Burl reviews Lethal Weapon! (1987)

 

Getting too old for this shit, it’s Burl, here to review 80s buddy-cop carnage for you! Of course there had been buddy cops before this movie came out, and even black and white buddy cops as we have in this picture (Number One with a Bullet, anybody? Ha ha, anybody?), but the success of this particular duo led to an explosion (often literal) of buddy cops – in only the year and change after this one’s release we had alien/human buddy cops in Alien Nation and The Hidden; living/dead buddy cops in Dead Heat; American/Russian buddy cops in Red Heat; natty/slobbo buddy cops in Tango & Cash, and army/civilian buddy cops in The Presidio! And the movie that kicked this genre into high gear? Ha ha, Lethal Weapon, of course!

And as we know, the picture canonized another tradition: setting action movies around Christmas! Earlier action pictures – First Blood, To Live and Die in L.A., Cobra – had already flirted with a touch of noel flavouring, and then Die Hard came along the very next year to solidify the trend, and Die Hard 2 to lacquer it, but I think it was Lethal Weapon that made it a thing! Certainly it popularized the use of incongruous holiday music to make some kind of ironic point! And it goes that extra Christmas mile by casting Phil Spector’s Christmas Album superstar Darlene Love as Danny Glover’s wife!

The setup and story hardly bear repeating, but here goes! Mel Gibson, whom we recall from his roles in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and Conspiracy Theory, plays Martin Riggs, so archetypally the emotionally hollowed-out cop that he seems a parody of the form; and whether he’s putting a gun in his mouth or sharing his dog’s breakfast or acting all bugeyed and crazy, he doesn’t seem much like a real person! This behaviour had more impact back when it was fresh, but it was never very realistic! Meanwhile, Danny Glover, well beloved from his role in The Dead Don’t Die, is Roger Murtaugh, whom I used to think was so old but is only just turning fifty as the picture opens! And just as Riggs is a near-parody, of course Murtaugh is the very model of the too-old-for-this-shit family-man cop still doing the job, but with half an eye on retirement and his driveway watercraft which ought to be named the Midlife Crisis! The introductory scene where he’s relaxing in his bath and the whole family bursts in to give him a birthday party while he’s in his birthday suit always struck me as odd, but I guess that’s the repressed North American in me!

The action is kicked off in the opening moments by a naked lady, zonked on the devil’s dandruff, plummeting to her doom from the top of a luxury tower! This unfortunate lady turns out to be the daughter of none other than Tom Atkins from Halloween III and Night of the Creeps, playing an old pal of Murtaugh’s called Hunsacker! Then we have the obligatory scenes in which Murtaugh meets-cop with Riggs and reluctantly becomes his partner; Riggs acts crazy and near suicidal and Murtaugh becomes upset; and Riggs comes over to the Murtaugh house for dinner and relations between the two buddy cops soften into a true partnership! Ha ha!

The baddies are a bunch of drug-smuggling army fellows led by a pocky old general played by Mitchell Ryan from Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers! The plot particulars are actually a bit murky, and there’s a sense of the filmmakers not really caring much about the mechanics of it, or how Hunsacker’s daughter's death plummet fits in! The important thing is how evil these fellows are, particularly Gary Busey from Silver Bullet playing Mr. Joshua, the general’s right-hand man, who literally offers up his right hand to be burned by a cigarette lighter on the general’s casual instruction just to make a point! And of course, ha ha, there’s perpetual hench Al Leong as Endo, who’s forgotten more about administering pain than the rest of us will ever know! Mr. Joshua’s pain endurance capabilities are not really explored beyond the cigarette lighter scene, and Endo’s legendary talents as, conversely, an inflictor of agony don’t seem to stretch beyond crude car battery electrocution, so in these senses the movie is more talk than walk!

But in other respects it’s a perfectly-wrought 80s action extravaganza, right down to the climactic front yard punchfight, complete with MTV effects provided by a spurting fire hydrant and a hovering helicopter spotlight, and cops kept at bay by only a few words from Glover! Richard Donner, who'd earlier brought us The Omen, directs the thing with about the right amount of flair, and the performances, as clichéd as they may seem to us today, are on point! It hums along like a well-tuned engine, and never mind how sketchy the plot is or how contrived the events! The bad guys all get their just desserts, and then Riggs, who invites himself over for Christmas dinner, presumably gets some dessert too! Ha ha! I give Lethal Weapon two and a half dashboard grenades!

Burl reviews Better Off Dead! (1985)

 

Friends and neighbours, ahh, listen to me now! Ha ha, it’s Burl here again with a movie review for you, and this time it’s a beloved 80s teen comedy set at just around this time of the year! Well, it covers December and goes into January I guess, so there’s a little bit of Christmas cheer in there, much as we find in another, lesser, 80s teen pic, Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home! But this one is fondly recalled by me and by my friends, and by, I gather, quite a few other folk as well! It’s Better Off Dead!

Of course the movie stars John Cusack, and with this he was following up yet another vaguely Christmastime teen comedy romance, The Sure Thing, released the year before! Here he plays Lane Meyer, a prototype for the character he’d play later in Say Anything: a guy who’s kind of sporty (Lane, or at least his stunt double, ha ha, is a decent skier), sort of cool (he has a cute horseyface girlfriend and a hot, if immobile, car), but also a little bit of a nebbish, loser, and geek! So I guess they’re trying to have and eat cake at once by making Lane an Everyman, but with movie protagonist qualities (good looks, athleticism, a Camaro) that the genuine Everyman rarely possesses! His best and seemingly only friend is Charles De Mar, an eccentric who wears a top hat, snorts anything he can coax up a straw, and is played perfectly by Curtis Armstrong of Revenge of the Nerds fame; and Charles, I suppose, by his stovepipe whimsicality is meant to provide hard evidence of Lane’s mid-to-lower level social station!

