael Hall, well-known for his role in Out of Bounds, and Dana Barron of Heaven Help Us! Everyone in the family does a terrific job, particularly Chase, and it’s easy to see why he was such a popular comedy star even if he did many terrible movies and nobody liked him much personally!

Frankly there’s a pretty great supporting cast too, with lots of fine comedy cameos! Randy Quaid of The Paper appears as the famous Cousin Eddie, who later got his own spin-off movie which I will never see; Norval Jones himself, Eddie Bracken, plays the Disney-like Roy Walley; James Keach, looking very much like he later would in Moving Violations appears as a motorcycle cop; Imogen Coca is an ornery granny; Eugene Levy from Armed and Dangerous is the car salesman who sells Chevy the Family Truckster, and John Candy from Summer Rental plays a Walley World security guard! It’s a pretty impressive aggregation of 80s talent, with a few underused old ringers tossed in!

It’s a sunny and likeable picture that could have gone a bit deeper maybe, plumbed the depths for laffs a bit more! Still, the uncomplicated style of director Harold “Caddyshack” Ramis suits the material well, ha ha, and the movie is ultimately a painless way to spend 96 minutes! Ha ha, I’m going to give Vacation two flattened moose snouts!

Burl reviews Summer Rental! (1985)

Hi, Burl here with another movie review – a fluffy summer holdover called Summer Rental! This was one of the first starring vehicles for John Candy: he’d spent years as a second banana – albeit a big one – supporting comedy stars like Tom Hanks (in Splash and Volunteers), Richard Pryor (in Brewster’s Millions), Bill Murray (in Stripes) and Elliot Gould (in The Silent Partner)! But thanks to this picture, we could look forward to such Candy-centric pictures as Armed and Dangerous and Uncle Buck!

Candy plays Jack Chester, an air traffic controller showing signs of burnout! He’s ordered to take a vacation, so he loads up the family and it’s next stop: Florida! There they take up residence in a seaside shack, and Candy meets two older men who will become important to what scanty shreds of a plot Summer Rental has to offer! The two men are Richard Crenna, whom we know from such films as Death Ship and The Evil, playing a local big-shot and sailor-man who’s managed to win the regatta every year for nearly a decade; and the other is a pirate restauranteur played by Rip “Extreme Prejudice” Torn, who becomes Candy’s ally and sailing mentor!

Karen Austin, whom we may know from Fish Hawk and Far From Home, plays Candy’s wife here, and does so in the same amiably boilerplate way as Stephanie Faracy would in The Great Outdoors a few years later! Kerri Green, who captured hearts in Lucas and The Goonies, plays his eldest daughter, and there are a couple of other kids as well!

The movie clocks in at a lean 87 minutes, but is very obviously missing entire subplots that someone (the studio, or maybe director Carl “All of Me” Reiner) decided should be given the chop! Ha ha, John “Demon Knight” Larroquette shows up as a solicitous vacationer who helps the family (minus Candy) get into a screening of Top Secret, and is perfectly positioned to serve as a romantic rival to Candy, but then poof! He’s gone! There was other stuff like that too!

Altogether it wrecks the image of the finely-crafted 80s Paramount entertainment machines I described in reviewing Footloose, because the movie is kind of muddled, ha ha! (It reminded me of another 1985 Paramount picture, Blue City, in that way!) There’s not a whole lot of forward momentum, or vim, or pep, or, frankly, laffs! Sure, Candy is funny and appealing, because he always was! Crenna and Torn are good too, but the script, I think, is the culprit here! Ha ha, no jokes! Reiner’s direction is a little bland too! It’s a pretty forgettable little fushtwanger and has all the plot of an actual vacation, so I’ll just give Summer Rental one and a half elderly Chinese pirates!

Burl reviews The Great Outdoors! (1988)

Ha ha, time to go deep, deep into the piney north woods with Burl to review The Great Outdoors, a picture from John Hughes and Howard Deutch, the same team that brought us Some Kind of Wonderful just one year earlier! This time it’s not a teen angst fest though, but, purportedly, a goofy family comedy!

It’s another movie where John “The Silent Partner” Candy goes on vacation, just like he does in Summer Rental, and again it all goes hooky-pooky! Because, wouldn’t you know it, just moments after he and his family (wife, two boys) install themselves in a fantastically huge lakeside cabin owned by Robert “Christine” Prosky, along comes his brother-in-law Roman, uninvited, to mess up the week! Roman is played by funnyman Dan “Ghostbusters” Aykroyd, and he’s a slickster investment-banker type with a wife and two daughters modeled after the twins in The Shining! (Twilight Zone music plays whenever they appear on screen, which I suppose is slightly better than using the shower cue from Psycho! But not much!)

