Burl reviews The Howling! (1981)

 

Ah-roo and graw-graw, it’s Burl, here to walk on two legs with a movie I’m surprised I haven’t already reviewed! Yes, it’s a werewolf picture – you’ve already guessed that, I’m sure, from my introductory noises – and it stars the finest of actors, Dick Miller, and it’s a key film of my youth! Ha ha, my pals and I just loved it, along with An American Werewolf in London, which is sort of its compadre and rival in the werewolf world! It was one of the gems of 1981, which was designated by Cinefantastique magazine as the Year of the Wolf! Of course, in my usual long-winded way, I’m talking about Joe Dante’s fine picture The Howling!

And as noted it’s a werewolf picture, but it starts out like a crime show, with TV newslady Karen White, played by the ever fragile-seeming Dee Wallace from Secret Admirer, hot on the trail of the notorious Smiley Face Killer, who's known for leaving a smiley face sticker at the scene of each brutal slaughter! But when Karen comes face to face with the maniac in a dark and scary pornoo booth, something so oddball happens that she’s traumatized! The cops shoot the killer dead, but Karen can hardly remember the weird thing she witnessed! Her husband, played by Christopher Stone from The Annihilators, her station manager, in the person of Dennis Dugan from Smile, and her best friend, Belinda Balaski from Cannonball, are all sympathetic, but nobody can stop her nightmares or recover her memory!

Patrick Macnee from Sweet Sixteen plays the sort of pop therapist whose field of study happens to be exactly what the movie’s about, and his advice to Karen is to get out of it for a while and go up to his therapeutic compound on the coast! This woodsy and rustic place proves to be, among other things, a hotbed of great character actors like John Carradine from The Boogey Man, Slim Pickens from Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and Noble Willingham from City Slickers! Of course I don’t think I’m giving away a confidence by telling you that in addition to providing a satirical look at the sort of self-actualization pocus that the 70s was known for, the therapeutic compound is also a breeding ground for werewolves, and so things get pretty hairy for Karen!

But meanwhile her friends Dugan and Belaski are doing some investigating back in the city, and they find that the Smiley Face Killer, played here by Robert Picardo from Explorers, has turned up missing even though he was dead, and that’s because he’s a werewolf of course! Some silver bullets are provided by none other than Dick Miller, and then the stage is set for a battle of fang and tooth! It does take a little long to get there by modern standards – ha ha, there are long werewolf-free passages in the first two thirds of the picture, and a surprising dearth of ah-roo overall – but the journey is one of absolute enjoyment! The Pino Donaggio score is a big help, and the script is a gangbuster!

And oh frankenstein, what a supporting cast! In addition to the many champs already named we get veterans like Kevin McCarthy from Invasion of the Body Snatchers in the role of the grumpy owner of Karen’s TV station, Ken Tobey from It Came From Beneath the Sea as a cop, and best of all the fabulous Miller from A Bucket of Blood, here again playing Walter Paisley, this time in the guise of the mercenary occult bookstore owner who calls werewolves “worse than cock-a-roaches!” Ha ha! We also get cameos from Roger Corman and Forrest Ackerman and screenwriter John Sayles, who also turned up in Dante’s Matinee!

Of course there were many sequels to this picture, beginning with Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, then moving on to the one with the were-marsupials, and only getting worse from there! Ha ha, I’ve seen a few of them, but all I recall is that they were stank! This one is the real deal, though – a terrific follow-up to Dante’s previous picture Piranha! My friends and I watched it plenty back in the old VHS days, and I can tell you it holds up! The standing-up werewolves look cool and the transformation trick effects are tasty! There’s even a touch of stop motion, as you'll find in most Dante pictures! Yes, it’s a solid entertainment, very hairy, and so I give The Howling three and a half frying hamburgers!

Burl reviews The Hole! (2009)

Ha ha and holey holes, it’s Burl, with one of the newer Joe Dante pictures to review for you today! With the Gremlins-fuelled salad days of his career behind him by the early days of the twenty-first century, Dante was pulled back to the lower budgets of his early years; but hand-in-glove with that regression came a return to the more horror-oriented pictures he used to do, like Piranha and The Howling! Today’s review is of The Hole, which is a horror-fantasy with a youthful dimension, and of all Dante’s previous works it most strongly recalls his episode in Twilight Zone: The Movie!

