Burl reviews Vampires! (1998)

 

Bluh bluh and again bluh, it’s Burl, here to review vampire antics gone southwestern! It’s a picture from what can only be considered John Carpenter’s declining years as a director (though not as a composer of course!), by which point he had only a picture or two left in him, and one of them was The Ward! Ha ha! But this one has still some Carpenterian touches, and if you ask me he never made an unwatchable picture! The movie I’m talking about here is Vampires!

It’s based on a novel, which I suppose accounts for the rich backstory that is implied and/or spelled out as the picture goes along! We open with a Vatican-funded vampire-killing team run by Jack Crow, played in very James Woods fashion by none other than James Woods from Videodrome! This well-equipped posse includes second-in-command Montoya, essayed by Daniel Baldwin from Nothing But Trouble, and familiar faces like Mark Boone Junior from The Quick and the Dead and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa from Big Trouble in Little China, and there’s also a ridealong priest played by Gregory Sierra from Pocket Money and The Towering Inferno!

Well, they clear out an old farmhouse full of vampires, but don’t find the leader of the bite 'ems: the master vampire! They hold a motel party anyway, and of course the master vampire, played by a tall drink of water named Thomas Ian Griffith, shows up and slaughters everybody! Well, everybody but Jack Crow, his buddy Montoya, and a hired evening-lady called Katrina, played by Sheryl Lee from Wild at Heart! Meanwhile a scarlet cardinal essayed by Maximillian Schell from St. Ives sits at home until the surprise at the end!

Montoya takes charge of Katrina and hotel-rooms her, while Jack Crow and a new ridealong priest, a young beard played by Tim Guinee (who encountered vampires again that same year in Blade), track the master vampire! The rest of the movie almost manages a Phantasm II vibe as they follow the fearsome hemogobbler across the country, evade his traps along the way, and finally confront him at the old mission as he’s about to enact his master-vampire plan! Much baring of fangs ensues, ha ha!

Well, I’ll admit it’s a far cry from the glory days of Carpenter – Halloween, say, or The Fog, or The Thing, or Prince of Darkness! But as I say, there are a few moments here and there which remind you this is indeed a movie from that singular Kentucky-born picturemaker – some characteristic framing, camera moves, Hawksian themes, and of course the score, which is much in the mode of his music from They Live! There’s some nice vampire gore and a performance by Woods that’s so hard boiled it seems demented, but, ha ha, that’s Woods for you!

On the frownier side, the picture has kind of a bad script! There are some bon mots, and Woods elevates it all quite a little bit, but there’s no getting around that this is a simplistic and unfulfilling narrative without much in the way of interior logic! The master vampire is fairly boring, too – he’s just a tall guy who glowers a lot! Much more energy should have been spent on every aspect of this guy: his dialogue, his look, his performance, his pep! He should be a memorable and frightening presence, but he’s just not! He seems more like a local longuebönes recruited for a vampire movie mostly because he’s tall!

There’s fun to be had with the movie, make no McSteak™, but potential-wise I think it leaves a lot of good stuff on the table! While I appreciate the unexpected destruction of the team from an unpredictable, Psycho-inspired narrative point of view, at the same time the movie never really recovers from their loss! The picture tries to make the friendship between Crow and Montoya the emotional centrepiece, but that doesn’t work terribly well, and certainly not well enough to revitalize the Hawksian energy of the opening reel! It’s not too scary and it's too often silly, but après tout it remains a John Carpenter movie! I recall going to see it with my dad back in the day, and it was the perfect sort of movie to see with him, so I have that extra affection for it too! I’m going to give Vampires two hardworking winches!

Burl reviews Escape from L.A.! (1996)

Ha ha, it’s me - call me Burl! Yes, I’m here to review not the first, but the second adventure of Snake Plisskin, which is to say the time he had to Escape from L.A.! Now, like just about everybody, I’m very fond of his first go-round, Escape from New York! That’s just a terrific picture! But I remember going to the theater to see the new one when it came out back in 1996, and I came reeling out with my brain full of skunkfire! It was a terrific disappointment!

Watching it again more recently, I found more to like in the movie, but not much! It’s certainly on the bottom level of John Carpenter pictures, along with Ghosts of Mars and The Ward, and so very remote from the heights of The Thing and Halloween!

Snake Plisskin is still the monocular man of action we know and love from 1982! It seems there’s another godly hypocrite in the White House, played by Cliff Robertson in Malone mode, and he’s made L.A., that heathen city, into a dumping ground for everyone he doesn’t like: atheists and so forth! Ha ha, Los Angeles is a big city, but I don’t think it could fit everybody this joker doesn’t like! Ol’ Burl, for example, would be sent there immediately, and I would probably set up shop in the Academy screening room and just watch movies all day!