Lane’s girlfriend Beth, played by Amanda Wyss from A Nightmare on Elm Street, dumps him right off the bat, and this provides the motivation for what slim narrative drive the picture offers! Mostly it’s a shapeless accumulation of incident, some of it almost realistic teen angst comedy, like the breakup and the ski race against blonde bad guy Roy Stalin; some more fanciful, like the demoniac paperboy or the two Japanese brothers who street race against Lane every chance they get, colour-commenting on the race in a Howard Cosell voice over loudspeakers on their car; and some much crazier still, as in the scenes where Lane’s mute little brother creates a laser gun or a bedroom brothel or a home-built space shuttle! And Lane himself spins off into fantasyland regularly, imagining himself as a Dr. Frankenstein creating living hamburgers who sing and play like Eddie Van Halen! Of course there are the repeated, if halfhearted, suicide attempts, which had aged badly even between the time the movie was shot and when it came out, and haven’t gotten any better since! There’s not a lot of hilarity to be wrung from teen suicide when you get right down to it!

In the course of the movie we also meet Lane’s father, who is perpetually annoyed with the immobile car and with other bizarre family behaviours, and who is played by David Ogden Stiers from The Cheap Detective and, in a later reteaming with Cusack, Shadows and Fog! Lane’s mother is played by Kim Darby from Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, and she keeps busy wearing crazy costumes and cooking unpalatable meals! Across the street is a yet more grotesque family: Mrs. Smith and her bulbous, crochet-loving son Ricky, but they have as a houseguest a French foreign exchange student played by supercute Diane Franklin, known from The Last American Virgin and Amityville II: The Possession! Ha ha, and when she wears a ballcap and gets automotive grease all over his face, she’ll simply capture your heart just as she does Lane’s! And let’s not forget Dan Schneider from Making the Grade and Hot Resort as the neighbour Ricky, who shows off some excellent physical comedy skills in the course of the picture! Ha ha, that little futile jump he does when trying to get his balloon back is priceless!

This was director Savage Steve Holland’s feature film debut, and he recruited Cusack again the following year for One Crazy Summer! That one never developed the legs of its predecessor, though – ha ha, back in the old VHS days, Better Off Dead got the repeat replays from my friends and I, while the follow-up got maybe one viewing in toto! That doesn’t mean Better Off Dead is a great film – ha ha, far from it! It’s as shapeless as a sea-level blobfish and lots of the jokes don’t hit; but on the other hand plenty of them do, and it’s got an antic sense of absurdity that carries it along nicely! We get some fine comic performances, and the bit with the math teacher, played by Vincent Schiavelli from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, whose students hang on his every word and live for his homework assignments, is a good example of how the movie occasionally strikes a relatable chord for all of us Everymen but does so in a way that’s both overextended and baggy, yet still pointed and funny! Anyway, its good nature goes a long way, and so I give Better Off Dead two dollars and a fifty cent tip!

Burl reviews Krampus! (2015)

 

Ha ha ha, merry Christmas! Yes, it’s Burl, and of course we’re well into the Christmas movie season, and I’ve already watched a number of the usual suspects this month: Gremlins, Christmas Vacation, A Christmas Story, Die Hard, so forth! But I also watched one that was new to me: a little PG-13 horror dingle-dangle called Krampus! Now, I know there’s a little cottage industry of direct-to-video Krampus pictures out there, but the one I’m talking about is the relatively big-budget one that came from the director of Trick ‘r Treat! As mentioned, it’s a PG-13, so rather than having the Krampus rip people’s heads off or stick them with icicles, the picture features a family besieged by an army of demonic toys like some kind of unimaginably slick Full Moon movie! Ha ha!

Charles Band could only dream of a cast of mildly recognizable faces such as Krampus has on offer! Adam Scott from Our Idiot Brother and Who Loves the Sun is Tom, the dad, and Toni Collette from Fright Night and The Way Way Back is Sarah, the mom; they have two kids, a younger boy called Max and a teenage girl named Beth, and Tom’s German-speaking mother is there to make traditional Bavarian treats! As in Christmas Vacation, the homestyle holiday is interrupted by the arrival of a gang of downmarket relations, including David Koechner from Dirty Work as Howard, the gun-crazed über-American slaphead, plus his wife and three kids (a pair of tomboy bullies, a baby, and a pre-teen dunderklumpen who never says a word), and the grouchy lush Aunt Dorothy, played by Conchata Ferrell from For Keeps?

Young Max is so upset by these goofs that he rips up his letter to Santa and sends it flying to the four winds! This act alone is sufficient to conjure up the Krampus, a horned and hoofed demon who leaps from rooftop to rooftop and employs random tactics to harass the un-festive! Homicidal gingerbread men, humongous toothy jack-in-the-boxes, dirty elves borrowed from Icelandic mythology: all this and more eventually shows up to bedevil this extended family! Ha ha! Omi knows what’s going on, because as a girl, back in the old country, she had a run-in with the Krampus! Kids start disappearing, either into the uncanny blizzard that has the family trapped, or up the chimney, or in the cavernous attic!

