Burl reviews Eraser! (1996)

 

HA-LLO DIS IZ BURL! Ha ha, as you can tell from my note-perfect Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonation, I’m reviewing an Arnie picture for you today! It’s late-mid period Arnie, after he graduated to comedies like Junior, but before he got into his Grizzled Old Muscleman phase! Evidently as the second half of the 1990s began, he felt like dipping a toe back into the R-rated action of his earlier years, when he was doing pictures like Commando and Raw Deal and the like; and the big-budget nubscrum that resulted is called Eraser!

Arnold is of course the titular Eraser: an agent with no life, back story, or personality, who works for the Justice Department, giving new identities to witnesses and informants and folk of that nature! In the opening scenes he does just that for a low-level gangster played by the late Robert Pastorelli, and then we meet the main erasee, a lady called Lee, played quite well by Vanessa Williams, who’s ready to give up the goods on the shady armaments company she works for by recording them through a hideous brooch camera! Here we get just a kiss of science fiction, because the company’s newest invention is something called a “rail gun,” which shoots pellets nearly at the speed of light! Ha ha, in reality these pellets would just pass through a body and it would take a second before the victim even noticed, while in the movie if you get shot by one of these things, then of course you fly screaming all the way across the room and crash into the wall in slow motion!

James Caan from Misery is Arnie’s mentor and work chum, but it’s pretty evident he’s the bad guy right from the start! Of course maybe it’s not so evident, because James Coburn from Hard Times, here wearing a silver cocksman’s beard, is lurking around in the office scenes looking just as suspicious! Soon Arnie is on the run from the both of them; there’s a pretty impressively-sustained level of action-suspense once Arnie realizes he’s been betrayed and must jump off a flaming jet plane to escape, and then drives like a maniac to the zoo, where he must gunfight and battle alligators!

The picture slows down a bit after this, but I suppose it had to! It’s got a little sparkle to the script, maybe thanks to the participation of Walon Green, who also wrote Sorcerer and The Wild Bunch! Of course it’s pretty hard to say who wrote this lame-o bon mot or that goofy gay bar scene, so best to spread both the credit and the blame around as far as it’ll go! The sci-fi superguns are a nice addition, because that peps things up a bit! Whenever one of the rail guns starts shooting, it leaves a trail of expanding blue smoke rings from every supersonic projectile! It’s an effect I liked well enough, but not nearly as much as the filmmakers liked it themselves: ha ha, it must happen a million times! I bet the animation artists got tired of drawing blue smoke rings!

The  climax is a pretty bog-standard shipyard shootout, with the addition of a lot of blue smoke rings of course; and then there’s a final revenge scene that’s hard not to read as a fond fantasy from people who might like to see sterner measures taken against real-life perpetrators of similar crimes! Ha ha, this is an Iran-Contra movie just the way The Parallax View is a product of Watergate, though of course Eraser is far and away the weaker film I think it should go without saying!

It sits squarely in the middle of the 90s Hollywood action pack: not nearly up there with Speed or The Fugitive, but cheek by jowl with Passenger 57 and Con Air on the ho-hum-hell-why-not shelf! It’s got a fine action look from cinematographer Adam Greenberg, a nice scene of henchmen getting crunched by alligators (which beasts are brought to life by both animatronics and rough mid-90s digital trick effects), and a reasonably brisk pace! Making a smart political thriller out of this material might have been nice, but these particular filmmakers just weren’t interested in doing that! I’m going to give Eraser two concerned bartenders!

Burl reviews The Long Goodbye! (1973)

 

With a scratch of the match it’s Burl, here to review a hard-boiled detective story in shaggy 70s garb! Of course there are movies like The Late Show, and I’ve already reviewed The Big Fix, Klute, and the great Night Moves, but all must bow to the king daddy of Me Decade noir revamps, The Long Goodbye!

Ha ha, this is a long-time favourite of mine, with the only turn-off being the running theme of domestic violence against ladies! It’s not as though the movie endorses this, but it’s hard to watch sometimes! Given that, it’s amazing how delightful the movie nevertheless is in telling the story of how the scales fall from Philip Marlowe’s eyes and he finally ceases to be the most passive detective in film history! Ha ha, and at the end of the picture, after Marlowe has finally asserted himself and taken direct action, he’s so delighted with himself that he dances a merry jig!