Of course Snake has no time for that: he has to get back some important trinket from Robertson’s rebellious daughter, who has set up shop with notorious gangster-terrorist Cuervo Jones; and for Snake there’s a countdown clock (referred to even more insistently than it was in New York) and gangs to fight, and, as in the previous picture, a terrific supporting cast! As before, everyone he meets either knows him or has heard of him, but now, instead of everyone thinking he was dead, they all thought he’d be taller!

There are also lots of really ropey CGI trick effects (that shark!) and a lugubrious mise-en-scene that drains the action scenes of any pizzazz! Oh John, how did it come to this! You’re a terrific action director! It doesn’t help that so much of the movie plays as a pale imitation of the earlier movie’s highlights! Instead of gliding onto the World Trade Center, Snake submarines onto a freeway ramp! When he’s captured by the bad guys, he doesn’t fight their biggest man in a ring, as he did in New York; no, he must play basketball! At least the doo-dad he’s after is a mini disc instead of a tape cassette, ha ha!

The general reduction in amazingness extends to the supporting cast, which, as I said, is terrific! Just not as terrific! Stacey Keach is fine, but he’s no Lee Van Cleef! Steve Buscemi is a wonderful actor, but he’s not Harry Dean Stanton! Peter Fonda is great, but Ernest Borgnine is greater! And George Corraface is most assuredly no Isaac Hayes! We also get Pam Grier and Bruce Campbell, wonderful performers both, but somewhat underused here!

On the plus side - and Burl always looks for that, ha ha! - Kurt Russell doesn’t miss a trick in his Snake Plisskin shtick! A couple of the fights are pretty good, and there are pleasing ideas or bits of design lurking in the margins! There’s a little cavalcade of Rick Baker makeups in the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills scene, which is always nice! And, as with every movie about the destruction of L.A. made by people who live there, there’s a certain glee taken in the city’s demise, with potshots aplenty taken at its ways and its people!

And of course, in its depiction of the demagogic Robertson, the picture has a certain prescience; enough, maybe, to serve as a cautionary tale along the line of Sinclair Lewis’s book It Can’t Happen Here! And even at his worst, John Carpenter is still John Carpenter, and there’s some pleasing carpentry throughout the movie! I give Escape from L.A. one and a half full-court free throws!

Burl reviews Big Trouble in Little China! (1986)

Ha ha, this is ol’ Burl talking at you from the Pork Chop Express, here to tell whoever’s listening that John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China, the picture he made right after Starman, is still one of the most enjoyable movies the 1980s ever produced! And, ha ha for a guy like Burl that’s saying a lot! Yes, I remember going to see this one in the theater with my good pal Carnee! We watched it, then, as the lights came up and the end credits scrolled, Carnee and I just looked at one another and without a word settled back in our seats to wait for the next screening! Ha ha!

And guess what! Just the other day I saw it in the theatre once again! Ha ha, that’s right, it was screened along with a bunch of other elderly movies (including The Dark Crystal), and I was there! It was legitimately fun to see the gosh darn thing with an audience – a far bigger audience, I might add, than I saw it with in its original flop release! Ha ha! 

Of course it’s the story of hapless tough-truckin’ hombré Jack Burton, played by Kurt Russell from The Mean Season, who gets mixed up in the subterranean craziness of San Francisco’s Chinatown! Along with pals played by Dennis Dun and Victor Wong from Prince of Darkness, and an overly spunky gal played by Kim Cattrall from Porky’s, Jack sets forth to rescue a comely maiden with green eyes from the ancient cursed wizard Lo Pan, essayed by James Hong from Blade Runner! Ha ha, that was a plot rundown for any poor fools who haven’t seen this picture! Let me assure you, it’s worth it!

Now, this is a king-fu fantasy picture, and while it didn’t break any new ground with the fight scenes, and I’ve always thought they could stand to be more kinetic, they’re fun and well-done! With the exception of Kim Cattrall, who seems to be trying on a spunky 1930s screwball heroine persona (the better, perhaps, to snag a role as Indiana Jones's next girlfriend), the performances are perfect for the job! Special mention must be made of Russell, who walks the perfect line between the Duke and a dunce! Victor Wong is also a pure-d delight in the role of Egg Shen, tour bus driver, San Francisco Chinatown! Ha ha!

It’s a shame this picture failed at the box office! But on the other hand, maybe it’s not! Perhaps this is part of a select coterie of pictures, among whose number I might include The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, Lifeforce and other big-budget goofnugget-supremes, which are terrific on their own and could only be injured by the existence of some lame attempt to recreate their particular magic in a sequel! I used to want someone to make Buckaroo Banzai vs. the World Crime League, but now I’m not so sure! Anyway, John Carpenter doesn’t have a great record of sequelizing his own stuff anyway – just look at Escape From L.A.! Even Halloween II’s no great shakes!