Max, who started it all with his Santa-ripping shenanigans, is more or less our hero, but the ending leaves the efficacy of his heroics in question! Ha ha, the whole last act seems kind of piecemeal, and this stands in contrast to the first part of the movie, which concentrates on being a sort of family Christmas comedy, almost entirely sans horreur! I thought this was a good decision, ha ha, and it would have been an even better decision had the affrights, when they do come, been more effective! But they’re not, particularly, and nor are the comedic parts particularly uproarious!

There are some rewarding moments, though, and the performances are good, and I liked the opening scene with the slow-motion shopping frenzy, even if that has very little to do with anything! It’s no seasonal classic, but it was enjoyable enough counter-Christmas programming to watch with the family by the fire! An R rated version might have been more fun, but this was perfectly fine as it was! I give Krampus two and a half vinartertas!

Burl reviews Lady in White! (1988)

 

Hello and a happy post-Halloween to you all! Just a few days ago, and for the very first time, I watched a movie I’ve been aware of for years and years, something I saw on the shelves of the video store I worked at and the ones I patronized! I never did pick it up, because although it was a spooky picture and I like those, it seemed a bit too much like a kiddieshow! Ha ha, it was the same with The Monster Squad! But having a kid myself now, who's the same age as this film's protagonist as it happens, it seemed the perfect time to finally sit back and take in The Lady in White!

The opportunity to see the picture came from the director himself, Frank LaLoggia, who posted a link to his director’s cut on a social media! I downloaded it toot sweet and watched it with my family, it being a family-type movie more or less! It’s a flashback sort of a story, a childhood memory caper like Stand By Me, and so it’s appropriate that it begins in the present day with the main character as an adult, a Stephen King-type horror writer played by LaLoggia himself, being ferried to his old stomping grounds by a cab driver played by Bruce Kirby from, yes, Stand By Me! Ha ha!

The young version of this character, Frankie Scarlatti, is played by Lukas Haas from Witness, Mars Attacks! and Who Loves the Sun! He dwells in a small upstate-New York town with his dad, Alex Rocco from Gotcha, Stick, and Herbie Goes Bananas, his brother Geno, played by the talented Jason Presson from Explorers, and his old country bickerson grandparents! Life is good for jug-eared Frankie except for the fact that his mom has recently died, and he must occasionally suffer some older-brother ribbing from Geno!

Also there’s a pair of mean kids in his classroom, and one evening close to Halloween they lock him in the cloakroom at his school! There he sees the ghost of a little girl who was murdered a decade earlier, and then a rather more substantial presence: a man with a hooded face who comes into the cloakroom to find something, and, realizing he's not alone, starts to strangle poor Frankie! Yes, it seems the town has been suffering a series of child murders, and Frankie, having survived his encounter, realizes he’s got access to clues that might help him find the killer, and that another ghost, the legendary Lady in White, might be a further key to the mystery!

But he only comes upon these realizations gradually, for Frankie is no precocious boy detective but a refreshingly real kid who gets scared and doesn’t always do the right thing! And the movie itself is not a fast-paced, Goonies-style kids’ adventure, but a more meditative memory piece that moves at its own tempo, bringing on characters like a family friend played by Len Cariou from One Man, The Four Seasons, and Executive Decision; the local crazylady, Katherine Helmond from Time Bandits and Brazil; a storytelling postie well played by Sydney Lassick from Alligator and Silent Madness; and Lucy Lee Flippen from Summer School as Frankie’s teacher! And then of course there’s the poor school janitor, blamed for the killings mostly because he’s black; and his poor wife, left alone with her children to suffer the wrath and scorn of the town; and the grief-stricken racist lady, mother to one of the dead children, who gets a mad look in her eye and plots revenge against the wrongly-accused janitor!

Between the child murders and the racism it gets kind of murky for a family film, but some tonal equilibrium is maintained thanks to the heavy filter of nostalgia, the antics of the grandparents, and, since the story unfolds over a period of months, the inclusion of both Halloween and Christmas scenes! The narration, delivered by LaLoggia, is pretty ropey and is probably best ignored, which the poor sound mix on the director’s cut I watched made easy to do; and some of the optical trick effects are silly in both conception and execution! Also, at 122 minutes, the movie, or at least the director’s cut, might be a tad overlong, ha ha! The cliffside climax does tend to linger like the last guest at a Halloween party!

But it all comes straight from the heart, and that’s a virtue not to be airily discounted! LaLoggia took his own history - that of a horror-loving kid named Frank growing up in an Italian family in upstate New York - and married it to an established local lady-in-white legend and an invented serial killer story, and the result is a heartfelt if minor spookshow! I should also mention Rocco, who so often played a hard case but here is warm and kind as the anti-racist father! It was nice to finally catch up with this little movie, and I give Lady in White two and a half squirrel hunting jackets!

Burl reviews A Christmas Story! (1983)

 

Ho ho, it’s Burl, here to review a seasonal classic for you! It’s a Christmas picture from Bob Clark, and I know what you’re thinking: Black Christmas, right? Ha ha, no! I’ve already reviewed that one! This is Bob’s other twinkle-light extravaganza, the well-beloved cornball nostalgia-comedy A Christmas Story!

You all know the story, because, ha ha, there is no story! Well, I suppose there is: a boy in 1940s Cleveland desperately wants a BB rifle for Christmas, but encounters resistance from all the authority figures around him, and even from Santa himself! Purfling the edges of this narrative are all the details of schoolboy life in a mid-century December: weirdly obsessive fathers, annoying little brothers, neighbourhood bullies, triple-dog dares among chums, radio giveaway gimmicks, and so forth!

