Burl reviews Endgame! (1983)

 

With a hey-ho and a hoch now, it’s Burl, here to review a little post-apocalyptic Italian insanity! Yes, we’re in the realm of Mr. Joe D’Amato, who brought us Ator the Fighting Eagle and so many more under a wide variety of fake names! Ha ha, he worked in all the genres (but especially the erotic!), and here he is taking on future action in a movie called Endgame!

We all know about the Italian predilection for borrowing from the big genre hits of the day, and this picture evidently had a long shopping list, because we find elements of Escape From New York, The Road Warrior, and, for the climactic confrontation, even Carrie! Most amazing is the opening twenty-five minutes or so, which are a terrific simulation of The Running Man – ha ha, a good trick, since that wouldn’t even come out for another four years! Maybe it’s more of a Rollerball riff, but, as though it has the psychic powers possessed by some of its characters, Endgame hews pretty close to that Schwarzenegger hit nevertheless: our hero, Shannon, played by a fluff-bearded Al Cliver from Zombie and The Beyond, is the best player of the hit television violence-show "Endgame," in which he runs from a trio of costumed hunters! Ha ha, pretty Running Man!

Of course this also closely resembles another Italian picture that psychically predicted The Running Man, the Lucio Fulci joint The New Gladiators, which came out in 1984! But after Shannon dispatches two of the hunters who are after him, and evades the third – his old frienemy Karnak, played by big George Eastman from Warriors of the Wasteland – the movie shifts more to Road Warrior territory, as Shannon is recruited to shepherd a gang of psychic mutants to a safe location! These meek folk are led by a telepathic lady named Lilith, played by Laura Gemser, who was many times a Black Emmanuelle! And there are several scenes of Lilith and Shannon communicating by mind power, which means shots of their faces looking grave and stationary as their voiceovers run on the soundtrack!

Shannon has some pals to help him with the shepherding task, like Ninja, played by Hal Yamanouchi from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and another guy essayed by Gabriele Tinti from Cut and Run, and a few more of them besides! They have to fight legions of blind monks, a gang of mini-croscronics, and of course the animal people who sport prosthetic cat muzzles or painted-on fish scales! And among the psychics there’s a young lad with extraordinary powers, leading to a terrific Carrie-inspired climax in which the government baddies who want to kill off the mutants are exploded by flames, crushed by rocks or trucks, or fired upon by rogue machine guns!

It’s an enjoyable meli-melo, that’s for sure! It borrows so avidly from other movies that it becomes its own thing, and there are plenty of weird touches that make it memorable! I have a fondness for these movies – Warriors of the Wasteland, Exterminators of the Year 3000, After the Fall of New York, 1990: Bronx Warriors, Warrior of the Lost World, & c. & c., and this is one of the better ones, so I liked it! Oh sure, there are flaws – wooden acting, nonsensical dialogue, a general lack of coherence – but are these really flaws? Ha ha, that’s in the mind of the beholder, and my recommendation is that you behold this one if you get a chance! I give Endgame two and a half floating rocks!

Burl reviews Black Cobra! (1987)

 

Greetings to all, it’s Burl here with another review! Ha ha, and this is a strange one: a movie that isn’t any kind of official remake, but an unofficial adaptation that makes no bones about its status as a cinematic remora! Of course there are a lot of these movies in international cinema, from the Turkish Star Wars on down, and endless Italian examples but usually they purloin from big hit movies instead of, say, the Sly Stallone vehicle Cobra! Ha ha! Yes, the picture I’m talking about today is the Italian-made, Fred Williamson-starring, hyper-literally titled Black Cobra!

The Hammer, whom we remember from The New Gladiators, itself the Italian clone of The Running Man, plays Robert, aka Black Cobra, a homicide cop whose unconventional methods drive his captain crazy! We see his moves early in the picture when, instead of a supermarket as in Cobra, some nogoodniks have taken over a swimming pool, of all places! Meanwhile there’s a crazed murder gang with a profound love of studded leather, led by big-faced Bruno Bilotta from Warrior of the Lost World! In the course of their everyday murder activities, Bilotta has his picture taken by fashion photographer Miss Trumbo, played by Eva Grimaldi, who was in something called The Fine Art of Love: Mine Ha Ha! Based on that title, I supposed I ought to see that one some day!

