Burl reviews Frankenhooker! (1990)

 

Ha ha, wanna date? No, just kidding, it’s Burl here to review another movie for you, and if you ever had “Wanna date?” shouted at you by a VHS box, you’ll know which one it is! Now, here’s an interesting case: as of the other night, I’ve now seen this movie twice, and both times it was in the theatre! The first time was a midnight show in Montreal the summer it came out, which as you can imagine was a lot of fun, and then it was playing here in my town on a double bill with its soul mate, Re-Animator! Ha ha, this is the sort of picture it’s unlikely to have even seen once on the big screen if you don’t live somewhere like New York, and since I don’t, I call that an accomplishment! The movie I’m talking about is Frank Henenlotter’s third picture as a director, Frankenhooker!

Henenlotter is a funny case: studied from a distance he seems an inevitable product of New York City, and in particular of Times Square before they tidied it up! He’s made a little industry out of exploring the psychopathologies of young New Yawk men who find themselves in tragic and monster-related situations, and there’s a grimy collegiality to his movies that usually leavens the less-pleasant aspects of his stories! Basket Case, the first and grimiest of his movies, doesn’t always manage this of course, but there’s still an underlying jollity to it, and the monster certainly has his rough-hewn charms!

Frankenhooker is a picture that could have gone wrong, but Henenlotter made several deft choices along the way! As much as I appreciate well-done gore, I think he was correct to keep this movie on the dry and more cartoonish side – instead of guts and blood, the hookers in this movie explode in sparks and what appear to be mannequin parts! It doesn’t quite go the “green streamers” way of Evil Dead II, but almost! (And, like that movie, it was forced to go the unrated route anyway!)

The story has Jeffrey Franken, a coverall-wearing amateur mad scientist played by James Lorinz from Street Trash and Last Exit to Brooklyn, suffer a terrible bereavement in the opening moments of the picture: his fiancée Elizabeth, played by Patty Mullen from Doom Asylum and nothing else, is run over by a remote control lawnmower! Well, Jeffrey manages to save her head, and, after he has an impassioned chat with his mother, played in a cameo appearance by Louise Lasser from Bananas and Crimewave (the Raimi one), we discover that he’s keeping the noggin in a freezer in his garage laboratory! He’s got to find some replacement body parts if he’s going to reassemble his lady love, so of course his next course of action is to head across the bridge to Times Square and find some hookers to explode with his lab-created super-crack!

It’s when Jeffrey gets to New York that the picture really comes to life, ha ha! He meets some lively whores and a fearsome bemuscled pimp named Zorro, and also encounters a portly bartender named Spike played by the mighty Shirley Stoler from Klute and Splitz and Three O’Clock High and Grumpier Old Men! And after Jeffrey has exploded a roomful of working girls (accidentally, because he’s had a change of heart and decided not to go through with it after all), he collects their bits in plastic bags and constructs a new body for Elizabeth! But when she’s brought to life by lightning, she’s no longer Elizabeth, but rather a sort of hooker automaton, and she immediately shambles back to Times Square to ply her ancient trade!

 

By the end of the picture Zorro has become involved, and has suffered a nasty encounter with a freezer-full of mutated bits – poetic justice for his cruel practice of addicting his ladies to mind drugs! Jeffrey himself comes to the sticky but apposite conclusion befitting one who would pervert science and meddle with nature and reconstruct his lawn-mown girlfriend without her consent! Ha ha!

The picture is a bit ramshackle, but it’s amusing! There are no affrights to speak of, but that’s not the goal! Nor is it a gross-out picture, though it has its moments, as any movie featuring a cooler full of disembodied breasts must! It’s a real artifact at this point in history, which gives it some additional interest; and the special effects are janky but appropriate and the performances unexpectedly strong! I particularly liked Mullen’s twisty-mouthed work as the jigsaw zombie! Ha ha, it’s kind of a shame she didn’t stay in the acting game, because I thought she was really solid! Anyway, the whole movie has a likeable backyard quality that mostly overwhelms the conceptually unsavory aspects, and so I give Frankenhooker two and a half Visible Women!

Burl reviews Sully! (2016)

 

Heading for runway two-niner, it’s Burl, reporting birdstrike from the sky! Ha ha, it’s a real-life disaster movie – or is it? Those of us who remember watching the news in early 2009 remember that it wasn’t a disaster at all, but a heartening story of competence! Yes, it’s a picture from the man who reinvented himself as a chronicler of ripped-from-recent-headline stories, and this, as far as I can tell, is the best-regarded of them: by garr, it’s the fabulous story of Sully!

Yes, it’s Sully Sullenberger, Airport Pilot, and who better to essay him than Tom Hanks, the fellow we recall from Dragnet and Big and pictures like that! Why, Hanks already had the real-life-pilot-wrings-triumph-from-disaster angle covered in his portrayal of Jim Lovell of Apollo 13! Like Lovell, Sully keeps a calm head and is helped by his even-keeled co-workers, and from the oncoming rush of too-certain tragedy comes the joy of unexpected survival – a water landing from which the aviatrons emerge smiling!

You recall the story: in January of 2009, a flight takes off from La Guardia airport in New York, and instead of its intended destination, Charlotte, a capitol of one of the Carolinas I believe, the airplane is struck by passing birds and, bereft of thrust, is forced into the icy waters of the Hudson River! Injuries are minor and fatalities nil, and pilot Sully Sullenberger is hailed as a hero! But wait – the Red Cross blankets draped across the shoulders of the survivors are not the only wet ones in this story, because various authorities, especially those concerned about insurance costs and so forth with regards to the plane, ask whether Sully and his co-pilot could not have returned to the aerodrome even in their bird-crippled state! By the end of the picture it is revealed that the pilots did all the right things, and their reputations and hero status remain intact!

