Burl reviews Cockfighter! (1974)

 

Buck buck b’kaw, it’s Burl, here to review a movie at which many would cry fowl! Ha ha, you know, old Burl is an animal lover, so I find it hard to get behind a movie that depicts – indeed, has caused – harm to any creature! I actually think Cannibal Holocaust is a pretty effective movie, but that tortoise-killing scene really sours it for me! (To be honest, some of the other gnarly stuff in there does too!) I’ve praised many an old Western film, but when they start tripping horses I spend the rest of the movie thinking about how mean that is! And then comes along a movie whose story, theme, very essence, and even title, involves heavy doses of terrible animal cruelty: Cockfighter!

What to make of it? I’d seen it before but watched it again the other day, because someone I know is writing a book about the movie! Ha ha, I’m raring to read it! And I’ll tell you what, I also met the director of this picture, Monte Hellman, when I stayed at his house in the Hollywood Hills, where he hosted an Air B‘n’B! He was a nice fellow and we chatted quite a bit about movies and such! The third outside factor which might somehow affect how I think about this movie is that once, for moviemaking reasons too complicated to get into, I had to keep a rooster overnight in my apartment! I built a big cage for the thing, put it in my living room, and then of course the bird went off at four-thirty in the morning, cock-a-doodle-dooing away and waking up all the people in my building; and only playing the song “Bali H’ai” from South Pacific could get it to shut up! Ha ha, the incident didn’t endear me to roosters, I’ll say that!

So: Cockfighter! It’s the story of Frank Mansfield, played by Warren Oates from Blue Thunder and Race with the Devil, a down-South fighting-cock trainer who has taken a vow of silence after letting his own foolish words cause him to lose out on a chance to be Cockfighter of the Year! Only once he wins that medal does he plan to speak again, and so far, we gather, it’s been a couple of years since he first clammed up! (Ha ha, we get to witness his pre-vow chattiness in a flashback, and he’s so obnoxious that I was quite happy to have him spend most of the movie with zipped lips!)

Frank travels around with his birds and a gal named Dody, who has only ever heard Frank talk in his sleep, when he blusters and yells and threatens to kick people across the room! Dody is one of a very few performances from Laurie Bird, who was also in Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop and later in Annie Hall, and that’s it! Frank loses yet another bet to his frenemy Jack Burke, played by the great Harry Dean Stanton from Christine and Repo Man, and Jack walks away with Frank’s money, car, camper trailer, and girlfriend! This is where we get a sense of how much Frank values human relationships, in particular with women, which is to say not very much! We also see how he treats his brother (played unexpectedly by matinee idol Troy Donahue, known from Grandview U.S.A. and Deadly Prey) and sister-in-law: Frank arrives at the family home, stays the night, and the next day steals the house (which technically he owns) right out from under them and has it shipped off down the road on a truck!  

But Frank does have at least one true pal in Omar, essayed by Richard B. Shull from Klute and Spring Break! Ha ha, Omar is a mighty appealing character, or at least as appealing as someone who engages in a pointless blood sport can be! Frank hangs out with Omar and with Buford, another affable fellow, here played by James Earl Jones’s dad Robert Earl Jones, whom we may recall from Trading Places! Much of the middle act of the picture involves Frank hanging out with these two, or episodes in which he encounters such characters as a gangly overall-clad goofbuster played by Ed Begley Jr. from Get Crazy, or Steve Railsback from Lifeforce, playing a cocky cockfighter with a loosey-goosey pointin’ finger who likes to give his birds a little bit of digital persuasion!

I’ve not talked much about the cockfights themselves, which are frequent and often bloody! They’re faked to an extent – the sharp spurs are mostly not actually made of metal – but there’s only so much you can fake these things really, and there are times when the cocks are clearly killing each other! It’s pretty grotesque, but also a powerful dramatic device! Through the course of the picture, in spite of or maybe because of Frank’s silence, we move more than we may like into his point of view and the fights become less brutal and alien; but when the object of his silent amours, his fiancée Mary Elizabeth, played by pretty redheaded Patricia Pearcy from Squirm, finally witnesses a cockfight, we see the bloody spectacle from her perspective and are suddenly repulsed anew by it, along with her!

The picture is exacting in its detail and almost never strikes a false note! It’s clear the cock pits we see are real cock pits, the spectators are real spectators, and of course the roosters are real roosters, fighting and clawing and beaking each other bloody! The cast is just about perfect: ha ha, what a gallery of faces, and in addition to those already named we get folks like Warren Finnerty from The Laughing Policeman, Tom Spratley from Deadly Friend, and even Kermit Echols from Grizzly! But it remains that Mansfield, as ingratiating as he can sometimes be in his silence – slapping his knee in response to a joke, or darting out his hand for a shake to seal the deal or to indicate agreement – and as marvelous as Oates’s performance is, is ultimately a damaged and inhumane guy; and that the sport itself, in spite of occasional bursts of first-person narration trying to explain Frank’s love of it, is indefensible! It’s a wonder that this movie exists, and, cruelty aside (if that’s possible), it’s one of the most perfectly-crafted things Roger Corman, or the 1970s for that matter, ever produced! And that’s saying something on both counts, ha ha! I give Cockfighter three and a half busted beaks!