Back to the start, however: Elliott Gould from The Silent Partner is Marlowe, who lives in a scrumptious tower building near the Hollywood Bowl and has a gang of topless candle-dipping yoga hippies for neighbours! The opening fifteen minutes of the movie are devoted to Marlowe’s efforts to feed his cat, because that’s just the sort of picture this picture is! Soon his buddy Terry Lennox, played by the famous horsehidesman and inventor of Big League Chew, Jim Bouton, appears at Marlowe’s doorstep and requests a ride to Mexico, which Marlowe grants! And thus begins his troubles!

Nina Van Pallandt from The Sword and the Sorcerer and the fantastic Cutter's Way plays Eileen Wade, who calls on Marlowe to find her husband Roger, played by Sterling Hayden from Dr. Strangelove doing John Huston playing Ernest Hemingway! Hayden is terrific as the blustering beachside author, and Marlowe quickly locates him at a clinic run by Dr. Verringer, a role essayed by Henry Gibson from Innerspace and Tulips at his near-slimiest! All this would seem to have as much relation to the main narrative as Marlowe’s troubles with his cat, and this turns out to be the case, in that it has plenty to do with it! Ha ha!

Marlowe also has troubles with a vicious gangster called Marty Augustine, and when you want someone to play an unpredictably brutal crime lord, who better than the director of On Golden Pond, Mark Rydell? The picture also features little appearances by the likes of David Arkin from Cannonball, David Carradine, whom we recall from Armed Response, Rutanya Alda from The Stuff, Arnold Schwarzenegger from Predator, and George Wyner from Fletch! And then of course there’s the security guard who does impressions: a marvelous creation indeed!

It’s one of the most Los Angeles movies ever made, and I guess that’s really saying something! It’s also, I suppose, one of the most Robert Altman movies ever made, though not necessarily the Robert Altmaniest! (M*A*S*H or McCabe & Mrs. Miller or Nashville or even Short Cuts might take that prize!) And finally it's one of the most 1970s movies ever made, ha ha, which is another feather in its cap so far as I'm concerned! It undoes the detective genre, subjecting its gumshoe to a series of indignities, inconveniences, and downright punishments, all the while underlining how decent a fellow he is at heart! But, ha ha, he’ll only be pushed so far, though that limit is a lot farther than a Marlowe played by, say, Bogart would accept!

Quite frankly I think that if I made a list of my top twenty movies, this would be on it! It has a singular atmosphere, note-perfect performances, great and understated cinematography, and a theme song that plays over and over again, on radios, in supermarkets, or by the efforts of a Mexican marching band! It’s a very special motion picture, and if you haven’t seen it, I thoroughly recommend it, with the caveat that it contains some very unpleasant violence against women! I give The Long Goodbye four Walter Brennan impressions!

Burl reviews Predator! (1987)

Ha ha, get to da choppah because it’s Burl, striding through the jungle with a new review for you! It’s a review of the perennially entertaining Predator, a picture I saw with my pals in the thee-atre back in the summer of 1987, the very same season as I took in The Lost Boys and The Witches of Eastwick and Robocop and Full Metal Jacket too! Ha ha, it was a full couple of months - I had to go to summer school that year, and I was working in a warehouse also, and I was trying to make a movie of my own at the same time!

But Predator was a highlight that summer because it was a real classic entertainment, and you could tell it even then! I’ve seen the picture a number of times since, and watched it again recently with my son, “accidentally” leaning on the remote control fast-forward button for the crude jokes told by the Shane Black character! Ha ha! We both enjoyed it, and I came away thinking about how emblematic certain movies can become if they’ve been built sturdily enough! I don’t think Predator is brilliant cinema exactly, but it’s such a doughty fireplug of an action movie that it seems as though it might endure and epitomize long after many other similar films have blown away into dust!

And by garr, that 80s cast! Arnold Schwarzenegger, of Conan the Barbarian fame, plays ‘Dutch,’ whose nickname obviously comes from his thick Austrian accent! (Ha ha, so many Schwarzenegger movies give him names like Ray Owens or Gordy Brewer, and I’m surprised more of them didn’t go the nickname route just to avoid that little disconnect between his natural accent and his character's name!) Dutch has been asked by The General, played by none other than the excellent R. G. Armstrong from The Beast Within, to take his team into the jungle and try to rescue a cabinet minister whose 'copter has been shot down! Carl Weathers, ‘Action’ Jackson himself, will come along whether Dutch and his biceps like it or not! So ordereth The General!

Dutch’s team includes the likes of Bill Duke, who starred with Arnold in Commando and Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura, who met him in The Running Man! There’s also Sonny Landham from 48 Hours and Richard Chaves from Witness, and of course the jokester played by Shane Black! Elpidia Carillo from Beyond the Limit pays an ill-defined lady who just sort of turns up, and who is later directed by Dutch to get to the choppah!