Aaron Eckhart from Olympus Has Fallen is the co-pilot of Mustache Air flight 1549, and he provides a stolid backup to Sully, a faithful wingman, someone for him to talk to! Laura Linney from Congo is the worried Mrs. Sully, whose scenes are all on the telephone and who doesn’t get to do anything but fret from a distance! Ha ha, it’s a bit of a nothing part, but Linney is a good actor and does what she can! And of course the picture is directed by Clint himself, who as a filmmaker has brought us many pictures: some of them very good, others more like Blood Work! And yes, as mentioned above, of his ripped-from-the-headlines pictures, which include one about the terrorists on the train to Paris and another about the security guard who was thought to have planted a bomb, Sully is the one people thought was pretty good!

Maybe that’s because Sully himself was such a readymade white middle-aged man hero, and therefore perfect to be played by Hanks! Hanks is good in the role, but there’s not all that much to the man aside from being a good and dedicated pilot who’s certain of the rightness of his actions aside from one or two moments of doubt! The picture is assembled in such a way as to break the actual crash and rescue into sections, one of them from the perspective of the La Guardia tower; and occasionally we are privy to the explosive visions with which Sully is occasionally assailed – snapshots of how the disaster might have unfolded if everything hadn’t gone exactly right in the aftermath of the birdstrike!

Like most Eastwood pictures, it’s a competent but unspectacular work! It certainly doesn’t wear out its welcome – at 93 minutes, including credits and explanatory titles, it qualifies as a miniature in the Eastwood oeuvre! It’s a fine piece of reportage, very basic in its themes and emotions, and carries nearly to a fault an abhorrence of nuance or complication! It’s no Unforgiven, ha ha, and it's no Sully Sullenberger: Airport Pilot either, but then what is! Still, I’m going to give Sully two and a half cries of “Heads down, stay down, brace, brace, brace!”

Burl reviews Zelig! (1983)

 

By the power vested in me, it’s Burl, here with another taste of the Woodman! Yes, it’s a Woody Allen picture, and whatever you may think of this fellow in personal terms, and deep within the chambers of your heart, he did make some good movies along the way! Broadway Danny Rose is fun, and so is Sleeper; and of course there are many others too - some of them merely okay, others very good indeed! This picture, Zelig, is one of his least typical movies, and for my money one of his best! And ha ha, I went to see this with my first girlfriend at a rep theatre on a double bill with Dangerous Liaisons! Odd but true!

It’s a faux documentary, which is a form Allen had tackled before with his very first proper picture, Take the Money and Run! But this one is much more committed to its documentary-ness and therefore much less obviously a comedy, though it’s well-supplied with jokes! It’s the tale of Leonard Zelig, a nebbish of the early 20^th century, who so desperately wants to fit in and be liked that he has gained the ability to become, in just about every way, just like the people with whom he is surrounded! By garr, he's a human chameleon!

Set (delightfully!) in the late 1920s (though almost overdoing the period detail along the way, ha ha, which I’d have thought near impossible), the picture opens with the discovery of Zelig and his strange affliction, then follows him as he’s hospitalized under the care of glasses-nerd doctor Eudora Fletcher, played by Mia Farrow, who’d made her Woody Allen debut the year before in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy! It chronicles the ups and downs of Zelig’s life as he becomes a famous oddity, then is taken into the care of his half-sister and her shady boyfriend, neither of whom give a minkling for Zelig’s well-being; then, after a murder-suicide spree among his sister and her two boyfriends, the movie tells us, Zelig is again on his own! A renewed connection with Dr. Fletcher, a cure for his condition in the offing, and a budding romance all point toward happy days for the Z man, but a sudden barrage of scandal and a complication involving Nazi Germany mix things up further for the poor chameleon!

All of this is presented in classic documentary fashion, with a perfectly-chosen narrator ("They try to pull off his diz-guise, but it is not a diz-guise!") telling the story, and a great rush of old documentary footage, newly-shot but cleverly treated-to-look-old footage, contemporary talking head interviews with (often) real people, like Susan Sontag and Saul Bellow, providing pictorial detail and additional commentary! I must say I’m in awe of some of the technical accomplishments here – the cinematographer, Gordon Willis, and the editor, Susan Morse, have done some brainbustingly admirable work in matching the new footage to the old and spiriting Zelig into shots with Hitler and Jimmy Cagney and Josephine Baker and Tom Mix and so forth! The re-creation of the Zelig life story – clearly shot to resemble a Warner Bros. production of the 30s – is note perfect too, with Garrett Brown, the dad from Uncle Buck, looking hilariously whitebread as the actor playing Zelig!

Ha ha, the picture is probably more about Allen himself than he might admit, which adds a nice layer to it all! On the debit side, the movie feels a lot longer than it actually is, and there’s a same-iness to it that sometimes causes a little feeling of drag or repetition! But that’s only occasional, and there are enough wonderfully subtle gags and a wild array of highlights, both technical and one may say structural, to override these minor issues! The newly-created novelty songs are also brilliant, and the period music perfectly selected, right up to the wonderful tune that ends the film! I like this picture a lot, and so I give Zelig three and a half houses painted a disgusting colour!

Burl reviews Hot Nights on the Campus! (1966)

 

In grimy black-and-white, it’s Burl, here to review olde-tyme erotica! Ha ha, what would you get if you teleported a Michael Findlay roughie like The Touch of Her Flesh together with a regional campus picture like And No Birds Sing? Well, I think you’d open the telepod at the other end, and after the smoke cleared, out would stagger a picture very similar to Hot Night on the Campus!