Burl reviews Grand Theft Auto! (1977)

 

Vroom, vroom, eerrrrkkkk! Ha ha, that’s ol’ Burl burning out with a good old-fashioned car crash picture for you! Well, we all know the story: Ron Howard, the well-known ginger who would later direct pictures like Apollo 13, was, back in 1976, only an aspiring film director, and he asked Roger Corman if he could direct a movie for Corman’s company New World Pictures! “Ha ha,” Corman told him, “you sure can, just as long as you’ll first star in an item called Eat My Dust!” Well, Howard said yes to that, and then the next thing you know he was co-writing (with his dad Rance), starring in, and directing a movie called Grand Theft Auto!

When I was maybe eight or nine I’d have told you this was my favourite movie! It was on TV regularly I guess, and I sure did love all the car crashes, ha ha! But some time during that period my family happened to be hosting a bunch of people we barely knew, who’d been displaced because of a forest fire in their little town; and one evening they proposed going to a movie, Being There, and invited me along! I was torn because Grand Theft Auto was on TV that night! But ultimately I opted for Being There, and I think that experience might have been profoundly formative: an introduction to a level of movie quality of which I’d been previously unaware!

I still appreciated Grand Theft Auto, though, and liked it again when I re-watched it the other day with my son, who's at the perfect age for Grand Theft Auto appreciation! It tells the tale of a young couple, Sam, played by the young Howard, and Paula, played by Nancy Morgan from The Nest! This doesn’t sit well with her richie-rich parents, who want her to marry a wealthy dork called Collins Hedgeworth, a role essayed by Paul Linke! He of course is well known from Moving Violation, Motel Hell, and his many appearances on CHiPs! Paula’s parents are played by Barry Cahill from The Groundstar Conspiracy, as her blowhard dad Bigby; and Elizabeth Rogers, who’d been involved in this sort of vehicular nonsense before in The Van, plays her mother!

Now one of the best moves Howard made, and probably one of the reasons I was so taken with it as an eight year-old, is that the action in this picture starts right from the get-go! There’s a short argument scene with the parents, then the girl steals her father’s Rolls Royce and it’s off to the races without a whole bunch of needless blah blah blah! I felt the same thing about that other big 1977 release, Star Wars – ha ha, I thought to myself, finally a movie that starts at the beginning! And as for Grand Theft Auto, except for a pointless argument scene between Sam and Paula late in the picture, it doesn’t let up ‘til the end!

Boy, they sure crashed a lot of cars in this picture! It’s pretty impressive on a Roger Corman budget, I must say! Paula and Sam (who spends most of the movie in the passenger seat, presumably to make it easier for him also to direct the movie) point the Rolls toward Las Vegas in a bid to secure a quickie wedding, and immediately become folk heroes thanks to the interest in their case taken by radio DJ Curly Q. Brown, played of course by The Real Don Steele, whose voice we know from his vocal appearances as Screamin’ Steve Stevens in Rock n’ Roll High School and Rockin’ Ricky Rialto in Gremlins! They’re also being chased by an ever-increasing number of people including but not limited to Paula’s parents; a bunch of private eyes or something in their employ; Collins Hedgeworth of course, and, separately, his mother (played by Mrs. Cunningham, natch); a pair of fortune-hunting mechanics; and police! Also worked in there is the requisite and always welcome Paul Bartel cameo!

It’s a pretty auspicious directorial debut, ha ha! There are crack-ups aplenty and the pace is good and quick! The story doesn’t amount to much, and the intra-lovebird conflict is highly manufactured and annoying, and Dick Miller should be in here somewhere but mysteriously isn’t; yet it’s nevertheless a breezy and entertaining little picture! And of course I feel a lot of residual affection from my prepubescent ardour for the movie, and, strangely, gratitude too, for I associate it with my viewing of Being There and subsequent entry into a wider world of movie appreciation! Grand Theft Auto, in this view, was not just something I appreciated, but something I had to overcome before becoming able to broaden my world! I still like the picture though, ha ha, and I give it three homemade lovewagons!

Burl reviews Frankenstein Unbound! (1990)

 

Attention pilgrims, it’s Burl, here to review the work of a legendary filmmaker! The legendary filmmaker’s name of course is Roger Corman: the fellow who brought us such distinguished works as A Bucket of Blood, Rock All Night, Sorority Girl, and Attack of the Crab Monsters! He took a little break from directing movies which ended up lasting twenty years (though he produced them, and still produces them, with wild abandon), and his return to the director’s chair was this curious item, Frankenstein Unbound!

We begin in the future year of 2031, where a scientist called Buchanan, played by the terrific John Hurt of Only Lovers Left Alive, is putting the finishing touches on his superweapon! The superweapon dissolves matter, but it also opens up some kind of temporal time rift, such as we saw in The Philadelphia Experiment, but here shaped like a purple vagina; and after Buchanan drives home in his talking car to find a bunch of kids in his yard holding a funeral for a bike for some reason, he and his sapient auto get sucked up by the time rift and deposited in 1817, near Lake Geneva!

Naturally, as we know from history, Dr. Frankenstein was conducting his notorious experiments in this area, and of course, once Buchanan and his talking car have figured out where and when they are, and Buchanan has hidden his talking car in a bramble, he walks into a bar and the first person he meets is none other than the modern Prometheus! The good doctor is played by Raul Julia from The Eyes of Laura Mars as an imperious dandy, and after he gets a look at Buchanan’s digital watch, he’s pleased in return to show off the hulking creature he’s built! Nick Brimble from Lust for a Vampire plays the monster, a brutal oaf who speaks in a tragic, baronial timbre, is covered in face putty, and is happy to knock people’s heads off when he takes a mind to!