The story is fairly simple: a single mom with two kids - one an unusually angsty male teen, the other a precocious younger brother - move into a new house in a small town, and, after they meet the pretty girl next door, she and the two brothers discover a heavily padlocked trapdoor in the basement floor! Of course they open it up to find a seemingly infinite void within! My first worry would be that my house was going to collapse into this cavern, but this apparently doesn’t cross their minds - all they do is continue to bicker and be rude to their mother!

But of course spooky things begin to happen, and it’s hard to say whether they’re borrowed more from Poltergeist or The Gate! Ha ha, I’m not accusing the picture of plagiarism, but there are a few remarkable similarities, namely the clown doll of which the younger sibling is afraid, and which comes to life and tries to strangle him, just as happens to the little brother in the Tobe Hooper picture! From The Gate we get material that is less specific, but more important: a back story of familial tragedy, parents who go away for the weekend, and a general horror-meets-After School Special sort of atmosphere!

Luckily this is a Joe Dante picture, and so we also get a cameo appearance from Dick Miller, who plays a pizza man! Ha ha, it’s a completely wordless part, measurable in single-digit seconds, and is perhaps the most desultory role of Miller’s sixty-year career! But we’re lucky he’s in it at all - the movie was shot mostly in Vancouver, with only a week or so of pick-ups in Los Angeles, which is where they shoehorned Miller in! Bruce Dern from The King of Marvin Gardens also shows up, playing a lightbulb-loving (or, more properly, a darkness-fearing) old crank, and his appearance is in a way even more desultory than Miller’s, seeing as how he’s so much more a plot device than he is a character!

There are some spooky sequences though, and Dante, grizzled Hollywood veteran that he is, keeps a sure hand on the tiller! The early bits with the discovery of the hole and the mystery of what it’s all about are probably the best, and the climax, which features some clever moments, is what most specifically reminds us of Dante’s segment in Twilight Zone: The Movie; but it also recalls the snake-man sequence from Dreamscape, which I guess is yet another picture this one borrows from!

The borrowings are more charming than they are anything else, and I don’t hold them against either Dante or his movie! I do wish the older brother’s angst could have been communicated without him being so unpleasant all the time, and I could have done without some of the 3D trappings that are nearly at the Jaws 3D level of flagrancy, but on the whole I thought the picture was reasonably effective, decently efficient 80s throwback! Ha ha, plus Miller’s in there, and also I guess I’m just a devotee of holes! So I’ll give The Hole two pizza deliveries!

Burl reviews The Movie Orgy! (1968)

Hello and ha ha, it’s Burl here to review movie madness! Yes, I’ve recently watched Joe Dante’s first film, The Movie Orgy, which he made a full ten years before Piranha, back when he was a student and still wanted to be a comic artist! I guess The Movie Orgy represents Dante’s swing from comics into pictures, and as such I suppose it has historical value to those of us who appreciate the man’s work, even though one waits in vain for a clip with Dick Miller in it! But Dante's a fine director and, ha ha, you all know how I feel about Matinee!

But what is The Movie Orgy? Well, it’s a long pastiche of movies - mostly B pictures -  and television snippets, all cobbled together into a four-and-a-half hour beast that you can easily imagine the aliens from Explorers watching on their space TVs! A few pictures seem to occupy more real estate than others: Dante has distilled the likes of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, College Confidential (an Albert Zugsmith joint, natch, featuring Elisha Cook Jr. as The Angry Dad), The Giant Claw (the turkey gobbler from outer space, as big as a battleship) and something called Speed Crazy into just the good parts, and woven them all together like stripes on a mackintosh!

Laced into these are bits from other movies, like Teenagers from Outer Space, the 1933 King Kong, Beginning of the End, Moby Dick, and The Giant Gila Monster! We get many olde-tyme television moments too, like an episode of You Bet Your Life in which Groucho enacts something I’ll call The Humiliation of John Farbotnik! Other TV gold includes Andy Devine’s demented kids’ show Andy’s Gang, featuring good old Froggy; a clip of Elvis singing Hound Dog to a big basset in a top hat; US Treasury Bond appeals asking you to Underwrite Your Country’s Might; Nixon’s Checkers speech; and a series of insane Bufferin ads best described as inconclusive mini-dramas about “sensitive people” who care so much about others they need an extra edge to their headache medicine! Ha ha!

