Burl reviews Cindy and Donna! (1970)

 

Ohhh it’s Burrrrlllll, sweeeeet Burrrrllllll, where are you tooooo-niiiight??? Ha ha, that was an attempt to give myself a syrupy theme song, the sort of warbling tune we find in movies as diverse as Sweet Sixteen and Cindy and Donna! And of course it’s Cindy and Donna I’d like to ramble on about today - a Crown International special from the days before they turned fully to the teen sex comedy genre with pictures like The Pom Pom Girls, Van Nuys Blvd., Malibu Beach and The Van, and instead put all their energy into weird nudie dramas!

Cindy and Donna Weeks are sisters, and in fact the movie is really a portrayal of the entire Weeks family, which is spectacularly dysfunctional! At sixteen or whatever age she’s supposed to be (the actress is of course in her twenties), Cindy has already developed a sort of prudish housewife mien, while her sister Donna is a wild child with poor judgment skills! Their mother speaks in a bizarre accent that seems half New Jersey and half just plain Jersey; she’s a nagging, bitter lush who’s of no help to her daughters! Dad is a barfly with a bad case of wandering eye and a hankering for Donna which turns out to be reciprocal! Ha ha, yuck-o-bah!

The father also hankers after the world’s laziest erotic dancer, ha ha, who is played by Alice Friedland from The Young Marrieds and is the same age as Donna! Again, yuck-o-bah! Meanwhile the mother tries to pick up Dad’s barfly friends, but they just put her in the car and send her on her way! Cindy gets more and more prim as her family becomes more and more debauched, but finally she’s had too much, and something within her busts! First she enjoys (or doesn’t enjoy: it’s hard to tell) a touch of bohankie with her more worldly gal pal, and then near the end of the picture she makes a bold play for Donna’s boyfriend! Donna arrives home in the middle of it, raises an objection, and is commanded to leave her own house by the nasty jerk of a boyfriend! Donna flees, trips over a little red wagon, and is creamed by a passing vehicle! As Cindy scream-weeps for her sister, the syrupy title song begins again and the credits roll!

It’s a strange picture, ha ha! Of course there are plenty of ladies in dishabille, but I can’t tell if it’s the work of someone who earnestly wanted to tell the story of a crazy malfunctioning family and the tribulations of being the youngest daughter of such a clan, and then they added all the sex to make it marketable; or if they wanted from the get-go to make a sex picture and then came up with this weird quasi-drama in an attempt to make it dramatically respectable! I suppose it was probably the latter, but I like to think it was the former, and that it was a story director Robert Anderson - whose first movie this was at age fifty-three, and who later went on to make The Young Graduates - simply had to tell!

Not only is it a strange picture, it’s a bad one too, I’m sorry to say! No great filmmaking skills nor cinematic imagination are in evidence, and the simulated bohankie on display is pretty cheerless! It’s got a some value as an artifact or a curio, I suppose, but not a lot beyond that! I give Cindy and Donna one spark plug box mobile!

Burl reviews The Beach Girls (1982)

Hul-lo, hul-lo, it’s Burl at the beach! Ha ha, yep, it’s me, here with a review of another Crown International beach picture from back in the day, but not nearly as far back in the day as it seems to be from! Ha ha, I’ll explain! The picture is called The Beach Girls, and it was apparently made in 1982, but in almost every way it seems to have jetted in straight from 1976!

There’s just something about it! Maybe it’s the presence of James Daughton from that earlier Crown International classic Malibu Beach, or maybe it’s that the movie was probably shot on short ends left over from the mid-70s, or maybe it’s Ginger and Duckie, the pair of hormonal Id creatures which power this Tempest-like endeavor! Ha ha, the more I think about it, the more this appears to be a beach party adaptation of The Tempest!

Debra Blee, who would later appear as a shrill harpy in The Malibu Bikini Shop, is the Miranda figure, who is granted the use of her Uncle Carl “Prospero” Purdue’s beach house for the summer! Along for the trip are her pals Ginger and Duckie, who work together as the shapeshifter Ariel in my Shakespearian reading of the picture; and their laid-back, guitar-strummin’ pickup Scott, who makes a pretty fair Fernando! Chaos agents Ginger and Duckie quickly whip up a party by inviting everyone from the pizza boy to the diaper lady to get down and boogie! Skulking about like Caliban is the mustachioed gardener, played by Bert Rosario from Stick, who peeks through windows and fences at all the sunbathing and skinny-dipping ladies, and who eventually finds himself mud wrestling with a Chinese chauffeur! Ha ha!