Meanwhile, of course, Mary Wollstoncraft (that is, the future Mary Shelley) is hanging around, played by Bridget Fonda from Singles, and there are brief, fey, pointless appearances from Byron and Shelley, essayed respectively by Jason Patric from The Lost Boys and rocksman Michael Hutchence from Dogs in Space! And then there’s Catherine Rabett from The Living Daylights as Frankenstein’ sweetheart Elizabeth, who gets cracked open like a walnut by the creature!

Yes, he’ll do violence all right, that creature, and he’s mad mainly because of the meat! Ha ha, no, he’s mad because Frankenstein has thus far refused to make him a mate, but then the doctor obliges him after all, and the mate seems to have CDs growing out the sides of her head; and then the time rift reappears, sending Buchanan, Dr. Frankenstein, the creature and his new jerrybuilt ladyfriend to some kind of frozen future wasteland! Ha ha, the talking car gets left behind in nineteenth century Switzerland, where it presumably will roll around the countryside startling locals with loud honks or unexpected badinage!

The climax involves more killing and the predictable revelation that the wasteland is actually the world of the future, which has come to this sad state thanks to Buchanan’s superweapon, and which he’s fated to wander alone for the rest of his days! Ha ha! I guess this is meant to function as a sort of corollary or echo of the monster’s self-imposed Arctic exile as depicted in the book!

Well, it’s a strange picture, and an odd choice for Corman! Of course, he made all sorts of pictures in his career, so maybe there is no odd choice for him! It’s a bit akin to the Poe films he made, Premature Burial and suchlike, but it has more heads and arms being ripped off than those ones did, ha ha! And it’s less elegantly made, frequently goofy, and in places demonstrates genuine ineptitude! But it also has really effective bits, as when the creature is chasing down Elizabeth’s carriage, or when he goes ape on the torch-bearing townsfolk!

I’m glad it exists though, as a curio if not a compelling piece of cinema; and it’s really not that much goofier than its contemporaries, films like Gothic and Haunted Summer! I thought the stitched-together multicoloured eye on the poster was a pretty cool image, meant no doubt as a metaphoric synecdoche for the creature itself - but it turns out that’s what the monster’s eyes really look like! Ha ha, talk about impractical! But there’s the movie in a nutshell for you - and look, a synecdoche after all! I give Frankenstein Unbound, or F.U. as some may prefer to call it, two vaporized Statues of Liberty models!

Burl reviews Rock 'n' Roll High School! (1979)

 

Hey ho, let’s go, it’s Burl Ramone here with another movie review for you! Yes, it’s that paean to rock n’ roll and to some of their high priests, those leather-jacket lotharios the Ramones! Of course the movie is Rock 'n’ Roll High School, and it’s always been funny to me that, after being conceived originally as something called “Disco High,” before it was pointed out that a school could not be blown up to disco music, and then cycling through rock bands as diverse as Devo and Van Halen, the picture ended up with the Ramones as their superstar all-time teen idol crush objects! Ha ha, I’m a tremendous Ramones fan, but the idea of them as objects of starry-eyed devotion is amusing indeed!

P.J. Soles from Halloween plays the marvelously-named Riff Randall, the top Ramones fan at Vince Lombardi High! Concurrent with the building excitement for the big Ramones show the entire school wants to attend is the appointment of a new principal at Vince Lombardi, a tight-bunned autocrat called Miss Togar, played by that singular talent Mary Woronov from Cannonball! With her two Katzenjammerish hall monitors, she institutes a reign of terror; meanwhile, Riff waits in line for three whole days and buys Ramones tickets for the entire student body! Meanwhile again, there’s a romance triangle: a gormless sweater-jock played by Vincent Van Patten from Hell Night sets his cap at Riff (who only has eyes for Joey Ramone of course), while Riff’s friend, a sweet nerd played by Dey Young from The Running Man and The Serpent and the Rainbow, sets hers, for some reason, at Van Patten! It falls to boy’s room entrepreneur Eaglebauer, played by Clint Howard from Ticks and Apollo 13 as a good-natured cross between Milo Minderbinder and Sgt. Bilko, to try and put things aright!

Paul Bartel from Piranha is Mr. McGree, a rather stuffy music teacher who is yet open-minded enough to give the New York good-time rock combo a chance, and once he attends their concert, he’s shouting Gabba Gabba Hey along with everyone else! Ha ha, he doesn’t even mind when Joey calls him “Mr. McGloob!” He’s a very likeable fellow, I must say! The Ramones concert sequence is highly reminiscent of the concert stuff in Get Crazy, which makes sense since they were both directed by goodtime music lover and ex-Fillmore East usher Allan Arkush! (Ha ha, a trivia for you: by the end of the shoot, Arkush became too sleepy to continue, so Joe Dante had to direct the last day or so!)

When Miss Togar pushes Riff Randall and the rest of the student body too far, they take control of Vince Lombardi High and rename it Rock 'n’ Roll High School! The fantastic and much-beloved Dick Miller, known from from Armed Response and Explorers and many dozens more, is called in to help keep the peace, and truth be told his character doesn’t do much except stand around and call the Ramones ugly! But it’s great to have Miller there, so ha ha, I’m not complaining! It all ends with a tremendous explosion which, like much of the rest of the picture, belies the measly $300,000 they spent on it!