The murder gang decides that the hospitalized Miss Trumbo must be killed, and as step one of their plan to infiltrate the medical institution, they wrap a chain around some poor motorist’s neck and drag him to his bloody demise! Step two involves actually visiting the hospital, but Black Cobra arrives there too, and rides gurneys around the place while blasting away at the murder gang! Black Cobra manages to save Miss Trumbo from the murder gang, but only just, and so he decides that the best way he can protect her is if she comes and lives with him!

At home, Black Cobra is utterly dominated by his cat Purvis, which terrorizes him with its constant demands for colour-coded cat food! (Could this be a little tribute to The Long Goodbye? Ha ha!) But even Purvis must adapt to a new routine when Miss Trumbo arrives, and one somewhat nervously expects the movie to become an Odd Couple riff, with Miss Trumbo complaining about Black Cobra’s homemaking habits! But this doesn’t come to pass! Instead, happily, the murder gang attacks again and people are blasted by Black Cobra’s big gun or the grenades he will occasionally toss!

Meanwhile Black Cobra has a partner whose teenage daughter is kidnapped by the violence gang, and their wish is to trade her for Miss Trumbo! But Black Cobra is having none of it, informing his partner that “I’d go and get her even if it was Santa Claus’s daughter!” Ha ha, I’m sure Santa is happy to hear that! The climax is decently well done for a cheap little rip-off picture, I suppose, and includes a fake-out or two; but the gang leader’s demise is nothing close to the spectacle offered in the Stallone picture!

Those are the things you miss in these rip-offs! Cobra drove a big black tank-like vintage car; Black Cobra drives a shitbox Ford! The violence gang in Cobra chanted and banged axes together; the clowns in Black Cobra just sit around moping in their abandoned factory hideout! Ha ha, they don’t even keep the furnaces blazing like the guys in Cobra did! On the other hand, neither Cobra nor any other movie I know of can boast a collision between a Chevy Blazer and a windsurfer, ha ha, but Black Cobra sure can! For that, and for all its other little peculiarities, I give it one tin of blue cat food and a half a tin of red!

Burl reviews The House by the Cemetery! (1981)

 

Ha ha and marinara sauce, it’s Burl, here with a review of some pastaland slaughter! Yes, today I’m reviewing a picture made by that much-loved auteur Lucio Fulci, the man who brought us City of the Living Dead and many other movies! Ha ha, and not just gory zombie pictures either - he was a filmmaker for all seasons! But his horror pictures are really his trademark, and in this one, The House by the Cemetery, he really went all out with not just the tomato paste, but the alarming existentialism as well!

I was slightly reluctant to watch this movie again! I last saw it when I was a teenager, but I could remember that it featured a child in peril, and now that I have a child of my own, just a little older now than the one in the movie, I don’t have a very high tolerance for scenes such as that! But the kid in the movie is an eerie looking little moppet called Bob, and I thought maybe, just maybe, he would end up being more the source of the terror than the recipient!

Ha ha, no! The entire last half of the movie, it seems, is made up of scene after scene of Bob being remorselessly terrorized by a zombielike creature who resembles Admiral Ackbar’s disreputable second cousin! This entity is none other than the hideous Dr. Freudstein, a scientist from long ago who has discovered that a steady program of murder can keep him alive, if not especially handsome! So he hangs out in the basement of his old house and murders whoever he can!

The family in the house consists of a bookish scientist who’s there to follow up on the work of the scientist who lived there before and was goaded into suicide by the continuing presence of Freudstein; his wife, played by that familiar face of Italian horror, Catriona MacColl; and poor, unearthly little Bob! There’s also a babysitter who seems to have some agenda of her own, but who is beheaded before she has a chance to enact it! Of course it all ends in a strange, seemingly downbeat ending that’s nevertheless open to some interpretation!

Ha ha! No, I didn’t like the excessive terrorization of little Bob, but outside of that, I must say that Fulci did some good work here, not least in the hiring of his technicians! Sergio Salvati, the cinematographer, provides some marvelous imagery, and good old Gianetto De Rossi does up the trick gore effects in a way few others have managed! Fulci himself weaves an atmosphere of increasing dread and baneful inevitability; not in the relatively subtle way of, say, an Algernon Blackwood story, but with his usual dark sledgehammer lumpiousness! I didn’t enjoy the experience of watching this picture, but I recognize its place in the pantheon! I give The House by the Cemetery two throat rippings!