Well, this picture has its faults, but while I’m watching it I hardly notice them! That’s because it’s just so gosh darn marvelous an experience! It’s got pretty 80s trick effects from the gang who provided Ghostbusters with the same; it’s got laffs, action, and monsters; and it spends plenty of time knocking out the props from under its putative hero, who doesn’t actually do very much that’s particularly heroic! Ha ha, during the climax he shoots his gun at the ceiling and is knocked out by the falling masonry that results; so really the picture is pointing and laughing and kicking sand at the whole concept of the tough-guy hero, which is a-okay by ol’ Burl! This is a perennial good-time picture and a personal favourite, and I give Big Trouble in Little China three and a half six demon bags!

Burl reviews Starman! (1984)

Beep, boop, it’s Burl, here with a picture about an alien’s visit to earth! Ha ha, no, it’s not our old friend E.T., but an alien who looks more like a ball of pure light than a Raisinette under a magnifying glass! Ha ha, he’s the Starman! And no, they never have occasion to play the David Bowie song in the movie, but I’ll bet it was tried at least briefly before being declared too on-the-nose!

There’s a Stones song prominently used however, ‘Satisfaction,’ and this is heard in the opening as we see the Voyager II spacecraft drift past, its hand outstretched in greeting! Our lightball decides to make the trek to Earth, but is shot down as soon as he enters the atmosphere! He bips around Wisconsin a while until he finds the DNA of a dead house painter in the lock of hair kept by his still-grieving widow, Karen Allen, well-known from Animal House!

Well, after a little sequence of rubber alien babies growing into adulthood, put together in separate stages by a superstar team of trick effect artists, the alien takes on the aspect of Jeff Bridges, famed for his great work in King Kong! Ms. Allen can’t quite believe it, but soon the chase is on as the alien tries to make it to the place he can meet up with his buddies before they all leg it back to their own galaxy!

And it’s a Herbie Goes Bananas reunion as Charles Martin Smith and Richard Jaeckel play government fellows with an interest in finding the alien! Smith is a kindly sort who wants to make the alien welcome, while Jaeckel, whom we also know from The Dark and Grizzly, is a hard-nosed fellow who wants to capture and experiment on him, or worse! Meanwhile there are many picaresque adventures, curious culture clashes and wild animal reanimations as the Bridges-alien interacts with everyone from a nasty hunter played by Ted White (he was Jason in Friday the 13th part 4, don’t you know) to, of course, George ‘Buck’ Flower from Teen Lust and Pumpkinhead, who turns up as an amiable chef! Ah, ‘Buck!’

And of course love comes to town, because even a glowing ball of light, whose intellect is stratospherically above any concept of physical attraction, recognizes that Karen Allen is pretty cute! Ha ha! Everything follows pretty much the expected path, though in a generally charming way! John Carpenter does a fine job with this uncharacteristic material, and I think if almost anybody else had directed this, I’d just think of it as a drippy rip-off of E.T.! But Carpenter pulls it off!

I’ve always paired this one with Christine in my mind because they were both made for the same company, and came along during the Cundey Interregnum, when Donald M. Morgan was shooting his films! (This is to be differentiated from the Cundey Abrogation, when Cundey went on up to the Zemeckis / Spielberg leagues, and Gary Kibbe took over the camera and lighting!) It’s as fluffy and studio as Carpenter ever got, with the possible exception of Memoirs of an Invisible Man, but still a mildly engaging watch!

Bridges gives a goofily entertaining performance and does solid work throughout! The trick effects are very good, though the weird growing baby is in its own category; and it’s altogether a polished piece of Hollywood craftwork, with a nicely efficient yet affecting ending! I give Starman two and a half exploding trees!

Burl reviews They Live! (1988)

Attention, sleepers, it’s Burl here to let you know just what’s really going on! Ha ha, the movie I’d like to talk about today is John Carpenter’s marvelous mini-epic They Live! Now, we know that for years, Carpenter flung great movies at us like throwing stars – Halloween, The Fog, The Thing and Prince of Darkness, to name only just a few! All terrific! And do you know what? They Live is another terrific one!

But it’s a severely compromised terrific one, ha ha! For one thing, there simply wasn’t the budget to stage the large-scale revolution the movie seems to be angling towards! It’s not just a budget issue though, but, I regret to say, a third-act failure of momentum and imagination!

However, there’s so much that’s good about the picture that it still remains one of my favourite Carpenter movies, and that’s saying a lot! It’s as class-conscious as genre movies get, and probably more relevant today than ever before! Ha ha, one cringes to imagine what the special glasses would show on your computer screen; but on the other hand, it probably wouldn’t have to be too different than what we see already! Ha ha!

I’ll back up a bit and describe the story for those who for whatever crazy reason have never seen this movie: an unemployed construction-drifter arrives in Los Angeles and discovers, by way of a special pair of sunglasses, that the world is not what it seems! In actual fact, the world is black-and-white and is completely run by skull-faced aliens, who occupy positions of wealth, power and privilege while disguised as ordinary humans! No less an authority than George “Buck” Flower, wearing a tuxedo for perhaps the only time in his film career, informs us that there are no countries, no borders, that the aliens are “runnin’ the whole show!”