From there the movie is mainly plotless! Candy’s Chet and Aykroyd’s Roman have a mildly antagonistic relationship, which plays itself out shaggily through the first two acts, then suddenly becomes more heated largely so the picture can move into its final act! The other members of their families mainly just sit around and watch, though Candy’s older boy finds time to strike up a romance with a pretty local girl (which supplies the teen angst we expect from Hughes, ha ha!), and the two little girls get themselves lost in a dynamite-filled bear cave so the picture can have its climax! (Some Chekhovian law or other is brazenly flaunted by the unbelievable fact that this dynamite never goes off!)

The best part of this picture comes near the beginning, when Chet tells the story of a bear encounter he’d had in that very cabin, years before on his honeymoon! He’d fired a shotgun at the bear and, while failing to wound it, had taken all the hair off its head with his buckshot! Towards the end of the picture this very same baldheaded bear returns, and I was astonished to find by watching the credits that the picture’s Special Makeup Effects, which credit I assume is in reference mainly to the bear’s glabrous pate, had been created by none other than Rob “The Thing” Bottin! Ha ha! The bear itself is of course played by Bart, and not to be a name dropper, but he’s a celebrity I’ve actually met! At a certain distance of course, ha ha!

But aside from the bear and an opening set to “Yakity Yak,” most of the movie is pretty dire, and I say this as one who appreciates the comedy stylings of both Candy and Aykroyd! Ha ha, it’s just not a very funny picture! I suspect director Deutch is a man without much of a sense of humour, and that what hilarity could be gleaned from Grumpier Old Men came only in spite of his work! As for Hughes, well, he provides a few bon mots, but this feels like something he tossed off over a weekend at his own lakeside cabin! There’s a certain country coziness to it, but it’s too episodic and ramshackle even to provide 80s comedy-level amusement! So in the end, it’s my sad lot to give The Great Outdoors one set of bear buttocks!

Burl reviews Uncle Buck! (1989)

Hi, bananas! It’s Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to review a John Hughes picture I’d never seen before! I thought, ha ha, since I’ve enjoyed many of his other works, like Weird Science and so on, so forth, I should give this one a look too! Plus it has John “Armed & Dangerous” Candy as the titular avunculus, so hey, why not!

The important thing in setting up a high concept late-80s comedy like this is establishing the situation, however unlikely it might be! We have a family, and a well-to-do one it is from the look of their giant house! Presumably they live in Shermer, the same Chicago suburb wherein dwell Ferris Bueller, the Breakfast Club gang, the lady from Sixteen Candles and so forth!

But, ha ha, they have a problem! More of an inconvenience, really! The spectacularly unphotogenic mother’s father is ill, and they must go to whatever Midwestern backwater he lives in to offer succor, and for some reason both parents must make this trip, and for some other reason the teenage daughter can’t be relied on to provide care for the two younger children (quite reasonable, actually); and for some other reason entirely, adequate care cannot be found! Enter Uncle Buck, who’s meant to be a family black sheep but in reality is a dogmatic moralist who might give the sternest Puritan a run for his money!

The teenage daughter is a grim specimen indeed: she’s perpetually angry for no particular reason, much like the sister in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and she’s rude to poor Uncle Buck and mean to her little brother, who’s played by the kid from those Home Alone pictures! Macauley Conklin is his name!

Meanwhile Uncle Buck has his own problems, which revolve around his ladyfriend, Amy “Streets of Fire” Madigan! Ha ha, when will this oversized manchild finally grow up? It’s the dynamic we see in so many 1980s comedy pictures! But here, as wonderful as John Candy is – and he has many great moments – he never really convinces as a dyspeptic layabout! Ha ha, he’s just too upright of a fellow!

There’s not much of a plot here, and few jokes that are funny, and not much that sticks in the memory! For the first half of the thing, such was its polytetrafluoroethylene character that I wasn’t sure whether or not I'd even seen it before! It turns out I had not! And now that I have, I think there remains only one or two Hughes-directed pictures I haven’t watched, and at least one of them concerns a little girl and a grumpy TV star! Ha ha, I won’t be rushing out to find that one, I don’t think!

The picture has a few endearing cameos, principally that of Mike Starr, well known from The Money Pit and Funny Farm, in the role of Pooter the Clown! But beyond that, a good heart, and a few funny bits, there’s not much to recommend it! I watched it more out of a sense of obligation, as well as the Everestian “because it was there!” (Ha ha, I got it as part of a bulk VHS pawn shop score!) So on balance, and after much serious consideration, I’m going to give Uncle Buck one and a half giant pancakes!