But what’s all the trouble about, you might ask? It seems a spaceman has dropped to Earth from another planet, here for a vacation and a spot of hunting! Ha ha, and what he enjoys to hunt are not elephants or badgers, but human army men! Kevin Peter Hall, who also played the interstellar hunter in Without Warning, essays the role of the alien, who is fairly humanoid except for his goochy bug face! And of course he sports a natty set of dreads, ha ha!

The pace is a little stately by current action movie standards, but I think it works perfectly; and the action scenes, when they come, are satisfying and 80s-enjoyable! Alan Silvestri contributes a top-notch score, the jungle cinematography is excellent, and the script is not as stupid as it easily might have been! Ha ha, it gave me a good time at the movie thee-atre, so whenever I pull the DVD out and start to watch it again, I greet the movie like Dillon greets Dutch! I give Predator three cabinet ministers from this charming little country!

Burl reviews The Running Man! (1987)

 

Ha ha, I told you I’d be back! And so I am, with another 80s Arnie extravaganza! I remember that I saw this in the theatre on my seventeenth birthday, and went from there around the corner to the local punk bar to see the marvelous band NoMeansNo play and sing their goodtime rock and roll music! I bought a copy of their wonderful album Wrong on that snowy November night, so to this day I feel a strange association between that watershed of heavy punk music and the movie under review, which is The Running Man!

Arnold, whom we know so well from Conan the Barbarian and Raw Deal, stars as a fellow sporting the traditional Austrian name Ben Richards! He’s a police helicopter pilot in a dystopian, game show-loving future who balks when asked to slaughter hundreds of people protesting a lack of available comestibles! Next thing you know he’s in prison, framed for the crime of slaughtering a hungry crowd, and he’s teamed up with Yaphet Kotto from Truck Turner and Marvin J. McIntyre from Fandango to escape the future jail, where if you cross a certain line at the wrong time, your head will explode like one of those watermelons David Letterman used to toss off a five story tower!

After hijacking Maria Conchita Alonso (whom we recall from Fear City and Extreme Prejudice) in more or less the same way he did Rae Dawn Chong in Commando, Arnie is netted by police and recruited by evil game show impresario Richard Dawson to guest star on his program The Running Man! In this telecast, hapless contestants run from a series of “stalkers,” played by the likes of Erland Van Lidth De Jeude from Alone in the Dark, Jim Brown from The Slams, Gus Rethwisch from The Concorde… Airport ’79 and Professor Toru Tanaka from Darkman! Ha ha, there are a lot of big men in this movie, and plus there’s ginormous Sven-Ole Thorson from Nowhere to Run, and Jesse “The Body” Ventura from Predator!

Mick Fleetwood and Dweezil Zappa, both of whom look thin as feathers compared to their bulky co-stars, play some underground resistance fellows with whom Arnie hooks up after he’s battled all the novelty warriors! Ha ha, these battle scenes are fairly perfunctory, and Arnie seems to pause and deliver at least two catch phrases for each victory! “Here is Subzero, now plain zero!” is at once the most famous and the least sensical of them! The climax, too, is pretty shoddy, with a little bit of running around and some machine guns going off, yawn; but at least there's a satisfying disposal of the villain!

The picture was directed by Starsky himself, Paul Michael Glaser, whom we know from his starring appearance in Phobia, and he tries to apply some of that Miami Vice gloss to the movie, but it never really sticks! He’s not the most accomplished action director either, and the fighting and chasing and car crashes are never as exciting as they ought to be! Only the tube cars which convey the contestants down to the boring wasteland in which they compete manage to stick in the memory!

It’s not all bad! Arnie is on autopilot most of the time, but manages a few good lines! Richard Dawson is very convincing as the nasty gamesman, so much so that I now look at old episodes of Family Feud slightly askance, ha ha! The cast altogether is a little weird, that’s for sure, which is all to the good; but imagine what it could have been like with real imagination behind the camera, giving us stuff more along the line of the Thunderdome scenes in the third Mad Max picture! Kinetic and bizarre and thrilling, more punk rock and less dancing: those would all have been good choices to make for this film, but few of these values are found! It’s a film of some vaguely approached but in the end entirely squandered potential, and I give The Running Man one and a half neck bombs!