There are plenty of clever little editing room goof-offs, like a bit that starts with the opening title to The Naked City, followed by a short silent vignette from the 1920s involving a young inventor who has created a strange viewerscope upon which he can call up images of a topless ladies! Of course he is interrupted by his mother, which must be a familiar scenario to many of to-day’s computer-screen teenagers! Then we pop back to The Naked City, and the closing spiel: “There are eight million stories in the naked city; this has been one of them!”

We come away from The Movie Orgy with some fine quotes, like “That Skippy is too much for television!” from College Confidential, and the endlessly repeated “Everybody’s always crowdin’ me!” from Speed Crazy! There are lots of funny juxtapositions and a few editing tricks, and assorted monster movie, Western, and jungle picture clips, and lots of credits too, which I appreciated; and on top of all that the funniest Abbott and Costello skit ever: the Susquehanna Hat Company! Ha ha, great stuff!

The last reel jumps equally between 50 Foot Woman, Giant Claw, Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers and Giant Gila Monster, with other clips salted in to make an ironic point, or a joke, or an ironic joke, or no point at all! Finally there’s a bloom of The End cards, and people signing off or walking out or saying goodbye, and even Nixon claiming this would be his last press conference and you wouldn’t have Nixon to kick around any more! Cut to an audience clapping with enthusiastic approval, ha ha! And there are a few other good jokes at Nixon’s expense, and, looking forward, a couple of jabs at Ronald Reagan too! None of it's very slick - ha ha, you can practically hear the rattle of the Moviola and see the tape splices - but you can tell it was made with heart!

Dante, who created this college collage with his pal Jon Davison, remembers “great drifts of funny-smelling smoke” coming from the crowd wherever this was screened (mostly university halls), and it seems to me funny-smelling smoke is the right mindset to adopt for this experience! It’s got lots of easy jokes, sure, but it’s equally easy to forget that this would have been a lot of work to put together back in the actual-film days! Oh those glory days! The Movie Orgy is a pretty special creation, and I give it three Skippies who are too much for television!

Burl reviews Gremlins! (1984)

Doot-doot-doot-doo-doo-doo, it’s Burl here, humming Jerry Goldsmith’s marvelous theme from Gremlins! Yes, that’s the picture I’m reviewing for you now, because I just saw it very handsomely projected on 35mm film at a movie theater in Hollywood! And yes, in case you were wondering, Dick “Gunslinger” Miller was in attendance, ha ha!

Now, I hardly have to tell you the plot of this very famous 80s movie, do I! Well, for those who are not “hep,” here you are: an inventor finds a weird puppet creature in a Chinatown shop run by Keye “Dead Heat” Luke, and brings it home to his curly-haired manchild son Billy for a Christmas present! (Ha ha, yes, it’s an Xmas movie!) The creature, named Gizmo, is cute and sweet-natured enough, but spill some water on him (as Corey “Friday the 13th part 4”Feldman is quick to do), and mean versions of the little fellow pop out of his back! Then all you have to do is feed them after midnight and they turn into little dragon monsters: agent of chaos who turn the reasonably placid little backlot world of Kingston Falls into a nightmare puppetscape beyond comprehension! Now it’s up to Billy and his young l*dyfriend Kate to stop the menace any which way they can! Ha ha!

Now, after Piranha and The Howling and a short segment in Twilight Zone: The Movie, this was Joe Dante’s first adventure in big-ish budget Hollywood feature filmmaking, and he didn’t waste it! He was able to assemble one of his typically marvelous casts, sticking people like Harry Carey Jr. (from Exorcist III), Jackie  Joseph (from Get Crazy), Glynn Turman (from Out of Bounds), William Schallert (from The Man From Planet X) and Kenneth Tobey (from Strange Invaders) into the margins! Ha ha, Chuck Jones is in there too, as are many references to past Dante works! All of this helps give the picture a comfortably cinematic feeling, as opposed to anything approaching a realistic one; and this in turn helps Dante achieve that perfectly 80s humour/horror balance that led to the picture becoming so successful! (Ha ha, as we know an expensive and much-loved Gremlins 2 came along some years later!)

Other familiar faces include Judge “Beverly Hills Cop” Reinhold, Belinda “Matinee” Balaski, Jonathan “Armed and Dangerous” Banks and Robby the “Hollywood Boulevard” Robot! So the picture has that going for it, and that’s a lot! It’s an enjoyable romp, but clunkier than I remembered – the script, with its undercooked characterizations, seems patently from the hand of a first-timer, and it seems like it could have been scarier and more exciting than it actually is! But the kitchen scene with Billy’s mom, where she massacres the gremlins without pity or hesitation, is marvelous, and it still delights and mystifies me that the studio gatekeepers allowed Kate’s grisly, Gahan Wilson-inspired Christmas story to pass through unscathed!