Burl reviews The Silent Partner! (1978)

Ha ha, it’s Burl, please give me all the money! No, just kidding, I’m not here to rob you! I’m here to review one of my own Yuletide standards, the great Canadian thriller The Silent Partner!

Yes, where some people have Die Hard or Cobra, my own favourite non-Christmasy Christmas picture is this jolly tale! But many people forget – I myself had forgotten before re-watching the movie, in fact – that it’s only a Christmas picture for the first half, after which it switches to a summery milieu! Nevertheless, the images of a cold-eyed Christopher “Dreamscape” Plummer in a Santa suit are what linger from the movie, so file it under Xmas, say I! Ha ha!

The plot unfolds like the chess game so frequently and unsubtly referred to through the picture! Miles Cullen, played by Elliot Gould from M*A*S*H and S*P*Y*S and W*H*I*F*F*S, is a milquetoast bank teller in Toronto’s then-new Eaton Centre mall! It’s nearly Christmas, and the observant Miles notices clues which lead him to believe one of the many mall Santas is going to mount a bank heist! So he prepares by setting aside most of the money for himself, and Plummer, the bad Santa, gets away with only a small amount!

Well, this does not sit well with Santa, and he sets about trying to von Trapp the teller into giving him the money! Back and forth goes the see-saw, and soon Miles has cleverly led the police to Santa’s very workshop itself! This is where the time jump occurs, with Miles sitting on his money – which he keeps in a safe deposit box at the curiously low-security bank – while Santa sits in the cooler!

Of course the battle continues once Santa is released, and then we have more threats, some shouting, a gruesome fishtank murder and a scene in which John Candy, years before he was Armed & Dangerous, gets married to a vacuum-headed blonde! Finally Santa, who has reinvented himself as a woman, makes another assault on the bank, and Johnny Smith’s dad from The Dead Zone gives him serious what-for!

Anyone who is curious about what Canadian money looks like should watch this picture! They’ll find not just many scenes of Gould counting out bills, but attractive photography from Billy “Billion Dollar Brain” Williams and solid suspense direction from Daryl Duke, who’d made Payday a couple of years earlier! Little remarked upon, other than for its existence, is the score by jazz great Oscar Peterson! Ha ha, it turns out that Peterson was not just a great pianist and composer, but a dab hand at suspense music as well!

Here is a fine genre exercise, dated in only the best ways! (Candy, for example, is quite svelte!) There could stand to be a little less of the relationship between Gould and banking colleague Susannah York, but it pays off in the end, and makes the picture richer! The young and lovely Francophone who makes sweet love to Gould later in the picture is not the greatest performer ever, but she does okay! In sum, this is a movie worth your while, especially at this time of year! I give The Silent Partner three deceased angelfish!

 

Burl reviews Armed and Dangerous! (1986)

Ha ha, yes, it’s Burl here, once again catching up with a 1980s comedy movie I’d never before seen! This time it’s Armed and Dangerous, a buddy picture featuring two stars of the great SCTV show – possibly my all-time favourite television program ever produced!

John “Brewster’s Millions” Candy and Eugene “Cannibal Girls” Levy are the two buddies, but of course the poster makes it look as though it’s a one-man Candy show! Ha ha, he was certainly the larger star back in 1986! But it’s safe to say that, while this picture gives the big man some choice comedy moments, it’s yet another in the string of movies – Summer Rental, The Great Outdoors, Delirious – that failed to capitalize on the Canuck laff-laff genius he embodied!

Candy plays a cop on the beat who catches some fellow officers stealing TV sets! The tables are turned and it is Candy himself who is ejected from the force! Meanwhile lawyer Levy is disbarred for being not a very good lawyer! Neither of these fellows, it should be noted, are through-and-through bunglers – Candy even makes the claim that he was a particularly good cop! Still, they both end up working as security guards at an operation run by Kenneth Mac “Protocol” Millan, and staffed by his daughter, Meg “Innerspace” Ryan! Ha ha, it was a real confusion for me, trying to decide which of these two fellows would claim Ms. Ryan as his love interest! Eugene Levy, it turns out, in the most perfunctory romantic subplot of the year!

The action part of the story begins when the boys realize that the union they’ve been forced to join is run by crooks! Ha ha, the fact that Robert Loggia, well known from Psycho II and Over the Top, is their union boss ought to have been a tip-off! And the fact that a union is being represented at all in a Reagan-era mainstream movie ought to have been another! Ha ha, it wasn’t the most union-friendly era in American history, was it! But I wonder how all the brothers and sisters of the I.A.T.S.E. felt about working on such a flagrantly anti-union picture!