None of this feels particularly unlikely – it’s as good an explanation as any for the massive income inequality and rampant oppression we see in the world today! For most of the movie, Carpenter does a fantastic job of doling out the situation in spooky little nuggets of paranoia: a ranting street preacher shut down by cops; helicopters circling menacingly; a bearded explicator straight out of Dawn of the Dead appearing on TV, trying but failing to convince his viewers of the truth! We get dropped into the story much as our burly hero does, and are every bit as unsettled!

Carpenter really did a great job casting this thing, because everyone, actors and wrestlers alike, is terrific! Rowdy Roddy Piper does a marvelous job appearing baffled and mind-blown; Keith David, from Roadhouse and The Quick and the Dead, is marvelous as ever; Raymond St. Jacques makes an excellent street preacher (though it doesn’t make a lot of sense for the resistance movement to host his heat-score rantings right in front of their secret headquarters, ha ha!); Peter Jason from Streets of Fire, Dreamscape and Brewster’s Millions does solid work; Sy Richardson from Repo Man shows up as another resistance fighter; John Lawrence, the angry sheriff from The Pom Pom Girls, plays the television beardsman; Meg Foster from Masters of the Universe uses her bright blue eyes to good effect; John Goff from Alligator and Maniac Cop makes an appearance as a frowny businessman alien; and then of course there’s our man Flower, who had a fine role in Pumpkinhead, but may be best known from his role as the skeezy plumber who turned out to be the heroine’s father in Teen Lust! Why the aliens would feel the need to recruit a drawling stewbum into their ranks remains a mystery, but this is truly a film of mysteries!

Ha ha, and I haven’t even mentioned the big alleyway battle, which I won’t because it’s been well-covered elsewhere! I’ll simply say that, flawed though it is, They Live is a terrific paranoid thriller whose reach exceeds its grasp! Well, there are certainly greater sins than that! I’m going to give this fine motion picture three and a half hours long, which is the running time it deserves! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Prince of Darkness! (1987)

This is not a dream! It’s Burl! Ha ha, yes, I’m here to review a fine October spookshow, John “Halloween” Carpenter’s return to the small scale, Prince of Darkness! This is the picture he made after the unfair box-office flubup of the delightful Big Trouble in Little China, which is a movie so ridiculously entertaining that when ol’ Burl and a friend went to see it in the theatre, on its conclusion we just looked at one another and wordlessly settled back into our seats to watch it again right away!

I saw Prince of Darkness in the theatre too, but may have had to sneak in because it was rated R, for super-silliness perhaps! Ha ha! The picture is Carpenter’s tribute to Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass pictures, because I guess Halloween III, which Kneale actually wrote (before it was changed around a lot and he had his name taken off) didn’t quite work out that way! Carpenter wrote the script for this one himself, but took the credit “Martin Quatermass!” Ha ha, subtle!

The story has a priest, played of course by Donald “You Only Live Twice” Pleasance, discovering that a little-known Catholic sect has kept the devil trapped in a carboy in a downtown Los Angeles church! Ha ha, you can imagine his surprise! The devil is in liquid form, and for no particular reason has begun seeping out of his bottle! Naturally the next step is to recruit an eccentric physics professor and a number of postgraduate students, and have them camp out in the church to ponder on the problem!

Much of the first half of the picture is the students scoffing loudly at their situation and proclaiming it “bullshit”! It seems a preemptive stratagem on Carpenter’s part, frankly! But when they start having crazy dreams that prove in fact to be messages from a demonically-plagued future (the messages come from “the year one-nine-nine-fzzzt!”), the Kneality kicks in! Ha ha, that’s the scariest part right there, those dreams!

It comes down to a lot of running around the church (almost all the movie is set there) and fighting with possessed grad students! The movie presages the [Rec] series of pictures by conflating demonic possession with zombieism, though these particular possessed zombies aren’t as scary as they should be! Ha ha, they’re not scary at all, really, though I did like the one who stands in the parking lot calling out warnings before he disintegrates into a pile of bugs!

Almost nothing makes much sense, but that’s not a problem, at least not to ol’ Burl! I’ve always liked this picture, flawed as it is, and I fear I won’t be able to make a very lucid case for why you should see it! I just like it! I like the cast, or some of it at least, like Pleasance and Victor Wong as the physicist, and the ponky, mustached guy who plays the lead! And Dennis Dun is always good too, ha ha! I like the climax, in which Pleasance is trapped in a closet longer than R. Kelly ever was, and in which we are given some genuinely eerie imagery!

I never thought of this as a gory picture, but it does have a few heads and hands coming off, and some impalements and suchlike! Ha ha, the glasses nerd from Riptide and The Horror Show even gets turned into a living bike by Alice Cooper! Say what you like about this movie, but you’re never going to see a scene like that anywhere else! I don’t mind being a cheerleader for the film, because I figure someone has to be, and so I’m going to give Prince of Darkness three ant-filled TV sets!