It’s all very quaint now, but still nifty and enjoyable; and after all it gave Dante the career he’s enjoyed since, so we must grant it that! Plus: a substantial role for Dick Miller, which is a prize beyond value! I give Gremlins two and a half eerie Johnny Mathis Christmas carols!

Burl reviews Gremlins 2! (1990)

Hello, Burl here to consider a sequel! Ha ha, and Gremlins 2 is a little bit special among sequels – many consider it superior to the original, which I’m not sure if I do; but you can’t argue that it’s not quite a bit different! The story goes that Joe Dante – director of Explorers, Piranha and Matinee, ha ha – was given carte blanche on this one simply because the studio wanted a sequel to the original hit so badly! He was able to do just about what he wanted, and what he wanted was to make a live-action Chuck Jones cartoon! Ha ha, so he did, and this is probably more faithful to the Jones spirit than even Dante’s own Looney Tunes: Back in Action!

I didn’t bother going to see this one in the theatres, though I should have! I was pinching my pennies that summer as I recall, saving them for everything from Total Recall to Last Exit to Brooklyn to Frankenhooker to The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover to Jan Svankmeyer’s Alice, to Mo' Better Blues, and to Alan Rudolph’s Love At Large for some reason! So Gremlins 2 got the old cold shoulder, and I didn’t see it until many years later, even though I was and remain a big Joe Dante fan and an even bigger Dick “Lies” Miller fan!

“Ha ha, Dick "Lies" Miller?” I hear you say! “Weren’t Mr. Futterman and his wife killed by gremlins in the first one?” The answer is no, apparently not! Dick Miller and Jackie Joseph (who also played husband and wife in Get Crazy, remember!) show up in New York to visit Zach Galligan and Phoebe “Private School” Cates and their little pal Gizmo! Both of the youngsters now work in the Clamp Tower, owned by the Trump-like airhead Daniel Clamp! Ha ha, and the next thing you know, gremlins have taken over the building, causing cartoon havoc throughout!

Ha ha, the great thing is that Miller really takes a hand in battling the little beasts this time around! He gets to be heroic and rescue Zach Galligan – ostensibly the hero, but actually offloading all heroics to Miller, Daniel Clamp, Phoebe Cates and Gizmo, along with several other supporting characters – and fights a gremlin on the streets of New York! He’s the only one who gets to do this, as all the other action is situated within the building itself, making this yet another movie about being trapped in a high rise!

It’s got plenty of gags, many of them pretty sharp (and I’ve always been partial to the line “It’s like I’ve always said: if you want to find something weird, you have to go downtown!”), ha ha, but the general silliness of everything means you don’t care much about what’s going on! That’s one thing the original has over this one – it was grounded in some form of recognizable reality, which I realize is an odd thing to say about a manifestly backlot-bound picture about little transforming creatures, ha ha! But whatever endemic goofiness Gremlins had, the sequel has in triple spades!

The great thing here is the cast! Of course we have Dick Miller, and almost as inevitably we find the underrated Robert Picardo, here playing another officious brambleberry, like in Matinee but worse! And then there’s John Glover, who’s fantastic in the Daniel Clamp role! Beyond that we have Robert Prosky, the garage owner from Christine, as a melancholy Al Lewis figure, the great Christopher "Starship Invasions" Lee essaying the role of a genetics scientist, and a gorgeous redhead whose name I’m ashamed to say I’ve forgotten! Ha ha, this building has everything!

It’s a big, professional production, with plenty of that great Joe Dante pep! Ha ha, pep in general is not lacking here! Neither is Dick Miller, I’m pleased to report! It’s a garden of pleasures, but also kind of an unmovie – like a book of gags or point-form lists is to an actual story! There’s still plenty to enjoy though, and just the fact that such an oddball studio movie exists at all is a point in its favour! I’ll give Gremlins 2 two and a half portly twins!

