Burl reviews Deadly Blessing! (1981)

With a chinbeard and a fearsome frown it’s Burl, here to review culty cornpone horror! Yes, it’s an early, which is to say pre-Elm Street, effort from Wes Craven; not one of his better-loved pictures, it’s true, but it’s also not Swamp Thing! It’s a movie about something deadly, but it’s not Deadly Friend! No no, gumchewers, today we’re talking about the one and only Deadly Blessing!

I’ve seen this one a few times over the years, and I’ll admit to you right now that I’ve never gotten a handle on it! I could never really remember what it was - a slasher movie? a killer cult story? supernatural demon horror? I guess I still don’t really know, except that it might be all of them, ha ha!

It’s a Texas picture all right, but I suspect it’s meant to be set in Pennsylvania somewhere! It’s set on a colony of “Hittites,” which don’t seem to be connected in any way to the ancient civilization, but are more like real far gone Hutterites! “They make the Amish look like swingers,” Sharon Stone says!

Yes, Sharon Stone, whom we know from Total Recall and The Quick and the Dead and of course Allan Quartermain and the Lost City of Gold, is in this picture, looking very gorgeous too, but the main character is Martha, played by Maren Jensen! It seems her husband Jim, an ex-Hittite, has a fatal encounter with a tractor one night in the barn! Now a widow, Martha invites her two friends, Stone’s Lana and another one called Vicky, to stay with her on the farm, “Our Blessing,” it’s called, situated right next door to the Hittite colony! But of course the Hittites fear and despise the outlanders, or at least some of them do, and heretics like Jim especially, so they do not make very good neighbours! A manchild played by Michael Berryman from Weird Science keeps popping over to accuse Martha of being the incubus, but this isn’t Incubus after all, and she’s quite innocent of the charge! (Seeing poor Berryman run around in the hot Texas sun, knowing that in real life he is unable to sweat and is thus highly susceptible to heat exhaustion, really made me feel for the poor guy!)

Ernest Borgnine, famous for his role in When Time Ran Out, struts around being psychotically stern and dementedly pious, while Jeff East from Up the Creek and Pumpkinhead plays a sympathetic young Hittite who begins a tentative romance with Vicky! Bloodless knife murders very occasionally spice things up; a snake turns up in the bath; and Craven gets in some of his soon-to-be-patented dream sequences! And then at the very end the floor busts open and things get decidedly supernatural for the downbeat ending! Ha ha!

There are a few darn good moments in the picture, which I had either forgotten of never previously appreciated! But there are quite a few dull patches too, and for long stretches the thing feels like a somnolent rural horror picture in the vein of, say, Funeral Home! I’d imagine that if you’re not in the proper mood, it might come off as a little dull! But it manages some countryside atmosphere and a few good shocks, and the mighty Borgnine gives a good performance as the sort of holy jerk to whom you want to deliver a sharp kick to the inner rectus! Ha ha, I give Deadly Blessing one and a half spiders in the mouth!

Burl reviews Shocker! (1989)

Zip zap it’s Burl, here to review a Wes Craven picture; and not, I’m sorry to say, one of his good ones! No, instead it’s Shocker, a movie that’s shocking mostly for how galactically silly it is! It’s clear that with this effort, old Wes was trying to recapture the magic of the marvelous A Nightmare on Elm Street, but he succeeded instead in recapturing the magic of Deadly Friend!

And somehow, you know, he really didn’t even do that, because though Deadly Friend is bad, it still manages to be what David Lynch calls a “neighborhood film,” and Shocker, though it be set in a neighbourhood, does not! But Shocker is still not without its own peculiar charms, like some goofy trick effects and a late-film innovation that takes the film from a wacky but still apparently serious horror picture into the realm of high-concept silly-fi!

It seems that the town is beset by a monstrous serial killer who, like the fellow in Manhunter, will invade a home and kill the entire family within! Our main character, Jonathan, a teen with a face like one of the aliens from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, has some sort of mental connection with the killer, who turns out to be a TV repairman named Horace Pinker! This fiend has committed numerous outrages, and the police are at a loss how to catch him despite the fact that, during his killings, Pinker always parks his van with PINKER’S TELEVISION REPAIR emblazoned across the side directly in front of whatever house he’s targeted!

With the teen’s help Pinker is caught, but not before killing the family Jonathan was adopted into a dozen years earlier! Yikes, another family massacre! After some ritualistic shenanigans held in his cell before a TV, Pinker gets the chair! But ha ha, he’s got something up the sleeve of his checkered boiler suit: he turns into energy and escapes into the wiring! Then he takes over the bodies of a series of people, including that of a little girl, and then her mother, and then a pick-axe waving city worker! Much is made of the novelty of a sweet-looking but foul-mouthed six year-old bent on murder! Finally Pinker rediscovers his first love, television, and becomes some kind of program-hopping imp who can appear on the news, or in a Leave It To Beaver rerun, or anything! Then the ghost of Jonathan’s girlfriend appears, the movie achieves a sort of apotheosis of silliness, and the movie ends!

This is all pantomimed out with perfect seriousness by Peter Berg in the role of Jonathan (Berg being one of those handsome-boy actors, like John Stockwell from Christine, who decided to pack it in and become a director), Michael Murphy from Cloak & Dagger as the pathologically cynical father, and Mitch Pileggi from Return of the Living Dead 2 as the ridiculously violent killer! But their seriousness only makes it all sillier, ha ha!