Of course the focus is more on the hot nights than the campus, and to tell you the truth I wouldn’t have minded a little more mid-60s NYU campus material than we get here, because we get virtually none! Our story, such as it is, concerns Sally, just off the bus from small-town Indiana to attend college in the Big Apple; her family friend, whom she’s long considered an uncle, is a professor at the college and sets Sally up in an apartment with a bunch of other young ladies!

Gigi Darlene from Crazy Wild and Crazy plays Sally, and her new roommates are essayed by a gallery of faces familiar to those of us who’ve seen a lot of Something Weird Video releases! My favourite is Judy Adler from The Sin Syndicate, essaying the role of Fran, the beatnik sex maniac! There’s also Darlene Bennett from Nudes on Tiger Reef and Joanna Mills from The Love Merchant! Soon after Sally’s arrival, the girls hold an erotic rumbustification, which starts off normally enough but soon everyone is down to their scanties and building human pyramids, and Fran is carried off into the bedroom by a posse of men! And, oh gasp, there are two of her female roommates lying together on a bed making sweet love!

Of course Sally is scandalized, declaring in her voiceover narration that this party is the most horrible nightmare ever! Rural Indiana never prepared her for this, ha ha! But after she talks about it with the family friend professor guy, and separately with a young fella she met at the party, she’s soon enjoying the big city ways and performing bohankie on the reg with both of these men! (One at a time, though – ha ha, she’s still a Muncie girl after all!) Yes, she really gets into the swing of things, as one does once one has discovered the magic of sex!

But in these movies pleasure always comes at a price, and it’s not long before Sally is feeling ill and clutching at her stomach! A nudie photographer diagnoses her condition: she’s pregnant! Oh, what will she do? The men in her life are no help at all of course, and they're even worse than that – they instantly transform into jerks who push her around and tell her it’s not their problem! But a roommate called Purice knows what to do! She sends Sally to a horrible abortion apartment staffed by a grim, straggle-haired old lady and featuring the most cheerlessly blazing fire ever seen on film! And while one might have thought such back-alley establishments a part of America’s past, it now seems they, and the many horrors and health risks that go along with them, are a firm part of its future too! America, what are you doing?

It works out for Sally, because the fakey happy ending of this picture has her flee the old abortioness’s apartment before the horrible woman can get out her coat hangers, and then, what do you know, Fran’s boyfriend declares that he wants to be with Sally, to marry her and take care of her and her baby forever! A grateful Sally agrees, but being forced into a lifelong relationship out of desperate circumstance doesn’t seem much like a happy ending to me!

But while the last act of this picture (if it can be said to have acts, other than mildly sexual ones) is depressing, the first forty-five minutes or so are pretty fun, if you like grimy views of mid-60s New York! Ha ha, and I sure do! The content is nonsensical, that’s for sure, but this movie is an artifact above all, and an enjoyably inept one! I just wish it spent a little more time actually on the campus! I give Hot Nights on the Campus two shapeless black beatnik sweaters!

Burl reviews Big! (1988)

 

Up, up, and away, it’s Burl, here to review the beloved classic from years gone by! Ha ha, it’s a beloved classic to a lot of people I guess, but not to me, because this is one of the popular pictures I ignored back when it was new, and continued to ignore as the years went by! (I ignored all the late-80s body-switch pictures in fact - Like Father, Like Son, Vice Versa, 18 Again!) In fact I only just saw this particular picture for the first time a few years ago, and now I’ve watched it again, and am prepared to review for you a little movie called Big!

Of course it comes from director Laverne DeFazio, who also brought us pictures like Jumpin’ Jack Flash, A League of Their Own, and other popular entertainments I haven’t seen! Big begins by introducing us to 12-going-on-13 year-old New Jersey kid Josh Baskin, who hangs out with his little pal Billy, played by Jared Rushton from Lady in White, and suffers an embarrassment in front of the school cute girl when he’s too tiny to get on a roller coaster! He consults a fortune telling machine called Zoltar, makes his wish to get bigger, and wakes up the next morning in the form of Tom Hanks, whom we know so well from Volunteers and The Money Pit!

Mercedes Ruehl from The Secret of My Success plays his mom, who’s horrified when the gangly Hanks appears in her kitchen insisting that he’s her son! Ha ha, the poor woman! (The movie is too determinedly cheery to dwell on the horror these poor parents must be feeling for the many weeks their son is gone, apparently kidnapped by a fresh-faced comedy actor!) She chases him away, and Josh runs to the school and manages to persuade a terrified Billy that he is who he claims to be, and so the two head to the big city, New York!

Pretty quickly the movie edges into 80s boardroom comedy territory when Josh bluffs his way into a job at a toy company, then charms the avuncular owner – played by Robert Loggia from Psycho II, of course – with his childlike outlook and a spirited round of piano dancing! So he instantly becomes a vice president in charge of playing with toys, a perfect job for a kid, and snags a huge loft apartment (which in New York, even in the 80s, would be outside the price range of a minor executive) while being regarded as a weird eccentric by his co-workers! These colleagues include Jon Lovitz from ¡Three Amigos! as a fellow who tries to give Josh tips on becoming a love-yuppie; John Heard from C.H.U.D. as Paul, who develops a rivalry with the free-spirited boy-about-town; and Elizabeth Perkins from Love at Large, whose affections transfer from Paul to Josh with all due haste!