Burl reviews Looney Tunes: Back In Action! (2003)

NYAAAAAHHHHH, what’s up, pals? It’s me, Burl! I’d like to review a picture that I’ve just finally gotten around to watching, and that’s Joe Dante’s half-cartoon Looney Tunes: Back in Action! I’ve never been what you’d call a fan of half-cartoons, though I’ve seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Cool World and of course Evil Toons, which, like this picture, features the great Dick “Sorority Girl” Miller! (He could be the only actor to have ever starred in more than one of these half-cartoons, ha ha!) But I’ve never bothered with Space Jam, and probably never will!

Anyway, for whatever reason, I wasn’t the least bit interested in Looney Tunes: Back in Action when it came out, even though I was and am a big Joe Dante fan! Ha ha, after all, he made Piranha, The Howling, Explorers and Matinee, and has been known to sing the praises of Miller! It just seemed like a bit of Hollywood kids' nonsense! But I finally watched it, and thank goodness it was a lot more entertaining than I expected it would be!

That’s squarely because of Dante, I’d be willing to bet! Ha ha, he surely does bring along many of his cultural obsessions, and if you were to make a Venn diagram of Dante’s cultural obsessions and ol’ Burl’s, I think you’d find significant overlap there! Of course I’m not nearly the Warner Bros. cartoon fanatic he is, though I am a longtime and devoted casual consumer, so those aspects – the greater part of the movie, that is to say, ha ha – were not lost on me!

The story begins with tension between Daffy and Bugs, which has to be resolved at the executive level at Warner’s! Meanwhile, elsewhere on the lot, a lowly security guard wishes to become a stuntman, but fails miserably and upsets the actor he’s actually being played by, Brendan Fraser! Ha ha, the “real” Fraser is a mean man, and the security guard played by Fraser is a meek and humble stumblebum, who happens to be the son of the studio’s biggest action star, a James Bond type played by Pierce Brosnan who actually turns out to be a real superspy! He in turn is kidnapped by a psychotic nerd played by Steve Martin, and only Brendan Fraser, the “fake” one, not the “real” one, can save him!

Ha ha, are you following all this? Amid all this plot stuff, they do manage to shoehorn in the cartoon creations! Ha ha, there are plenty of jokes from these loveable characters, and just like in Roger Rabbit, there’s plenty of uproariousness mined from the collision of the physics of our world and that of the cartoon entities who operate by their own physical guidelines!

And then there’s Steve Martin, who gets generally frowned upon in the other reviews of this picture! But no frowning from ol’ Burl! No, his nasal performance, while slightly perplexing, is perfectly cartoonish, as befits the material! His wig is pretty great too! Ha ha, I like how he romances Mary Woronov! That’s a match made in some kind of crazy heaven!  

I know the movie didn’t turn out like Joe Dante wanted it to, and I firmly believe his version would have been much better! But there’s still plenty of entertainment here, a few laffs, and of course Dick Miller! That automatically makes it worth seeing, and I give this effort two Robot Monsters!

Burl reviews Innerspace! (1987)

Ha ha, how would you like to enter the world of miniature people? I, Burl, will take you there today with my special review of Joe Dante’s picture Innerspace! That’s the one in which Dennis Quaid is rendered mini and injected into Martin Short’s bum! Yes, you know the movie I’m talking about!

Of course, like so many Dante pictures – Explorers, Matinee and Piranha among them! – Innerspace has a great cast! The principals are Hollywood types, but backing them up with great panache are thespians like Kevin McCarthy, Robert Picardo, Henry Gibson, Fiona Lewis, Vernon Welles, William Schallert and of course the legendary Dick Miller, well known from his roles in Sorority Girl, A Bucket of Blood and many other classics! And on top of all these folks, I think I saw Kenneth Tobey and Rance Howard lurking in the margins like Aragones doodles!

The plot is kind of nonsense, but I’ll tell it to you anyway! Dennis Quaid plays a guy named “Tuck,” a test pilot or something, who likes drinking a little too much for someone in his profession! He ends up part of a miniaturization experiment, but through a series of confusions finds himself within Martin Short (famous from his role in ¡Three Amigos!, of course!), and together this unlikely duo must outwit spies and criminals, and restore “Tuck” to his original stature! All of this takes 120 minutes, which seems a little overblown to me! I think they should have cut the whisky scene, myself, and maybe made Fiona Lewis and Kevin McCarthy into one character!