The movie is chock full o’ delights: a great cast, the hilariously bad acting from the Ramones, a marvelously sincere embrace of the anti-authoritarian spirit of rock n’ roll, and a boogie van called the Warlock! Dey Young is pretty, but her crush on the dweeby square played by Van Patten is mystifying! Ha ha, oh well - different strokes, I guess, and anyway by the end, like many a teen Romeo before him, Van Patten is singing “Sweet Mr. Sansregret” at the top of his lungs! It’s altogether a fun time at the pictures, and I give Rock 'n’ Roll High School three placards reading “Gabby Hayes!” Ha ha!

Burl reviews Galaxy of Terror! (1981)

By grimbus and by garr it’s Burl, here with a review of one of Roger Corman’s early-80s sci-fi/horror hybrids! You all know about such gems as Forbidden World and Humanoids From the Deep, and you may even know about Space Raiders, but the picture I’m reviewing for you today, Galaxy of Terror, is in many ways the most special of them all!

Ha ha, when this one came out I tried to go see it with my friend Dave! We were both little kids, but we loved horror movies; and, as Galaxy of Terror was showing in a multiplex and was rated R of course, we bought tickets for a Rocky Horror Picture Show revival then tried to sneak across the hall into the cinema where the movie we really wanted to see was playing! But halfway through the opening credits we felt strong hands clamp on our shoulders, and two burly ushers hoisted us up, marched us to the door, and tossed us out into the street to roll in the gutter! It's too bad, because what a victory it would have been to see this beauty on the big screen!

It’s a Alien knock-off, of course, but only to a point! We open in the office of The Master, a fellow with a glowing red head and the voice of that fine gent Ray Walston, famous for his roles in Silver Streak and Johnny Dangerously! He’s talking to an old space witch played by Mary Ellen O’Neill from Van Nuys Blvd., and he decides the thing to do is to round up a spaceship crew and head to Morganthus, a mystery planet where a previous spaceship crew has disappeared! Thanks to the enthusiasm of spaceship captain Grace Zabriskie, whom we recall from Drop Zone and many fine David Lynch pictures, the characters find themselves on the nightmare planet in no time flat!

Our hero is an upright fellow named Cabren, played by Edward Albert from When Time Ran Out and Getting Even! Ha ha, everybody has lame space-names, like Baelon, the mildly antagonistic character played by erotic film director Zalman King, or empathy-lady Aluma, played by Joanie herself, Erin Moran! Bernard Behrens from The Changeling and The Man With Two Brains is an old man along for the ride; Taafe O’Connor from Hot Chili is the buxom lady with a fear of worms; Robert Englund, Freddy himself from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, is a little guy called Ranger; and Sid Haig, whom you surely remember as the Righteous Brothers’ drummer in Beach Ball, is the virtually mute Quuhod! Ha ha, Quuhod! And Ray Walston is along as the cook, who by an amazing coincidence has the same voice as The Master!

It turns out the planet, and in particular a big pyramid located there, is a place that makes manifest the worst fears of anyone who enters! The first to go is a whinyman played by Jack Blessing from Summer School, who gets eaten by a big doodlebug and we’re glad to be rid of him! The old commander guy goes down a wormhole and is sucked dry by vermiforms; Sid Haig has his beloved crystals turn on him and his own severed arm delivers the death-stab; Zabriskie’s Captain Trantor is incinerated; and poor Erin Moran ends up getting crushed by cable snakes in a crawlhole! Ha ha, yikes! But the worst and the goofiest of all is of course the famous maggot assault, which makes neither psychological nor physiological sense but was intended only as an over-the-top outrage designed by Corman to attract daring or depraved viewers!

There’s some good squoochy gore in here, and mixing this together with ambitious low-budget special effects, James Cameron’s tenpenny production design (and his shock-dancing maggots, ha ha), that stellar oddball cast, and some gloriously dumb metaphysics, we get a heady brew indeed! The movie cares not a fig about making sense, but it does deliver a parade of trick effects you will surely enjoy! I don’t care for the maggot rape, nor for the sensibility that concocted it, but it’s outlandish enough to be more or less ignored, and I’m only glad the actress escaped being crushed by the giant worm prop! Galaxy of Terror is not a movie for everyone, but it’s got a strange hold over me, so with some reservations I award it three redheads!

Burl reviews Humanoids From the Deep! (1980)

Blub-blub, it’s Burl, here with monster terror from beneath the waves! It’s New World Pictures time, and more specifically it’s one of their early-80s monster pictures, like Galaxy of Terror and Forbidden World, the kind of thing they were loading full of gore and monsters and nudity and all the stuff that the drive-in patrons of the day truly appreciated! The picture in question is none other than the notorious Humanoids From the Deep!

Now, ha ha, I’ll get into the major notoriety issues later, but first we should address that inaccurate title! For, while the monsters do indeed swim and come up from the water, they never seem to get very deep, and they certainly don’t live in the depths! No, they dwell in the caves and indents of the Pacific Northwest coast, specifically around the small fishing town of Noyo, home of the Salmon Fest!

Doug McClure from Tapeheads and 52 Pick Up is the fisherman hero, a little reminiscent of the Tom Atkins character in The Fog; and while he has an appealing teddy bear presence, by the climax he’s getting some pretty weird ideas! Anyway, it seems that the fishing around Noyo has been poor of late, and meanwhile a big company is thinking of opening a cannery in the area! Most of the townsfolk, including the town jerk played by Vic Morrow, are for the cannery, but the local Indigenous population doesn’t want their land appropriated and their waters polluted! It’s a reasonable position, but tensions are at a boiling point, and when something kills all the dogs who hang out at the pier, a big fistfight is the result!