Ha ha, yes, the twelve year-old in the big man’s body has sex in the course of the picture, and, to the irritation of his little pal Billy, is pulled, with a gruesome inexorability, into the adult world of work and responsibility! In fact he seems to thrive in the corporate atmosphere in which he’s been plunged, and that might be the most Reagan-era aspect of this picture – anyway, that and the giant Pepsi machine Josh installs in his loft! Yes, this is a capitalist entertainment through and through: too timid to explore the real ramifications of what’s happened to Josh and his family, but, like its hero, happy to sit on the floor and play with toys!

It’s all done with studio professionalism, plenty of polish, and not a little charm; though not quite so much as it believes itself to have! Hanks is the picture’s ringer, of course, and the movie paid him back by becoming a big hit and sending him to the stratospheric heights of stardom in which he’s marinated ever since! But watching it today I think to myself “Ha ha, no wonder I didn’t bother with this back then!” It was the biggest (ha ha!) of the body-switch movies, despite the fact that Josh doesn’t actually switch his body with anyone, but to me it’s not any great shakes! I give Big two canapés!

Burl reviews Broadway Danny Rose! (1984)

 

With a schvitz and a plotz it’s Burl, here to review a little more of the woodman! Yes, it’s a picture from Woody Allen, whose work we know in the form of Sleeper and Midnight in Paris and oh so many others, and this is one of his smaller works from the 80s! Ha ha, my favourite of these is Zelig, but I’ve always liked this one too - another black and white number, as it happens! Yes, it’s Broadway Danny Rose!

There’s a fraternal coziness to the picture, a tone set from the beginning, where we the viewers move through Carnegie’s deli in New York to a table of aging comedians, all playing themselves, and telling each other jokes and war stories! Ha ha, instantly we’re in a world that’s not our own, but becomes fully developed as soon as you see these guys: the meat and potatoes New York punchclock showbiz world! And the comics get to talking about a legendary figure, Danny Rose, a small-timer they clearly regard with great affection!

The bulk of the movie is told in flashback: the best Danny Rose story there is! (Sandy Baron, whom we know from his appearance in Vamp, is the comic who tells the story!) And of course Allen plays Danny Rose, who turns out to be a sweeter version of the usual Allen character: a talent agent and personal manager whose acts are all two-bit, if that, but whom Danny loves, believes in, and treats as family! His earnest solicitude towards the folk he manages is enormously endearing!

There’s not a lot of plot, but what there is goes as follows: Danny has one client who’s on a bit of a roll, namely a lounge singer called Lou Canova, played by real-life lounge singer and one-time movie actor Nick Apollo Forte! Lou is a family man (there’s a scene in which Danny has dinner with the family and asks the young daughter how old she is; learning that she’s twelve, he asks “Are you married?" Eesh!), but he has a ladyfriend on the side, Tina! She’s played by Mia Farrow, who made her Allen debut in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, and when Lou gets a big opportunity to sing in front of Milton Berle and Howard Cosell, it’s Danny’s job to escort the dame to the gig!

Of course it all goes pear shaped when misunderstandings lead to Danny and Tina being chased by gun-toting thugs! Lou meanwhile is getting loaded, and it looks bad for everybody! Ha ha, I won’t tell you how it ends, but it involves the most melancholy Thanksgiving dinner ever, and a bunch of Danny’s sad-sack acts, and it brings us back to Carnegie's!

The beautiful monochrome, the inside-baseball feel to the New York showbiz world, the nearly indefatigable optimism of Danny Rose himself, and the surprisingly solid performance of non-actor Forte as Lou, along with the perfect songs he wrote for his character, all combine to make this one a charmer! Sure, it’s lightweight, and has some uniquely creepy Allen moments, but if you can bring yourself to watch a Woody Allen picture at all (some can’t, and I respect that!), this picture, the scene with the twelve year-old aside, is among your best bets for satisfaction!I give Broadway Danny Rose three gumbas!

Burl reviews Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle! (1994)

 

With a big bouquet of bon mots, it’s Burl, here to blab about a biopic! Well, a sort of a biopic anyway - it concentrates mainly on one particular chunk of its subject’s life! The subject is Dorothy Parker, the chunk is the Roaring Twenties, mostly, and the movie is Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle!

Jennifer Jason Leigh from Eyes of a Stranger and Grandview U.S.A., using a more languorous variant of the accent she sported that same year in The Hudsucker Proxy, plays the feisty wordsmith, who’ll throw back a drink and toss out a quip faster than you can sing exclavius! As the picture begins, she’s slaving away writing reviews at Vanity Fair alongside her friend Robert Benchley, played with astonishing amiability by Campbell Scott from Singles and The Daytrippers! The relationship between these two, which is platonic but suffused with tender regret and longing, as well as a fond formality which has them addressing one another as “Mrs. Parker” and “Mr. Benchley,” is the emotional spine of the movie, and was to me a stirring one!

The centerpiece of the film, ha ha, is of course the Algonquin Round Table, which we see the genesis of as Parker, Benchley and the many witticists of their acquaintance gather at the storied Gotham hotel for lunch, filling a booth as more and more of them arrive and causing the exasperated maître d’ (Wallace Shawn, back in a restaurant again as in My Dinner With Andre, but not a patron this time) to finally roll in a big round table and let this gang of tongue-runners do their thing!