Well, that’s Monday morning quarterbacking for you! Ha ha, it doesn’t do much good now! So it’s true, the movie is a little too long for something so goofy and insubstantial! But as a special tribute to Fantastic Voyage, it’s not bad! There are a few funny moments scattered here and there, some impressive special effects and plenty of fine performances! All of these elements come together in such moments as the special-effects face changes, which are straight out of Looney Tunes!

There are a few other things I didn’t like about the picture, and a few other things I did, but I don’t want to just make a big list for you! Instead I’ll simply say that I give Innerspace two vibrating hands! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Piranha! (1978)

Hi, Burl here to review a fine old classic about munching fish! Ha ha, I’m talking about Piranha, the great original that was such a marvelous rip-off of Jaws that Steven Spielberg himself apparently championed it when Universal Pictures was mulling an infringement lawsuit!

But Piranha is its own thing, most definitely! It’s a Joe Dante picture, and you all know what that means: Dick Miller is in it! He plays a good, meaty role, essentially the Murray Hamilton part from Jaws, but with a lot more humour and dimension! Ha ha, he’s as great as ever, and his reaction shots to the things his glasses nerd assistant says are priceless!

It seems that a scientist played by Kevin McCarthy, who was in almost as many Joe Dante movies as Dick, created the mutant piranhas to destroy any ‘Cong who dared dip a toe in the waterways of Vietnam, but they were never used! I guess they’ve been languishing around in this strange swimming pool for years! And then two teens get the Big Munch, and our heroes turn up and immediately manage to release the fish into the river! Ha ha, they never really apologize for that one, but at least they try to help!

I could go on about the cast of this movie! Dick Miller is there of course, and McCarthy, but we also get the great bellowing deaf man Keenan Wynn whom you’ll remember from The Dark; the spooky Barbara Steele from Shivers and of course the hero, Bradford Dillman, whom we know from that fine 70s classic Bug! The fate that befalls old Keenan is particularly gruesome and has stayed with me every time I sit on a dock and let my feet dangle in the water!

A lot of people object to the strange little monster seen in the laboratory, but I think it’s a marvelous addition to the picture! I’m also pretty fond of the piranha fish themselves, who seem whipped up into such a frenzy that you’re afraid they’ll just wiggle themselves into a heart attack or a stroke! And they make a funny noise: rrrrrrrrrrrr! You have to hear it to know what I’m talking about!

Anyway, Piranha is a fine little picture with its heart in the right place, and I’ll always be glad it was made! Thank you Joe Dante, John Sayles and Roger Corman and everybody else too! I give Piranha a solid three disintegrating rafts!

Ha ha, a little note! Sorry I haven’t been putting up too many reviews lately! I’ll try to step it up a bit! Thanks for sticking with me, everybody!

Burl reviews Matinee! (1993)

B’dee, b’dee, b’dee, it’s Burl! That “b’dee” business was supposed to be the noise of Twiki the robot for you, but I’m not sure if I spelled it right! And what does Twiki have to do with Joe "Explorers" Dante’s marvelous movie Matinee? Exactly nothing! It was just fun to type, ha ha!

I’ve already tipped my hand, I guess: I’m a fan of Matinee! Not only does it feature such delights as The Shook-Up Shopping Cart (with an early appearance by Naomi Watts of Mulholland Drive fame), but it teams up my favourite actor, Dick Miller, with John Sayles, a director, screenwriter and sometime actor I greatly admire! And plus it has John Goodman in it, straight out of C.H.U.D., and he's an actor I always enjoy, and lots of other stalwarts in the cast too; and the cream in the coffee is a grand re-creation of the 1950 giant monster pictures I love so well!

Ha ha, the picture is set in Key West at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis! There’s a kid named Gene who loves horror pictures and also a William Castle-like impresario arriving in town to show off his new gimmick-laden monster movie Mant just as the nuclear hysteria reaches its peak! There’s a subplot about another kid who likes a girl, but that girl has an imbecilic, violence-prone boyfriend who just came out of the reformatory and is itching to pound his young rival’s face into face-paste! Ha ha!

And that’s about it for the movie’s story! It’s a movie of incidentals, but our great good fortune as viewers is that these incidentals are so very splendid! You get Miller from Get Crazy and Sayles from Piranha as supposed morality crusaders whipping the citizenry of Key West into anti-Mant outrage! Of course they’re actors hired by Goodman’s Castle stand-in to help publicize the picture! (Miller can be seen standing in the background of the Mant sequences, wearing an army helmet and clutching a huge bag of sugar!) And David Clennon, Palmer from The Thing, is on hand as a beatnik dad! (Ha ha, funny thing - Robert Cornthwaite from The Thing From Another World is in here too, so both versions of the space invader story are represented!)

