Burl reviews Gordy: The Little Pig Who Would! (1994)

 

Bumpkins rejoice: it’s Burl, here to review the animal show! Ha ha, cast your mind back to the year 1994, when a garrulous young pig took the culture by storm, capturing hearts and spraying bacon world-wide! That young pig’s name was Babe, and he has nothing to do with the movie under review today, except that he utterly crushed it and left it flattened and forgotten on the pop culture highway like an old piece of jerky! The name of that misbegotten pig picture? Well it’s Gordy: The Little Pig Who Would!

Ha ha, and you won’t believe it, but I actually saw this porkshow in a movie theatre! I was a semi-professional reviewer back then, and I guess I attended the free preview screening – certainly, ha ha, I didn’t pay for the privilege! I didn’t care for the movie then, but when chance and galactic happenstance recently put a VHS copy in my hands, I thought I’d give it another oink!

To the picture’s credit, it gets off and trotting from the get-go, quite literally! Gordy is a pig who lives in the barnyard of a foreclosed farm with his mother, father, and five piggy siblings! Rough men arrive from the meat packers’ and haul away the dad, and as Gordy is galloping behind the truck carrying his porcine pater, back at the farm the rest of the family is scooped up too, and all of them are taken Up North, the terrifying direction from which no oinkers return! Gordy is left on his own, trotting up the highway in a desperate search for his family!

He soon meets a family country music band who travel the highways and byways in an attractive RV, and briefly, and hearteningly, the movie turns into an RV picture, which you know is something ol’ Burl likes! Ha ha, from Race with the Devil to Paul, the genre is filled with gems, though the movie RV is an exception to the rule! The dad in the band is played by Doug Stone, evidently an established country music star, but I didn’t know him from Joe Bopkins; the tween daughter, meanwhile, a junior-league Lee Ann Rimes, sings about pulling hangnails and checking out your own butt while people line dance before her! Ha ha, line dancing! There seems no terpsichorean form more determined to bleed the fun and spontaneity out of dancing!

But soon Gordy is on his own again, and he hooks up with Hanky, the young scion of a junk food company whom Gordy saves from drowning! This somehow makes him famous, and the next thing you know there’s tedious corporate intrigues, and the daughter of the old man who runs the company – mother to Gordy’s new young friend Hanky – has a boring stuffed shirt for a boyfriend, who works at the junk food company and is trying to win the old man’s heart! But of course when the old man dances off his mortal coil, it’s Hanky who owns the company, along with Gordy! They turn it from a junk food company into a health food company, and inexplicably this causes the company to skyrocket in value! From there– well, let’s just say that none of the subsequent plotting will surprise you very much, but I was glad when the RV and the family band reappeared!

It’s not a movie overburdened by movie star power, ha ha, but there are a few familiar faces and/or voices! The family band’s manager, Cousin Jake, is played by Tom Lester from many a hayseed comedy, and one of the antagonist boyfriend's hired thugs is essayed by Afemo Omilami from Trading Places and The Money Pit! The picture also employs the voice talents of Hamilton Camp from No Small Affair and Earl Boen from The Man With Two Brains, and of course those of the everywhereman Frank Welker, whose golden throat adorns Gremlins and Explorers and so many, many more! And of course there’s a cameo appearance by the young people’s favourite, Louis Rukeyser!

The climax takes place in Branson Missoura, and involves the country-fried talents of Roy Clark from Matilda (the kangaroo one, naturally, not the Roald Dahl one); Jim Stafford of Bloodsuckers From Outer Space fame, and also for singing “Spiders and Snakes;” Mickey Gilley from Smokey and the Good Time Outlaws; and of course Boxcar Willie, decked out in full railriding hobo-face, but with a gee-tar in hand instead of a bindle! Then there’s some fisticuffs between the family band dad and the weasel-faced boyfriend, lots of face-pulling from Cousin Jake, and then the final race to save Gordy’s family, intercut with nightmarish shots of butchers sharpening their knives!

Don’t worry, it all ends up fine, with the last moments of the movie making it seem like the origin story of one of those rural sitcoms of the 60s, most particularly Green Acres! As for the movie itself, everybody in it seems just a little bit off-brand! The grandpa seems like he should be played by Will Geer from Moving Violation or Richard Farnsworth from Into the Night, although the old boy they got is perfectly adequate in the part! Cousin Jake is the sort you can see Jim Varney from Ernest Goes to Camp or Lou Perryman from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 playing, though again, the varmint they cast instead is quite serviceable! And then there’s Gordy himself! He’s cute enough and all, but, as in Francis, a voice is overdubbed as the animal opens and closes its mouth rapidly, as though someone has shoved peanut butter in there, or maybe iron filings!

