Burl reviews Volcano! (1976)

Ha ha: Burl here with a dash of reality for you! Yes, it’s a documentary, one I saw years ago and recently revisited! It’s called Volcano, but the full title is, I think, Volcano: An Inquiry Into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry! Ha ha, that’s a mouthful! But as I recall the title card on the movie itself is simply Volcano, so that’s what I’ll go with, even though some may confuse it with Volcano from 1997! That would require a good deal of confusion, and cause even more!

Because this Volcano is an almost experimental Canadian documentary about Malcolm Lowry and his great creation, and possibly my all-time favourite novel, Under the Volcano! Boy oh boy, I read the Penguin edition of that thing when I was twenty years old, and I was by golly hooked! I return to it regularly, in fact, that same battered copy! Ha ha!

The documentary, which came along seven or eight years before the John Huston adaptation of the book, with a great drunkard act from Albert Finney as the Consul, uses interviews and location footage, and one curious courtroom re-creation scene, to give a full biography of Lowry from cradle to grave, packed with every detail you might want to know and several you might not! The portrait is of a tormented genius; a desperate, devoted inebriate; a disordered emotional state and crippling lack of self-confidence! It’s not a pretty picture, but if you’ve read Under the Volcano, it’s precisely what you’d expect!

Lowry, born into comfort in England, leaves this behind to become a cabin boy on the high seas, and then, after some schooling, writes his first book, Ultramarine! Ha ha, the movie doesn’t mention this, but my understanding is that, en route to a publisher, the young author left his only manuscript in a cab, which then drove away, and he had to rewrite the entire book from scratch! Soon after that Lowry was married, and spent some harrowing time in New York where his copious mental health problems erupted into full bloom, and he ended up in Bellevue! Next he went to Mexico, where he began work on the manuscript that would become Under the Volcano, and where his wife called it quits on their troubled marriage! He married again and moved to a small shack outside Vancouver, where the book was finished, rejected by every publisher there is, and then rewritten and, after eight years, finished again!

The rest of the tale contains both triumph and tragedy, and many atmospheric shots of the Mexican volcano Popocatépetl! On the soundtrack we have plentiful narration from director Donald Brittain (who also gave us Sweetheart: The Hal C. Banks Story), a lot of Lowry readings from Under the Volcano or from letters, voiced perfectly by Richard Burton from Exorcist II: The Heretic, and an eerie avant-garde music score by Alain Clavier! Many of the interviews, and the interviewees themselves, are horribly fascinating, and are just the type of eccentric old Brits that I’ve met quite a few of myself!

On the debit side, the picture is quite definitively just a bit too long: removing just a few volcano shots and other Mexican material might have helped! And it seems to revel a bit too much in the harshest aspects of Lowry’s life! But these are very minor complaints: I find Lowry fascinating, his book spellbinding, and Volcano an exceedingly worthwhile account of both! Ha ha, I give it three and a half unnecessary photos of syphilis victims!

Burl reviews Luis Luis, Folger of Men! (1957)

¡Hoy! ¡Hoy! It’s Burl! Today I’ve got an obscure Mexican picture, though one curiously multinational in its cast and crew, as though Mexico decided to try out every co-production deal it had at the same time! In the blurred and dodgy subtitled version I found, the movie goes by the title Luis Luis, Folger of Men! I was lucky enough to get a scan of the original poster from my pal Alejandro, and I present it here for your delight! Ha ha, I do enjoy presenting odd and obscure artifacts!

Anyway, Luis Luis, Folger of Men appears to have been equally inspired by two other shot-in-Mexico movies, Simon of the Desert and The Sin of Adam and Eve; or at least it would appear so if it didn’t predate both of those pictures! Luis Luis, essayed in one of his only starring roles by perpetual bit player and hairstylist Cosmo “The Errand Boy” Sardo, is a humble, middle-aged clerk who is obsessed with long-dead actress Florita de la Cruz, played in repurposed silent film footage by long-dead actress Cécile Guyon! But, in a fascinating gambit that comes of as a cross between Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid and The Purple Rose of Cairo, a number of other silent-film starlets (or would-be starlets) begin competing for Luis Luis’s attention! (All this old footage alone makes the picture worth a viewing, ha ha!)

