Burl reviews It's Alive! (1974)

 

Hello and a-goo goo goo to all of you, it’s Burl, here to review the king of the killer baby movies! Of course there’s only one picture that can really claim this title, and it’s Larry Cohen’s famous tale of cradle-creature terror, It’s Alive! I recall when I was in grade school, ha ha, and it must have been from a reissue when the sequel came out, because I was too young to have any consciousness of the original, but the whole schoolyard was abuzz with talk about the scene with the milkman being attacked, and the street running first white with milk, then red with blood, or anyway pink with the blood and milk flowing together in a cruel sauce!

The plot is pretty simple, even if the movie itself is not! Ha ha, Larry Cohen always was good with a concept, and he knocked it out of the park with this one: an atmosphere filled with pollution results in the birth of a baby which is larger, stronger, and much more murderous than your usual everyday run-of-the-mill infant! This bairn is clawed and befanged, and its first order of post-natal business, set to the sounds of an alarming Bernard Herrmann score, is to slash and claw the attending doctors and nurses, and then escape out of a skylight!

This doesn’t sit well with expectant father John P. Ryan, the stern-faced and almost Neanderthal actor we know so well from Avenging Force, The King of Marvin Gardens, and Three O’ Clock High! His poor wife, played by Sharon Farrell from The Premonition and Sweet Sixteen, survives the monster birth, but slowly loses her mind thereafter, and the baby himself prowls the sewers and shrubberies of Los Angeles and becomes the object of a police manhunt! Without showing too much of the infant, Cohen manages to instill a real sense of sympathy for it; while Ryan, in an excellent performance, goes from wanting to kill the child himself to being willing to lay down his life for it!

Cohen evidently liked to hire tall guys, because everyone in this movie is about 6’2”! Almost-old timers Andrew Duggan, whose final-ever appearance was in Cohen’s A Return to Salem’s Lot, appears as a scientist; Guy Stockwell from Santa Sangre pops up, and Michael Ansara from The Manitou is in there too! James Dixon, also fairly tall, plays a cop called Perkins, and I believe he was the only actor to appear in all three It's Alive movies, and in fact he was a guy who was in just about every Larry Cohen movie there is, and also Maniac Cop, which Cohen wrote and produced!

Cohen is, to me, a fascinating filmmaker! He’s got a singularly primitive style that sometimes makes it seem as though he didn’t know that much about making movies, until you discover the sophistication of the thing woven in, sometimes subsumed, other times on the surface sitting side by side with the primitivism! He’s a strange case, just like J. Edgar Hoover, ha ha, and it’s clear that he in fact knew plenty about making movies, but there were some things, like coherence and slick Hollywood professionalism, about which he simply didn’t care! He liked to use non-actors if he thought they’d be right for the part - real doctors to play doctors, real milkmen to play milkmen, that sort of thing - and that verisimilitude was simply more important to him than the usual day player’s imitative competence!

Like its first sequel, It Lives Again, this is a gritty little horror drama very self-conscious of its socio-political commentary! Of course there was no shortage of environmental thrillers in the 1970s, and this is certainly one of them; but it also seems to me to have a few things to say about modern fatherhood! What they are, I’m not sure, but I know that I connected with not just the father (being one myself), but the little fang-baby too! Like him, I was born with a terrible condition, but rather than making me eat people’s faces it made me unable to keep food down, and so was a real risk to my life but not to anyone else’s! An operation, cutting edge at the time, saved me, but it was touch and go for a while, and my father, on some level believing me doomed, sort of checked out emotionally! He was, and is, an excellent father, but in a way he never fully returned from that check-out, and so there’s a level on which I can appreciate the monster child’s sense of dislocation and his occasional urge to mutilate! Ha ha! So in the end, while it’s surely a flawed picture, I consider that it’s really got something, and what it’s got might be a little different for every viewer! I give It’s Alive two and a half French toasts!

Burl reviews The Stuff! (1985)

 

Glip glap glorp, it’s Burl, here with a dessert recipe for you courtesy of Mr. Larry Cohen! Ha ha, move that light! Yes, as you probably already know, I’m fond of Larry Cohen and his pictures, even though many of them aren’t very good, and this one in particular is, well, flawed! But as with all of his movies, however technically inept the may occasionally be, or how unformed the narrative, there are compensations both conceptual and performative, and frankly this picture, The Stuff, needs all the compensations it can get!

The idea can hardly be beat, ha ha! We open in an industrial setting, where a worker espies a strange creamy substance bubbling from the ground! Of course his first instinct is to take a big fingerful of this goop and jam it in his mouth, and, finding it delicious, take it to market as The Stuff!

Before you know it The Stuff is the newest taste sensation, replacing ice cream, whipped cream, icing, or any other sweet paste! The establishment confectionary companies aren’t any too pleased about this, and they hire an eccentric industrial espionage agent, Mo Rutherford, so-called, he frequently explains, because whenever he gets something, like money, he always would like some mo of it! Equally unhappy with The Stuff is a little Long Island boy who sees it move in his fridge, and the advertising lady who came up with the dynamite campaign for the uncanny treat once she learns (and easily accepts) the truth about it - namely, that it’s a sentient slime which will hex the eater’s brain and, eventually, grotesquely rupture his body!

So there you go, ha ha, primo material for horror, action, weird trick makeup effects, and social satire; and all of this The Stuff has, but in very budget amounts! Of course this is fair because it was a very budget production, though it must be said here and now that there are some excellent trick effects in it and some obvious but amusing old fashioned techniques on view, like the old spinning set routine or the forced perspective shots! These things give the picture a pleasantly old-fashioned feel!