I know I’ve made much of the gooftastic nature of this picture, but that really is its defining characteristic, and the occasional flashes of self-awareness mitigate this not a whit! It’s no A Nightmare on Elm Street and it isn’t even A Nightmare on Elm Street 2; and though the rain falls softly upon Wes Craven’s premature grave, I have to give Shocker just one and a half stretch-lips!

Burl reviews The Serpent and the Rainbow! (1988)

Good day, it’s Burl! How did you sleep last night? Ha ha, you dreamt of me, and of the grave – I know, because I was there! No, not really, I’m just doing some of the scary lines spoken by the villain in The Serpent and the Rainbow! To me he’s always been an unusually effective villain, at least until he transforms into Freddy Krueger near the end! We should recall that Krueger-like faces pop up in so many Wes Craven pictures – this, the Nightmare movies, Deadly Friend, Shocker, probably others – that one assumes he carried a terrible childhood memory of burn wards, along the line of Griffin Dunne’s trauma in After Hours!

Anyway, The Serpent and the Rainbow is quite simply one of Wes’ best! Bill Pullman from Ruthless People and Spaceballs plays a scientist who’s on the trail of a marvelous anesthetic, which he suspects might be the same thing used by voo-doo doctors as a zombification powder! He makes his way to Haiti, which had at that time only recently rid itself of Baby Doc Duvalier and was still in the grip of poverty and desperation, with, as we now know, worse yet to come! Craven’s portrayal of the country is surprisingly gritty and earthbound; it seemed to me at the time almost documentary in its realism! Ha ha, but what did I know: now I can see that, while leagues ahead of most 1980s horror in its attempt to ground its terrors, the picture is still in many ways pretty cartoonish!

Despite not being quite right for the role, which is itself pretty unbelievable, Cathy Tyson from Mona Lisa gives a solid performance as the pretty lady doctor who serves as Pullman’s guide through the brutal politics and strange witchdoctory of Haiti! Even better is Zakes Mokae, known from his appearance in The Island, who plays the evil houngan, who heads up the secret police on the side! Ha ha, altogether a dangerous individual, and the ever-snarling Mokae oozes forth every bit of threat innate to this excellent character, and bathes in it! Ha ha, he’s terrific! We’re also lucky to have Paul Winfield, from The Horror at 37,000 Feet, Damnation Alley, The Terminator and Blue City, in the cast, and Brent Jennings from Fear City and Michael Gough from Top Secret as well! Ha ha, I also liked the guy who played the reanimated hoodoo victim in the graveyard – the secret hero of the picture if you ask me!

The hallucination and dream sequences, Wes’ specialty of course, can occasionally be silly (the long arms! the angry chair!) or over-familiar, but they can be pretty compelling too; and the special effects required to pull off these sequences are for the most part excellent! Ha ha, poor Pullman is really put through the ringer in this one, and there’s one part in particular that’ll have the menfolk crossing their legs for days! It’s still a pretty unique horror picture, and one that has aged very well, even if it has still never really found its audience! I give The Serpent and the Rainbow three prune-faced brides!

Burl reviews Deadly Friend! (1986)

Hi, it’s B-B-B-Burl here to review Deadly Friend! This is the movie Wes Craven made after he had such a marvelous hit with his first Freddy movie, and presumably could make almost any movie he wanted to as long as it was a modestly-budgeted horror movie, and so that’s exactly what he did! Ha ha, but it’s kind of a weird one! BB!

The plot is a little bit ridiculous! There’s a nerdy brain wizard who travels with his single mom to live in the same backlot-looking neighborhood we see in movies like Fright Night and The ‘burbs! I almost expected to see the guy from Fright Night and his single mom walking down the street in the background! Anyway, this kid is so smart that he’s built his own robot, BB, who has been developing his own special set of values! BB looks and sounds like pretty much any other 1980s movie robot you can think of, particularly Number Five, and for quite a while Deadly Friend seems like another one of those robot or science lad movies, like Short Circuit, My Science Project, The Manhattan Project, Explorers or The Wizard of Science – but none of those movies have an old lady’s head exploding into mush from a basketball being thrown at it! Ha ha, BB!

BB gets blown up by Momma, the old lady who was in such 80s pictures as Class Reunion, and then a little bit later the brain wizard’s new girlfriend, Samantha, played by Kristy Swanson from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, is knocked down the stairs by her nasty drunk of a father and gets brain dead! Well, the young smartypants’s twin interests very conveniently dovetail here, and so he inserts BB’s 20 megabyte thought-chip into Samantha’s dead brain, and, you guessed it – BB! So it’s a lot like Frankenstein, and then of course there are some killings to be done, namely of Momma, the nasty father and a local bully, who gets tossed through the air by the teen reanimate! At the same time, the young paperboy whom the brain wizard has been relying on to be his Ygor totally flips out and shows himself to be nothing but a “craven” coward! So he gets shaken around by Samantha/BB, but not quite killed!

It doesn’t end well for Samantha or BB, or the young genius, who you’d think would be looking at some pretty serious time in juvy for his various crimes of bodysnatching, corpse outrage, secretage and accessory to murder! I wonder what happened to that actor, anyway – he was sort of a nerd, but his performance was pretty good, I thought! Samantha turned up as Buffy, and of course Momma played Momma in Throw Momma From the Train, and another momma in The Goonies, and she got a lot of accolades for those! And Wes Craven of course kept on making movies, some of them better than this and some of them even worse!

It’s a strange little movie, but I recommend tracking it down and having a look just because it’s so bizarre! Ha ha, in a weird way it might be one of the most 80s movies ever made! And is that a bad thing? Burl says no! I give it two flying bullies! BB!