Our hero is Ralphie, a bespectacled cherubim played by Peter Billingsley from Death Valley! It’s of critical importance that he convince his mom, played by Melinda Dillon from Staying Together, that the Red Ryder repeater is a necessary toy, and that there will be no accidental de-oculation! Dad, or rather The Old Man, is played by Darren McGavin from Raw Deal and Dead Heat, and indeed he is an old man, in fact perhaps a touch too old so to be playing this character; but then he does such a darn good job in the role that any such complaint is moot!

The Christmas season is ever-present, and all the attendant rituals are checked off: the buying of the tree, the visit to Santa and his elves! There’s a freewheeling structure reminiscent of Kenny and Co., and in many cases it’s the non holiday-specific segments which linger longest in the memory! Ha ha, the triple dog dare at the flagpole, for example, or Ralphie’s beatdown of the dreaded Scut Farkus, or his accidental cry of “Fudge!”, or, of course, the whole saga of the leg lamp! Ha ha, I need hardly go into further detail on these or any other episode in the picture, as it will no doubt be playing on a loop this Christmas day on some network or other!

This being in essence a Canadian movie, there are some familiar northland faces in the cast! Ralphie’s teacher, Miss Shields, is played by Tedde Moore whom we may recall from Rip-Off and Rolling Vengeance, and the Christmas tree man is none other than Les Carlson from Videodrome, The Dead Zone, and even some non-Cronenberg pictures! The whole thing has an appropriately fog-filtered Norman Rockwell look courtesy of cinematographer Reg Morris, who shot Bells and all sorts of other pictures!

I could have done without the Chinese restaurant scene at the end, or at least without the singing, but otherwise the movie goes down like a smooth nog! It’s funny here and heartwarming there, and sometimes it’s just there, playing on your TV, but it remains a repeatedly watchable holiday candy cane crunch, and I think, low-key as it is, Bob Clark really pulled something off here, and only a year after he made Porky’s too! I give A Christmas Story three strangled cries of “Notafinga!”

Burl reviews On Her Majesty's Secret Service! (1969)

Ha ha, this never happened to the other fellow indeed! Yes, it’s Burl again and Bond again, only this time the superspy in question played not by Connery, not by Moore, not by Dalton, Brosnan, or Craig, but by the doughty one-offsman George Lazenby! So yes, of course the picture is On Her Majesty’s Secret Service!

Now, I’m not so sure I’d have watched this movie in July had I remembered it was a Christmas picture, but there you are! It’s not one of your more action-packed outings, to be sure, but, ha ha, Lazenby’s not the only novelty here, because the picture tries a bunch of new things! Because it’s the late 1960s, we get some elliptical editing and other New Hollywood movie tricks, particularly in the fight scenes! I enjoyed this, though to contemporary audiences it may well have seemed like the kind of blender-editing which makes Quantum of Solace such a chore to sit through!

He does some garden-variety spy stuff, like when he sneaks into an office to steal some documents! But he doesn’t just snatch the papers, nor photograph them with a little spy camera, no: he has a buddy dress up like a construction worker, then place a large case into a crane bucket so it can be hefted up the side of a building to the fifth floor where Bond is! The case contains a device which proves to be an enormous photocopier, ha ha - state-of-the-art equipment for any spy in 1969, I’m sure!

Of course it all ends up in Blofeld’s mountaintop allergy clinic on Christmas, ha ha! Blofeld even has a tree and gives out neatly-wrapped gifts! And here, the perennial villain is played by Kojack himself, Telly Savalas, whom we know so well from his equally sinister appearance in Mario Bava’s Lisa and the Devil! Ha ha, Blojack! And what’s great about this iteration of the super-villain is that he gets a lot more personally involved in the battle against Bond than we see in other pictures! He’s not just sitting in a chair and stroking his pussy this time, no sir!

The big question is: how’s Lazenby? Well, he’s demonstrably no Connery! He’s matey and cavalier, and seems equally uncomfortable doing the action as he does in the long section at the allergy clinic during which he must wear a kilt and pretend to have no interest in the beautiful ladies who abound there! And in the end he’s not really an actor, nor does he claim to be! But for all that I didn’t mind him - certainly I prefer him to Moore in his smarmier moments! And the movie Lazenby has going on around him is, while not exactly action-packed, interesting and solid enough to raise him up to a quite acceptable level!

And the movie sticks the landing, emotionally speaking! This is perhaps the only Bond picture which ends with the superspy sobbing instead of snogging, and it makes for a genuinely affecting conclusion! Diana Rigg, who plays Mrs. Bond, and whom we know so well from Theatre of Blood, is quite believable as the woman Bond would want to settle down with, and Gabriele Ferzetti, who was Sandro in L’ Avventura, is terrific as her friendly gangster dad! I give On Her Majesty’s Secret Service two and a half purple parcels!

Burl reviews The Nightmare Before Christmas! (1993)

Ha ha, ho ho ho and booga booga too, it’s Burl! Yes, I’ve just come from a special screening of the animated picture The Nightmare Before Christmas, with a full orchestra playing the Danny Elfman score, so perhaps this review will be slightly skewed by this charming and unusual movie-going experience! Or perhaps not; it’s hard to say! All I know is that it was y first time seeing this picture in any scenario, so my impression will always be that its standout quality was the music!

And this of course is hardly fair to the animation, which is stellar! The story I found less compelling, but that’s okay! It all takes place in the magical world of holidays: each special calendar day, it turns out, has its own little world, which is responsible for that particular holiday! Ha ha, I guess it’s a stretch to call Halloween a “holiday,” because, after all, it’s not exactly holy, and more crucially, your boss doesn’t give you the day off of work!

