Burl reviews Innocent Blood! (1992)

Ya pastrami, it’s Burl, here to review a John Landis horror picture I’d somehow never before seen! Ha ha, I guess this movie, Innocent Blood, is really the only other full-length Landis horror movie besides An American Werewolf in London, and it’s kind of a mystery why I didn’t go see it back when it first came out in 1992! I was going to see lots of movies back then, mostly at the budget cinema, and as a horror-loving Landis fan it’s inexplicable that I gave it a pass! Just one of those things, I guess! Now that I think of it, I was living in another city at that time and probably didn’t have much disposable income! Not like now, ha ha, ha ha, ha!

Well, I’ve finally caught up to the picture! I’d always assumed it was a fairly lightweight mock-horror picture, without much, you’ll pardon the expression, bite, ha ha! But turned out to be stronger meat than I’d supposed, featuring plenty of nudity and a decent helping of gore! Ha ha, a pleasant surprise!

It seems that a French vampiress is living in Pittsburgh for some reason (perhaps it’s  the same reason a British vampire is living in Detroit in Only Lovers Left Alive!), where she tries to live a low-key existence by preying exclusively on criminals! This backfires when she puts a non-fatal biting on good old Robert Loggia, whom we know from Psycho II and Armed and Dangerous and orange juice commercials; he’s a brutal capo who is at first totally confused to find himself a vampire, but eventually realizes it might just be a good way to conduct his business!

 Our pretty hemogobbler, wishing to rectify her mistake, hooks up with undercover cop Anthony LaPaglia, from Betsy’s Wedding, and chases after old Loggia! But Loggia puts a biting on several of his underlings, figuring that by such a strategy he’ll soon be the ruler of the underworld in more ways than one, ha ha! He first bites his lawyer, Don “Toy Story” Rickles, but this ends in Rickles’ spectacular demise in a hospital when the curtains are opened to let in the daylight! Linnea “Witchtrap” Quigley plays the screaming nurse!

There are plenty of director cameos of course, this being a Landis picture! We see Sam “The Quick and the Dead” Raimi (a better actor here than he was in Indian Summer, ha ha!), Dario “Opera” Argento, Michael “Fletch” Ritchie and Frank “The Dark Crystal” Oz! And there are plenty of other familiar faces: David Proval from Mean Streets and Vice Versa; Kim “The Club” Coates, Marshall “Stand By Me” Bell, Angela “F/X” Bassett, Luis “The Limey” Guzmán; and, in the role of the cowardly paparazzo, Tom “Creepshow” Savini! Everyone in the movie is watching other movies: vampire pictures of course, of both Universal and Hammer varieties, but also The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Phantom of the Rue Morgue (the clip used includes that great skylight gorilla jump, ha ha!) and even Strangers on a Train!

I was indeed gratified that the movie delivered the goods, along with many incidental pleasures! On the other hand, at nearly two hours in length it’s absurdly overstretched, and it feels it! There’s a great deal of dialogue and incident I would classify as “dumb,” though, ha ha, I hate to be so negative! And I can’t say that Anne Parillaud, the vampiress, is very effective in the role! But in the end the good stuff just barely outweighs the bad, and while it’s no classic, it’s an enjoyable time at the movies! Had I seen in in the theater back in 1992, I’d have probably liked it even better! I give Innocent Blood two trademark Landis wildcat roars!

Burl reviews Trading Places! (1983)

…And she stepped on the ball! Ha ha and ho ho ho, it’s Burl, here with another non-Christmas movie set around the holidays! Of course I’m talking about Trading Places, the comedy classic made by John “Into the Night” Landis! It’s not a particularly Christmasy picture, but it does have a scene in which one of the stars, Dan “The Great Outdoors” Aykroyd, inebriates himself and dresses as a dirty Santa! Then he says “Bluaaaghhhh, blargh!” Ha ha!

We all know the plot! Here we have the rough-edged but good-hearted ne’er-do-well Billy Ray Valentine, played by Eddie Murphy of Beverly Hills Cop fame, and the posh fancylad Louis Winthorpe III, played by Aykroyd; and we have two elderly superwealthies, the Duke brothers, who like to play hob with people’s lives! Ha ha, the plot begins when the Dukes – Bo is played by Ralph Bellamy from The Wolf Man, and Luke is Don Ameche from Heaven Can Wait – make a bet on whether, if they switch these fellows around, putting Billy Ray in the catbird’s seat and Louis in the gutter, Billy Ray will become a respectable commodities broker and Louis a criminal street bum!

There are many misunderstandings and crenulations, and characters like the kindly butler (Denholm Elliot from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), the kindly prostitute (Jamie Lee Curtis from Grandview U.S.A.) and the not-so-kindly dirtytricksman (Paul Gleason, the well known meanie from Night Game and Die Hard and Welcome to Spring Break and Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home) figure in; and Christmas comes and goes, and there’s a train gorilla and some crop reports, and a big final scene on the commodities trading floor!