Most of the actors have to spend the rest of the picture with bruise and abrasion makeups on their faces as a result of this fistfight! They all putt-putt around in little boats with tiny Johnson motors on them, while Morrow and his boys spy and plot strategies against the Indigenous folks! Meanwhile, humanoids created by the young, hungry, and unstoppable trick effects genius Rob Bottin are popping up here and there, slashing at the menfolk with their big long arms and forcing themselves upon the community’s ample stock of young women! For a movie directed by a woman, Barbara Peeters, it seems awfully rapey, but thankfully these scenes - which, indeed, may have been added later by male filmmakers, thus the controversy - are displayed in quick cuts and without much detail; but they’re still most unsavory!

After McClure, his buddy Johnny Eagle, and the lady scientist from the canning company played by Ann Turkel have an encounter with the fishmen and manage to kill a few of them and bring one back to the town, it becomes apparent what scale (ha ha!) of problem Noyo has! Turkel admits that her salmon experiments must have gone terribly wrong! Urgent, immediate action is clearly required, so she shows her new friends a film about frogs! But in the meantime Noyo’s Salmon Festival is about to commence, with the funfair action on the harborside pier, and the local radio announcer celebrating by pronouncing the L in “salmon;” and the next thing you know humanoids are busting up all over, slaughtering folk, slashing at them, pulling off their heads, or just plain ripping off their brassieres! It’s the Corman exploitation philosophy in a seven-minute nutshell, and on some level you’ve simply got to admire it! And Peeters carries it all off with real conviction, ha ha!

Not everything makes sense, though! McClure’s idea to firehose fuel all over the place and set the harbor adjacent to the funfair on fire is a decidedly odd one, and doesn’t help things in any way! Is it an attempt to burn up the creatures, or merely to distract them? He manages to shoot one or two humanoids, but otherwise this supposed hero is virtually useless!

And then there’s the footage Peeters didn’t even shoot - the extra added rape stuff, and the bellybusting birth scene at the end! The knowledge that these were added by male filmmakers after the real director, a woman, was given a pat on the head and told to go home gives the whole thing a distinctly skeevy, unpleasantly old-fashioned edge! But at the same time, if you make the effort, it’s possible to watch Humanoids from the Deep and see the marvelously unpretentious B-movie Peeters intended to make! It’s well-crafted, decently acted, and punches well above its weight in areas such as James Horner's score and Bottin's trick makeup effects! Ha ha, I give Humanoids from the Deep two groovy brown ca-trucks!

Burl reviews Cannonball! (1976)

Vroom vroom and hello, Burl here with a movie review for you! Today I’m talking about a star-studded movie that dramatizes the famous illegal cross-country race known as the Cannonball Run! Ha ha, so is the movie in question The Cannonball Run? No, it’s the earlier, altogether more satisfying Cannonball!, directed by famed beardsman Paul Bartel!

David Carradine from Armed Response plays Coy Buckner, our hero, whom we meet as he’s waking up from a terrible dream! He’s about to embark on the great race, driving a gaudy red Trans-Am of course, and a series of mixups and confusions ensure that his goofy buddy Zippo (played by Archie Hahn from Protocol and Innerspace) and his grand amour (Veronica Hamel from When Time Ran Out… and A New Life) will be traveling in an exact copy of the same car!

Meanwhile we have A Couple Of Crazy Kids In Love, played by Robert Carradine from Mean Streets and The Pom Pom Girls and Massacre at Central High and Number One With A Bullet, and Belinda Belaski from Piranha and Gremlins; a vanful of ladies led by Mary Woronov from Get Crazy and Black Widow; a psychotic hillbilly played by Bill McKinney from Looney Tunes: Back In Action, who’s riding with country music star Gerrit Graham, from Class Reunion and The Annihilators and of course Chopping Mall; a flamboyant German played by James Keach from Vacation and Moving Violations; and a portly moustacheman, played by Carl Gottlieb from Jaws and Into the Night, who simply loads his Chevy Blazer into a plane and flies to New York!

So you can see that there are a lot of familiar faces amongst the racers! On top of that, it seems the race organizer is none other than the legendary Patrick Wright, who was in Roller Boogie and If You Don’t Stop It… You’ll Go Blind, and directed Hollywood High! And best of all is Dick Miller, from Apache Woman and Carnival Rock, playing Coy’s brother Benny Buckman! Ha ha, Benny is placing all sorts of bets with a mobster played by director Bartel, which leads to a weird scene in which Miller is savagely beaten by thugs as Bartel serenades him with quasi-Cole Porter tunes of his own composition! There’s an even weirder scene too, in which Bartel’s mobster has a confab with a pair of Mafiosi played by Martin Scorsese and Sylvester Stallone! Ha ha, odd!

And while we’re talking cameos, we ought to mention that the directors of Hollywood Boulevard, Allan Arkush and Joe Dante, appear as a pair of small-town car nerds, and the director of The Slams, Jonathan Kaplan, shows up as a gas station attendant, and the director of A Bucket of Blood, Roger Corman himself, appears, sitting behind a tiny desk in a tiny office in the role of the Los Angeles district attorney! Whew!

There’s more to the picture than cameos, though: there’s car crashes! Lots of them, all accompanied by huge fireball explosions! They must not be too terribly hot though, because after a climactic sequence in which dozens of cars collide and erupt into infernos of metal and flame, we are told that seventeen people have been admitted to hospital as a result! Ha ha, this after we’ve seen that one of the people involve in the pile-up was shot in the head and another had a car fall on him!