There’s some nonsense about marijuana smuggling, and garbage bags full of pot that wash up on the beach and end up befogging and enchanting the partygoers’ minds, but it doesn’t add much that a few generously-filled joints wouldn’t have just as well! Adam “Frogs” Roarke, as Uncle Purdue, arrives in the middle of the party and magicks up a metaphorical storm by suggesting that he doesn’t want a party going on at his house after all! Meanwhile an astronomer neighbor trains his telescope on the beach house rumbustification while his perpetually irate wife hounds him unmercifully! The wife is played by the very familiar Mary Jo Catlett, who faced beach trouble of a different kind on Blood Beach! Ha ha!

 It’s got a lot of antics and quite a number of naked ladies, but it still seems kind of sluggish and slightly pep-free! It’s also even sillier than it should be, with the sad trombone making frequent appearances! But there’s enjoyment to be had nevertheless, and the consequence-free world it proposes is pretty attractive, ha ha! I can’t say it’s great, I can’t say it’s good, but it fairly lives up to its title, and that’s a pretty strong compliment right there! Ha ha, I give The Beach Girls one and a half pocket salamis!

Burl reviews Van Nuys Blvd.! (1979)

Hi, ha ha, it’s Burl! Would you like a taste of determined and consequence-free grooviness? Simply pop Van Nuys Blvd. into the old VCR machine, and you will be confronted with the very welcome sight of the Crown International logo, immediately followed by the even more welcome sight of a vintage Chevy boogie van booting down the road with Bill "The Pom Pom Girls" Adler at the wheel! Adler here turns out not to be playing the sullen loser or half-hearted bully he essays in the other C. I. releases that feature his high-pated greaser’s mug, no! Instead he sits proudly atop the cast list and serves as our representative naïf on a journey into the anachronistic fleshpot of Van Nuys Boulevard itself!

Adler plays Bobby (of course!), a car mechanic living in a small town somewhere in the American southwest! He’s got the fastest van in town, a good job, and a naked girlfriend waiting for him in his trailer; but he yearns for something bigger, flashier and more exciting, though as yet obscure in his dim imagination! A television news broadcast about the San Fernando Valley’s famed cruise strip, Van Nuys Boulevard, brings his dream into sharp relief! Here is what he has been waiting for: a community full of people as aimless as he, and moreover devoted to externalizing their aimlessness every Wednesday night by driving pointlessly up and down the same stretch of road, hooting, hollering, and revving their engines at random! The appearance of a ball-busting, cruise-hating cop in the broadcast does nothing to stifle Bobby’s enchantment: he takes off for Van Nuys there and then, leaving his gorgeous girlfriend, his trailer, and most of a beer behind! The disco theme song carries us through Bobby’s journey: “I got my wheels in motion… my love machine… Van Nuys!” As this gruelling number finally ebbs, Bobby stops his van, apparently to observe a beautiful sunset; but no, he’s reached the rim of the Valley already and is staring downward at the glittering, blithesome crosshatches, eyes wide, grooving on the pulsebeat of humanity that is spread out before him like an invitation card from God Himself! Ha ha, Van Nuys!

 

This being an updated, smaller-scale and less ambitious reworking of American Graffiti, as so many of these films are, there are more characters to meet, seemingly chosen at random! The film’s Fonz figure is “The Chooch,” the ponkiest guy ever, who drives a souped-up old hot rod and shares both the Fonz’s mercurial personality and tendency to refer to himself in the third person! Meanwhile, elsewhere down the strip, helping put the Van in Van Nuys Boulevard, Moon and Camille are driving around in their mean blue boogie machine, looking for action; and Greg, a ginger-haired suburban jerk with a maniacal laugh (a close cousin to grinning Bobby from The Van), is cruising around with his disposable buddy, looking for a beautiful girl he’d dreamed about three nights running! Hanging above them all, just as in Malibu Beach, is a big neon sign reading “Pleasure!”

Eventually, after being tossed into the same jail cell by Officer Al Zass, all of these characters form a kind of fun-gang! They ride roller coasters, disco dance, pair up, argue, kiss and make up, and they laze on the beach as a pig breaks loose and charges frantically up and down the sand! There are plenty of shenanigans, and then, after a surprising character shift by The Chooch – he scraps his denim vest, sells his hot rod, dons a pink flowered shirt and re-christens himself Leon – matters come to a head in the form of a drag race between Bobby and Moon! They’ve fallen in love, but also have fostered a fierce van rivalry that only a race can settle; and preferably a race that ends with a van rolling in slow motion down a steep, rocky hill!