Burl reviews The Thing! (1982)

It’s Burl here with a review of a movie I saw five times in the theater alone, and countless times on home video since! Ha ha, it’s John Carpenter’s The Thing, one of the all-time great examples of how a remake can better its predecessor, even if the predecessor is already pretty good!

There are a few other examples of this – Cronenberg’s The Fly, even Chuck Russell’s remake of The Blob – but  The Thing is the king of them all! You already know the story of course: alien life-form invades Antarctic research camp, paranoia and gruesome special effects ensue! The great idea behind this production was to go back to the original John W. Campbell story in which the alien was a mutative beast who could hide within its victims, rather than a tall humanoid with rosethorn knuckles and vegetable flesh! Ha ha, if they’d tried that, they might have ended up with something like that legendary turkeybird The Dark!

This movie’s got it all, except ladies! You have a wonderful, chilly score from Ennio Morricone – I guess the suits wouldn’t let Carpenter do his own, ha ha, but I think I’m glad for that in this case! – and uniformly solid performances from all the gentlemen involved! Kurt Russell is marvelous as MacReady, A. Wilford Brimley (who is also the Wilford Brimley) makes an excellent Dr. Copper, and David “Matinee” Clennon is perfect as the stonerman Palmer! Of course Keith David gives his usual mackerel of a performance, and Charles Hallahan is good too! They’re all good, dagnabbit! And many of them wear beards!

The dog who brings the infection into camp is really fine too – one of the best dog actors I’ve ever seen, right up there with the one from The Boogens! I hope he got some extra kibble the day they shot his “wandering through the base” scene, ha ha! Other virtues to be found in this picture include the icy cinematography from the portly cinematographer, Dean Cundey, and the tightening sense of dread as we realize first how unlikely is a happy ending for these men, and what the stakes are if – or when, ha ha! – the alien reaches a populated area!

There isn’t a whole else left to say about the picture, except that it’s one of Burl’s all-time favourites and has been since June of 1982! Sure, it’s hardly a perfect movie, but it’s pretty close! It’s the best movie Carpenter has ever made, and he’s made some doozies! Halloween is great, and so is Dark Star, and so are The Fog and Big Trouble in Little China and They Live and Prince of Darkness (though Christine, the movie he made right after this one, is only sort of solid), but none of them touch this cool cucumber of a picture! He out-Hawksed Hawks with this one, ha ha! I give The Thing a solid four crabheads, my highest rating! If you haven’t seen it, ha ha, give it a chance!

Burl reviews The Ward! (2010)

By crackee, it’s Burl here! Yes, I’m reviewing yet another movie for you today, and this time it’s John Carpenter’s long-awaited return to feature filmmaking, The Ward! Ha ha, I’ve taken my sweet time in catching up with this one, mainly because I’d read some reviews of it! But I believe firmly that Carpenter is one of the twentieth century’s fundamental cinematic intelligences, so the bottom line is that I’ll happily watch anything he makes! The Thing is one of my all-time favourite movies ever made, I’m a big supporter of Prince of Darkness, and you already know what I think of Christine and Halloween and The Fog!

I was excited to hear about The Ward, but then everybody was kind of ho-hum about it, and it came around at the same time as Wes Craven’s horror comeback, My Soul To Take, which also was considered ho-hum! Worse than ho-hum, actually – more like po-pum or even bo-bum, ha ha! But I finally decided to give it a look, and yes, I must report that this is not one of John Carpenter’s better movies! It’s not his worst either, though – it’s no Escape From L.A.!

For perhaps no better reason than to obviate the cell phone question and keep certain superannuated psychotherapies in play, the movie is set in 1966! You have to keep reminding yourself that it’s 1966 though, as the period detail is rather slipshod, or so it seemed to ol’ Burl! A young lady, Kristin, is burning down a house, and the next thing you know she’s been popped into a psych ward overseen by Jared Harris, who makes a sinister presence indeed, as he played Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows!

There are a number of other young ladies in the ward, all with their own special problems and personality quirks, and they’re all being stalked by the ghost of yet another young lady, a ghoulish creature named Alice! Alice performs a number of semi-gory murders before a third-act twist makes us tally up the movies we’ve seen before that had more or less the same twist!

Frankly, the whole movie is made up of what I hate to call clichés! I hate to call them that because I think that word is so overused and frequently misapplied as to be meaningless; but frankly this picture is like one of those Scary Movie things, but without the jokes! Everything in it seems to have been imported whole from somewhere else! It’s trying to be one of the classic Asian spookshows I guess, but as with Big Trouble in Little China (a movie I love!), Carpenter really can’t quite get the elements quite right when he tries to ape the Asians! Ha ha!

But the movie is not all bad! There are a few effective sequences, and a couple of the classic Carpenter jumpers! The performances are generally pretty good (these ladies are committed in more ways than one, ha ha!), and I have to admit that the ending, while itself a well-traveled path, undercuts the clichéd nature of some of the earlier clichés! Ha ha, do you see what I mean? I guess you’ll have to watch the picture to know for sure!