Burl reviews Tentacles! (1977)

 

Ha ha and handshakes, it’s Burl, here to rassle with cinema’s eternal problem: how to make an octopus seem huge and threatening on film? 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea did a pretty good job with their squid, and I’m even a little fond of the one in Peter Benchley’s The Beast! And of course there’s It Came From Beneath the Sea, but otherwise the octopi usually don’t get the titular roles, or even featured parts - ha ha, look at The Goonies, which left its octopus on the cutting room floor, but had the cruel audacity to maintain a reference to it in the dialogue! Outside of the Sharktopus kind of stuff, which even ol’ Burl finds nearly unwatchable, and close kin to same like Eye of the Beast, there aren’t many good movie octopi to choose from!

But ho! you say, what about Tentacles? Ha ha, I remember seeing this picture on television many years ago, in the flower of my youth, and it made a real impression! I never forgot the portly fellow who suffers a calamari attack and is pulled around with his feet sticking out of the water! Naturally the picture is a direct rip-off of Jaws, whose imitators always seemed the most brazen; but aside from setting up a close reworking of the small seaside town situation found in the Spielberg picture, Tentacles can’t come close to maintaining the beautiful simplicity or primal power of its inspiration!

Directed by Ovidio G. Assonitis, who of course also brought us the nerd-in-love comedy Desperate Moves, the picture is set, and even mostly shot, in a small California coastal community! In the very first scene, unnecessarily in my opinion, a sweet young baby relaxing in his stroller becomes the first victim of Tentacles! Tentacles, a rampaging monster who sucks the very marrow from the bones of his people-meals, next plucks a bandy-legged fisherman from his craft, and later on he wrecks boats and eats portly men!

John Huston and Shelley Winters, both of whom would catch a case of Assonitis again when they appeared in The Visitor, play an elderly brother and sister who live in the beach community Tentacles has chosen for his feeding ground! Huston is, as one review has it, “the sort of grizzled investigative reporter who wears his nightdress on the porch,” and Winters plays a hot-to-trot divorcée with a young son! Meanwhile, up the coast, Bo Hopkins from The Killer Elite plays an orca expert, while Claude Akins of TV’s Lobo plays the local lawman!

Henry Fonda, who had no sea monsters outside of a decent-sized trout to deal with when he hung out On Golden Pond, plays Mr. Whitehead, the owner of a construction company and an almost completely pointless character! Ha ha, I suppose Mr. Fonda thought “Hmmm! Once Upon A Time in the West turned out pretty well! Maybe I’ll do another picture with these Italian fellows! Ha ha!” But Tentacles is not quite up to the level of the masterful Sergio Leone western, I’m afraid! Cesare Danova from Mean Streets carries most of Mr. Whitehead’s narrative burden anyway,  surreptitiously ordering the vibration-drilling experiments theorized to be the cause of the calamari’s murderous rage, and leaving the old man to play most of his scenes upbraiding people over the telephone!

I guess I’m kind of talking around the star of the picture, Tentacles himself! Well, I think that’s because he’s a bit of a disappointment! Most of the time we see what looks like a perfectly normal octopus, intercut with shots of people screaming, or bubbles coming from the mouths of divers! For one scene of boat destruction the filmmakers pull out a fake head that gets pushed though the water and frankly looks more like a swimming hippo than an octopus, and there appear to be a few fake appendages waving around here and there! I wish they’d pulled off a good old-fashioned fake ‘pus, complete with clicking beak and eight arms to hold you! Carlo Rambaldi could have made a good one for them, I’m sure! They did pull off a few good moments involving Tentacles’s glaring angry-eyes, though!

The picture’s got that charming ESL atmosphere of so many offshore Italian productions (though Assonitis himself is Greek-Egyptian or something), some enjoyable wide-screen photography, and a little of that genuine seaside summer atmosphere that Jaws manages so well! Plus it’s got some laughs and some very weird performances from Huston and Winters! Bo Hopkins just looks a little embarrassed as he orates to his orcas before asking them to kill the octopus for him, which they do! Ha ha! I give Tentacles two fish standing on their heads!

Burl reviews L'Avventura! (1960)

Ciao bella, it’s Burl, here to review on of the grand Italian pictures of the 20^th century! Ha ha, this one is L’Avventura, by Michelangelo Antonioni, a director I’m very fond of! Ha ha, I still remember his Oscar speech, when he got one of those special achievement statuettes at the age of about a million and two, and he shuffled up to the microphone and leaned in, and the crowd hushed reverently to hear what the Maestro would say, and, in a gravelly old-man voice that had somehow lost none of its fortissimo, he uttered but a single word: “Grazie!”