But anyway, in Halloweentown, a lanky fellow called Jack Skellington is the Pumpkin King, the fellow evidently most responsible for coming up with their annual scary Halloween gambits! Everyone loves Jack, ha ha, but he himself falls prey to a vague but powerful misgiving, a feeling that there must be more to life than Halloween! And so there is: he comes across a forest glen where trees are marked, restroom-style, with the symbols of different holidays, and the trees prove to be doors! After a brief sojourn in Christmastown, Jack is charmed by the concept and resolves to bring Yuletide joy to Halloweentown!

Jack’s specific plan is a little half-baked, but he ends up masterminding the kidnapping of Santa Claus, whom he imagines to be a towering half-man, half-lobster with snapping claws and crushing mandibles! This turns out to be a misapprehension, ha ha!

Anyway, by the time Christmas comes and Jack is riding a coffin-sled pulled by skeleton reindeer, he’s given cause to regret his rash embrace of someone else’s holiday, and Santa certainly upbraids him for the attempt! Ha ha, perhaps Jack would have been better off appropriating Casimir Pulaski Day! Christmas is saved in the end, and the main bad guy, some sort of boogen living in the basement, is revealed as being made of bugs!

There are Tim Burton design touches everywhere to be found, which would surely have felt fresher back in 1993! Ha ha, Christmastown is sort of boring and boilerplate; you can tell his heart is in Halloween! The movie itself was directed by Henry Selick, who later did a fine job with Coraline and other creepy animations! Jack is given voice in song by Elfman himself, which occasionally gives the thing the flavor of a feature-length Oingo Boingo video; his speaking voice, less frequently heard, comes from Chris Sarandon, well-known from Fright Night! Catherine O’Hara from The Paper provides the female voices, and William Hickey from The Sentinel is a nasty duck-lipped scientist!

I enjoyed watching the picture, but having missed out on it all these years, I can’t see it becoming a holiday perennial for me! Maybe there were just too many songs! But there’s lots to admire, and the live orchestral accompaniment was a lot of fun, so I’m giving The Nightmare Before Christmas two and a half shrunken heads!

Burl reviews Comfort and Joy! (1984)

Aye, it’s Burl, ha ha! It's a new year, but I have a few seasonal holdovers to report on yet! I’ll tell you, I’ve spent some time in Scotland, and I had a marvelous time there! It’s a thoroughly charming country, and while I was there I went on a sort of pilgrimage to some of the locations used in Bill Forsyth’s marvelous picture Local Hero! Ha ha, it was a terrific little amble, magical and amazingly scenic!

So Local Hero is a favourite of long standing, but until the other night I’d never seen Forsyth’s follow-up, a semi-Christmas picture called Comfort and Joy! I ignored it back when I had every opportunity to see it on VHS, and then later it proved difficult to find! But if you beachcomb the Internet for long enough, these things will eventually wash up, and that was the case with this picture! It’s another one of those it-happens-to-be-Christmas movies, and you know how much I like to watch those, ha ha!

Our main character is a morning radio host, of the sort revered by pensioners, called Alan ‘Dickie’ Bird, and he’s not having a very pleasant holiday season! His ladyfriend, a dedicated kleptomaniac, is leaving him and taking with her all the trinkets and things she’s pilfered over the years! And then, one day not long after, Dickie catches sight of a lovely lady in an ice cream van, and, after purchasing his cone, bears witness to a terrible act of vandalism when masked men beat the truck with bars!

Well, this arouses his journalistic instincts, previously thought moribund, and Alan involves himself in what is apparently an internecine war between Glaswegian ice cream interests! The Mr. Bunny crew are the rogues, the interlopers, selling their cream rampantly anywhere in town they please, whereas Mr. McCool is the established frozen treat family! Ha ha! The violence, which is always directed toward things rather than people, escalates, and Alan attempts to broker a peace while simultaneously wooing the pretty lady! But she remains as aloof and exotic as the mermaid in Local Hero, ha ha!

However, Alan’s activities and his coded radio comments lead his listeners, friends and employers to believe he’s gone barmy! Further complications ensue on the road to the gentle and funny conclusion, ha ha, and along the way there are many wry, dry laffs, of the sort ol’ Burl appreciates very much! The gags unfold at their own pace, almost in the spirit of Jacques Tati, and most of them hit home! There are some groaners of course, and some that fall pancakewise, and some annoyances here and there too, like why Alan spends even a second pining for, not to mention erotically dreaming about, his horrible girlfriend once she’s gone! (Ha ha, she is pretty though, so I’ll grant him the erotic dreams!)

I was glad to finally track this picture down, or rather, in the manner of the internet, have it wash up on shore right to me; and if it sticks around I could see it becoming a seasonal staple for me! It was highly enjoyable and, like Summer Night Fever, it made me feel GOOD just to watch it! Ha ha, and what more could you ask for? I give Comfort and Joy three and a half creamed BMWs, or, as they're better known, Creamers! Ha ha!

Burl reviews I Come In Peace! (1990)

In a space-zap style, it’s Burl, here to continue my ha’-Christmas movie rundown, by which I mean reviews of movies that aren’t Christmas movies per se, but do take place around that time of the year! Ha ha, and here’s another happens-to-be-the-holidays movie, one more along the line of Cobra than, say, Trading Places! It’s Dolph versus the alien drug dealer in I Come In Peace!