The verbosophisticates include Lili Taylor from Mystic Pizza as author Edna Ferber; Sam Robards from Fandango as magaziniste Harold Ross; James Le Gros from Phantasm II as music critic Deems Taylor; Nick Cassavetes from Quiet Cool as playwright Robert Sherwood; Tom McGowan from True Crime as Alexander Woolcott; David Gow from Pin as Donald Ogden Stewart, and Martha Plimpton from The Goonies as Jane Grant! Ha ha, it’s quite a gallery! We also get Jennifer Beals from In the Soup and Vampire’s Kiss as Benchley’s undemonstrative wife Gertrude; Matthew Broderick from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as Charles MacArthur, who breaks Parker’s heart; Andrew McCarthy from Weekend at Bernie’s as Eddie, the drugs-addicted war veteran whom Parker married twice; and Keith Carradine from Thieves Like Us aw-shucksing it up as Will Rogers!

The picture follows Parker through her numerous heartbreaks and increasing reliance on the bottle, and includes many examples of her mordant wit and her difficulties in writing what, and for whom, she wanted! The drama is broken up, unnecessarily I feel, with monochromatic interstitials in which Leigh drawls bits of Parker doggerel! I suppose these were justified by Rudolph and Leigh as opportunities for people unfamiliar with Parker’s work to experience it, and therefore understand why they should be watching a two-hour tribute film about her, but I can’t agree with this logic! However, hearing that funny, sad, alarming verse is never a bad thing, so it’s not a fatal problem!

Leigh’s performance is a highly affected one, but after all she’s playing a highly affected person! It’s altogether very skilled work on Ms. Leigh’s part, and indeed the entire cast seems to have caught the spirit of the thing! Plenty of credit for this must surely go to the director, Alan Rudolph, who must have worked hard to create the sort of atmosphere in which these sorts of performances - naturalistic portrayals of highly artificial people - may flourish! My favourite is Scott’s performance as Benchley, though, possibly because he reminds me of a friend of mine, and because, as I said, his friendship with Mrs. Parker truly is touching! And he pulls off the Treasurer's Report beautifully!

Ha ha, Rudolph has made plenty of pictures, and some of them are very much Rudolph movies while others, like Endangered Species or an early number called Premonition, are not so much! Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle is perhaps the Rudolphiest of his movies however, and it’s no surprise to find Robert Altman’s name in the credits as a producer! Montreal does a very creditable job of standing in for New York, and Rudolph’s evocation of the period is exemplary! I liked Jan Kiesser’s cinematography too, and on the whole there’s something very sweet and cozy and lunchtime about this movie! Ha ha, I give Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle three banquettes!

Burl reviews Force of Evil! (1948)

 

Ha ha, it’s Burl here with some political noir for you! This is the first picture made by Abraham Polonsky, a cool guy who got himself blacklisted for not naming names, while his own name was named by The Long Goodbye’s Sterling Hayden, who regretted doing it all the rest of his life! Polonsky was a Marxist practically from cradle to grave, but, unlike too many of his fellow travelers, was smart enough to soundly reject Stalinism! His askance view of capitalism, largely shared by that ol' pinko Burl, is naturally on full view in his debut picture as a director, Force of Evil!

When I thought idly of Force of Evil over the years, I thought of it as a boxing picture, but that’s because of Body and Soul, which Polonsky wrote! John Garfield from We Were Strangers is in both movies, and he stars here as Joe Morse, a slick Wall Street lawyer in the employ of numbers racketeer Tucker, played by Roy Roberts from The Big Trees! Joe’s older brother Leo, who raised him after the death of their parents and who put him through law school, but from whom he is now estranged, is also in the numbers business, but in a benevolent, small-timer sort of a way!

Leo is played by Thomas Gomez from Key Largo, and boy is he good! He can whip himself into a froth just as well as Eugene Pallette can, but you really know he means it! All the actors are good, in fact, including stagestress Beatrice Pearson as Leo’s innocent secretary Doris, who eventually, if briefly, succumbs both to Joe’s corruption and his slab-faced charms! Marie Windsor from ‘Salem’s Lot plays Mrs. Tucker, the vampish gangster’s wife with whom Joe occasionally dallies; Paul Fix from Strange Cargo and Jet Pilot is the even more dangerous mobster Ficco; and Howland Chamberlain from Feudin’, Fussin’ and a-Fightin’ is Leo’s milquetoast slaphead accountant Mr. Bauer, and they must have got him at the same shop they get all the bald, moustached, bespectacled gangland accountants for TV and movies! Ha ha!

Though he discovers his moral bearings near the end of the picture, Joe spends most of it being a croquefort, even if his wish to help his brother is genuine! Ha ha, he does little jerky things like put Doris up on a shelf when she disagrees with him, and big jerky things like coming up with an idea to destroy all the small-time numbers bankers in town so his buddy Tucker can take them over! Apparently, you see, the folks who bet on these numbers always pick the same number, 776, every July 4, and Joe sees to it that 776 indeed comes up this particular Independence Day, meaning the small books will have to pay off big, and thereby get squeezed dry!

Well, Joe tries to warn his brother about it before it happens, and tries to help him after, but his clever scheme ends up costing Leo everything, and himself nearly that! Ha ha, there are no happy endings when going up against the forces of greed and capitalism (but I repeat myself, ha ha), which are after all simply code names for the force of evil referred to in the title!

It‘s a terrific, crackerjack picture! Joe seems like a typical film noir failpuss, but he’s actually quite a complex character, and it’s easy to get wrapped up in his story! Polonsky does a marvelous job with his first stint behind the megaphone, and one wishes he’d been given more chances rather than falling to the ridiculous blacklist! On top of all this, the picture will teach you about the numbers racket, and you’ll finally be able to explain to your friends just what it is! I give Force of Evil three and a half jolly newsboys!