Ha ha, it was then that I understood: this man spoke through his films! And he made some good ones, ha ha - I’m particularly fond of Red Desert, and like everybody I’m a fan of Blow-Up! And I even like Zabriskie Point! I went to see that picture he made with Wim Wenders, Beyond the Clouds, but aside from it being the very definition of an Old Man Movie, with plenty of ladies in the nude, I don’t recall much about it, except that it was not so great!

L’Avventura, however, is great, ha ha! As it opens we find ourselves among the Italian leisure class, with a bunch of stylish folk planning a boating excursion around the islands off of Sicily! There’s Anna, who seems a sad and troubled and dissatisfied young woman, and no wonder, because her boyfriend is Sandro, who seems strangely middle-aged and who reveals himself through the picture as a perfidious, inconstant, manipulative jerk! Ha ha, I really hated him! But he’s played very well by Gabriele Ferzetti from Lucio Fulci’s The Psychic!

The main character in all this is Claudia, played by the gorgeous Monica Vitti, the ScarJo of her day, ha ha! Claudia is Anna’s friend, but after Anna mysteriously disappears, and after a scene in which she and Sandro experience coincident revelations that, while they each loved Anna in their way, she, being incapable of love, never returned the feeling, romance begins to brew! Slowly, as the search for Anna continues and then peters out, Claudia and Sandro embark on the adventure, or fling, of the title!

Along the way there are other characters to concern ourselves with, of course, like Anna’s father, and her other friends, who don’t necessarily seem concerned about her disappearance, and the old goatherder! Ha ha, I assume he’s a goatherder anyway, because there always seems to be one on these islands! (And most of the first half of the picture is set on the island, and we briefly get reminded of The Lighthouse, a much more recent picture!) We also have the young painter, with his emo cut and pouty lips and hilariously bad breast paintings! And Gloria Perkins, ha ha - who is she, but an object stared at and lusted after by an entire town of creepy men? And this incident repeats itself with Claudia now the object of the creepy men’s gaze - I’ve never seen the discomfort women feel under the male gaze better or more repellently represented in a picture!

The ending of this picture is, not to put too fine a point on it, quite horrific! I won’t give the details, but if you feel anything like I do about Sandro, and if you’re pulling for Claudia because she’s beautiful, or because she grew up in modest circumstances and so really isn’t one of these indolent rich, or just because you like her, then you’ll feel as despondent as I did, ha ha! But you’ll probably also recognize the plain human truths this movie has to offer, and feel the power of the images and the sheer craft that went into its making! I could go on, but I won’t - I’ll just give L’ Avventura four spilled ink bottles!

Burl reviews A Bay of Blood! (1971)

Bueno bueno it’s Burl! Ha ha, a funny thing about ol’ Burl is that I tend to rank Italian horror movie directors according to the gentility of their work! Essentially my taxonomy is based on what some may call the tastefulness of their productions, or the lack thereof, but it's not a rating system and has nothing to do with my estimation of their talent or how much I like their movies! So Mario Bava strolls with quiet dignity near the top, with Dario Argento somewhere beneath, Lucio Fulci further beneath that, and Joe D’Amato and Ruggero Deodato lurking on some still lower rung!

Today’s movie, which I’ll refer to as A Bay of Blood though it has many other titles to choose from, comes from that upper-ranker Bava; but it is, nevertheless, one of the goriest, meanest movies ever made by any of the pastaland blood-slingers! I mean, ha ha, it’s no Anthropophagus, but still! It’s got head choppings, slow strangulations, pokings of all kind, including a sexual transfixation; face slicings, shotgunnings and squid bitings! It’ll be no surprise to you that this picture is considered the old grandpappy of the slasher genre! Certainly it was a hefty influence on Friday the 13^th part 2, ha ha!

The setting is a picturesque little bay which seems to be populated exclusively by murderers! An old countess is noosed right off her wheelchair, and the perpetrator of that crime, her husband, is straightaway poked at with a stabbing knife! We learn that the carnage is all because of the titular cove, which is, ha ha, coveted by everyone who lives on the bay, and by all of their relatives too! A quartet of feckless youths fall victim to the monstrous desire for seaside real estate as well, or at least to the desire others have to keep the area for themselves!