Burl reviews Conan the Barbarian! (1982)

Ha ha, Burl, what is best in life? To crush bad movies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their directors! Ha ha! No, that’s not my remit at all - I was just expressing the quasi-fascist ideal found in John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian! In fact, my own philosophy is quite different, but if you’re a regular reader of my notices, you are surely well aware of my gentle and pacific nature! Ha ha, Burl laughs not just at your Four Winds, but also at your Nietzschean Super-Man!

Of course this picture came out in that magical summer of 1982, along with The Thing, Blade Runner, Poltergeist, The Road Warrior, E.T., Star Trek II, and probably some others! For that reason it might be held in slightly higher regard than it might be otherwise, but it’s still a pretty solid action fantasy! It’s an origin story, following Conan from his youth, when his parents are killed and his village destroyed by a cult leader, Thulsa Doom, played by James Earl Jones in a beadless Donna Summer wig; through his kidnapping and maturation on the Wheel of Pain; his pitfighting and poetry-reading years; and finally the gathering up of his pals and his quest for revenge!

Conan and his friends jog across the countryside, through desert, steppe and thundering beach, with the cry of the loon accompanying them everywhere they go! There’s a marvelous heist scene featuring a giant snake, and later the mission gains some focus when a grizzled old king played by Max Von Sydow from Strange Brew and The Magician tasks Conan and his pals with the job of rescuing his daughter from the cult! Of course Conan is made to do some contemplation on the Tree of Woe, but there are some battles and finally a Wagnerian scene on the steps, complete with a head-chopping!

There’s a pretty good gallery of faces in this picture! In addition to those named, we get Mako from Armed Response and The Killer Elite playing a twitchy stilt-house wizard who becomes Conan’s pal and chronicler, and serves as the film’s narrator! William Smith from Fast Company and Maniac Cop does a terrific job in the part of Conan’s dad, and husky Sven-Ole Thorson, looking like a lost member of Spinal Tap, is Thulsa Doom’s hammer-wielding henchman!

I’ve never considered it a great action picture, though! It’s more like an opera stripped of its singing (though it has a terrific score from Basil Polidouris), with some thundering hoofbeats and clanging swords added in for spice! But while it does a fair-to-good job of translating the Conan mythos to the screen, it’s rarely exciting to watch! It’s good solid Hollywood comfort food, if frequently goofy and a bit on the reactionary side! I give Conan the Barbarian two and a half straightened snakes!

Burl reviews Collateral Damage! (2002)

Burl here to fill you in on action-drama! Yes, the picture I’m reviewing for you today is Collateral Damage, an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, one of the last he made before taking his hiatus from movies and becoming a ho-hum governator! This is one of those movies that was made before 9/11 and came out afterward, and it achieved a modicum of notice thanks to its scenes of bombs going off in public places and victims lying around covered in bloody sheets! For the briefest of moments the public mood was against such pictures, and the makers of Collateral Damage were not sure what to do! In the end they released their movie, but played down the terrorist elements in the advertising so as not to upset people! However I’m sure they toyed with the idea of playing them up instead: here, they might have insisted, you will see Arnold going after proxy versions of the real-life terrorists who have so upset America, and making them pay, pay, PAY!

That could have meant big box office bucks, I suppose, but the gang at Warner Bros., under the shadow of a history-making terrorist attack, chose to resist looking like tasteless mercenaries for the sake of a few dollars! Perhaps, too, they knew they had a bit of a clam on their hands, one which would have hardly satisfied the action junkies looking for cathartic vengeance!

Arnold plays Gordie Brewer, Los Angeles firefighter: once again a heavily-accented man with a mysteriously Anglo name! (This incongruity, so easily accepted in Schwarzenegger pictures by now, is put into sharper focus later in the movie, when Arnold briefly goes undercover as “Heinrich Beckmann,” German mechanic!) Gordie’s workaday world is shattered when his wife and young son are blown up by a Colombian terrorist known as The Wolf, who issues threats using a voice-altering device that makes him sound like André the Giant and who has targeted some US and Colombian officials! Once the chaos subsides, Gordie’s family are simply dismissed as, you guessed it, collateral damage!

Well that’s not good enough for Gordie! Forsaking his razor he makes his way to Colombia, and after several misadventures, and a stint in a South American jail, and encounters with John "Barton Fink" Turturro (playing the world most unlikely Canadian) and John "Die Hard 2" Leguzamo (playing a manufacturer of mind drugs) he finds The Wolf’s compound! But The Wolf finds him too, and in the course of their conflict there occur several explosions, some engineered by Gordie and others by CIA spook Elias “Some Kind of Wonderful” Koteas! Our tale ends in Washington, where there will be further explosions and an action climax involving indoor motorcycle riding and violence fights!