Van Nuys Blvd. is a strange animal, predicated as it is on the notion that a person can be drawn to Los Angeles without any grand ambitions of movie stardom, but simply from a need to drive up and down a particular one of its streets! It’s a movie about the need for community, as are so many of these pictures; but this one is more up front about it than most! The ensemble cast hearkens back to its 1974 Lucasfilm template, and, like that picture, Van Nuys Blvd. doesn’t forget that “ensemble” is French for “together!” There’s great comfort in watching disparate strangers drifting together into an unit, opposing, as it does, the expansive, outward drift of just about everything else in nature, from the continents to the universe itself! Even if the alliance is as shaky as the one in Van Nuys Blvd., the natural impulse is to hope it holds together, and to feel gratified when it does!

The sport of cruising, too, is given more play here than I’d seen in any film since the George Lucas hit, and some of the reasoning behind this gas-wasting activity presented itself! At the tail end of a fuel crisis, with the emergence of such fearsome overseas bogeymen as OPEC into the public consciousness, the practice of expending fuel to go nowhere must have felt like a joyful booting of sand into the face of these obscure threats to the SoCal lifestyle! It was natural, if reflexive, to make movies celebrating this, and to drive your car to the drive-in to watch them: fuel consumption and exhaust fumes be darned! They didn’t know then what we know now, of course, and these days, even in Los Angeles, cruising is probably frowned upon as a filthy, needless and destructive activity! So documents like Van Nuys Blvd. have greater archival value as every year goes by, and, if they’re as aggressively inconsequential as that film is, they’ll always be fun to watch! I give this marvelous peccadillo three cases of lockjaw!

Burl reviews The Van! (1977)

Hi, it’s Burl, here to review another 1970s teensploitation picture! I myself lived through the 1970s as a very young lad, but I had a only vague appreciation of the decade’s trappings – shag rugs and boogie vans particularly – and only ever managed to attend one classic late-Seventies swinging-hedonist pool party, which was held by the recently-divorced father of a childhood friend! He’d rented a palatial riverside house in which to sow his post-marital oats, all wood panelling and modernist angles, with a cavernous, two-story pyramidal living room, an adjacent glassed-in area with ferns and kidney-shaped pool, and a long interior balcony on the second level, each door leading to a bedroom furnished with mirror walls and waterbeds! Ha ha! The partiers were very groovy, sporting feathered hair and devil-may-care attitudes, and the air was thick with something I now well recognize as pot smoke! It was just one night of my young life; one social event of which I was not really even a part, but it affected me deeply!

And here is where the Proustian trigger effects of the best Crown International films kick in! My own thimbleful of the Seventies lifestyle was nothing like the sun-bleached, van-driving beach fun depicted in these films, but the attitude was the same, and it was easy to recognize when I finally saw the movies! For me, then, these fun-loving belles lettres are rich with reminiscence and longing, and their insipidity floats on the surface like a gasoline rainbow! As with memories absent analysis, they’re about nothing but themselves! Malibu Beach is probably the best example! 

The Van is another good example: not a movie about a van, but a movie about everything about a van, like buying it, owning it, driving it around, and trying to tempt girls into having sexual intercourse in it! Really The Van isn’t about anything at all – it’s a Crown International Picture, after all – but the elements listed above describe it pretty well nonetheless!

Ultimately, for the viewer (and who else is there?), The Van is about wishing you owned a van like that! It’s about envy, and about feeling better about it by feeling superior to those you envy! If you owned such a van, you wouldn’t be such a doorknob all the time like the guy in the movie; you wouldn’t smile constantly and smack the steering wheel, shaking your tousled head in wonderment at your good fortune! You’d be a lot smoother with the ladies: you wouldn’t, for example, let the car wash pull your overalls off while the girl you liked was watching, as happens to the main character in this movie, and which misfortune causes only the briefest fluctuation in his ever-present simper!

Bobby is this young fellow’s name, of course, and the movie begins with him driving not a van but his convertible down the street, already shaking his head and dashing his palm off the top of his steering wheel, grinning like a skull! His head is a kaleidoscopic hodgepodge of reverie and fantasy – he’s thinking about his graduation ceremony: remembering his fantasy of seeing the valedictorian’s robe dissolve during her speech, and recalling the collapsing-dais stunt he pulled with his buddy Jack! Bobby can’t stop smiling through this opening scene: a red-feathered Sardonicus cruising the PCH to the gentle strums of a neo-folk ode celebrating the magic of Chevy Vans!