Burl reviews Tales From the Darkside: The Movie! (1990)

 

Once upon a time, it’s Burl, here to review a multi-story, omnibus, portmanteau anthology horror picture! Ha ha, of course Dead of Night is the standard bearer for such works, and I’m here to tell you that this movie is no Dead of Night; nor, indeed, is it a Creepshow! No, in actual fact, the picture is Tales From the Darkside: The Movie!

Ha ha, I remember when this one came out in the theatres, but for whatever reason, even though I always like to see horror pictures on the big screen, I ignored it! And I continued to ignore it until recently, when a DVD of the movie came my way and I could ignore it no longer! It begins with a framing story concerning a suburban witch played by Blondie herself, Debbie Harry, well known from Videodrome, is preparing to fricassee a paperboy she has captured, played by Matthew Lawrence from Planes, Trains and Automobiles!

To distract her from her meal prep, the paperboy recounts three tales from a big volume he has found in his cell! The first is the most star-studded of them: laid on a college campus (a setting ol’ Burl always appreciates in horror movies), we meet a gang of students, including Steve Buscemi of Escape From L.A. fame as a nerdbody who has received a mummy by mail order, toffee-nosed rich boy Lee, played by Robert Sedgwick from Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home, who has cheated Buscemi out of a grant or a scholarship or something; the toffeenose’s even more toffee-nosed girlfriend, played by Julianne Moore from The Fugitive; and the girlfriend’s brother, who seems out of place in this tennis whites-wearing crew, essayed by Christian Slater of Hot Tub Time Machine 2! Soon the mean-faced mail order mummy, previously a reposing mummy, becomes a full-on walking mummy, and like his compadres in Dawn of the Mummy, exacts a little gory vengeance to the beat of the cloth-wrapped feet!

Next we meet a rich man, played by the always-welcome William Hickey from Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, who fears a local housecat and hires a gentleman assassin played by New York Doll David Johansen to take care of the fearsome feline! This one is based on a Stephen King story, but it’s one of his sillier ones, featuring as it does a scene in which the kitty forces its way into someone’s mouth and down his gullet! Ha ha!

The final story is the one that tries to pack in some emotional resonance, and it involves a downtown artist played by James Remar from Quiet Cool, who, despite being poor and unsuccessful, maintains a vast Soho warehouse studio that would tax the income of a Jeff Koons! He has a scary encounter with a gargoyle which wounds him and makes him promise never to tell anyone about it, and then leaves him be! Remar meets a pretty lady played by Rae Dawn Chong from Commando! They fall in love, get married, have kids, and if you can’t guess the twist then you’ve never read an EC Comic or a story by O. Henry!

With the stories told and the basting pan ready, the paperboy of the framing story must figure out a way to escape from the witch, and ha ha, I won’t give that part away! I will give away this fact, however: it’s not a great movie! But it’s not awful either: the cast alone (many of whom had appeared on the Tales From the Darkside TV show) ensures that! It’s slickly made, with some fine makeups and a moment here and a moment there, but it’s decidedly deficient in affrights, and in the end sits about on the level of, say, Creepshow 2! But for my money it doesn’t touch the Amicus pictures from yesteryear (though it does manhandle the later Milton Subotsky productions like The Uncanny and The Monster Club), and while it provides some fun, and the final story tries hard, I can only muster a rating of one and a half wire hangers for Tales From the Darkside: The Movie!

Burl reviews Friday the 13th part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan! (1989)

 

Chay, pah, blaah, it’s Burl, here to review the final Friday! Ha ha, and by that I mean I’ve finally watched the one Friday the 13^th movie I’ve been neglecting all these years! Last summer I caught up with Friday the 13^th part 7: The New Blood, which I hadn’t seen before; this year, after stumbling across a DVD that was too cheap to resist, I finally had no more excuses and spent 100 minutes of my life (the longest running time of any Friday the 13^th movie, by the way) watching Friday the 13^th part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan, the Jason picture that boasts the most outrageously false subtitle since part 4! 

Oh, these dumb movies! I love them and I hate them and I somehow find I can’t quit them, but installments like this have me coming pretty close! It opens on a small cabin cruiser floating in Crystal Lake, on board which are two dimbulbs who drag their anchor in such a way as to hook on an electrical cable and thereby resuscitate Jason, who’s been reposed on the lakebed ever since the psychic girl’s dad dragged him down! It’s a pretty silly way to bring the unsightly maniac back, but then, ha ha, what wouldn’t have been?

We then move to what will be our major setting, subtitle be damned: a big greasy cruise ship captained by Warren Munson from Executive Decision, carrying the graduating class of Crystal Lake High to New York for a glamorous weekend! Jason climbs on board, and, after lying low for a while, begins taking out the boat passengers in his patented one-by-one style! But before that, and woven in throughout, is a bunch of junior league soap opera stuff straight out of the 90210, ha ha!

Peter Mark Richman, a mean-faced TV actor who was also in Naked Gun 2½, plays the perpetually angry chaperone Mr. McCullogh, who bares his teeth like the chainsaw brand for which he is named and never misses an opportunity to act like a total jerk! He’s also the guardian of Rennie, the final girl; her boyfriend, Sean, is the son of the captain, and is a disappointment to the old man thanks to his lack of interest in or aptitude for ship captaining himself; and there's a mean girl who hopes to seduce McCullogh in exchange for good grades, and her friend, and a few other bonfivés!

Other characters include second chaperone Mrs. Van Deusen, played by Barbara Bingham from Splitz; a doom-crying deckhand played by Alex Diakun from Malone; and student-slash-porkbellies played by such Canadians as Gordon Currie, later the vampire from Blood & Donuts, and Saffron Henderson, who impersonated Geena Davis in The Fly II! And later, when the so-called New York location is finally gained, we espy big tall Ken Kirzinger, who gets tossed around by Jason, but would later himself play the leather-skinned killer in Freddy vs. Jason!