The Key West setting is very nice, and the period details are grand! If I’d been Gene, I would have had a big crush on the beatnik girl with the ironed hair too! And then there’s Mant itself, from which we are generously shown many scenes, and it’s pretty wonderful! Any student of the 50s big bug movies and/or William Castle will recognize that it’s not exactly accurate – William Castle never made a big bug picture, and based on the elaborate effects, Mant’s budget looks to be bigger than that of Them!, which no other big bug picture ever was! (Them!, by the way, is a great picture, one of my favourites, and not just because it has an exclamation point in the title!) They were also long done with big bug movies by the early Sixties, except for a Fly movie here and there; and frankly the guy who plays the Mant itself has a contemporary-sounding voice that hurts the verisimilitude a bit!

But such inaccuracies are meaningless, since after all the spirit of the era is captured perfectly, and that’s the important thing! The picture’s also often quite funny! It can get a little sentimental here and there, but never too much! If I’d been thirteen or fourteen when I saw this, it probably would have been one of my favourite movies ever! As it stands, it still ranks pretty high! I give Matinee three and a half flying rubber professor movies!

Burl reviews Explorers! (1985)

Hi, Burl here to take YOU on a journey to… outer space! Ha ha, Joe Dante seems to have made a real specialty out of directing big-budget Hollywood mainstream movies that somehow still mostly managed to completely dodge the popular mindset as much as the most abstruse art film! He managed this with all sorts of pictures: Innerspace, The ‘Burbs, Matinee, Gremlins 2, Small Soldiers and even Looney Tunes: Back In Action!

Explorers, for its part, sailed past the cultural zeitgeist like a bubble-enclosed Tilt-A-Whirl car hurtling past the moon, and flopped like a fried fish on its summer 1985 release! It’s a great idea for a young persons’ adventure film though, which is probably why I was captivated by it back when I was a young person! I saw it more than once in the theatre, but I guess there weren’t many others like me that year!

Here we find three young lads: a sci-fi loving everyman played by Ethan Hawke, a genius glasses nerd essayed by the late River Phoenix, and the afterward-unknown Jason Presson as a tough-façaded poorboy with mechanical and construction skills! These fellows are caught up in science madness when Hawke’s crazy computer-generated dreams prove to be instructions on interstellar flight radioed in directly to his brain by aliens! The dreamed-up schematics render it possible for Phoenix to generate a flying soap bubble which they can ride around in! Presson constructs a ship out of an old Tilt-A-Whirl car, a garbage can and some other stuff, and they’re off, with esteemed character actor Dick "Rock All Night" Miller staring up at them in awe!

I have to say, as much as I’ve always enjoyed this unusual picture, even back in 1985 I felt somewhat let down by the picture’s final act! The characters themselves are meant to be underwhelmed by what they find out in the nether reaches of the universe, so I guess it makes sense; but by the time they leave the spacecraft and their new alien friends, they’ve made some sort of emotional connection with their situation that the audience just doesn’t share! The special effects are pretty good in a 1985 way, the sets by Hitchcock veteran Robert Boyle are spectacular, and Rob Bottin’s alien suits are sophisticated silliness! And the upshot of it all, which is that the aliens have learned about Earth exclusively through TV broadcasts and therefore believe humans to be violent cretins while they themselves communicate in moronic catchphrases, is an undeniably salient point, if facile even for a young person’s movie!

But the first two thirds of the picture, in which the three young leads all acquit themselves well – and Jason Presson might be the best of these young actors actually, with the subtlest and most complex characterization – and in which we learn that Dick Miller once had these dreams beamed to him as well, makes up for the inadequacies of the space sequences! It’s full of great bits, like the drive-in Starcrash parody, James Cromwell searching for ze bug bomb, or anything involving Dick Miller! And Jerry Goldsmith’s score is grand, one of his best of the '80s! (I wish the songs used in the picture lived up to it – the kids name their spaceship after a Springsteen song, "Thunder Road," but we hear nothing of Boss quality on the soundtrack!)

Ha ha, I’m going to give Explorers three and a half phone calls to Gordon, mostly just for existing! And for Dick Miller too, of course! Ha ha!