Bobby’s been saving his money for years to buy a van of his own, but before he gets to that, we see him going through his daily routine! He manages to get on the bad side of the local van-driving bully, Dugan, by relentlessly ogling his girlfriend! Yes, it’s the same Dugan from Malibu Beach! 

Finally Bobby is able to go pick up his beloved new conveyance! This is truly a golden moment, and for once we forgive Bobby the face-splitting grin he sports as the customizer gives him the grand tour! Eight track player! Tuck and roll upholstery – foam rubber! A toaster! Mirrors on the ceiling! A captain’s chair, fog lights, a refrigerator and, hardly least, a waterbed! Ha ha! Bobby shakes his head in disbelief at each new wonder displayed for him, then peels out for a ride in his new machine – a yellow Dodge with big round windows and “Straight Arrow” splashed across the side – and a little more grinning and head-shaking! His mission now: to have sexual intercourse! The rest of the movie details that quest and its triumphant conclusion!

What wisdom does The Van offer its audience? The message is one of hope: you can be hopelessly uncool, socially paleolithic and dumber than a box of dead crabs, but if you can get your hands on a big yellow boogie van, ha ha, you’ve got a chance! It is of course another movie chronicling first love and first sex, but is also peerless in trapping that peculiarly 70s fascination with custom vehicles, in particular vans! George Barris, the most famous car customizer of them all, was not just the Kustomizer King: he was and is a towering figure of 70s mythology, worthy of inclusion on a Mount Rushmore of pop culture figures from that decade along with Evel Knievel, Joe Montana and the Crying Indian! The Van serves well as a glowing tribute to the glitter-glitz mentality of the day: it's a big rainbow iron-on thumbs-up of a movie, complete with a role for Danny DeVito of Wise Guys fame, and I give it two and a half bottles of castor oil-infused beer!

Burl reviews The Pom Pom Girls! (1976)

Hi, ha ha, it’s Burl here to review a cheerleader picture! There were lots of them through the 1970s, beginning in 1972 with The Cheerleaders, and in 1976 Crown International Pictures produced one called The Pom Pom Girls! This made four consecutive years in which major cheerleader pictures had been released – long enough for audiences to start taking the phenomenon for granted, ha ha! There was no reason to believe in those heady times that every year hence would not feature such benchmarks as birthdays, Christmas, Thanksgiving and a fabulous new cheerleader movie!

The Pom Pom Girls begins with the titular girls practicing their routines while clad in tiny 1976 bikinis! This opening promises much, but for a more accurate preview of what is to come, study the inter-cut shots of the foot-ball team practicing their own moves under the direction of a dictatorial coach! (The coach is an aggressive, sexually repressed, mean-spirited bible boy, and he’s a dead ringer for George Bush Jr. physically as well, ha ha!) The two key jocks are handsome Jesse, the class stickman, and crazed, goony Johnnie, well-known as the school maniac: a reckless daredevil prone to bursts of hysterical rage or childish petulance! Johnnie is played with great physical bravado by Robert Carradine, the youngest of the three Carradine brothers, Berzak himself from Number One With A Bullet, and who donned taped glasses in Revenge of the Nerds! In The Pom Pom Girls, he pulls off stunts which no doubt make him shudder when and if he recalls them today: climbing on the roof of a moving car, taking a garbage can to the head, motorcycle daredeviltry, being hit by a car and rolling painfully down some bleachers while wrestling Bill Adler from Malibu Beach! Jesse, meanwhile, is subjected to the sadistic, homoerotic whims of the deeply closeted coach, and makes time to mount a mutually antagonistic courtship with the gorgeous but straight-laced pom pom girl Laurie!

There are plenty of other terrific scenes of delightful insouciance in the film! A wordless food fight between Johnnie and his rival in romance Duane is punctuated by shots of the other students firing their straw wrappers into the ceiling! The four main characters run, roll and somersault down a vast sandy seaside slope as breezy So-Cal pop plays on the soundtrack! Tugs o’ war, dirt bike races, pep rallies and fun at the beach are scattered throughout the film for no better reason than to show these activities happening, ha ha!

But where in all this is the cheerleading, you might well ask? We don’t get to see the girls in uniform until almost an hour in, a sad state of affairs for a cheerleader movie! Instead of the big climactic football game, the movie’s wafer-thin dramatic spine leads to a game of “suicide chicken” between Johnnie and Duane! This brand of duello involves speeding towards a cliff edge, and the first guy to brake is the loser; Johnny, having been refreshed on the rules, remarks “Oh yeah, ha ha – I saw that in a movie!” But Rebel Without A Cause this film is not, and its goodtime vibe would hardly countenance a death, even that of a sourpuss bully dressed in full Wild One Brando kit!