Bava started as a cinematographer (his first work was the Rossellini short The Bullying Turkey, which I hope to see someday just based on that title!), and he shot many of his own pictures, including this one! So it’s a little strange that it’s one of his less visually striking works - it’s got some lovely shots, but movies like Planet of the Vampires, Hercules in the Haunted World, Hatchet for the Honeymoon and Danger: Diabolik all seem brimming over with striking imagery, whereas this one is a little more fast and loose! Maybe it was simply a lower-budget picture with a quicker schedule than he was used to!

As brutal as the killings are, and as misanthropic the theme, A Bay of Blood is nevertheless a pretty entertaining satire! Once you realize that everybody is just killing everybody else, it becomes genuinely uproarious, and the last few minutes serve as the cherry on top, ha ha! Though future slashers would fail to take this or some equally clever approach, you can't deny the movie's influence on everything from Friday the 13th to The Burning to The Dorm that Dripped Blood to The Mutilator! For its transgressive jocularity, its historic importance and its full-colour carnage, I give A Bay of Blood two and a half cable knit sweaters!

Burl reviews The Virgin of Nuremberg! (1963)

Ha ha, it’s Burl here with a little Italian Gothic! Yes, this picture, The Virgin of Nuremberg, is set in Germany and trades in some pretty German story points, and it has a particularly international cast, but it’s an Italian picture through and through! It’s very much a pastaland cousin to the Poe pictures Roger Corman was making around this same time, stuff like The Premature Burial! Ha ha!

But this is a touch more gruesome, sadistic, and horrible than the Corman movies, and that's saying quite a bit considering the Poe pictures include The Pit and the Pendulum and Masque of the Red Death! To give you an idea of where this picture's heart lies, the titular Virgin of Nuremberg turns out to be an iron maiden-type torture device, inside of which, in the opening minutes of the picture, an unfortunate young lady is found bloody and punctured!

The picture takes place almost entirely in and around an old house-castle, naturally! Mary Hunter, the young wife of Max Hunter, who I guess is a baron or something, has just moved in, and she spends the bulk of the film wandering the halls and staircases of the castle, discovering terrible things like that dead lady, and trying desperately to convince her husband that such dreadful happenings are occurring in his barony! But, ha ha, neither Max nor anybody else believes her - or, at least, they don’t seem to!

But of course there are secrets aplenty in this castle! There’s a legendary hooded torturer from the castle’s history, a Mickey Hargitay type more or less, who may have returned after hundreds of years’ absence! And why is Max acting so suspiciously, and why does the score thunder so menacingly on the soundtrack when he’s just sneaking up to give his wife a little kiss? And what is a disfigured Christopher Lee, that legendary heavy metalsman from Gremlins 2 and Starship Invasions, doing lurking around the castle’s museum of torture implements? And ha ha, why does the castle have a museum of torture implements?

Of course the secrets are revealed in the end, and there’s Nazi shenanigans involved! The actual killer is very creepy looking when he’s revealed, but is almost the sympathetic sort of monster we recall from movies like Raw Meat! And naturally, as in most of these tales, there’s a conflagration to cap everything off!

It’s a solid tale of Gothic creepsterism, enlivened by nice art direction and yucky trick effects engineered by director Antonio Margheriti himself! (Ha ha, Margheriti, who frequently worked under the name Anthony M. Dawson, took on the trick effects a lot in his pictures, even unto later works like Yor, Hunter From the Future!) On the downside, The Virgin of Nuremberg offers a slightly boring script, an overly bombastic musical score, and a general lack of common sense! But for those who love this sort of picture, these things are part and parcel of the package, and they - we, ha ha! - won’t mind much! I give this picture two and a half face-loving rats!

Burl reviews 8½! (1963)

Ciao, ho ho, is Burl! Yes, I’ve seen a lot of classic movies in my day, but one that always eluded my gaze was Fellini’s 8½! I don’t know why, because it’s right up my street, but I guess everybody has some gap somewhere in their film education! There are people, as I understand it, who still have never seen John Frankenheimer’s Prophecy, for example! Ha ha!

I’ve seen plenty of Fellini pictures of course, including once a marvelous 35mm cinema screening of Casanova! But this picture has to be one of his best! Most of you will know the story: Marcello Mastroianni plays a famous film director named Guido who is preparing a new picture! However, he doesn’t really know what it’s going to be about, and the project is falling apart around him even as his life, particularly his rom*ntic life, is falling apart too! Try as he might to direct all the ladies in his life, their previous tractability has waned along with Guido’s powers of influence!