As in so many of the Arnold movies in which he’s supposed to be a more or less everyday fellow, the picture works overtime in establishing his quotidian qualities, and tries manfully to resist turning him into a superman in the action scenes! For me, Arnold is better off in his more unflappably robotic roles, like Commando or Predator or most especially, and literally, The Terminator, in which he’s less likely to issue the panicked bellow that always bursts forth whenever he’s playing an everyday man in trouble, falling down or being blown through the air by an explosion or whatnot!

At times Collateral Damage, with its confused geopolitics and cake-and-eat-it-too view of American foreign policy, seems like a holdover from not just the 90s, but from further back still, right to the darn Reagan era! The action is middling at best, the story unsatisfying, and the execution plodding! It’s a forgotten mediocrity, and I almost regret reminding you of it here! Ha ha, sorry ‘bout that! I give Collateral Damage one Metallica t-shirt!

Burl reviews Raw Deal! (1986)

Ha ha, it’s Burl here, neither drinking nor baking, but trying to play catch-up on all the reviews I haven’t written lately! For example, it’s now time to look at a slightly oddball Arnie picture that I rewatched some weeks ago and should have reviewed back then, but didn’t! Anyway, better late than never, ha ha! Today’s picture, Raw Deal, hasn’t survived in the cultural memory banks as well as other Arnies of the era, like Commando or Predator, and perhaps the reason for this is that it’s so resolutely unmemorable, seemingly by design!

But all these attempts to be a normal action-drama upend the narrative and make Raw Deal one of the stranger pictures Arnie made in the 80s! For one thing, he’s given a scene of domestic drama to play, and it comes off more like a skit from Saturday Night Live! Ha ha, that’s the one where his drunken, resentful wife throws a cake at him, and he advises her not to drink and bake!

Ha ha, she’s drunken and resentful because Arnie, who used to be an FBI agent, was forced to resign and become a smalltown sheriff in a place where everybody only talks about agriculture! The scene ends tenderly, with Arnie carrying his passed-out wife to bed and then sipping on a whiskey; but when Arnie’s friend Hyarri comes knocking with tales of Chicago gagsters who must be stopped, the muscleman doesn’t hesitate to fake his own death-by-megaexplosion and take on a new identity in order to embed himself in the Windy City underworld!

From then on he assumes the persona of Florida sharpie “Joseph P. Brenner,” eager to work for badman Patrovita, of the Chicago mafia! Ha ha, perhaps to make up for the fact that, as played by Sam Wanamaker, Patrovita is not a particularly memorable villain, there is a tripartite hierarchy within the mob gang: Patrovita; his right-hand man Rocca (played by Paul “The End of August” Shenar), and Rocca’s right-hand man Max, as essayed by Robert Davi from Wild Thing! Schwarzenegger sports an expensive lifestyle suit and pulls a bit of a Yojimbo, pitting the Patrovita gang against a rival enterprise! He meanwhile keeps in touch with Hyarri (played by the terrific Darren McGavin from Hangar 18 and A Christmas Story) and embarks on a chaste romance with a lady gambler played by Kathryn Harrold from Into the Night! A couple of actors from Lassiter, Ed Lauter and Joe Regalbuto, figure in to all this as well! Ha ha!

Anyway, there’s some action and plenty of gunfire, and a scene in a transvestite bar, but on the whole it seems meant as a step up on the classiness scale for Schwarzenegger: an action-drama rather than the pure action pictures he’d theretofore made his stock-in-trade! They hired a real director for the thing (John Irvin, who brought us Ghost Story) and a big deal crew (Alex “The Keep” Thomson was the cinematographer; Anne V. “In the Line of Fire” Coates the editor)! But, though it has a few good bits of dialogue and some durable if unexciting performances, it’s also rarely exciting or thrilling or funny, features an intolerable musical score and is generally unmemorable! In those ways, and also with the Chicago setting, it reminded me strongly of Next of Kin, ha ha! I give Raw Deal one and a half guys from the dress shop!

Burl reviews Sabotage! (2014)

Hi, and a big ha ha to you today! You know, occasionally I think to myself “Hey! The old Schwarz is making movies again, ha ha! I should check them out!” This is the same impulse that led me to watch The Last Stand some time ago, and more recently I viewed another neo-Arnie picture, Sabotage!