If there is a single movie that Dazed and Confused is emulating, right down to the beer-swilling jock heroes and their hard-bottomed coach, The Pom Pom Girls is it! The PPG universe has its jerks, its monsters, its angst and pain, but like all these movies it somehow remains appealing and desirable nonetheless! Even Jesse, the duplicitous, monstrously immature and self-centred “hero,” fails to harsh the buzz! Pleasantries abound: the one football game we see – or almost see – turns into a violent donnybrook before the game is ten seconds old; one which is scored with jaunty lounge music and serenely observed by a pair of beatifically smiling stoner benchwarmers! Deep sadness, when it intrudes, is expressed by jogging along the beach at sunset to the sound of a drippy ballad! One can hardly fault Linklater for wanting to recreate this consequence-free world in his native Austin seventeen years later, nor for successfully imitating its basic plotlessness!

The Pom Pom Girls was a fitting close to the golden years of the cheerleader film, providing as it did a more or less seamless transition to the broader high school pictures of the late 70s! Post-Watergate cynicism was no longer as evident: antics ruled the day! Ha ha, I give The Pom Pom Girls two stolen fire trucks!

Burl reviews Malibu Beach! (1978)

Burl here! Today I wanted to stroll down the beach with you for a bit! What beach? Ha ha, Malibu Beach, of course! “'Cause school is out and nothin’s gonna hold us down! Malibu is calling, it’s got the best looking girls around! All day and all night we’ve got no troubles, everything is fine! Love is here, that’s summertime!"

That last paragraph was mostly me quoting the theme song of Malibu Beach, and not only is it a great song, but it pretty thoroughly describes the plot, such as it is, and outlines the main themes of the picture as well! Ha ha, this movie is just a movie about being young in Malibu in the late ‘70s in the summer, full stop! That’s it! And as a result, you don’t really watch the movie, you immerse yourself in it for ninety-some minutes and just enjoy!

There are a few characters, like a lifeguard girl, her friend, a couple of surfer-type guys (though they don’t do any surfing or even talk about surfing), a rich-kid named Claude, a local goodtime gal called Glorianna, and, wouldn’t you know it, a muscleman named Dugan – the very same Dugan from that marvelous picture The Van! All of these people, and many others, interact on and around the legendary beach of the title, and despite a few mild conflicts here and there - mostly involving Dugan; or a bratty beach kid; or a pair of van-driving lowlives, one wearing a weird cowboy hat-kimono ensemble and played by Bill Adler from Van Nuys Blvd., and the other clad in a denim vest of puce; or a dog who steals bikini tops just like the one in The Beach Girls - the overall vibe is extremely mellow!

What do they do? Well, they sit around driftwood beach fires, drink beer, smoke a little wig-tightener, go skinny dipping, make sweet love, drive around, attend a party at Claude’s place (he’s got an awesome stereo system, a catcher’s mitt chair and a huge neon sign reading “Pleasure!”), have a swimming race, toss around the old pigskin and oh so much more! It’s a lot like the opening scene of Jaws, but without the shark! Oh, wait a minute, there actually is a shark in the picture! It chases one of the characters, but he gets away okay!

This is a Crown International picture, it hardly need be said! Crown International was a company that seemed to specialize in this sort of plotless summer youth movie, and they made a whole bunch of them in the 70s! The Van is another one, and The Pom-Pom Girls, and The Beach Girls, and there’s plenty more too! They made other sorts of movies as well, but I think they’re best known for goodtime classics like this!

It’s the middle of winter as I write this, and therefore the perfect time to watch Malibu Beach! It’s like taking a little holiday, not just to California, not just into a groovy and mellow past, but to your own teenage years! And sometimes a movie with no plot at all is just what you want! As there’s no sense of forward motion to the movie, none of the usual signposts that tell you where you are in the narrative and that the climax is approaching, the movie seems to last forever! I mean that in the best possible way, of course!

Go on, seek out Malibu Beach and check it out for yourself! I don’t think you’ll be disappointed, though the third or fourth time you hear the same song on the soundtrack, you might become slightly annoyed! Just try to roll with it, dude, and take a puff on the nearest joint! I give Malibu Beach three very strange jukebox-type machines that Claude fools around with! Ha ha, you’ll have to see the movie to see what I mean by that, but trust ol’ Burl, it’s worth it!