Well, it’s the oldest tale in the book, really, and the director, young Landis, tells it in his usual straight-ahead style, with a few ingratiating looks into the lens and other trademark moves! Of course, we have to mention how unbelievably quickly Billy Ray turns from jive-talking con man to expert commodities broker, juggling pork belly futures as he used to handle discarded gutter-butts! We expect to withhold some disbelief in a picture like this, but even with that feature engaged, and an understanding of the exigencies of plot movement, it seems a bit of a quick transformation!

But there’s lots to enjoy! The cast is great, even when they’re playing the oldest clichés in the book, like poor Jamie Lee and her hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold! Eddie Murphy provides one of his finer performances, if you ask ol’ Burl, and Dan Aykroyd does prep-school nimrod almost as well as he does earnest techno-drone, which is saying an awful lot! It would have been nice to see John Candy in here somewhere, but you can’t have it all, I guess! I’m going to give Trading Places three eye-rolling gorillas that were somehow not created by Rick Baker!

Burl reviews An American Werewolf in London! (1981)

Aroooo, it’s Burl! Ha ha, yes, I have a review of a werewolf movie today, and it’s one of the best: An American Werewolf in London! 1981, by many reckonings, was The Year of the Werewolf, since this picture, The Howling, Full Moon High and Wolfen all came out that same twelvemonth! (Wolfen, it should be noted, isn’t really a werewolf picture, but in many ways it might as well have been!) And there was a lot of debate at the time, and there is still for all I know, about which was the better picture: this or The Howling!

Well, ol’ Burl is here to tell you that they’re both great, and choosing the better one is like choosing your favourite child! You might think you have a preference, but then you find it’s changed, and in any case most of the time you love them both pretty much equally! And, most importantly, you just don't have to choose!

Anyway, I’ve always enjoyed this movie most robustly! It’s the story of Jack and David, two students on a trip to Northern England, which I thought was a strange choice of destination until I traveled as a young man myself, and guess where I ended up! The lads get attacked by a werewolf of course! Jack dies, David is scratched up a bit and ends up in a London hospital, having a love romance with a nurse played by the gorgeous Jenny “Logan’s Run” Agutter! In the meantime his dead pal shows up and tries to persuade him that he’s a werewolf himself now, and that suicide is the only answer!

Of course David thinks this all hooey, and there follows a famous transformation scene! It’s very impressive, the more so today with all the weightless CGI they put on us! I don’t mean to fly my fogey flag too energetically, but give me those old fashioned Special Makeup Effects any day! Ha ha, and then there’s some killing, a policeman who appears to be auditioning for John Cleese’s part in Monty Python, further visits from Jack, the dawning of the truth, See You Next Wednesday, the freakout in Piccadilly Circus, and the final alleyway encounter!

I will say this in agreement with the picture’s detractors: the ending is a bit weak! There’s a very brutal series of car crashes in the Circus, which was the standard Landis climax of the day, and then an attempt at an emotional climax that the movie almost but has not quite earned! It unfolds with an admirable economy though, and you can’t complain about a good, sudden fade-to-black followed by the Marcels’ version of “Blue Moon!” Ha ha, no you can’t!

And the first chunk of the movie, the beautiful credits sequence right through the pub scene, is purely wonderful stuff! The two leads, David “The Sleeping Car” Naughton and Griffin “After Hours” Dunne, are perfectly cast, especially Dunne! Ha ha, imagine if John “Into the Night” Landis, the director, had cast whoever was big that year, in that age group! Imagine if the movie starred Robby Benson and Christopher Atkins! Ha ha, imagine that for just a moment! As in The Thing, the absence of big stars is of great benefit to the picture!

Some people complain about the wonky tone, but it’s always worked magnificently for me! It’s chock full of great British actors, it’s funny, it’s gory, the photography is nice, the trick effects are glorious! It’s logically challenged at times, certainly (ha ha, where are David’s parents?) but a marvelous picture really, one which, in its design, feels as Important as any Goldcrest production, but in spirit is one of the great 80s latex makeup movies! Chariots of Fire meets The Power! Ha ha, and the tag line on the poster was lifted from Prophecy!

I’m as fond as I can be of this picture, though I recognize its flaws! I’m going to award An American Werewolf in London three and a half walking meatloaves!

Burl reviews Into the Night! (1985)

The clock strikes twelve, and with a sudden ha ha, it’s Burl! I’m here to review an old favourite, a John “¡Three Amigos!” Landis picture called Into the Night! It was not one of his box-office hits, ha ha decidedly not, but it solidly targets one of ol’ Burl’s sweet spots, and that’s the Oddball Studio Picture!

I think you know what I mean! I’m talking about the sort of movie that has very little commercial appeal, and therefore seems an unlikely product of a system in which commercial appeal is the absolute, a-number one priority, with each potential production ruthlessly and scientifically vetted by many unforgiving parties for just that quality before it’s given the green light! And yet Into the Night must at some point have been given a green light, because it exists, but yet, ha ha, aside from a few pretty girls and a little gunplay, it possesses almost none of what we think of as commercially appealing elements!