Well, you’re certainly asking “Ha ha, Burl, does Arnie recapture his glory days in this picture, the crazy, hazy days of Commando and Total Recall?” Answer’s no! He’s trying here for extreme grit and bottle-green heartache, for pain and murderous obsession, and to get within the mind of a man whose family was kidnapped, tortured and killed by Mexican drugsmen! Perhaps if the movie wasn’t so fixated on its cast of meatheads and their terrible grooming habits, it might have worked as a tragic character study, or else a violent mystery, but it doesn’t! Really you just wait for these characters to meet their makers, moments which, in several cases, can’t come soon enough!

Arnie runs a team of hard case DEA police clods who, in the opening scene, geniuses that they are, bust in to a drugs-den and steal many dollars! This scene, like several others in the picture, involves the team making their way down hallways and around corners, shooting people and then shouting “Clear!” Ha ha, it gets a bit repetitive! But anyway, being a real gang of Einsteins they misplace the stolen money and are immediately suspected of the theft by their bosses!

They’re placed on administrative leave, and use the time to become even more ugly and unpleasant! Eventually they get their badges back, but almost immediately begin getting killed one by one! Is it the drugs gang taking their revenge, or is it a traitor within the ranks! Ha ha, in either case, whoever is behind the killings, you want to pin a medal on them!

A lady police cop played by the Olivia Williams from Maps to the Stars gets mixed up in things, and even puts a kissing on the Schwarz at one point! You can really see her screwing up her courage before she does! But we (and Olivia Williams) are spared the subsequent scene of sweet lovemaking!

The movie falls apart as it goes on, defying logic more every minute through the third act! That’s because it was meant to have a completely different ending, I later found out, and one supposes it made a lot more sense! Ha ha and dog cookies, it sure doesn’t now! It’s a pretty unpleasant movie besides – it seems to go out of its way to be grotesque and horrible! A typical scene, for example, has Arnie pouring a glass of scotch and rewatching the family torture tape sent to him by the reeba-reeba gangsters! Ha ha, yikes!

It’s got some moments, and Arnie’s not horrible in his role, but in the end the movie really does fall apart as spectacularly as the bodies of its many casualties! Ha ha, I’m going to give Sabotage just one of Arnie’s stinky cigars!

Burl reviews Commando! (1985)

Ha ha, it’s Burl, and I’m back… with a review of an Arnold Schwarzenegger picture! No, not Total Recall again! It’s called Commando, and I’m sure you’ve all seen it, and I’d certainly seen it before too, being that it was one of the more popular films enjoyed by my school chums and I in the olden VHS days!

Commando is probably Arnold’s most stripped-down and basic action movie! It comes in at a lean 90 minutes and has almost enough story to half-fill that time! It seems Arnold is John Matrix, another of his curiously-named cod-American characters! Ha ha, why couldn’t he have played “Heinrich Obermayer” or something, just once? Though there is a moment here in which, after grumping about Boy George’s andr*gyny, he actually admits to being foreign, bellowing “When I was a boy in East Germany, ha ha, the Communists considered rock ‘n’ roll subversive – who knows, maybe dey right!”

Anyway, John Matrix has a little daughter, Jenny Matrix, ha ha, and she gets kidnapped by the henchmen of none other than Dan “Buckaroo Banzai” Hedaya, playing a dictator who apparently wants to stage a coup of Catalina! He’s got a merry band of henchmen helping him out, like David Patrick Kelly from Dreamscape, rocking a three tie-clip look; Bill ”Action Jackson” Duke (for my money the movie’s ringer), and of course Vernon Welles, “welles-known,” ha ha, from Weird Science and Innerspace! John Matrix has only a short time to catch up with his daughter, and thankfully Rae Dawn Chong, whom we’re familiar with from Fear City, is along to help him out!

Punchfights and shootslplosions ensue, all to the sounds of a James Horner score filled with steel drums borrowed from 48 Hours; and John Matrix pauses only to deliver a quip or drop David Patrick Kelly and his three tie clips off a cliff! It’s not to be believed how Rae Dawn Chong becomes his greatest helper after being virtually kidnapped by him, but perhaps the sight of this musclebound fellow swinging across the Sherman Oaks Galleria on a giant sausage-balloon simply captured her heart, ha ha! (Though it ought to be noted that, curiously, there’s no hint of r*mance between these two characters at any point in the picture!)

It all comes to a head at Hedaya’s island stronghold, where John Matrix blows people up and shoots them and throws saw blades at them and chops them with machetes, then finally impales Vernon Welles on a big pipe right through his chain mail and into an even bigger steam pipe! If they’d had the courage of their convictions, though, they’d have shown a moment where the transfixed Welles tilts forward and some sizzling, bloody giblets slide out; but Commando is nevertheless really the template for the Violent 80s Hollywood Action Movie, alongside Cobra and a few other dubious gems!