As with most of the movies in this subgenre, the Christmas content is mainly crammed into the early part of the movie, as we follow a yuppie who plays carols on his in-car CD player! Ha ha, imagine the luxury! Well, the yuppie (played by Jesse Vint from Forbidden World, it should be noted) soon runs his Beemer off the road and has it blown up by a tall goony-bird alien from the planet Trenchcoat! He might be a cousin of the fellow from Without Warning, except with not quite so bulbous a head! The alien knocks down the yuppie and performs a procedure on him that will be repeated many times in the picture! It involves whipping a barbed cord into the victim’s chest, pumping in some kind of narcotic, then extruding something from the person’s brain! This particular substance is a powerful drug that’s very popular on Trenchcoat, and accordingly this alien criminal is being pursued by an equally tall alien cop!

The alien’s next stop is a drugs-deal, where he shows off one of his other weapons, a flying CD that cuts throats! Pretty soon rogue cop Dolph Lundgren, himself almost as tall as the aliens, is on the scene, and he gets teamed up with an uptight benben played by Brian Benben, and together they must overcome their mutual acrimony, battle the nefarious White Boys and figure out the mystery of the tall aliens and all the explosions that are happening around Christmastime!

Betsy Brantley, the mom from The Princess Bride, plays Dolph’s ladyfriend, with whom he bickers quite a bit! But he doesn’t bicker with her as much as he does with the benben! It’s funny: the benben gives the film’s most amusing performance, yet his character really doesn’t bring much to the narrative! I guess he was in there to provide the mismatched-partners element that was so popular at the time!

Other familiar faces include Michael J. Pollard from Next of Kin, playing, naturally, a weirdo who straddles the line between eccentric and developmentally disabled; and Al Leong, the longhair from Protocol and Die Hard, who defies all concepts of typecasting by playing not a henchman, but a luggage salesman! Ha ha! And then there’s the Terminator-like alien, who always says “Ha ha, I come in peace!” just before he puts a killing on someone! The role only requires that the actor be tall and wear painful-looking contact lenses, and these criteria are met adequately by this particular actor, who I believe is a German!

There’s not much to be said for the plot of this picture, nor for the dialogue, nor for the acting or directing; but there are many fine stunts and quite a number of explosions! If this is the sort of thing you’re looking for, it delivers the goods in sportsmanlike fashion! I give I Come In Peace one and a half benbens, which is what you would need to bring the one in this picture up to an average height! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Trading Places! (1983)

…And she stepped on the ball! Ha ha and ho ho ho, it’s Burl, here with another non-Christmas movie set around the holidays! Of course I’m talking about Trading Places, the comedy classic made by John “Into the Night” Landis! It’s not a particularly Christmasy picture, but it does have a scene in which one of the stars, Dan “The Great Outdoors” Aykroyd, inebriates himself and dresses as a dirty Santa! Then he says “Bluaaaghhhh, blargh!” Ha ha!

We all know the plot! Here we have the rough-edged but good-hearted ne’er-do-well Billy Ray Valentine, played by Eddie Murphy of Beverly Hills Cop fame, and the posh fancylad Louis Winthorpe III, played by Aykroyd; and we have two elderly superwealthies, the Duke brothers, who like to play hob with people’s lives! Ha ha, the plot begins when the Dukes – Bo is played by Ralph Bellamy from The Wolf Man, and Luke is Don Ameche from Heaven Can Wait – make a bet on whether, if they switch these fellows around, putting Billy Ray in the catbird’s seat and Louis in the gutter, Billy Ray will become a respectable commodities broker and Louis a criminal street bum!

There are many misunderstandings and crenulations, and characters like the kindly butler (Denholm Elliot from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), the kindly prostitute (Jamie Lee Curtis from Grandview U.S.A.) and the not-so-kindly dirtytricksman (Paul Gleason, the well known meanie from Night Game and Die Hard and Welcome to Spring Break and Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home) figure in; and Christmas comes and goes, and there’s a train gorilla and some crop reports, and a big final scene on the commodities trading floor!

Well, it’s the oldest tale in the book, really, and the director, young Landis, tells it in his usual straight-ahead style, with a few ingratiating looks into the lens and other trademark moves! Of course, we have to mention how unbelievably quickly Billy Ray turns from jive-talking con man to expert commodities broker, juggling pork belly futures as he used to handle discarded gutter-butts! We expect to withhold some disbelief in a picture like this, but even with that feature engaged, and an understanding of the exigencies of plot movement, it seems a bit of a quick transformation!

But there’s lots to enjoy! The cast is great, even when they’re playing the oldest clichés in the book, like poor Jamie Lee and her hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold! Eddie Murphy provides one of his finer performances, if you ask ol’ Burl, and Dan Aykroyd does prep-school nimrod almost as well as he does earnest techno-drone, which is saying an awful lot! It would have been nice to see John Candy in here somewhere, but you can’t have it all, I guess! I’m going to give Trading Places three eye-rolling gorillas that were somehow not created by Rick Baker!

Burl reviews Six Weeks! (1982)

Ha ha, Burl here to review a weepie from the early 1980s! As I’ve explained before, I have a certain fascination with the adult dramas and comedy-dramas of roughly the era 1978-82 – the time frame in which we saw the release of pictures like It’s My Turn, Only When I Laugh and The Last Married Couple in America! My working theory is that I’ve retained the perplexities I felt about adult behaviours and rituals at that formative time, and am looking to these movies for some key to solving them! Ha ha, who knows if it’ll ever really bear fruit, but in the meantime I’ll keep occasionally watching pictures in this genre, just in case!

The one I’m speaking of now is Six Weeks, which I’ve had sitting on my VHS shelf unwatched for a long time! It seemed like December would be the ideal month in which to make a viewing attempt, as it’s plain from the poster and video box that this is a holiday picture! In fact, as was the case with Cobra and Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home, it turned out to have only a small amount of holiday content, but that’s really the ideal for movies like this!