It’s not the Carpenter comeback I might have wished for, but it’s not the complete blight some have claimed, either! I’m going to give The Ward a rousing two repetitive escape/recapture scenes!

Burl reviews Halloween II! (1981)

Hi, it’s me, Ben Tramer! Ha ha, no, actually it’s Burl, here again with a review for you! The other night, which was actually Halloween night, I watched Halloween 2 once again! I’m talking about the original sequel, not the sequel to the remake that didn’t itself actually seem to be a remake of the sequel! Ha ha, are you following me? Doesn’t matter! The point is that Rob Zombie had nothing to do with this one, as he was a mere cradle baby when it was made!

As you know from my review of the original Halloween, I consider it a superior picture in almost every respect! And I also harbour a great fondness for Halloween III, even as I recognize the great lost opportunity it represents! So where does a fellow like ol’ Burl stand on Halloween II, the sequel that doesn’t simply take up the story exactly as it ended in the first picture, but shows us the last five or six minutes of that John Carpenter masterwork, just in case we’d forgotten them!

After a few pokings and jumpabouts, Michael Myers makes his way to the hospital where Jamie Lee Curtis is being treated by Doctor “I’ve Just Been To A” Mixer! Ha ha, he’s pretty soused, is old Doc Mixer! Some kind of terrible statewide health care budget cuts have evidently taken effect, as the hospital is severely underpopulated! Perhaps it’s simply that the Haddonfield General administration recognize what an important holiday Halloween is in movies like this, and have let as many staff as possible have the night off! (They must have learned the trick from the administrators of the hospital in Hospital Massacre!)

Michael sets about reducing the staff roster to zero! The only patients we see in the place are babies, but he lets them alone as far as we can tell! But everybody else is fair game, and Michael gives the old kitchen knife a rest and tries a few creative variations, like exsanguination, needles, a boiling hot tub, and a claw hammer! Ha ha, I guess this sort of thing was hinted at by his use of a curly phone cord in the first picture – an example, I guess, of movie murder using a weapon that no longer exists in our day and age!

At any rate, it’s all very unlikely, and though there are some efforts at stylization, as well as the usual attractive, pumpkiny camerawork from the portly cinematographer Dean Cundey, the picture has a slightly wheezy air! I used to think it was a crackerjack entertainment, bold and gleaming, but as each year passes the gap in quality between this sequel and the original becomes more apparent! To a certain segment of the population this one might come out on top, as there are more victims and even a few Special Makeup Effects! Dr. Loomis is a bit crazier, as one might be after shooting someone six times! Ha ha!

Altogether for an early-80s slasher picture it’s pretty good! The technical quality is marvelous, and The Shape will always be an iconic fellow, and a pleasure to watch on screen as he walks purposefully down a corridor or melts slowly out of the darkness! It's a typical 80s slasher movie, but as such things go, a superior one, though as a sequel to such a grand original, is inevitably a disapointment! I give Halloween II two razor blade apples!  

Burl reviews Christine! (1983)

Beep beep, it’s Burl! Ha ha, yes, I’m here to review a movie about a haunted possessed killer car, and no, I don’t mean The Car! Not yet, anyway! I’m talking Christine, a movie that I and my friend Dave won tickets to see a special preview of from a radio station contest! Ha ha, we felt pretty lucky, being big Stephen King fans at the time!

I’d read the book, and so was very eager to see what John "Halloween" Carpenter, whose previous picture The Thing had rocketed instantly onto my Favourite Movies Of All Time list (and, remarkably, has stayed there all these years!), had done with the killer car story! All the ingredients seemed present and accounted for: the glasses nerd Arnie, his unlikely BMOC best pal Dennis, the new girl in town Leigh, and of course the murderous conveyance itself, Christine! There are assorted parents, bullies, cops and garage owners in there as well, all trying to figure out why Arnie has fallen in love so deeply with his ’58 Plymouth Fury, and how he has transformed from a glasses nerd into a weasel of cool!

Well, it’s because the car is possessed! In the book, it’s more or less possessed by the rotting corpse ghost of its original owner, Roland D. LeBay! And this is where I was knocked for a bit of a loop when I saw that radio station promo screening lo those many years ago: no Roland D. LeBay! Ha ha, I was really looking forward to that creepy back-seat corpse, but he was nowhere to be found! The great Roberts Blossom, so creepy as the killer farmer in Deranged and so gentle as the painterman in Escape From Alcatraz, plays his brother, George LeBay, and he’s excellent in the role, but it was still disappointing at the time!

Now I can see the logic: it would have been distracting from the simple concept of a possessed auto! Ha ha, the movie more or less leaves the idea of where the car’s powers come from to us, the viewers, to figure out! I myself settled on the notion that it’s simply a car with more personality than most, rather than some sort of bedevilment or ghost scenario!