I haven’t said much about the quality of the movie, but I guess I have to admit that the script and dialogue are a little hamfisted, and the filmmaking itself is of pork wality! Scenes sometimes go on a little bit when there should be cold cuts instead, though I will say that the pacing in general is not bad, and I never sausage a thing as that climactic country music concert! Ha ha, I guess they couldn’t afford Johnny or Waylon or Willie or Kris! And then there’s the star of the show: well, Gordy is not as annoying a character as he might be, but I’m here to tell you he’s not charming either! I give Gordy: The Little Pig Who Would one congratulatory phone call from President Bill Clinton!

Burl reviews Death Valley! (1982)

Haw haw cowpoke, it’s Burl, here to review a rootin’ tootin’ slashin’ gashin’ tale of the wild fronteer! It’s one of the high-tone maniac killer pictures of 1982, Death Valley! Now, even though I haven’t contributed to it for some time, my growing taxonomy of slasher pictures is an ongoing project, and this particular one is of the sort you’d expect everyone connected to it would prefer was called a suspense thriller, ha ha!

Oh, you know the type! There are usually a couple of name actors in there, and certainly someone visiting from the television world! Think of Happy Birthday To Me with Glenn Ford and Melissa Sue Anderson, or Visiting Hours with William Shatner and Lee Grant, or The Initiation with Vera Miles and Daphne Zuniga, or even Too Scared To Scream, with Touch Connors and Ian McShane! Not many murder scenes (except for Happy Birthday To Me), nor much blood when they do occur (the exception once again being Happy Birthday To Me), and they usually run five or ten minutes longer than a slasher movie should!

Death Valley shares many of these qualities, though at 87 minutes it isn’t too long – just feels that way sometimes, ha ha! The picture begins with a long scene of frolic between young Billy – that is, The Dirt Bike Kid himself, bespectacled Peter Billingsley from A Christmas Story – and his dad, bespectacled Edward Herrmann from The Lost Boys! Of course dad and mom are divorced, and mom, Catherine Hicks from Child’s Play that is, is taking Billy out West, back to her home country and her high school beau Mike, played by a drawling Paul LeMat, the actor well-known for his parts in Grave Secrets and Strange Invaders! (Ha ha, I always thought LeMat and Jeff Fahey must be cousins or something!)

But there’s a slasher killer about, played by a fairly young Stephen McHattie, though not so young a McHattie as we saw in Moving Violation! After taking out an RV of teenagers – a promising beginning – McHattie must hang his mchattie and wait it out with the rest of us while Billy and Mike get to know each other while mom fusses in the background! Luckily a walrus-whiskered cop played by the one and only A. Wilford Brimley (from The Thing, of course) adds some spice to things briefly, but only briefly! Ha ha, he and Scatman Crothers, and Richard Farnsworth too for that matter, could swap stories about heroics interrupted by sudden sucking chest wounds!

The rest of the picture involves western-themed stalking and chasing, then there’s some fisticuffs and some maniacs get offed, and I think one of them is impaled on a cactus! Ha ha! (That’s right, ha ha, I said maniacs – there’s two of them, just like in Just Before Dawn!)

It’s not always a very peppy picture, it’s true! Why, a good half hour or so of screen time is dedicated to showing a hefty babysitter eating snacks! And there’s lots and lots and lots of relationship stuff, scenes of friendly Mike reaching out to the young lad, with poor LeMat being wrestled to le mat each time by Billy’s apple-cheeked stoicism! The picture kind of stacks the deck against LeMat by having Edward Herrmann as Billy’s real dad – you can see he’d be hard to compete with! They clearly did that on purpose, because it successfully gives the Billy-Mike relationship a genuine, if pedestrian, arc, from which not even a scream escapes!

Even though it’s slow and uneventful, it retains the capacity to entertain! The cast is strong (semi-familiar faces like Jack “Sweater Girls” O’Leary and Mary “Weird Science” Steelsmith fill out the supporting roles), it’s got more stolid craftsmanship to it than most of these things, and the locations are nice! It’s got a little bit of tomato paste (impalings don’t you know!) and a pretty mundane story! Ha ha, altogether I’m going to give Death Valley one and a half shower caps filled with a product compote!

Burl reviews Paul! (2011)

Ha, oh, ha ha, hi! Yes, it’s me, Burl, here with a new review for you! I thought I’d take a look at a Hollywood picture called Paul, which is about a couple of nerd guys who meet an alien! Standard issue crumbcake, right? Ha ha, sure, but with one great twist: these two guys are driving around in an RV!