Cohen was always good at putting together marvelous New York casts, and he does again here! Michael Moriarty, who, believe the hype, is very good in Q, is Mo; Andrea Marcovicci from The Hand is the advertising lady, Nicole; and then Garrett Morris from Motorama (but who isn’t from Motorama, ha ha!) shows up playing an excitable cookie magnate who suffers a wide-mouth demise that looked a lot better in the pages of Fangoria than it does in the movie! Near the end, when Paul Sorvino turns up as a right-wing cock-a-doodle-doo, we get some satirizing of the demented-patriot mindset, as though satirizing American consumerism and diet were not enough for one picture!

I guess the slapdash way Cohen put this together got under my skin a little, ha ha, because I believe he knew perfectly well how to make coherent movies, but so often he just didn’t bother! We find this syndrome in God Told Me To, in which it sort of works because the material is so weird, and in A Return to Salem’s Lot, where it doesn’t so much; but it especially seems the case here! There are explanatory factors: for one, the ambition and the budget didn’t exactly match up, and I understand there was post-production monkeying from the distribution company!

Of course the blame for the movie’s many flaws - the inconsistent acting, the confounding mise-en-scene, the chicken-with-its-head-cut-off storytelling, the whole impossible tanker-truck scene - rests with Cohen, but then so do the virtues! The killer dessert angle is marvelous; there are funny bits throughout; and the supporting cast, including Patrick O’Neal from Silent Night, Bloody Night and The Stepford Wives, Danny Aiello from Radio Days and The Protector, Rutanya Alda from Amityville II: The Possession and Black Widow, and, in cameos, Brooke Adams from The Dead Zone and (appropriately) Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Laurene Landon from Armed Response and Maniac Cop, Abe Vigoda from Death Car on the Freeway, and even Clara Peller from Moving Violations, is truly unique!

I guess whether you like The Stuff or not rests largely on whether you like Cohen and his crazy movies or not! I’m highly sympathetic to them, and him - I was sad when he died, prematurely it seemed to me! - and I also have some pleasant teenage memories connected with the movie! I’m going to give The Stuff two big spoonfuls!

Burl reviews A Return to 'Salem's Lot! (1987)

Ha ha, bluh bluh! It’s Burl here with a review of a vampire picture! This one is A Return to ‘Salem’s Lot, Larry Cohen’s name-only sequel to the Tobe Hooper adaptation of the Stephen King book! You probably recall that TV movie – it was spooky, especially when the kid shows up at the window! So it’s pretty strange that Larry Cohen got the job of making the sequel, because his movies are a lot of things, but they’re not spooky!

He makes idea movies, I guess you might say! There’s always one or two ideas in there that make you go “Ha ha, that’s pretty cool!” But then he usually forgets about the meat and potatoes of making a genre movie, which is to say the actual writing and directing parts! He does those things, technically speaking, but he just doesn’t do them very well!

But perhaps I’m being unfair! A better way to say it is that he doesn’t make movies the way we’re all used to movies being made! That’s just his way, and it’s not intrinsically bad – it’s just that the decisions he makes usually don’t work as well as if he’d gone a more conventional route, or if, better yet, he’d chosen another, better iconoclastic direction!

All this is by way of saying that I’m a Larry Cohen fan, but am heavily prejudiced against his movies! I guess that’s why I never bothered seeing this particular movie until the other day! It’s strange – I’ve seen most of his pictures, and have even seen It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive more than once, but I always steered clear of this one! Turns out it’s a pretty enjoyable little snapparoo!

Michael Moriarty (of course!) plays some kind of anthropologist, or what Larry Cohen imagines an anthropologist to be, and through subterfuge he is lured to the vampire-ridden down of ‘Salem’s Lot and enlisted by the local hemogobblers to write the history of their race! Therein lies the notion that is the true heart of the picture: the idea that the vampires have their own history in parallel to that of humans, and that they see themselves as essentially harmless (they feed off cows, ha ha!) and unfairly maligned!

But Moriarty’s incredibly foul-mouthed son, who’s along for the ride, becomes enamored of bloodsucking ways, and he starts looking a little pale and swearing more than usual when the sun hits his eyes! Ha ha, he truly lays a salty tongue on everyone! In the meantime a gobblety-faced creature is lurking in the woods and munching on stray teenagers! Pretty soon none other than Sam Fuller shows up to help battle the fiends!

Sam Fuller turns out to be exactly what the picture needs, and he helps shore up Michael Moriarty’s typically fine performance! Andrew Duggan is really good as the lead vampire, Judge Axel, who is also, I believe, meant to be the gobblety-faced vampire who lurks in the woods; and there are a number of other veterans performers who do a fine job! But all the under-thirty thespians are just wretched, ha ha, and it really hurts the picture!

This is the sort of thing that gives Larry Cohen movies their amateurish, community-theater reputation! It’s too bad! I sure wish old Lar would take a little extra time casting his pictures and working with the actors! It’s like he said, okay, I’ve got Moriarty, no need to bother with actors any more! Well, I could go on, but there comes a point when, as a Larry Cohen fan, you just go okay, God Told Me To, okay, The Stuff, okay, It Lives Again, okay Q, okay fine! And you leave it at that! In the meantime, I give A Return to ‘Salem’s Lot two and a half vanloads of punk rock victims!