An increasingly befuddled Luis Luis finally can’t take it anymore and, at about the midpoint of the film, decides to become a lonely desert anchorite! But this is easier said than done, and poor Luis Luis encounters resistance from his lawyer (played, I think, by a brought-out-of-retirement Bert Roach from Dr. Renault’s Secret) and his ex-wife! Ha ha, to have an ex-wife at all seems oddly progressive in a Mexican film of the 1950s, but there are so many separate influences in this strange brew that almost nothing can truly be out of place! It was all apparently based on an old screenplay by Jules Furthman, who wrote The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo, but I'm not sure how much of his work actually made it into the film!

Things go downhill for poor Luis Luis after that, but of course I don’t want to give away the ending! Suffice to say that it gets a bit racy, a bit horrific, and finally a bit surreal! No, strike that, a lot surreal! Luis Bunuel doesn’t seem to have been involved in any direct way, but from the title on down his spirit hovers over it all! It's a fascinating work, overheated and baroque in some places, remote and ascetic in others! Does Luis Luis ever really become a folger of men? And, perhaps more crucially, what is a folger of men? Ha ha, with the ambiguous ending we get, it’s impossible to say, but endlessly fascinating to speculate upon!

It’s a nice-looking picture, with even the muddy transfer I saw implying some crisp and inventive monochrome photography! Perhaps one day the movie will be remastered and reissued – we can only hope! I found it quite compelling: an exotic curio of the first order, of particular interest to students of cinema, and maybe a head-scratcher for everyone else but at least a highly entertaining one! I’m pleased to give Luis Luis, Folger of Men three life-sized effigies of St. Sebastian!

Burl reviews The Sin of Adam and Eve! (1968)

Ha ha, let there be Burl! Yes, it’s me, just plain Burl, here to review a Mexican picture dramatizing the story of Adam and Eve! It’s called The Sin of Adam and Eve, and quite naturally it spends a good deal of time on the parts before the great fruit-eating sin, when they didn’t wear any fig leaves at all! After the eating of the fruit – which doesn’t look like a terribly appealing viand, it must be said! – things move pretty quickly, because fig leaf shorts and the later accouterments we see are not what the customers paid their money to see!

So it’s your basic nudie flick! Ha ha, do I need to describe the plot? Well, after a Genesis dramatized through stock footage of erupting volcanoes and quaking landscapes, Adam is formed out of dust! He’s a burly fellow with a perpetually bewildered expression, and we see him wander about the Garden for some time, discovering such joys as swimming and shouting! Ha ha, truly a paradise!

Soon enough the Lord decides Adam needs a companion, and after a little rib surgery, Eve is formed! She’s a very comely lass, it must be said, and Adam shows her around the Garden for quite a while! The Lord points out the forbidden Tree of Knowledge and tells them it’s a no-no! But a snake is prowling around the premises and whispering to the not-too-swift-seeming Eve that she really ought to try some of this marvelous fruit – hey, she owes it to herself, and who is this Lord anyway to tell her what to do?

After many scenes in which Eve tries things like wearing an enormous flower on her head or showing off some pebbles, and Adam reveals himself to be an insensitive clod, the fruit is finally eaten! Then there’s the fig leaves, the casting-out (during which the pair lose one another for a while), and the separate wandering of the wastelands! Adam fights or flees from a whole series of animals, which also chase and eat one another – ha ha, no ASPCA on this set! – and eventually the pair are reunited!

Well, I guess the idea is that the picture has a sad ending – if only Eve had been able to resist the temptation, humans would have lived in a perfect, plentiful paradise and everything would be great, and there would be no war, no strife, no privation! But it seems like it could all have been avoided if only the Lord hadn’t put that tree there! Was it meant as some kind of test? If so, why? It makes the Lord seem kind of mean and dogmatic, at least as far as this picture explains things!

Anyway, it’s mostly a nice little movie with plenty of scenery to look at, ha ha! There’s no dialogue besides “Adam!” and “Eve!” shouted incessantly; but there’s plenty of narration! It’s mostly a curiosity: a Biblical picture with exploitation aplenty! It’s not the most thrilling thing ever made, but I enjoyed it in an obscure way, and I’m going to give The Sin of Adam and Eve two flaming swords!