Yes, the fellows who made this picture must have known about one of ol’ Burl’s most shocking weaknesses: I simply can’t resist an RV picture! From The Long, Long Trailer through Race With the Devil and Alien Predators right to several episodes of Shazam, I’ve just about seen ‘em all! In fact, the only one I haven’t had a look at is RV, starring Robin Williams! That one just seems like a low-rent retread of Vacation to me; but still, the lure of the RV is strong, and I may yet seek it out!

Paul exhibits another of its strengths right at the start: some decent music! Yes, after a brief prologue set in 1947, the movie proper starts at Comic-Con, a thing I’ve never been to, but which is apparently crawling with nerds! However, laid over this is a cool song, “Another Girl, Another Planet,” by The Only Ones! Ha ha, great tune! The nerds are played by the guys from Shaun of the Dead, and they pile into their RV for a tour of the American Southwest, and in particular all its fine UFO-related tourist sites!

Of course they meet an alien, who becomes their buddy, and whom they help along in a Starman-like manner to the place his UFO buddies are going to pick him up! Of course that’s Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, a location I myself have actually visited, despite not being a UFO nerd! They’re chased by a bunch of federal agent types of varying levels of competence, and also by some rednecks and the Bible-thumping father of a pretty but naïve one-eye they pick up along the way! Ha ha, no, rest assured, it’s not the same one-eye Grandpa speaks of in Grumpy Old Men!

The movie starts out pretty well, and it has funny bits all the way along, and the alien is not the grating presence he could have been, and there’s a minor twist towards the end which I appreciated; but like so many of these new-century comedy pictures, it runs out of steam halfway through! It becomes mostly just a series of references to other alien movies, mostly E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Mac and Me! Strangely, I didn’t notice any specific references to Starman, unless they meant the reference to be the entire plot of the movie! Ha ha!

It’s a good-natured little confection, and reminded me a little bit of Super 8 in its energetic back-hearkening to the high Spielbergian days of the 1980s! But compared to Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, it’s a little underwhelming! However, for the funny bits, the fine trick effects used to bring the alien to life, the strong soundtrack and of course the RV, I’m going to give Paul two pairs of baggy shorts!

Burl reviews Alien Predators (1987)

Hi, Burl here! I remember watching Alien Predators way back in high school! I probably watched it with my good friend Doug, and if I remember correctly, we both thought it was boring and uneventful! I couldn’t remember much about it, except that someone got a head shaped like a football, and that there was an RV in it!

That’s why I even bothered watching it again: the RV! Ha ha, I love an RV movie, especially when there’s a siege scene, or at least a scene of menace! I’m sure you’ve all seen that terrific picture Race With the Devil – that’s more or less the model for this microgenre as far as ol’ Burl is concerned!

This picture, which was directed by the son of the guy who made Vanishing Point, takes place in Spain for reasons I never figured out! But the main cast, three young people driving around the country in a rented RV, are all American, and three more annoying people you’d be hard pressed to ever meet! Ha ha, there’s two fellows and a girl, and it’s kind of a friendly romantic triangle that never turns into the Jules et Jim situation that would have made it more interesting! No, they’re all stuck in the aggressive flirtation stage of their isosceles, and something about the way they prosecute it makes them seem kind of dim-witted! At any rate, it takes up way too much screen time!

The actual plot is supposed to be about an alien virus which crash-landed on Earth along with Skylab, and now, some years later, has infected the citizens of a small Segovian town, the very town our troika of heroes is fun-truckin’ their way through! A Spanish NASA scientist explains all this to the kids, and informs them that head-bursting is part of the infection process! Yes, we do get to see a head bursting right at the end of the picture, and it’s not too bad! Really adds some spice to the thing, and spice is something this movie desperately needs!

An exotic if perplexing setting, some head-bursting and an RV – those are the ingredients for a magic sauce! But this picture is no magic sauce – it’s barely worth a hucklebuck! It encourages lots of questions, though! Ha ha, who is the fellow in the neat-looking truck? Is he meant to be an alien-possessed madman? And why is there a big NASA laboratory in Spain? Don’t they do all their work in Florida or Texas, somewhere like that?

There’s a bit of a siege against the RV, but it’s limited to a short bit involving an ugly alien crab chattering at the window, like a lost scene from Without Warning or something like that! Ha ha, it could have been a lot more exciting, and you can say the same for the entire movie!

I feel like I’ve been down on a lot of movies for the same reasons of late: namely, that they’re sadly deficient in eventfulness and action! I really should seek out some pictures that Deliver The Goods, which is what I always hope for when I sit down to watch a movie like this! Well, there are some goods delivered – what special effects there are, and what can be made of them through the murky photography, appear to be pretty good, and come courtesy of Mark Shostrom, the man behind the trick effects of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 and The Supernaturals!

Otherwise I don’t have a lot of marvelous things to say about Alien Predators, and I guess I’ll give it one irritating venetian blind shadow!