The story is built from dreams, flashbacks, real life and scenes in which real life collides with movie scenes and probably dreams, fantasies and flashbacks as well! The brilliant staging and beautiful black and white photography keep it all looking good and moving swiftly, and the overall impression is of kaleidoscopic chaos, a groovy disintegration, a headlong loss of control arrested only when the director finally gives up on conventional attempts to regain command and instead marshals his powers of filmmaking!

Ha ha, Guido can really be a not-so-nice guy, but he’s still sympathetic and makes for a grand hero! The flashbacks explain a lot, and in particular a great sequence involving a hefty dancer named Saragina! Nino Rota’s score really works here, and the beachside rhumba is altogether a beautiful piece of filmmaking! All the ladies are very impressive, and I was gladdened to see Barbara Steele, famed from her appearances in Shivers and Piranha, show up as a raven-haired non-Italian!

Most of the last part of the picture takes place around a huge half-built structure that is supposed to be a spaceship set for Guido’s movie! But soon every single person in his life shows up there, and of course there’s a clown parade as well! Ha ha, there has to be a clown parade! It must have been difficult to schedule these scenes – usually in a movie with a large cast, you don’t have everybody in there at once! Those would have been some pretty long call sheets, ha ha!

Well, this is a picture that lived up to my long-germinating expectations of it! It may well be the Fellini picture I like the best (that I’ve seen, haven’t seen them all yet!), and that’s saying something! It’s a True Tale of Filmmaking, and a funny and enjoyable picture! I give 8½ three ½ clown parades and an extra half of a pair of sunglasses!

Burl reviews The Visitor! (1979)

Ha ha, it’s Burl here to tell you about a really rather unusual movie! It’s called The Visitor, and whatever other genres you might place this one in, and there are many, it fits very nicely in a personal genre of my own, Movies With Weird, Amazing Casts! This picture’s got John Huston, Glenn Ford, Shelley Winters, Mel Ferrer, Lance Henrikson (who played a similar role in the superficially similar Damien: Omen II around the same time), and featuring the director of The Killer Elite, Sam Peckinpah (!), as a casual doctor, plus Franco Nero from Die Hard 2 as Jesus Christ, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar from Fletch as himself, and with a special appearance by right-wing jibber-jabberer Neal Boortz, who plays an ill-fated ice skater and has his name misspelled as “Bortz” in the credits! Ha ha!

It also fits nicely into the genre of Movies I’m Sort Of Glad I Saw The Shorter, More Incoherent Version Of! Ha ha, I just watched my VHS copy, but there is a DVD out there with the full meal deal on it, apparently! It’s ten minutes longer and letterboxed, but somehow VHS was good enough for me on this one - it was a cover I looked at with intrigue many a time in the video store, but never rented! And, naturally, it’s a Multiple Genre Movie; aside from the ones already listed, this is a horror picture, a religious fable and a sci-fi head trip!  

It’s crazy clown time for sure! Huston plays an elderly space hobo who planet-hops about in colourful Bruno Bozzetto animations! He’s concerned in a sort of beatific way about a mean little girl in Texas, who is some sort of diabolical telepath in addition to being naturally unpleasant! Meanwhile, the girl’s mother is under pressure to marry Lance Henrikson, and is paralyzed in a terrible freak accident involving a mysterious loaded gun! Soon Inspector Glenn Ford is on the case, and Shelley Winters appears as a housekeeper who strolls about singing the most menacing rendition of “Short’nin’ Bread” possible! The little girl tells Glenn Ford to go fuck himself, and calls Huston a bastard multiple times!

Then we get some Omen deaths! Glenn Ford is attacked by a bird in his car, has his eyes gorily pecked out, crashes through a chain link fence and rolls down an incline, and is trapped by the chain link as the car burns and explodes! Yowch, ha ha! There are some other strange incidents, a few odd dream sequences or something, a growing conspiracy plot involving Mel Ferrer, his butler, and a roomful of grim-faced Satanists in suits; and a counter-plot co-orchestrated by Huston and Jesus, and staffed by a horde of bald-headed children who live on a rooftop! Huston shows up at Lance Henrikson’s house in the guise of the world’s oldest babysitter, and he and the girl have a confrontation that plays like Obi Wan Kenobi facing down Regan from The Exorcist!

There’s more, but you get the idea! I realized part of the way through that the movie was actually scaring me a little, and I realized that was because it had created a world in which absolutely anything could happen! By the time John Huston gurns insanely at a series of coloured, flashing shapes, Mel Ferrer is found dead with slime on his face and the house fills with killer birds, you really know you’ve seen something!