Now, ha ha, we can see that the picture stars Moores Dudley and Mary Tyler, but in this case, the Moore is not especially the merrier! Dudley is a tiny little California politician whose British accent must be explained in dialogue several times, and, to the extent he’s well-known at all, is well-known for using humour in his stump speeches! On the way to a fundraising party being given him, he meets a precocious pre-teen girl, Nicki, whom he casually invites to drop in to the shindig after she gives him directions on how to get there! The girl arrives with her mother in tow, and of course Mary Tyler plays the mother! She seems at first to have held on to the frosty-bitch persona she used in Ordinary People, but it turns out she’s just mad at Dudley because of a misunderstanding: she's revealed to be a cosmetic tycoon in the style of Estée Lauder, Mary Kay Ash or Elizabeth Arden! She apparently has Moore money than all three of them put together, and so she believes that Dudley has merely lured her daughter to the party so he can cadge a big donation!

The daughter develops an obsession with Dudley – not a romantic one (though it’s sometimes hard to tell), but one focused on helping his campaign! Dudley’s campaign manager, played by Joe “Lassiter” Regulbuto, is all for this, but Dudley doesn’t want to do any “babysitting,” and turns the full force of his elfin sarcasm on poor Mary Tyler! However, it turns out that Nicki, as cheery as she seems, is shortly to die of leukemia, so she’s soon helping out with the campaign, making phone calls and pasting bumper stickers onto brown Datsuns! Meanwhile she and the two Moores begin spending lots of time together, forming the de facto family that the girl never knew, and prompting carefully tamped-down r*mantic feelings between the adults!

Trouble is, Dudley already has his own family, and his wife Peg, played by Shannon Wilcox from Zapped Again, is pretty resentful that Dudley is spending Moore time with these other people than he is with her and their son! This leads to many strained discussions and a few awkward, unresolved scenes! Eventually Nicki and the two Moores end up in New York city at Christmastime, where Nicki gets to live her dream of dancing in The Nutcracker! But of course there must be the inevitable sad ending!

I have to say, this picture surprised me a bit! I’m not much a fan of three-hankie weepers, and this always looked to me like the most saccharine, most manipulative thing ever! I pictured endless scenes of the girl in her hospital bed, giving out brave and life-affirming advice to the teary-eyed Moores as she inches closer to death! In fact, after her triumphant turn on the stage, she gets on the subway, twirls around the pole for a minute, then looks stricken, utters her last words – not some fleecy bromide, but a heartrending “It hurts so much!” – and drops dead! Ha ha, it’s much Moore effective than the hospital scenario so many other movies would have chosen!

The adult relationships are Moore realistic than expected also, mainly by remaining completely unresolved! Moore’s wife is still suspicious and resentful and hurt, and while the relationship between the Moores remains unconsumated, it will clearly haunt the margins of their existence for the rest of their lives, Brief Encounter-style! So it’s still not exactly my kind of picture, but it was Moore so than I imagined! Ha ha, I give Six Weeks two Ghost Story posters, which we see plastered on a construction fence!

Burl reviews Morgan Stewart's Coming Home! (1987)

Ha ha, Burl here to review a teen shenanigans picture! No, not one of those Andy Hardy things, but an apparently troubled production called Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home! Ha ha, Ferris Bueller took a day off, Parker Lewis couldn’t lose, and yes, early in this movie, Morgan Stewart does indeed come home!

Now, if Jon Cryer, whom we know from No Small Affair and Hiding Out, ever deplored his resemblance to Matthew Broderick, the feeling probably peaked around the time this picture came out! He was already thought of as the junior league Broderick; why underline it with a title like that? Ha ha, surely to biscuits he was being offered other stuff at the time; but on the other hand, maybe not! Or maybe Cryer had legitimate designs on whatever throne it was that Broderick occupied in 1987, and this was his way of saying “Ha ha, I’m coming for you, Broderick!”

Well, if that was his intention, he should have chosen a really compelling story as his vehicle! Instead we get the tale of Morgan, a likeable enough kid, a boarding school urchin as long as he can remember, with a fabulously wealthy, but distant and robotic mother, and a gormless Republican politician for a dad! One day as the Christmas holidays approach, the parents call him home, and he’s excessively, even touchingly pleased about it!

However, it turns out that the dad’s campaign advisor simply advised that Morgan come home so he can help play happy families on the hustings! We understand from the get-go that this campaign manager is a jerk, because he’s played by poor Paul Gleason, an actor we recall from Night Game and that Christmastime standard, Die Hard! It takes Morgan a long time to realize, or at least to care, that he’s just a political prop! In the meantime he meets a lovely young lady who shares his interests, but the relationship is torpedoed by his increasingly monstrous mother!

An important aspect to Morgan’s personality, and come to think of it the only one, aside from his fundamental decency, that we ever get to see, is his horror movie fandom! I remember being told of this years ago by my pal C. Milligan, Esq., who quoted a PA announcement heard in a mall scene: “Attention shoppers: come and meet George A. Ro-mee-ro, creator of the living dead!” We even catch a glimpse of Romero signing autographs, or at least a bearded actor pretending to be him!

I also related to Morgan’s horror in the heartrending scene in which he discovers that his mother has taken down and destroyed his precious horror movie posters! The same thing happened to me, though my mother did it out of cluelessness rather than malice! Ha ha, I can laugh about it now, but I was disappointed to find my splendid one-sheets for Creepshow, The Thing, The Funhouse, A Nightmare on Elm Street and so forth had been consigned to the shredder! To this day my mother insists she didn’t do it, but who else could have? I ask you, who else?