Burl reviews Simon of the Desert! (1965)

¡Ha ha! Esta Burl! I’m here to review a movie from one of my all time favourite directors, the great Luis Buñuel! Now I don’t mean he’s one of my favourites because of the movies he’s made, though of course those are all pretty great! But he’s also just one of my favourite directors just simply as a human being! No, I didn’t know him personally or anything, but after I read his fabulous autobiography, My Last Sigh, I just realized that here, truly, is an excellent guy that I’d like to have known!

Aside from his early pictures with Dali, Simon of the Desert is probably one of his shortest movies! It’s about forty-five minutes, but considering it’s the story of a guy who stands on the top of a pole, that’s about as long as you’d want it to be! In any case, it seems pretty much the perfect length!

Simon is one of these holier-than-thou types, and for six and a half years he’s lived on the top of a column in the middle of the Mexican wilderness to show his devotion to the Lord! As the movie begins, a local rich man has just bought Simon a new column, taller and with more intricate carvings about the capital! The grumpy anchorite has no sooner settled himself atop this new aerie than he must deal with none other than the Devil, who has taken the form of a beautiful lady and tries tempting him down from the column!

He also converses with the local shepherd dwarf, and with a priest who gets possessed and tries to out him as a high-living fraud! He performs a miracle on a handless fellow who proves to be a complete ingrate once Simon has mumbled some prayer and the fellow grows new hands! The bearded ascetic tries to increase the devotional ante by standing on one foot, but he is still assailed by demonic visions; and eventually, in a crackerjack ending, he finds himself having drinks with the Devil in a goodtime rock-n-roll club filled with groovy gyrating hepcats! Ha ha, this may be hell, but at least they have a good band!

It’s a good, solid anti-clerical piece all around, and must have been a bit of a shocker to the devout! There’s some unexpected nudity as well! Ha ha, and the movie looks great too, with great monochrome photography from Gabriel Figueroa, Mexico’s premiere cinematographer! I give the excellent Simon of the Desert three and a half bearded ladies!

Burl reviews Beaks: The Movie! (1987)

Hi, Burl here with another animal attack movie! This one originated in Mexico, I think, but, like the similar Slugs, uses a couple of American actors in the lead roles and fills out many of the supporting parts with Hispanic players! Anyway, if you don’t mind dubbing it works out pretty well!

This one is about killer birds of course, much like Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds! It’s pretty similar in that no solid reason is given for the avian aggression; though human pollution is rather heavy-handedly mentioned as a potential motive! Also there’s a long sequence at the beginning where a bearded fellow blasts away at pigeons in slow motion, which is kind of gross and mean if you have any admiration for these clever birds at all! Many city dwellers do not, I understand, but it still seems sort of cruel!

But the bearded huntsman gets his pretty quickly! An owl swoops out of nowhere and plucks his eye right out of his head! In the meantime, there are slow-motion bird attacks here and there, and the heroes of the movie – a newscaster who’s tired of doing the silly and unimportant stories she is always assigned, and her goofy cameraman boyfriend – travel the world to investigate the unusual events! They seem to work for a local news station, but their travel budget appears to be more or less unlimited! Ha ha, I’ve worked for much bigger networks than that, and let me tell you, they don’t dole out travel vouchers on a crazy hunch!

But never mind that: what about the bird attacks? Ha ha, some of them are pretty great, like when the old farmer is attacked by chickens, or all the kids at a birthday party get some new feathered friends! (I know, that happened in The Birds also, but hey, ha ha!) Also I seem to recall a hang glider finding out the hard way that man was not meant to fly!

There’s not much else going on in the movie! It’s only been a short time since I watched it, and I can’t remember how it ends! I think it just ends, actually! There’s no real conclusion or solution for the bird revolution, and since that’s more or less what Hitch did too, it seems like a bit of a cheat! Hey, rip everything else off from the old pudge, sure, but leave him his special head-scratcher of an ending!

This is actually the second time I’ve seen this movie, I’m slightly ashamed to say! I seem to recall watching it back in high school! Of course I didn’t remember anything about that viewing either, ha ha! But between the goofiness and the gore, there’s amusement to be had with this crazy picture, so I’ll award it one and a half arrogant sportsmen!