The picture is slick and quick, which should be no surprise as it was directed by Mark Lester: not the child actor from Oliver!, but the fellow who brought us such varied gems as Truck Stop Women, Roller Boogie and Armed and Dangerous! It gets rolling right off the bat, and most of the scenes have things going on in them! Schwarzenegger is as robotic here as in The Terminator, but you still root for the big lug – that rascal John Matrix, ha ha! I enjoyed the picture, even though the TV I watched it on made it look as though it had been shot on consumer-grade video! I’m going to give Commando – and nostalgia figures into this rating, ha ha – two and a half tie clips!

Burl reviews The Last Stand! (2013)

Ach, ach, it’s Burl, here to review some geezer action! This is The Last Stand, one of these new Arnold Schwarzenegger pictures! Arnold, of course, is famous from pictures like Total Recall and Junior, and now of course he’s appearing in movies like this, where he looks like what he wishes he would look like as the fifth head on Mount Rushmore if it was carved out of a big jerky slab and appended to the mountain by means of a rebar substructure! Ha ha!

As he has so many times before, he plays an Austrian fellow with a curiously un-Austrian name! This time he’s Ray Owens, a bordertown sheriff who becomes convinced that a big-time Mexican drugs lord in a superfast car is racing his way in a bid to cross the frontier by a hastily-erected bridge! This criminal is busted out of Forest “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” Whittaker’s custody by an elaborate, ridiculous plan, and from then on it’s ai-yai-yai-yai reeba-reeba time!

Ray Owens is of course no ordinary small-town sheriff, but an ex-big city cop with a story to tell! Ha ha, it would have been more interesting, I think, if he’d been just as inexperienced as his deputies, but managed to best the drugs lord anyway! In other ways the picture tries to undercut the action movie clichés Schwarzenegger himself did so much to cement in his earlier pictures! When one unlucky deputy fatally catches some lead, for instance, the ropey muscleman takes him in his arms and cries with unrestrained grief! Naturally there are also a number of Old Guy jokes, of the sort we find in those Expendables and RED pictures!

In the meantime there’s plenty, and I do mean plenty, of scenes involving the fast car, and probably at least a dozen snap-zooms into the gearshift as the drugs lord punches it into some stratospheric high speed! There’s a little bit of plot business involving a turncoat Fed, but not nearly as much is made of this as I expected! It all leads to a curiously, but pleasingly, unspectacular final punchfight on the jerry-built bridge! And the most curious thing of all is that the drugs lord isn’t even killed at the end, merely hurt a lot and taken into custody! I liked that, I must say! Of course there are plenty of underlings, particularly Peter “The Big Lebowski” Stormare, who do fall to the roughest of justice, so audience bloodlust is sated in plenty!

I would like to pay a quick tribute to the supporting cast! There’s Whitaker and Stormare of course, but you also get Luis Guzman as a deputy and a very special cameo from Harry Dean “The Long Ride Home” Stanton, who comes to a pretty sticky end, ha ha! It's a great bunch of fellows, and they really help make this an entertaining bouffant of a picture!

The picture is the North American debut of Kim Jee-Woon, the fellow who made I Saw the Devil, and I find it an interesting comparison to Stoker, which of course is the North American debut of Kim’s fellow countryman, Chan-wook Park! Ha ha, you’d be hard pressed to find two more different pictures! Of course that’s because they’re very different directors, but these are two pictures from Asian directors with baroque styles each releasing their first big Hollywood pictures within a few months of one another, so you can see why they invite comparison! Ha ha! But I’m not going to follow through by revealing which one I think is the better movie, except to say that I enjoyed The Last Stand on its own modest merits, and I’m going to give it two flying Dean Stantons!

Burl reviews Total Recall! (1990)

Ha ha, drive, chust drive! Yes, it’s Burl, here to review a sci-fi picture from the director of Robocop! It’s Total Recall, and it’s probably one of the smartest pictures – and one of the best too – that old Arnie ever made!

Arnie plays a Mars-obsessed construction worker in future-times, just another Larry Lunchbox! He decides to get an artificial Mars vacation memory implanted in his mind, but things go haywire after that! All of a sudden Harry from work turns against him, his loving wife Sharon “The Quick and the Dead” Stone is shooting at him, and Michael “Watchers” Ironside is trying to kill him with the explosive energy one usually reserves for important tennis matches! Ha ha, is it all for real, or is it just his secret-agent Mars vacation playing itself out? In either case, Arnie goes from Joe Punchclock to Johann Whupass pretty quickly!