The movie itself is what I’d describe as a solid piece of work! The acting is of a generally high quality, and there are great character performers decorating the fringes: guys like Roberts Blossom, Robert Prosky (from Gremlins 2 and The Keep), the great Harry Dean Stanton (who was also in Escape From New York, don't forget, and the fabulous Repo Man), and even Kelly Preston from Secret Admirer! John "The Fog" Carpenter pulls off some stylish scenes (Christine blazing down a dark highway on fire after a fleeing John Travolta lookalike is a doozy!), but mostly keeps it pretty basic! Donald M. Morgan’s cinematography is really quite good, and there’s plenty of golden oldies on the soundtrack, courtesy of Christine’s anachronistic radio!

It’s funny that the two lead guys, Keith Gordon and John Stockwell, both became directors a while after making this picture! Quite different directors too: Gordon, whom we know from his performances in Jaws 2, Dressed to Kill and Back to School, ended up making movies like Mother Night, which was based on my favourite Kurt Vonnegut book, while Stockwell, the star of the teen science picture My Science Project, made Blue Crush and other such cheesecake pictures!

I feel an affection for Christine even though there’s not much horror action in the movie and no Roland D. LeBay, and I appreciate the movie a lot more now than I used to! I give it three lunchbags filled with yogurt!

Burl reviews Halloween! (1978)

Ha ha, it’s Burl here to review a seasonal classic! It’s hard to imagine the landscape of cinema without this movie in it – it’s so basic and primal, it feels like this was the movie that had to be made before any more complex horror pictures could be attempted! Of course that’s not how it works, and glad I am of that, but still and all I do mean that as a complement to this fantastic low-budget horror phenomenon!

I don’t need to tell you the plot, do I? Ha ha, babysitters are stalked by a masked madman! Yes, that’s it! Mr. Michael Myers puts on his unpainted William Shatner mask, gets himself a kitchen knife and starts poking away! He puts a poking on his very own sister in the movie’s opening moments, and you’ve got to feel sorry for her because after all, her boyfriend just gave her the quickest rogering known to man, or should I say to woman, ha ha!

I’ll tell you, when it comes to movies like this – and there were an awful lot of them in the years following this one, let me assure you! – I always enjoy the part before the killings, where the characters are just hanging out and doing their thing! And these babysitters are a pretty likeable bunch, real classic 70s gals! It’s great that a couple of obviously popular girls hang out with a donkey girlscout like Jamie Lee Curtis! Ha ha, and John Carpenter sure was lucky to find her too, because who else could have pulled off saying “Well kiddo, I thought you outgrew superstition” to herself! Very few!

I like to think that if I was in high school with Laurie Strode, I would have taken her out on a date, not like that Ben Tramer! He obviously didn’t know a good thing when he saw it, and anyway, didn’t he get totaled in Halloween II? I think he did, ha ha! So I could have been the one if only I’d been there! And another thing, isn’t Annie a peach? She was great, even if she was the kind of girl who would babysit for the sort of people who do their laundry in a shed! And then the way she got stuck in the window was maybe not so believable, but it was pretty cute! She’s such a laid back gal, and she does funny jokes as well, like when she says “I have a place for that,” or, about her cynical cop of a father, “He shouts, too!”

Of course what everyone remembers from the movie is the scenes of Michael attacking Laurie in the house, and those are pretty darn good! I’ve seen this movie so many times I can’t even remember what my reaction was the first time I saw it, but I like to think I was right in there appreciating the suspense! The scenes where Michael’s white mask just melts out of the darkness are creepy no matter how many times you see them, though!

A lot of people give this movie some guff because it’s not very gory! Well, the sequel made up for that a little bit, and anyway, I never missed the gore, not really! Sure, a little bit of tomato paste and some Special Makeup Effects might have been nice, but when you get the great performances, the nice photography and the fine direction, what more do you want, really! Mr. Donald Pleasance, who once essayed the role of Blofeld in You Only Live Twice, was excellent as the grump of a doctor who wanted to keep Michael locked away forever and always!

Anyway, these are a pretty scattershot bunch of observations, because after all everyone else has reviewed this movie too, but it’s always fun to watch and to think about, which I do just about every Halloween! I don’t even mind that it was shot in Los Angeles in the summer instead of Illinois in the fall, because they do get some dried leaves and denuded trees in there, and there’s only occasionally a palm tree or bit of California architecture lurking in the deep background! I award this marvelous horror picture four post-coital beers served up by glasses guys in sheets! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Halloween III: Season of the Witch! (1982)

Hi, Burl here to review the most loathed of all the Halloween movies, which is to say number three, the one with no Michael Myers! But it’s not loathed by me, and I find it a lot more entertaining than some of the other later entries! For example, there was one involving some sort of reality show that I found nearly unwatchable! Ha ha, I can’t even remember the title of that one!