Well, most of these people catch the chop or some variation on it from our man Jason, and one word of mild praise I’ll give this movie is that the killings are nearly as plentiful and as varying in method as they are in Friday the 13^th part V: A New Beginning! But the killings are also the problem, for far and away my biggest complaint about this terrible film is how poorly directed it is! Ha ha, there’s no suspense or spookiness and not a single affright to be had at any point throughout its overlong running time! Other people will point to the script or the performances, or the terrible non-Manfredini score, or the fact that it takes forever to get to Manhattan and when they do, aside from one brief scene in Times Square and a stock shot of the Statue of Liberty, it’s Vancouver; but I say the utter lack of filmmaking acumen is the picture’s cardinal sin!

It’s slick looking, with nice lighting from cinematographer Bryan England, and Paramount clearly spent more coin on the picture than was their habit with these things, but none of this can overcome the bone-deep terribleness on display, with all the tension of an oversized novelty bra! Wet firecracker scare scenes follow one after another and graffiti on the subway informs us that “Quayton Lives!,” until finally there’s an apotheotic finale for Jason that tries for 2001: A Space Odyssey but ends up more Invasion From Inner Earth! Ha ha! I give Friday the 13^th part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan one half of an “Irish cop” with a heavily Canadian accent!

Burl reviews Conspiracy Theory! (1997)

 

Hi there and hello, it’s Burl! Now, I’ll say this right off the bat: the movie I’m reviewing for you today is Conspiracy Theory, and the whole entire review could simply read “Ha ha! This is a terrible movie!” and that would be the end of it! But I feel I’d be betraying the Reviewer’s Code of Ethics if I did that! Mind you, I’ve done it before, in another persona as a paid movie reviewer, but now that I’m Burl, I’m really going to try to maintain some kind of standards here!

The fact remains that Conspiracy Theory is a terrible movie! I had some hopes for it back when I first saw it in 1997 - I can’t recall if I reviewed it then, but I’m pretty sure I saw it at some kind of preview screening, so I probably did! I do remember thinking it was a pretty sour fardel, and I think my hopes for it came from the fact that Richard Donner was still at that time considered a pretty solid action director, thanks to the Lethal Weapon pictures (even though each one was poorer than the last, ha ha!), and of course the picture was written by Brian Helgeland, who’d written A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master!

Plus the whole idea of a suspense/action picture revolving around conspiracy theories sounded like it had real possibilities, much as the idea of a horror movie based on urban legends sounded good! But, like Urban Legend, Conspiracy Theory doesn’t do much more than pay lip service to its titular phenomenon and then go its own way!

Mel Gibson from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome plays a cabbie with a head full of skunkfire who jabbers endlessly to his passengers about this nutty theory or that one; meanwhile, he stalks and bothers Alice Sutton, a pretty woman who works in the Justice Department and who is played by Julia Roberts from Mystic Pizza and Ocean’s Eleven! He publishes a conspiracy newsletter with a circulation of five, and apparently one of the theories he’s published is real, and so a rogue government psychologist played by Patrick Stewart from Dune and Lifeforce kidnaps him to find out what he knows! But Gibson puts a nose-biting on him, and then the chase is on!

The chase stays on for the rest of the picture, but not in a way that offers blazing excitement to the viewer! Oh sure, Donner is a foursquare professional and knows very well what he’s doing, and so the picture is made with slick Hollywood aplomb! But all that aplomb is in the service of a movie that's little more than a sort of stalker fantasy-apologia!

There are a few appealing performances in the picture! Cylk Cozart, who played another federal agent in In the Line of Fire, is a personable FBI agent who keeps getting clonked on the head; Terry Alexander from Day of the Dead and The Horror Show is in there too, not doing his Jamaican accent; and of course we have Julia Roberts, who is not without her natural charms, but is cruising on autopilot here, as though she alone recognizes the true worth of the material! The central performance here is Gibson’s, and while I think we can all agree it’s highly annoying, it is uncontestably a performance, a skillful assemblage of jerks and pops and clicks housed in the skinsuit of a man with a head full of cracklin' bran topped by a black woolen toque! Of course, based on what we now know of Gibson, one must ask whether this was a performance or a rehearsal! Ha ha!

In conclusion, I can only say that Conspiracy Theory is a noisy, vacant thriller with some pizazz and wit, but not enough to offset the overlength, the irritating energy it radiates, and the vacuum at its core! I give the picture one wheelchair poking!

Burl reviews Little Shop of Horrors! (1986)

 

With a song in my heart, it’s Burl, here to review a movie musical! Here’s another one I saw in the movie theater, and when I think of this movie I think of my friend Jamie, whom I saw it with, and who is now deceased! So there’s always an element of melancholy connected with this picture, Little Shop of Horrors, but there’s delight too as I recall the strange adventures Jamie and I had the night we saw it! Ha ha, we witnessed a pair of toddlers speeding down the street at the wheel of a car, with nary an adult in sight! We saw a piece of garbage paper blown by the wind: it circled twice in the air then dove out of sight below a curb, emerging a second later as a living, flying bird! A cigarette butt blown along by that same wind struck Jamie in the chest and exploded in a starburst like a Tie fighter hitting the Death Star! Ha ha!