There are all sorts of little treats on offer! The Winters/Huston pairing is one of them, and was cleverly imported straight from Tentacles! As well, there’s some lovely cinematography courtesy of Ennio Guarnieri, who shot movies for Fellini, Wertmüller and De Sica! There’s a shot of a truck on a highway that might be the most beautiful I’ve seen! It’s not a good picture, but it’s weird, and sometimes weird is enough! I give The Visitor two and a half exploding basketballs!

 

 

PS: I saw the movie again recently, this time in a theatre! I was better able to appreciate the fine cinematography of Guarnieri, who, don't forget, also shot Pasolini's Medea, De Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Wertmüller's Swept Away and Fellini's Ginger and Fred! Ha ha!

Burl reviews City of the Living Dead! (1980)

Ah ah, ciao amici, qui é Burl! Yes, I’m here to review one of those pictures commonly referred to as a “Pastaland Chunkblower!” Of course Lucio Fulci was the master of these pictures, or one of the reigning masters anyway, and his movie City of the Living Dead was one of the grosser examples of that notoriously gross genre!

Ha ha, I first saw this picture years ago under the title Gates of Hell! I always thought of it as one of the lesser lights in the Italian-zombie-movies-released-on-video-by-Paragon group of films, but now I’m having to reconsider! (I guess I ought to see Dr. Butcher M.D. again before I fully commit to this opinion!) But I remember thinking there weren’t that many zombies in Gates of Hell/City of the Living Dead, and that the gore, which is what I was looking for in the movie, had kind of been replaced by the people vomiting up their intestinal tracts, which for me was not so much gore as just really grotesque and unsavory!

It certainly is those things, of course! But in re-watching the movie recently, I found it pretty gory in a conventional sense after all! The zombies’ favourite method of murder is to just grab you by the back of the head and rip your brain out! Ha ha, yuck! And of course there’s the famous drill press scene, which I guess is this movie’s version of the splinter through the eye from Zombie! How did they do it? I still can’t figure it out!

The story has more going on than the usual Italian zombie picture, too! It’s almost like a cross between the down-n’-dirty Zombie and my secret favourite of the bunch, the weird and great Zeder! (If you haven’t seen that one, you certainly should!) It’s as though, instead of taking the whole of Dawn of the Dead as inspiration, they took just the spooky scene where Peter tells of his grandfather’s playful motto: “When there’s no more room in Hell, ha ha, the dead will walk the earth!”

In a nutshell, the story is this: A priest hangs himself in the graveyard of Dunwich, New England! Who knows why, but in doing so he manages to open the gates of hell! Next thing you know, barflies are being terrorized and an unholy ruckus spreads across town! The priest can appear and disappear wherever he likes! A harmless oddball is drill-pressed! And a psychic who almost got buried alive (a great sequence!) joins forces with Christopher George (famed from his role in Mortuary!) to investigate the happenings in Dunwich! And then what happens?

Well, many brains will be ripped out, that’s all I can tell you! And the zombies are actually kind of scary, which usually isn’t the case in these films! On the other hand, none of it makes much sense (which usually is the case in these films, ha ha!), and while it’s all attractively photographed in that low-budget Italian manner, it seems to end prematurely, before the concept has had time to mature and flower to its true potential!

I remain impressed by the movie’s commitment to disgustingness! Even in the small scenes that have nothing to do with anything, this tendency displays itself! I enjoyed it when a cop discovers a lump of putrid, unidentifiable stuff on the floor and says “Inspector! What the dickens is this?” Ha ha, what the dickens indeed? On the basis of this and other such vignettes, I give City of the Living Dead two and a half near misses with the pickaxe!

Burl reviews The New Gladiators! (1984)

It's Burl roaring up to you on his customized dirt bike! Ha ha, I’m here to review an action picture by the famed Italian horror meister Lucio Fulci! Old Lucio was better known for his zombie pictures and, before those, his own crude takes on the giallo genre (The Lustful Duckling Winks Nine Times I believe is one of his!), but this futuristic effort takes him out of his comfort zone and puts him firmly in Death Race 2000 territory!

I guess technically The New Gladiators is meant as a cross between Death Race 2000, Rollerball, The Road Warrior and Blade Runner, but it most closely manages to rip off The Running Man, even though that movie hadn’t yet been made! And still it manages to get in some of Fulci’s trademark grue!