The lead character is a sad sack insomniac named Ed Okin, played by Jeff Goldblum, ha ha, who discovers that his wife is having an affair! His response is to drive to the airport, where he plans to hop on a plane to Vegas for a wild weekend! Instead he meets a lady on the run played by Michelle Pfeiffer, and embarks on a nutty night of unlikely cameos! Actually, although I always think of this as a One Crazy Night picture like After Hours, it takes place over a night, a day, and I think another night!

Ha ha, and if you want director cameos, belly up! David “Fast Company” Cronenberg appears as a nasty executive; Jack “Tarantula” Arnold shows up walking his dog; Jonathan “Caged Heat” Demme is a cop; Amy “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” Heckerling is a waitress, and so forth! You even get people like the film’s cinematographer, Robert Paynter, and of course Art “Fright Night” Evans and Clu “A Nightmare on Elm Street 2” Gulager! And many, many more!

The movie’s not conventionally funny (though it has laffs!) or suspenseful or moving or exciting, ha ha! The narrative is slack, the characters fairly one-note and the style flat in the classic Landis manner! And yet I find this an enormously entertaining picture, with terrific rewatchability! I can’t really tell you why that is, even though I realize that’s meant to be the point of this movie review blog, ha ha! You’ll just have to trust ol’ Burl, who has certainly never led you astray before! But if pressed, I’d say the cast has a lot to do with it, and the grand nighttime tour of old Los Angeles this picture provides!

And I guess it’s just a movie I watched a lot as a youngster, believing it was sophisticated! Ha ha, that kind of thing sticks with you! Anyway, I’d like to recommend this picture to you, and give it three David Bowie mustaches!

Burl reviews ¡Three Amigos! (1986)

¡Hola, it’s Burl, here with another film review for you, my good good friends! This picture is in the subgenre of the comedy Western, and before you can say “Ha ha, Burl, why are you reviewing Rustler’s Rhapsody?” I’d like to assure you that I’m not! Nor am I having a go at Cat Ballou or Support Your Local Sheriff! No, this is a movie directly from the mid-80s, and it was made by none other than John Landis!

Ha ha, it’s safe to say I like me a John Landis picture, even some of the stinkier ones! ¡Three Amigos! is probably one of those, I’m sorry to report; but it still has its passle of small pleasures! It seems to me that I used to think much more highly of this movie, but now when I watch it, as I did the other day, all I can see is its unrealized potential! Well, that and the funny bits I’ve already alluded to! The singing bush is of course one of these, but more on him later!

The story is a pretty solid one: in the early days of Hollywood, three movie caballeros get tossed out on their ke*sters by studio boss Joe Mantegna! They get an invitation from some besieged villagers, who believe them to be true heroes, to come and rid their lands of the dreaded El Guapo; the Amigos, of course, think they’re just going to put on a show! Misunderstanding piles upon misunderstanding, and the Amigos prove themselves pusillanimous hangdogs once they find out it’s for real! But ultimately, of course, there is redemption, though not found in a hail of hot lead as in The Wild Bunch!

With Steve Martin (from All Of Me) as Lucky Day, Chevy Chase (from Fletch) as Dusty Bottoms and Martin Short (from Innerspace) as Ned Nederlander, you’d think this would all be comedy gold dust, but you can feel the dust blowing away in the wind just like at the end of Treasure of the Sierra Madre! And not even Walter Huston would laugh and dance a hornpipe at most of the goings-on here! Everyone concerned with the picture, with the exceptions of Randy Newman, who wrote the songs, and John "An American Werewolf in London" Landis’s wife Deborah Nadoolman, who designed the costumes, was kind of operating on autopilot when they made this one!

Complexity seems a strange thing to ask for in a mid-80s comedy, I realize, but I was just wishing there was a little more to this thing: more nuance to the inter-Amigo relationships, more olde-tyme Hollywood stuff (though what’s there is pretty good), more mystical stuff like the singing bush! (I was a bit puzzled as to why mystical directions were required to find a perfectly corporeal location, ha ha!) And what’s the story with those Germans?

It’s sad to say, but if you ever wanted a master class in wasting talented comedy actors, this movie would do the trick! There’s a breathtaking scene early in the proceedings which manages to criminally underuse both Jon Lovitz and Phil Hartman! And Chevy Chase, despite being first billed in the credits, is mysteriously ignored! Martin and Short (ha ha!) get by, barely, but really it’s the Mexican actors who get the most care lavished upon them! Landis is on the record as saying he was much more interested in the banditos than the Amigos, so I guess that follows!

But we still get some good stuff sprinkled throughout – ha ha, dig the astonishing animation of the singing horses! – along with the general sense that Landis understands and cares about the genre he’s spoofing, and that’s worth a lot! I’m going to ignore many of the negative things I’ve said in this review and give ¡Three Amigos! two singing horses!