Cannonball! isn’t a great picure, but it has that 1970s New World Pictures charm, some terrific humour (Bartel’s singing mobster and Gerrit Graham’s performance being highlights) and that astonishing cast! I enjoyed it thoroughly, and will champion it over any Burt Reynolds nonsense any day of the week! Ha ha, I give Cannonball! two and a half flaming ballcaps!

Burl reviews Premature Burial! (1962)

Ha ha, the bell tolls twelve, and it’s Burl! I’m here to review one of the Roger Corman Poe movies, and if you know immediately what I’m talking about, then you’re in the right place! (And if you think to yourself that Corman prefigured this series with the walled-up black cat in A Bucket of Blood, you’re doubly in the right place – sit down and have a brandy, ha ha!) However, if you need a little reminder that, between 1960 and 1965, Roger Corman made a series of relatively lavish movies based on Edgar Allen Poe stories (with a little Lovecraft tossed in the mix, ha ha), then don’t worry, friend, you’re still in the right place!

The one I’m talking about today, Premature Burial (no “The” in the credits, ha ha!) is probably not anyone’s favourite of the Poe pictures (unless they’re a big fan of Ray Milland), but neither is it likely to be at the bottom of the list either, unless they hate Ray Milland! It’s unique in that it stars not Vincent Price in the leading role, but rather, you guessed it, Frank Stallone! I mean Ray Milland, ha ha!

Milland plays Guy, an artist with a morbid fear of being buried alive! Ha ha, this terror stems from his conviction that his father, a cataleptic, was interred alive these many years ago! Guy’s uptight sister disputes this, as does his would-be fiancée Emily, as does Emily’s father Dr. Gault (who’s played by Alfred from Batman, ha ha!), and as does family friend Miles Archer! The only person in the perpetually fog-shrouded house who doesn’t appear to have an opinion is the butler!

But there’s something afoot! Guy and Emily end up getting married after all, but Guy’s personality shifts violently, and he becomes worried and snappish! He retreats into a self-built crypt and paints dark and terrible paintings! And he outfits his crypt with all manner of escape mechanisms, which he shows off proudly in a terrific scene halfway through the picture! Emily and the rest finally convince him that he mustn’t dwell so on this unlikely eventuality, and they persuade him to blow up the safety crypt!

Things go wrong from there, and indeed there is a burial alive, and many of the characters come to various sorts of sticky ends! There’s a pair of gravediggers played by John Dierkes (the Tall Soldier from John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage) and the great Dick “Apache Woman” Miller! Dierkes gets a pretty stiff neck-twist and Miller a fatal poking! We also have death by electricity and gunfire, and all of this takes place among freighter-sized drifts of studio smoke!

The picture looks great, with extremely atmospheric widescreen photography and marvelous sets! Milland is pretty good, but sort of one-note; and the rest of the cast is solid but unremarkable – except of course Miller, with his top hat and dirty mole teeth! It’s a pretty talky picture too, but does offer up some scares and shudders and the solid Corman craftsmanship that was on view during this period! I enjoyed the picture, even if it was a bit stuffy, and I’ll give it two and a half pullcord escape hatches!

Burl reviews Rock All Night! (1957)

Hi, Burl here with a review of another Roger Corman picture! Ha ha, I always like those Corman movies, and of course I like his Poe pictures as much as anyone, but his grimy little black and white five-day wonders do an awful lot of good for me too! This one, Rock All Night, is a classic example! It would make a good companion piece to Carnival Rock, but it’s leaner and livelier and a lot less depressing! Also, Dick Miller has been moved from a supporting role to the lead, so I’d say it’s an improvement all around!

Dick plays Shorty, a little guy with a big chip on his shoulder! He gets kicked out of a club where the Platters are singing an awesome number – actually he gets carried out under the bartender’s arm – and makes his way to another joint nearby! This one is a little more welcoming to Shorty, but has the distinct disadvantage of being the place a couple of gun-toting gangsters have chosen to hole up! There’s also a nervous singer who’s auditioning for a singing job at the behest of a portly beatnik named Sir Bop; a surly shakedown fellow; a bewildered reporter, a muscle-bound truck driver and his salty lady friend; a would-be boxer, his manager and his wife (played by the lovely Barboura "Sorority Girl" Morris from A Bucket of Blood, ha ha!); and the sad-sack bartender who serves drinks to them all!

It’s a fairly big group of people, and helps keep your mind of the inertness of the setting! Ha ha, the bar is a pretty dingy little place! But the picture is only sixty-two minutes long, after all! It was based on a twenty-five minute TV play called The Little Guy, and the great screenwriter Chuck Griffith, who adapted the play for Corman, just threw in a bunch of extra characters and some musical numbers from the aforementioned Platters and a pretty good group called the Blockbusters!

It’s Dick’s character, Shorty, that keeps the whole movie lively! He needles everybody, no matter if they’re two feet taller than him or if they point a gun at his nose! He doesn’t care! And so in the end, after all the big guys fail to defuse the gangster situation, he becomes the hero! Perhaps the greatest hero of them all! And the movie ends with him strolling off with the singer on his arm to catch a screening of King Kong! Ha ha, how happy can an ending get?
 
The movie’s a little one-note, as I mentioned, and it never displays the wit of something like A Bucket of Blood, but it’s still packed with great stuff! It’s got an all-star cast – Bruno Ve Sota, from Attack of the Giant Leeches, makes a surprise cameo, Russell "The Horror at 37,000 Feet" Johnson plays "Jigger," the main gunman, and we also get Beach Dickerson from Attack of the Crab Monsters and Jonathan Haze from Not Of This Earth! Plenty of others too, and Sir Bop is played by the great Mel Welles! I give Rock All Night three marvelous striped bomber jackets! 

