Burl reviews The Long Ride Home! (1967)

Yippee-ki-yay-hi, it’s Burl! Yes sir, it’s time to review a Western picture, or at least a Civil War movie that is more or less a Western! This one is called The Long Ride Home, or sometimes A Time For Killing, and it’s one of those movies that suffered from what’s known as “production problems!” It started with Roger “Rock All Night” Corman as the director, but he quit or was fired (accounts differ!) a few weeks in! He was replaced by Phil Karlson, certainly a man who knows his way around a tough-guy picture! So it didn’t turn out so badly! And thanks to Corman’s involvement, this movie contains a performance from my favourite actor, Dick “Smokey Bites the Dust” Miller! Ha ha!

We’re at a fort somewhere in the South in the last days of the conflict, in the spring of 1865! Union soldiers have a bunch of Confederate prisoners, including George “Love At First Bite” Hamilton and Harry Dean “Repo Man” Stanton, and also Jethro himself, Max Baer Jr., who of course is well known for directing Hometown U.S.A.! Ha ha, a pretty odd crew, all in all! On the Union side you’ve got Glenn Ford of Happy Birthday To Me, the great fartiste Timothy Carey, Kenneth Tobey from It Came From Beneath the Sea, a comedy-relief duo played by Kay E. Kuter and a bearded Dick Miller, and a friendly appearance from the young “Harrison J. Ford”! Ha ha, an even motlier crew!

The bluecoats, led by an intransigent colonel, make no friends by botching an execution! The decent Glenn Ford opposes it, but there’s nothing he can do! Hamilton and his boys have had enough: they escape through a tunnel and make their way towards Mexico, and freedom! But there are complications: G. Ford has a missionary fiancée played by Inger Stevens whom he sends away by wagon train, and Hamilton does first a kidnapping on her and later a violation! Meanwhile, Max Baer Jr. is a real maniac, a giggler who goes kill-crazy! Ha ha, gotta get those bluebellies! And Hamilton decides his main mission is to kill Glenn Ford, and he won’t even let the official end of the war stop him, ha ha!

It’s a pretty violent movie, that’s for sure, with lots of popguns firing wildly! It’s no The Wild Bunch, but there’s still plenty of tomato paste! In the middle of all that, and amidst the brooding, the rape, the thirst for revenge, sits a pair of comic performances from Miller and Kuter! Ha ha, they’re pretty funny guys, and it’s a welcome sight whenever these two scalawags appear on the screen!

If you try not to think of The Wild Bunch (an immeasurably better picture) while you watch it, The Long Ride Home is not half-bad! It’s not the jolliest motion picture ever, but it has an authentically liberal outlook, evidenced by the hero’s dislike of war, guns and killing, and the fairly perfunctory nature of his revenge when it finally occurs! Also, you have to admit it has at least one thing The Wild Bunch can’t even touch, and that’s Dick Miller! Ha ha, I give The Long Ride Home two and a half Dean Stantons!

Burl reviews Repo Man! (1984)

Happy New Year, it’s Burl! Ha ha, 2013, who would have thunk it! Today I thought I’d review a cherished favourite of mine from years gone by, Repo Man! Not only did I love the picture, but the soundtrack album, along with those of Return of the Living Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and Some Kind of Wonderful, ha ha, was marvelously formative! So if you’re ever wondering to yourself “Say, ha ha, how did Burl come to be so punk rock,” you can put the blame on Repo Man!

Well, I watched the picture again just yesterday, and it still holds up extremely well! It tells the tale of Otto, a young SoCal white suburban punk who gets caught up in the shady, adrenaline-fueled world of car repossession! Ha ha, it’s perhaps fueled more by methamph*tamines than adrenaline, actually! Anyway, the hippest cat in the impound yard is Bud, played by the great Harry Dean Stanton! Stanton was going through a pretty wonderful period in his career at that time! He’d done Alien in 1979, then through the early 1980s he appeared in movies like Wise Blood, Escape from New York, One From the Heart, Christine, and Paris, Texas! Ha ha, not too bad! It also represents the high point of Emilio Estevez’s acting career, in my estimation, though there are some who would accord that honour to St. Elmo’s Fire!