Anyway, in a comedy like this it’s just a plot mechanism and not to be taken very seriously! What the movie does try to take seriously is its action scenes, which are pretty generic, but more spectacular than I was expecting! The movie was directed by Mark L. Lester, who made Truck Stop Women and Roller Boogie, and before this had just finished Commando, one of the finest and most explosive Arnie pictures! So no wonder Armed and Dangerous has so many splosions of its own!

Ha ha, but do you want to know the most unexpected part? I actually found this picture somewhat funny! Yes, if you had been there you would have heard ol’ Burl give off a chuckle or two! I thought it would be a laff-free zone along the line of Moving Violations, but no! Candy and Levy both deliver solid performances and create actual characters; the supporting cast is strong (Brion “Blade Runner” James, James “Wolfen” Tolkan, Don “Explosion” Stroud and Tiny “Blue City” Lister are all in there, with a special friendly appearance from David “Swamp Thing” Hess! Ha ha, quite a gang!); and the picture is slick and well-paced! It’s hardly the greatest thing since graham crackers, but I’ll give Armed and Dangerous two Steve "Lifeforce" Railsback cameos!

Burl reviews Brewster's Millions! (1985)

Hi, it’s Burl here to review a movie that had a lot of potential! Well, maybe not a lot, but a lot more than was ever realized by the final product! Brewster’s Millions was about the ninety-hundredth adaptation of a 1902 novel of the same name, and I guess it’s the wish-fulfillment storyline that keeps it so perennial! It seems there’s a down-and-out type of guy who turns out to have that eccentric rich uncle we all would like to have; and this uncle croaks it and leaves all his money to the schmoe! But of course there’s a catch: to make him appreciate the money, he must spend a huge chunk of it in thirty days without anything to show for it at the end, just to give him a disinclination for free and easy spending!

So it’s a classic chestnut of a story! Let’s just say it’s the mid-80s, and one of the great comedy talents of the era, Richard Pryor, is chosen to play Brewster the squanderpuss! And let’s say he’s surrounded by a dependable group of comedic players, including the majestic John Candy, and the project is written by some guys who’ve had a recent success with Trading Places, a very similar story, and the whole thing is entrusted to a real left-field choice of director, namely the great punch-‘em-up king Walter Hill! Sounds pretty good, right?

Well, what they came up with after all those fine ingredients was this frou-frou, and I’m sorry to speak in such harsh terms, but it’s not worth a cruickshank! Pryor’s not too bad as the baseball-obsessed simpleton Brewster, but John Candy is both mis- and underused as his rotund best pal Spike! Candy was an excellent comic actor, and played just about every kind of character on SCTV, but in the movies it was always a bit dicey whenever he tried to play a slightly sleazy guy! His character in JFK is a good example!

Brewster’s Millions starts out not too badly, that’s the sad thing! Pryor and Candy are on the Hackensack Bulls, a minor league team so minor that they have freight trains chugging through their outfield! The Bulls manage to win a game though, and we go to a scene in a bar which ends in a wild donnybrook! Ha ha, we get to see John Candy and Richard Pryor kicking bu*t and then ending up in jail together, and at that point it looks like we could be in for a profane action comedy along the lines of Hill’s earlier 48 Hrs.!

However, no such luck! After Brewster learns about his inheritance and the secret clause, and sets about spending his $30 million in thirty days, the movie settles into a repetitive groove! Brewster does something dumb and excessive with money while his associates look puzzled, or he gets downcast when he accidentally makes money, or there’s a montage of him spending money crazily! Eventually the movie doesn’t so much end as peter out in a non-climax that features Brewster throwing one measly punch at the ridiculously ineffectual forces that have arrayed against him over his mensis perditus!

I know free advice is worth exactly what it costs, but here comes some anyway! This movie should have starred Eddie Murphy and should have been rated R with plenty of profanity, maybe some nud*ty and a bunch of generally bad behavior! Richard Pryor, as great as he was, was too old for the role, and had been in too many bad movies! Of course, this came out the year after Beverly Hills Cop, and Eddie would have been pretty hard to get, especially for a project that’s a close carbon copy of a movie he’d already done, Trading Places!

In a movie about squandering, it’s the squandering of John Candy that somehow hurts the most, and there’s an appearance by fellow SCTV veteran Rick Moranis that’s just as bad! He just plays a guy in a blue tuxedo who repeats everything other people say for some reason! And they even waste Yakov Smirnoff, who appears, says “What a country!” and then more or less vanishes! There’s also a Ry Cooder score that’s as impersonal as the one from Blue City, and Hill’s direction is just plain lackadaisical! I give this disappointing picture one single motorized iceberg!