Burl reviews Not Of This Earth! (1957)

Hello, it’s Burl reporting from the planet Earth! I’m here to review another movie for you, and this time it’s an old Roger Corman classic that I’d never even seen before! Of course I’m talking about that famous picture featuring a portly, Ray-Ban-sporting alien vampire, Not Of This Earth!

It’s a strange and quite affecting little movie! Paul Birch plays the interstellar hemogobbler, whose planet-fellows are dying off of a blood disease! He’s here on Earth to test humans for plasma compatibility in advance of a full-on blood invasion! He sets up house in a Beverly Hills mansion, enlists small-time thug Jonathan “Gunslinger” Haze as his assistant, then hires the great Beverly Garland as his live-in nurse! Slowly she comes to realize the threat this grumpy interloper poses!

For it seems that the alien, Mr. Johnson, can kill you with a glance! All he has to do is take off his sunglasses, peer at you for a moment with his eggy-whites, and he’ll frizzle-fry your brain! Ha ha! He zaps a young lady right at the beginning of the picture, and among his other victims is none other than the great Dick “Carnival Rock” Miller, playing a hep-cat vacuum cleaner salesman who gives Mr. Johnson the hard sell and gets a one-way trip into the furnace for his trouble! Mr. Johnson also invites three hobos over for dinner, but he’s no compassionate Viridiana – he wants those hobos for dinner, ha ha!

Mr. Johnson’s alien accoutrements, all of them built by the late monstersman Paul Blaisdell, include a space radio, a transportation portal by which he sends a wandering Chinaman back for experimentation purposes (although we hear later that the unfortunate Chinaman was crushed to a jelly by the teleportation process), and a flying umbrella that glides in through a window and sucks out a doctor’s brain! Eventually a goofy cop gets in on the action, there’s a car chase, and the vanquished Mr. Johnson ends up getting his very own gravestone in the middle of Griffith Park – just as, in the background, another sunglasses-sporting individual strides towards the camera, presumably to continue Johnson’s important work!

Ha ha, this is a little gem! It has a nice noir-ish look to it, thanks to cinematographer John Mescall, who shot such classics as Edgar Ulmer’s The Black Cat and James Whale’s great Bride of Frankenstein! But they say he harboured a taste for the grape, so Mescall never really got the chance to live up to the talent he so manifestly possessed!

The performances are good too, particularly Beverly Garland’s, and Corman seems to have put a little more effort into this one than he sometimes did in his pictures! Apparently he got into a fistfight with Paul Birch at some point, and Birch walked off, and this is why there are numerous scenes with Ed Wood’s chiropodist doubling for the actor even though the two looked nothing alike! But the real selling point to this picture is of course the great Dick Miller, and his presence alone, brief as it is, makes Not Of This Earth an absolute must see! I give it three compacted Chinamen!

Burl reviews Gunslinger! (1956)

Hi, kapow, kapow, Burl here, tzing tzing tzing! Ha ha, sounds like I’m in a gunfight, doesn’t it! No, I’m just here to review a movie for you: Gunslinger, the Roger Corman western! It’s not the only Roger Corman western, of course: there’s also Apache Woman and Five Guns West, and probably others! But this was his last one, or so they say!

It’s a lot like Nicholas Ray’s great picture Johnny Guitar, which had come out two years before! But this wasn’t a case of Corman recreating someone else’s massive hit on a micro-budget, I don’t think, because I’m pretty sure Johnny Guitar was no barnburner at the box office! This was just a movie Corman wanted to make because he liked the idea of two ladies wrestling and shooting at one another, maybe!

Beverly Garland, who I think was Roger’s girlfriend at that time, plays the sheriff’s wife, and the sheriff is played by Joe Dante regular William "Innerspace" Schallert, back when he was younger but looked the same! Ha ha! Anyway, he gets bumped off by a curtain rifle pretty quickly, and Beverly must pin on the silver star and take vengeance! Her main antagonist is Alison Hayes, the fifty foot woman herself, who keeps sycophantic ponyboy-cum-moron Jonathan "Carnival Rock" Haze as her assistant and literal bottle washer as she attempts to buy up all the local real estate she can get in advance of the railroad coming through town!

Haze is sent to Tombstone (where else, ha ha!) to hire a gunslinger that can take care of the formidable new ladysheriff, and he comes back with John Ireland, well known for his work in The House of Seven Corpses and Satan’s Cheerleaders! Well, even though Bill Schallert is not yet cold up in Boot Hill (yes, their graveyard is really called that), Sheriff Bev likes what she sees, and the feeling is mutual! Of course, Ireland starts to feel a bit conflicted about his assignment, but on the other hand, the fifty foot woman is offering all manner of persuasion, and in all sorts of coin!

Just about everyone in town ends up getting shot, ha ha! There’s not much of a town left by the time Sheriff Bev canters her way out past the bodies of Corman stock players that are stacked like cordwood along the roadside! Even the great Dick "Sorority Girl" Miller, playing a cheery Pony Express rider, is shot in the back by the evil fifty foot woman! Bruno "Attack of the Giant Leeches" Ve Sota is plugged too, and so is Jonathan Haze!

