Burl reviews 52 Pick-Up! (1986)

It’s Burl here with a little 80s neo-noir! I guess it’s more just a thriller - it doesn’t attempt to recapture the noir style like Body Heat or something, but at the same time it has many of the tropes we associate with the noir genre, in particular a main character who finds himself in a quicksand of trouble thanks to his own poor judgment! The patsy in question is played by famed leatherman Roy Scheider, whom we know so well from Jaws and Sorcerer, and the picture is called 52 Pick-Up!

Scheider plays a wealthy industrialist who hasn’t forgotten his blue-collar roots, and who, despite being married to Ann-Margret from Grumpy Old Men, is playing a game of bohankie on the side with the lamentably late Kelly Preston from Mischief! A blackmail gang made up of John Glover from Gremlins 2, Clarence Williams III from Tough Guys Don’t Dance, and living gumdrop Robert Trebor from My Demon Lover take the requisite pictures and put the screws to the fancy car-driving beefjerky!

You can guess where it goes from there! Scheider immediately confesses to his wife, then sets about resisting the blackmailers with all his leather! They raise the stakes, and soon grisly murder becomes a flower in their bouquet! Scheider is implicated, so can’t go to the cops, and because this is an 80s movie it eventually comes down to such predictable events as a gun battle in a house and, finally, an exploding car! Ha ha!

John Frankenheimer, who brought us The Train and Prophecy, is the somewhat unlikely director of the picture, and he gives it the kind of B movie sauce someone like Alan Pakula or Sidney Lumet would have eschewed! It’s a little bit too bad the Elmore Leonard story was relocated from Detroit to Los Angeles, and the L.A. location is never used to its full potential; but on the other hand, the cast all do fine work! The leads are all good, as are the blackmailers, and there’s solid support from the likes of Vanity, whom we recall from Deadly Illusion, and Doug McClure from Tapeheads and Humanoids From the Deep! Clarence Williams III is especially good here, as the sort of scary fellow you’d be better off avoiding!

It’s no super-barnburner, but this is a well put together 80s thriller that gets lost in all the Jagged Edges and Morning Afters and what have you! And, ha ha, it’s a Cannon production, so it’s not afraid to get a little sleazy around the edges, with the pornoo parties and so forth! I enjoyed 52 Pick-Up, and I give it two and a half deadly car cassettes!

Burl reviews The Train! (1964)

Ha ha and rolling stock, it’s Burl, here to review a fantastic movie about a train - and guess what, it’s called The Train! That’s right, it’s the wartime action drama from John Frankenheimer, who also brought us such winners as Prophecy and The Manchurian Candidate! The picture is laid in France as the Liberation approaches, and the Nazis, at the behest of a German colonel called Von Waldheim, played by the terrific performer Paul Scofield, are collecting great artworks from the Paris museums and shipping them to Berlin by puff-puff!

Burt Lancaster, whom we know so well from The Osterman Weekend and Local Hero, plays Labiche, a railway yardmaster who’s also part of the Resistance! When he’s asked to use his rail-based sabotage network to stop the art train, he initially scoffs! Ha ha, he says, a bunch of paintings aren’t worth the lives of several fellows! But others in his group feel more strongly about it, and when they start acting to slow or stop the train, Labiche has no choice but to join in and do his best to foil the Nazis! Quickly he becomes the number-one enemy to the increasingly art-obsessed Von Waldheim!

Ha ha, I became a big fan of this picture the moment I first saw it, which was actually at an art gallery as part of some kind of film series they were doing! The movie clearly respects, even cherishes, the crucial role of art in human society, but as more and more partisans are killed in the effort to save the Picassos, Cézannes, Braques, Renoirs, Mìros etc. etc. from the Nazis, the tough questions are asked: how many lives are a trainload of paintings worth? Ha ha, or, is that even a fair equation?

Of course the picture has a fantastic French cast: Jeanne Moreau is in there as a wan war widow; Suzanne Flon and Albert Rémy both make appearances, and the great Michel Simon plays the dyspeptic Papa Boule! And there are Germans too of course, most notably Wolfgang Preiss, who was always playing German officers in pictures like Von Ryan’s Express (another wartime train picture, ha ha!), and who plays another one here! He does a particularly good job of it, and is a good foil for Scofield, particularly near the end!