So all of these strange events, which are preserved not just in my memory but in the lyrics of a song Jamie and I wrote for our high school rock band, come to mind when I consider Little Shop of Horrors! Of course I was already a fan of the old non-musical Roger Corman version, because of course that one featured Dick Miller in a supporting role as the flower-eater Burson Fouch! I was slightly chagrined to see that the Fouch character had not been carried over from the original movie to the musical stage adaptation or the big-budget movie currently under discussion here; but thinking about it, I realized that the adaptors must have known they simply couldn’t find anyone as good as Miller to fill the role if they had maintained it! Of course they could have hired Miller himself, who was around and active when this movie was made, but I guess they didn’t think of that!

Still, the cast they ended up with is a pretty remarkable bunch of comedy superstars! Rick Moranis from Strange Brew and Streets of Fire plays Seymour Krelborn, the slightly-renamed nebbish working in the flower store and being constantly yelled at by his boss Mr. Mushnik, played by the aptly-named Vincent Gardenia from Death Wish II! Also working in the shop is the daffy spin case Audrey, played with great gusto by Ellen Greene from Wagons East!; and, as in the Corman original, one wonders how a Skid Row flower shop entirely bereft of custom can afford so many employees! Ha ha!

Further down the cast list comes a true galaxy of starpower! Steve Martin from L.A. Story and All of Me plays Audrey’s truly despicable boyfriend, a biker-dentist named Orin Scrivello! John Candy from The Great Outdoors does a marvelous job as a wacky radio host; Bill Murray from Meatballs shows up in the Jack Nicholson role of the masochistic patient; Christopher Guest from The Princess Bride does an excellent turn as a flower store customer – the closest analogue to the Dick Miller character, in fact; and Jim Belushi from The Fury appears without making much of an impact!

Of course the real star is Audrey II, the voracious monster plant Seymour discovers and begins feeding blood and bodies to! The trick effects used to bring the big flytrap to life are truly impressive, from the big reaching tentacles to the expressive lips; and the voicing, from Four Tops singer Levi Stubbs, is ideal! Almost as impressive are the three ladies who act as the story’s Greek chorus – ha ha, I thought they were terrific! And on balance I thought Frank Oz managed some fine staging on his Sesame Street sets, though a little more pep and dynamism wouldn’t have gone amiss!

But Frank shouldn’t have listened to those outraged preview audiences who detested the original apocalyptic ending of the story, in which the plant devours Seymour and Audrey, spawns equally hungry offspring, grows to immense size and goes on a Godzilla-like rampage! Ha ha, they must have been pretty angry audiences to convince a studio to dump a huge multi-million dollar sequence and replace it with a gormless happy ending involving a playhouse! It does a real injury to the movie, I think! I didn’t realize they’d monkeyed with it, not until I read an article in Cinefantastique magazine anyway, but I could still tell there was something missing! It’s never been restored, though you can watch it on the internet! And considering all this, I’m forced to give Little Shop of Horrors two and a half bandaged fingers!

Burl reviews Johnny Dangerously! (1984)

 

All bastiges be on the lookout! Ha ha, yes, it’s Burl here to review a mid-80s would-be crazycomedy that tries to play in the sandboxes already occupied by Top Secret on the one hand and, let’s say, City Heat on the other! Now those are two very distinct sandboxes, so it’s no real surprise that today’s picture, Johnny Dangerously, can’t really pull off whatever it’s trying to do!

The very first gag, with an ahh-oooga car crashing into the numbers “1935,” primes us for a Zucker-Abrams-Zucker free-for-all, which the movie only sporadically delivers on! It’s a flashback picture, with a pet store owner played by Michael Keaton from The Paper telling a local rapscallion the story of his entrée into the gangster lifestyle, which arises from a need to pay for the constant medical treatments required by his old Irish washerwoman ma, played by Maureen Stapleton from Interiors and The Money Pit!

We follow Johnny’s adventures as he bonds with his crime mentor, Jocko Dundee, essayed by Peter Boyle from Outland, romances a songbird called Lil, undertaken by Marilu Henner from L.A. Story, and clashes with his primary enemy, Danny Vermin, as personified by Joe Piscopo from Dead Heat! In the meantime Johnny’s little brother, played by Griffin Dunne from An American Werewolf in London, goes through law school and becomes a crime-fighting assistant D.A.! And among all this we get malapropisms galore from a rival crime boss, and this truly was the only element I could recall from seeing the picture on home videocassette with my friends back in 1985 or so! (Ha ha, I suspect we rented it from the 7-11 at the end of Dave's street!)

There are lots of cameo appearances from familiar people, like Danny DeVito from The Van and Ruthless People as a corrupt D.A., and Ray Walston from Silver Streak as an afflicted news vendor, along with Dick Butkus from Gremlins 2, Joe Flaherty from Club Paradise, Jack Nance from Ghoulies, and Alan Hale Jr. from The Giant Spider Invasion! The trouble is that the movie invites very few horselaughs, though there are smiles to be found here and there! The performers all try hard, but can only do so much when the movie around them is so bereft of pep, wit, or craft! (Brian De Palma apparently loved it however, and hired Piscopo and De Vito to be in his own gangster comedy Wise Guys on the strength of their performances here! Ha ha!)

It’s trying to parody the Warner Bros. gangster pictures of the 30s, but nobody involved seems to have watched very many of them beyond The Public Enemy, Angels With Dirty Faces, and the 1949 throwback White Heat! There’s no atmosphere in the photography, which looks more Channel 5 than chiaroscuro! And I’m afraid it simply isn’t uproarious enough! The picture has its moments, but too few of them by far; and I know some people are fond of it but me not so much; and so after all this is calculated I award Johnny Dangerously only one and a half fargin iceholes!