The movie’s very similar to Apache Woman in its circular pacing and the way it seems to be the same scene playing over and over again for great stretches! It's also really similar in plot to Blazing Saddles, ha ha! But it has a certain conviction, and then there’s that great cast! All the players are pretty good, and Beverly Garland especially so, I thought! Fred West’s colour photography is a bit dim – no Floyd Crosby, he! – but that’s probably because it rained for the entire shoot, so they say!

Altogether, I enjoyed the picture, but not as much as some other Corman joints I’ve seen! I give it two of Dick Miller’s shoulderbags! (He rode for two weeks and that’s all he was carrying? Ha ha!)

Burl reviews Apache Woman! (1955)

Lu-lu-lu-lu-lu, it’s Burl! Ha ha, yes, I’m here to review a cowboy-and-indian picture for you, an authentic oater from days gone by called Apache Woman! It’s a Roger Corman picture, and an historic one too, since it featured the first feature film performance – or should I say performances – from the legendary Dick "Explorers" Miller, who plays both a cowboy and an Indian! Ha ha!

Things are restless between the townsfolk and the Apaches, it seems, and that’s putting it mildly! There’ve been rootings, tootings, rustlings, ropings and murders happening throughout the vicinity, and though, as we’re told many times, the marauders leave no living witnesses to their crimes, all signs point to the Apaches being behind it! The townsfolk, including Dick Miller and Jonathan Haze, are starting to feel in a posseing sort of mood!

Caught in the middle of this are the brother-and-sister demi-castes Armand and Anne, half white and half Apache, who can’t get any respect from either side! Armand in particular, perhaps feeling additionally alienated because of his French name, has had enough of this poor treatment and universal disrespect! Every word he says drips with venal sarcasm, and he delivers each line with a weird sharky grin! It’s pretty clear that he’s the one behind the marauding – unless of course there’s a startling twist at the end!

Soon Rex Moffitt shows up, and he’s played by Lloyd Bridges! Rex is some kind of Apache expert, and he’s trying to keep the situation from blowing sky high like the powder keg it is! The moment he meets Armand he’s pretty sure he knows what’s really going on, but his special attraction to Anne – he bears special witness to a little bit of skinny dipping after all, ha ha! – prevents him from hauling her brother off to the pokey without some solid evidence!

I won’t tell you how it all winds up, but I will say that I enjoyed all the performances in this picture, particularly the dual roles essayed by Mr. Dick Miller! He really did a great job, and it was hard to believe it was only his first movie! I thought he was marvelous as the Apache in the bowler hat!

Altogether, this is a pretty solid little oater! It’s too bad what happens to Jonathan Haze, and maybe there are some scenes with a bit too much chatting in them, and maybe I didn’t see the movie in its original Pathécolor, but I enjoyed it! I give Apache Woman two and a half yo-yo sheriffs!

Burl reviews The Nest! (1987)

Bug-bug-bug! It’s Burl! Yes, it’s me, Burl, here to review a movie that may well move you to embrace the human and put the insect aside! It’s called The Nest, and it’s all about what Washington, Barbarino, Horshack, Epstein and the gang used to call “cock-a-roaches!”

 

It takes place on an island that’s also a town, just like Jaws! The mayor wears a lot of cable-knit sweaters (and has a cable-knit brow) and has surreptitiously sold off half the island to some sort of experimental laboratory company! We only ever see one scientist though, and she’s in the Barbara Steele mould from Piranha, so that’s okay! Ha ha, it’s amazing this picture isn’t about some sort of killer fish though, because it really follows that template!

 

Well, in the meanwhile the sheriff is involved in a love triangle because his old ladyfriend, the proto-Polley Lisa Langlois, well known from John Huston’s Phobia and of course the rat picture Deadly Eyes, has returned to town! And in the meanwhile of all this, killer cucarachas have begun putting a biting on food, books, animals and folks clear across this benighted islet!

 

Homer the Pest Control Man gets involved, and eventually, after a scary encounter with giant disembodied testes, it is discovered that supposed victims of the roach horde have in fact become fused with it, becoming sort of bug zombies that transform further into insectomorphs as they roll awkwardly forward on their casters! Finally we meet the Queen, and find out exactly how the effects in John Carpenter’s The Thing would have looked if they’d only had a few bucks to put them together and Rob Bottin was busy that day!

 

Ha ha, Roger Corman must have surely had It Conquered the World flashbacks when he was introduced to this monster! Also good is the moment when they mayor’s cable-knit sweater bursts open to reveal his new Blattarian nature! And there’s a few moments of fake-looking but tasty gore too, like the head that gets chomped in two! Ha ha!

 

It’s not a good film, but it has a lot to admire! The acting is generally pretty good, with Robert Lansing a standout as the Mayor! It’s actually not a role completely without nuance, and Lansing pulls it off very well! Homer the Pest Control Man (the secret hero of the piece according to the director) is played by an actor who seems like a hormonally-created hybrid of Daniel Stern and Dennis Franz! If that’s your cup of tea, this may be the only serving of it available!

 

And I liked how much effort they put into the thing, with all those terrible special effects! Even terrible special effects are hard to make, and I’m sure there was no money and no time and very little staff available to do it! But they tried! It has a lighthouse like The Monster of Piedras Blancas, and there’s a tiny bit of small-town island atmosphere!

 

I’m an animal lover, so I can’t say I liked the scenes where first a dog and later a cat (and still later a cat zombie right out of Re-Animator) become roach food! And I’m never wild about seeing lots of bugs squished and killed in movies, even cock-a-roaches! Well, I’m a softie! Nevertheless, I’ll give The Nest two giant swinging ballsacks!