But the puff-puff itself might be the real star! Well, ha ha, I’d give it and Lancaster equal billing I suppose, because both turn in the most extraordinarily physical performances! Lancaster is forever sliding down ladders, leaping on and falling off moving trains, rolling down hills and leaping over gullies, often while in real life suffering from a leg injured when he stepped into a gopher hole while golfing on his day off! Meanwhile the train steams grimly ahead, slipping off sabotaged rails or charging ahead like black lighting, a scream of warning issuing from its whistle!

There’s a great train collision that has to be seen to be believed, and this was accomplished not with models or other trickery, but by simply smashing one real train into another, at speed! Ha ha, my hat is tipped to Frankenheimer, his great camera crew, and all the stunt and trick effects folk who worked so hard to make this spectacle! And we should pour one out to all the cameras that obviously got mangled while capturing, in their last moments, these titanic clashes of steam, wood and metal! Ha ha, this is a fine war picture, and I give The Train three and a half one-franc pieces!

Burl reviews Prophecy! (1979)

Hi, Burl here with a review of what might have been the first movie I ever saw on the VHS format, over at my pal Dave’s house after his family got themselves a top-loading VCR as big as an old humidifier! I went with Dave and his dad one Friday night down to Krazy Krazy’s, the component shop where they had bought the highly modern device, and we were allowed to pick a movie to watch, any movie! One title stood out, and that was Prophecy, which I remembered as having played at my neighborhood movie theatre when I was even younger, and boy oh boy the movie poster alone had me spooked out my young mind!

So you can bet we were pretty excited about watching the movie! It starts with some guys running through the woods, leading some baying dogs and obviously on the hunt for something, and quicker than you can say “Sweet Nancy, I been cornswoggled!” they go over a cliff and get eaten by some kind of monster! This is all supposed to take place in deepest Maine, but I learned later that the movie was made in British Columbia!

So naturally a public health official and his cello-playing wife are sent up to see what’s going on! Ha ha, turns out there’s a territorial dispute between a paper company and the local native peoples, who are represented by none other than Armand Assante in redface! Very quickly, the scene where Armand Assante uses an axe to fight a paper mill guy who’s got a chainsaw made its way into schoolyard lore; but of course we were also very excited about the scene with the family of campers who get attacked by the monster, and there’s a kid who can’t get out of his sleeping bag in time, and as he’s hopping around helplessly the monster bats him across the campsite and he explodes in feathers against a tree! Ha ha!

So just what is this crazy monster? Well, it’s sort of like if a giant bear was crossed with a huge pig and then they were turned inside out and wrapped in bacon! No wonder it’s upset, anyone would be! The public health official, Rob Vern, and his wife Maggie, try to figure out what’s going on and they eventually learn that the paper mill is letting mercury into the water system and creating giant tadpoles, huge trouts, angry raccoons, and of course the monster! And then there are monster babies to deal with as well!

A few interesting facts: Maggie is played by none other than the mother of Max Fischer from Rushmore! Rob Vern is of course Robert Foxworth from Death Moon, thank goodness wearing a beard! And the monster was played by Kevin Peter Hall, a very tall man who was also the Predator from the movie of the same name; Harry from Harry and the Hendersons; the alien from Without Warning; and one of the Misfits of Science! What a career – it’s too bad he died young! The jocular head of the paper mill is played by Richard "The Thing" Dysart! And, in an amazing fact I can barely credit, Prophecy was directed by John Frankenheimer, who made such classics as The Train!

You know, most people don’t like this movie very much! But, ha ha, old Burl often finds himself a lone voice in the wilderness, and here again I have to say that, although I might be the only such person in the world, I really like Prophecy! I can’t claim it’s a good movie exactly, but it’s a perfect flick to take along to the cottage or some similar place and get yourself all spooked up that something might be out there in the woods, just outside your range of vision, breathing heavily and about to lumber out and bite your head off! I give Prophecy three Richard Dysarts and heartily recommend that you give it a look sometime soon!