Otto starts wearing a skinny tie and helping Bud and the rest of the repo men with their shady work! In the meantime a mysterious Chevy Malibu, driven by a dying, cancerous scientist played by Fox Harris (who also played a dying, cancerous scientist in Forbidden World), is prowling the streets of Los Angel*s, zapping anyone foolish enough to look in its trunk! What’s in there: aliens, fission rods, a flying machine, an angry ghost? Nobody knows! And in yet another meantime, Otto’s punk friends are committing crimes, and Otto is falling for a young UFO enthusiast!

Ha ha, this movie is great! It’s got that terrific soundtrack (as so many Alex Cox films did, like Walker and Sid and Nancy), some lovely camerawork from Robby Müller, excellent performances all around and a marvelous and highly quotable script! When you’re a young teenager and a movie like this comes along, you’d have to have a heart of pure huckleberry not to embrace it! And I have a meat heart, so I loved it, and I still do!

I always remember the last scene as including Harry Dean Stanton somehow! In the final scene, the Chevy Malibu (which was the first brand of car I ever owned, by the way!) glows green and flies around the city with Tracy “He was, you boys” Walter at the wheel and Emilio Estevez riding shotgun! In my imagination Harry Dean is in the back seat, reclining in his hospital gown and slowly being healed of machine gun wounds by the alien powers that are carrying the car aloft! And that’s the ending I’m going to carry in my meat heart whenever I think of this picture! Ha ha, I give Repo Man four plates of shrimp and advise you to see it at your first opportunity! Happy 2013 from me, Burl!

Burl reviews Christine! (1983)

Beep beep, it’s Burl! Ha ha, yes, I’m here to review a movie about a haunted possessed killer car, and no, I don’t mean The Car! Not yet, anyway! I’m talking Christine, a movie that I and my friend Dave won tickets to see a special preview of from a radio station contest! Ha ha, we felt pretty lucky, being big Stephen King fans at the time!

I’d read the book, and so was very eager to see what John "Halloween" Carpenter, whose previous picture The Thing had rocketed instantly onto my Favourite Movies Of All Time list (and, remarkably, has stayed there all these years!), had done with the killer car story! All the ingredients seemed present and accounted for: the glasses nerd Arnie, his unlikely BMOC best pal Dennis, the new girl in town Leigh, and of course the murderous conveyance itself, Christine! There are assorted parents, bullies, cops and garage owners in there as well, all trying to figure out why Arnie has fallen in love so deeply with his ’58 Plymouth Fury, and how he has transformed from a glasses nerd into a weasel of cool!

Well, it’s because the car is possessed! In the book, it’s more or less possessed by the rotting corpse ghost of its original owner, Roland D. LeBay! And this is where I was knocked for a bit of a loop when I saw that radio station promo screening lo those many years ago: no Roland D. LeBay! Ha ha, I was really looking forward to that creepy back-seat corpse, but he was nowhere to be found! The great Roberts Blossom, so creepy as the killer farmer in Deranged and so gentle as the painterman in Escape From Alcatraz, plays his brother, George LeBay, and he’s excellent in the role, but it was still disappointing at the time!

Now I can see the logic: it would have been distracting from the simple concept of a possessed auto! Ha ha, the movie more or less leaves the idea of where the car’s powers come from to us, the viewers, to figure out! I myself settled on the notion that it’s simply a car with more personality than most, rather than some sort of bedevilment or ghost scenario!

The movie itself is what I’d describe as a solid piece of work! The acting is of a generally high quality, and there are great character performers decorating the fringes: guys like Roberts Blossom, Robert Prosky (from Gremlins 2 and The Keep), the great Harry Dean Stanton (who was also in Escape From New York, don't forget, and the fabulous Repo Man), and even Kelly Preston from Secret Admirer! John "The Fog" Carpenter pulls off some stylish scenes (Christine blazing down a dark highway on fire after a fleeing John Travolta lookalike is a doozy!), but mostly keeps it pretty basic! Donald M. Morgan’s cinematography is really quite good, and there’s plenty of golden oldies on the soundtrack, courtesy of Christine’s anachronistic radio!

It’s funny that the two lead guys, Keith Gordon and John Stockwell, both became directors a while after making this picture! Quite different directors too: Gordon, whom we know from his performances in Jaws 2, Dressed to Kill and Back to School, ended up making movies like Mother Night, which was based on my favourite Kurt Vonnegut book, while Stockwell, the star of the teen science picture My Science Project, made Blue Crush and other such cheesecake pictures!

I feel an affection for Christine even though there’s not much horror action in the movie and no Roland D. LeBay, and I appreciate the movie a lot more now than I used to! I give it three lunchbags filled with yogurt!