But Halloween III discombobulated everyone by having nothing to do with Halloweens I and II, and considering that Michael Myers, the masked knife-maniac from the earlier pictures, had been blown to flinders in a hospital conflagration, it seems an understandable move on the part of the filmmakers! They thought it made more sense to brand the title and, in essence, the holiday along with it, at least as it pertained to horror movies; and then the idea would be to make a different Halloween-themed movie every year!

I actually think that’s a pretty good idea, but Joe Moviewatcher evidently did not! I went to see Halloween III when it came out (very excitedly, though I was on the young side for such a film), but I must have been among the few! Anyway, you’d think with the combined star power of Tom Atkins (from The Fog) and Dan O’Herlihy (from Fail-Safe) there’d be an enthusiastic audience for such a photoplay, but it was just not the case! Perhaps when word got around of the incredibly annoying commercial jingle heard repeatedly throughout the film, the constituency that normally would have flocked to it got scared off! Ha ha, ya bunch of wimps!

The story is simplicity itself! A man comes running down the street holding on to a pumpkin mask, and then later in the hospital a strange businessman pops out the man’s eyes and then pulls his face up! This leads to an investigation on the part of a local doctor's moustache and the dead man’s curly-haired daughter, and together they discover the nefarious toy company, staffed largely by robots as it turns out, which is the headquarters of a warlock named Colonel Cochrane! I don’t know in which army Cochrane achieved the rank of Colonel, but their recruiting standards are very lax!

Anyway, the Colonel has a plan: blast the skulls of America’s children into fishsticks by selling them rubber masks equipped with laser beams, which will be set off Halloween night by some unholy combination of the aforementioned jingle and the rocks of Stonehenge! His witchery, his weird science and his robot army are pitted against Tom Atkins’ moustache, and we all know that in such a contest there can be only one victor!

Ha ha, this movie is the goofiest thing ever, but I feel a great deal of affection for it! I love the grotesque makeup effects, like the lady who gets accidentally blasted in the face! I love that snakes and bugs are somehow generated when the lasers go off! Ha ha, poor Little Buddy! I like Tom Atkins’ heroics! And it’s great that the Colonel’s plan is so odd and insane and pointlessly sadistic and, as far as we can tell from the sudden cut to black at the end, successful!

It could have been a better movie, I’ll grant you that! If John Carpenter had directed it in full Prince of Darkness mode and made it a little more dynamic, suspenseful and scary, we might have a full-on Halloween classic on our hands! Instead we have more of a curio, a thing some will take to their hearts and most will hate or just dismiss, like those hard, sticky orange-wrapped candies that used to fill the bottom of your bag at the end of a long night of trick or treating! Hey, I liked those candies! I give Halloween III two and a half pulled-off bum heads and all the arterial spray that goes with it!

Burl reviews The Fog! (1980)

11:55! Almost midnight! Enough time for one more review! Ha ha, no, it’s not old Mr. Machen, it’s Burl, here to review the original version of The Fog! (I’d almost forgotten there even was a remake, you know – I saw it, I think, but insofar as I can recall it, it was really bland!)

That’s not the case with this one, which was stylishly made by a director I really like, John "Prince of Darkness" Carpenter! He starts it off with a ghost story, excellently told by John Houseman as a sea captain named Mr. Machen! He sets up the whole story, and if the movie isn’t quite able to live up to that first five minutes and the possibilities it raises, well, it truly does its best! Almost right away, as the clock strikes twelve and it’s been exactly a hundred years since this little seaside community fooled a bunch of lepers into steering their ship into the rocks, sword-wielding leper-ghosts begin stalking the town and popping out of the ever-present, you guessed it, fog!

There’s a great cast, with lots of choices for heroes and heroines! If you don’t like Adrienne "Creepshow" Barbeau, then you can pretend Jamie Lee "Halloween" Curtis is the female lead; and if you don’t like that particular donkey girlscout, just focus on Adrienne instead! (And Adrienne was married to John Carpenter at the time, so fat chance she wasn’t going to be in it, ha ha!) And you’ve got guys like the great Tom Atkins as the hero who doesn’t really do much of anything, Hal Holbrook as a whiskey priest, that ol’ houndog George ‘Buck’ Flower as a doomed sailor-man, and John Carpenter himself as Bennett! Add to that Houseman and the legendary Janet Leigh and you’ve got the best bunch of actors to appear in a low-budget horror movie in some time!

Great location, too! The movie was shot in Northern California, near the Point Reyes lighthouse, and boy does the area look great! The scene with Adrienne Barbeau walking down a million stairs to get to the radio station she’s set up in her lighthouse (weird, I know!) is beautiful, so congratulations to that portly and bearded cinematographer Dean Cundey!

I should note that I sure wish there was a radio station like hers in my town, by the way! It seems to be largely Adrienne talking in a sexy voice, interrupted occasionally by tootling songs that sound like 1940s elevator music! I’d have that station on all the time! Anyway, many thanks to all of you who helped make this delightful minor classic, which I would like to give three and a half grizzled sea captains!