The question of true reality recurs now and again throughout the picture, most effectively in a scene with a cringing executive who appears in his Martian hotel room and does a pretty good job of convincing Arnie (and us!) that he’s not on Mars at all, just gone loco while sitting in his memory implant chair! It would have been nice to have more such scenes, but because the hero is played by Arnie, there’s never much doubt that he’s really doing all the heroic acts he seems to be doing! Though, ha ha, it’s fun to consider that he has just gone completely bugs! The last act, existentially speaking, is quite extraordinary, as it chronicles the desperate attempts of a dreamed individual, Quaid, to assert his reality at the expense of the real person whose body he inhabits!

It’s a pretty violent picture! It’s one of those where the future guns don’t just make holes, but take big steak-sized chunks out of the people getting shot! And there are plenty of pokings also, and of course the hilarious Martian Head Expansions, complete with bulging eyes and fat, twitching tongues, all courtesy of the very talented Rob “Explorers” Bottin! (I thought some of the Mars mutants were a bit goofy looking, though!) All the other trick effects are well done too, and one shot, the secretary doing her fingernails, was a particular bafflement to my friend Sean and I when we saw it in the theatre!

It’s a fast-paced picture that along the way meditates on the nature of reality and of self; and it has a lady with three boobs! Ha ha, how can you go wrong? Arnold gets a chance to play happy hubby, and to also be a smarmy, cigar-chomping bad guy in a series of videos through which he entertains and enlightens his more quotidian personality! Lots of great faces in the cast – Ronny “The Beast Within” Cox does his usual great heavy, Robert “Matinee” Picardo does as good a Johnnycab as could be done, and Marshall Bell, the rubber-daddy coach from A Nightmare on Elm Street part 2, makes an excellent Mr. Kuato, or at least chauffeur to Mr. Kuato – and also a few that were never seen again (by me anyway!), like leading lady Rachel Ticotin or second banana baddie Mel Johnson Jr., the guy who plays Benny!

Even though it’s dumb in some places and goofily implausible in others, I consider Total Recall to be a pretty solid Hollywood space-action picture, and I’m going to give it three boobs! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Junior! (1994)

Hi, it’s Burl to review the sort of movie I’d usually run a mile to avoid! I watched this one as a bit of a joke, and it was pretty much exactly what I thought it would be, with one minor exception! I’ll get to that later!

The story involves Arnold Schwarzenegger playing a brilliant scientist! If you can swallow that one, I’ve got another for you: Schwarzenegger dabbles in weird science and, with the help of Danny DeVito, makes himself pregnant! Ha ha, no, Danny does not help him in the usual manner, but then this is not the usual kind of pregnancy!

Also, this is not the first pregnant man movie! Offhand, I can think of one called A Slightly Pregnant Man, and another one called Rabbit Test, where Billy Crystal gets pregnant! I haven’t seen either one of those, so I don’t know what sort of scientific explanation is used to back up the premise, but for Junior they simply implant an egg somewhere in Arnold’s cavernous abdomen, then fertilize it with one of Arnold’s own wrigglers, and after that totally ignore the fact that he has no uterus! I guess you’re not supposed to think about it too deeply, and that’s fine! It’s sort of like when you go see the stage production of The Elephant Man, and the actor is wearing no makeup! Well, you just imagine that he’s an elephant man! And in Junior, you just imagine Arnold is able to bear children without any of the proper equipment!

The movie was directed by Ivan Reitman, who has made much better films than this! Cannibal Girls, for example, or Meatballs, or even Ghostbusters! All of those are much better! Junior has that Hollywood social conservatism that I hate so much – the kind which appears to be cheerfully progressive, but ends up reinforcing gender roles and the heteronormal family unit more energetically than even Newt Gingrich would bother to! It’s the kind of movie where if two guys, let’s say Schwarzenegger and DeVito, are suspected for even a moment to be gay lovers, they leap apart like a lightning bolt struck the ground between them! Ha ha, it was almost funny in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, but give it a rest, guys!

Anyway, that’s not such a big deal, because what else would you expect? The main trouble is that the movie is not terribly funny, and the direction is very plain jane and drab! But the big surprise is Schwarzenegger, who’s actually good as the cold-fish scientist who gets in touch with his sensitive feminine side! Ha ha, I know, I couldn’t believe it either! Kudos to Reitman and Arnold both on that one! I give Junior one and a half bowtie-wearing Frank Langellas!