So all that, and the fact that, like Cobra, this one of those stealth Christmas pictures, is why I finally watched the movie this year! Sadly, it’s a pretty bad picture! Sure, it’s got some appealing elements, but it’s poorly written, formulaic, and in general very badly directed! No wonder old Al Smithee ended up taking the credit, ha ha! The performances are okay, I guess, but Lynn Redgrave is almost too effective as the mother: she’s so horrible, so much like one of the alien people in They Live, that her last-minute transformation into a caring mother is not to be believed!

There’s not much else to say about it: at the end the family is all lovey again, Gleason is in chains, Morgan and the girl are a couple, and, in the most unlikely of events, the dad wins his election, even after being shown up to the world as a hopeless rube! Ha ha, I’m going to give Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home one Day of the Dead t-shirt!

Burl reviews The Shop Around the Corner! (1940)

Ha ha and a happy New Year: it's Burl here, catching up on my movie reviews! For example, here I am reviewing The Shop Around the Corner, a picture which takes place in the days leading up to Christmas, and which I watched in the days leading up to Christmas; yet here I am only just reviewing it now! Ha ha, go figure!

The Shop Around the Corner is of course a picture brought to us by Ernst Lubitsch, who of course also gifted us with films like Eternal Love and Heaven Can Wait! (My very favourite, though, is Design for Living!) This story was later remade into a late-90s email picture called You’ve Got Mail, which I’ve never seen, and so I can only imagine how a tale involving the employees of a small Budapest department store was adapted into a fin-de-siècle rom-com!

The store in question is Matuschek’s, owned and operated by the fearsome Mr. Matuschek, who is played by the Wiz himself, Frank Morgan! Ha ha! His longest-serving employee is the decent and efficient, but slightly officious, Alfred Kralik, played by a young Jimmy Stewart! Of course we know Stewart from many pictures, including but not limited to Rear Window and Thunder Bay! A young lady, Klara Novak, played by the tragic Margaret Sullavan, comes to work at the shop, and she and Alfred take a gradual dislike to one another! But, ha ha, it turns out that aside from being co-workers nurturing a mutual antipathy, they are anonymous pen pals who’ve fallen in love with one another in written form!

The situations that follow never get as artificially complicated as they would if the picture had been made later or by less skilled parties! There is, thankfully, none of the door slamming and bedclothes-hiding that drag down pictures like Madame Satan! But Alfred becomes aware of the full picture long before Klara does, which seems a bit unfair, and this climaxes in a scene in which he finally reveals the truth in an almost sadistically drawn-out way! In her shoes, I might have just clobbered him and stalked out, ha ha!

The Lubitsch Touch is in evidence here, but sporadically! The picture spins its wheels quite a little bit in the second half, I’m sorry to say, and too often the characters come off as shrill clobberbabies! The acting is skilled all around, however, and the little community of the departments store workers is effectively drawn!

I enjoyed the picture, because how could I not, and the Christmas Eve conclusion is in general quite heart warming, if a little aggressively capitalistic! I’m going to give The Shop Around the Corner two and a half musical cigarette boxes!

Burl reviews Black Christmas! (1974)

Agnes! It’s Burl! Bleaughaughauughrragagag, snort, snort, pretty pretty! Ha ha, no, I haven’t gone mad – I’m just imitating one of the shocking telephone calls in the classic proto-slasher Black Christmas!

I watch this one nearly every Christmastime, ha ha, and it never gets old! Well, some things about it are old, like the rotary dial telephones and the many minutes it takes to track the origin of a call! And the many marvelous innovations which were hoary clichés only a decade later are, I suppose, technically old, but the engaging way in which the picture plays out ensures a fresh and robust experience each time!

It is, at heart, a movie about a very crazy person killing off sorority girls one by one, but these young ladies are not the simple dingbats usually found in such stories! They’re highly individuated humans, and even the not-so-pleasant ones (the haughty scold, the angry souse) are real, and one feels sad when the screeching maniac puts a poking on them!

The sorority house is closing up for the holidays, and only Jess and Barb and Phyl and a couple of others are around! Jess is having boyfriend problems – the young fellow with whom she cavorts, a stringhair played by the Paperback Hero himself, Keir Dullea, is an intense weirdo with issues of control! Ha ha, could he be the kill-crazy knife-o-path? Maybe, or maybe there will be a finale drenched in grim ambiguity!

It’s a spooky picture, and maybe one of the two best, scariest slasher pictures ever produced! The other of course is Halloween, but this one runs neck-and-neck for sheer goosebumpery! Bob “Porky’s” Clark made the movie, and I’d call it the best Christmas picture he ever made, even though A Christmas Story is a marvelous creation as well! His cinematographer, Reg Morris, did am A-1 job of giving some real Christmas-light-and-snowball atmosphere to it all!

The cast really is top flight too! John Saxon, who was a cop in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and Blood Beach, here plays a cop, ha ha! Another cop is played by Doug McGrath from Back Down the Road! Then you’ve got the co-eds in peril, Olivia “Escape 3000” Hussey, Andrea “Club Paradise” Martin, Lynne “Strange Brew” Griffin and of course Margot Kidder from Sisters, all of whom are terrific, especially Kidder!

If you’ve never seen Black Christmas, well, you should do so and quickly, and thence make it an annual tradition just as I have done! It’s got lots of laffs and plenty of old-tyme shivers, so I give Black Christmas four king cans of 50! Ha ha!