Ha ha, the year is 2072 and everybody likes violent TV! The best-loved show is a kind of jousting game called Kill Bike, but the popularity on that one is waning so the crafty, ratings-hungry robots that run the world decide they need an even bloodier game! Ha ha, they come up with The Battle of the Damned, which is also a motorcycle game, but played out by death-row convicts who have nothing left to lose!

A trio of whistling new-wave assassins set in motion a series of events designed to force Drake, the best dirt-bike warrior of the future, to take part in the games! Meanwhile Sam, the ruthlessly avuncular Big Brother type who runs all TV on the planet (or something!) has a nefarious agenda of his own! And then Fred Williamson shows up just like he did in Warriors of the Wasteland, here wearing an even more outlandish outfit!

I’ve got to say, this is a silly picture! But it sure is entertaining! The many shots of the futuristic cityscape, which are meant to look like Blade Runner but come off more like a particularly ambitious ad for model toys, get a lot of grief in the reviews, but I loved them! Sure they look fake, but there’s a strange beauty there and a conviction of its own effectiveness that carries the day! And there are many other visual tropes that give this picture its own special look – ha ha, why use a four-point star filter when a eight-point one will do!

As I mentioned, there’s lots of blood and gore, with dummies in white jumpsuits suffering many decapitations (remember Eye of the Tiger?) and impalings! There’s also a fellow with a melty face who reminded me of the Robert Joy character in George Romero’s Land of the Dead! (Maybe Romero thought “Ha ha, that Lucio has taken enough from me over the years, now I’m going to borrow something from him!”) But where the movie stumbles for this reviewer is in its action scenes! Ha ha, there are many more exciting ways to shoot motocross duels than what Fulci comes up with, that’s for sure! There’s no particular excitement, and the participants are all pretty anonymous in their jumpsuits and helmets anyway!

It’s too bad, because this could have been a modern classic of camp! It’s halfway there at least, so it’s certainly worth watching for the discerning viewer! I give The New Gladiators two magic palm-rays!

Burl reviews Welcome to Spring Break! (1989)

Hi, Burl talking! It’s time for a review of a mighty odd little movie, Welcome to Spring Break, which is apparently also known as Nightmare Beach, despite the fact that none of the particularly nightmarish stuff happens at the beach! Ha ha, except for the prankster guy, who does the old fake shark number – I guess he’s a grown-up version of those jokester kids from Jaws! And of course we can’t forget the prankster kid in Malibu Beach – though this probably isn’t an older version of him, because that Malibu Beach kid seemed to have learned his lesson by the end of the movie!

Anyway, it’s spring break in Fort Lauderdale, and the place is crawling with Lauderdale Ladies and the mullethairs who love them! But somebody is killing off these freewheeling hedonists – is it the wrongly-convicted but recently-executed biker come back from the dead? Is it hardbottomed cop John Saxon? Is it one of the other bikers, or the weird priest, or the desperate mayor, or the peeping-tom motel manager, or is it maybe failed punt returner Skip Banacek? Ha ha, my money was on Skip Banacek, but this movie is nothing if not filled with surprises!

The killer uses all sorts of methods to murderize his prey, but by far his favorite is electricity! He drives a motorcycle with special handgrips for the passenger, but if you hold on to those things, you’ll get zapped! He uses the motorcycle a couple of times and then just grabs whatever electrical wires are handy! He also frequently employs the garrote, and once he uses the element of fire!

Skip Banacek is the hero of the movie, I guess – after his buddy gets zapped, he teams up with a local waitress whose sister had been an earlier victim of the leather-clad killer! Together, this not particularly dynamic duo bait the killer into what they might consider a trap – but they’re a pretty incompetent couple of folks, ha ha! Skip loses his gun just they way he lost that football in the Orange Bowl, and then, after the world’s shortest chase scene, the killer suffers an extremely unlikely accident and dies in an appropriate manner!

The great thing about Welcome to Spring Break is that, like only a precious few other movies, such as Final Exam, it manages to achieve a great balance of spring break stuff, like boobs and beer-drinking antics, with the wacky murder stuff! (And unlike Final Exam, it’s actually pretty gory!) Put it this way: have you ever watched a teen sex comedy and about halfway through it thought “Ha ha, I wish somebody would start killing this bunch of goofs!” Well that’s exactly what happens in Welcome to Spring Break!

Ha ha, I give Welcome to Spring Break two beaver hunts, mostly for mixing two genres so seamlessly! Take a look yourself, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll agree!