Burl reviews The Dark Half! (1993)

 

By the squirrels of autumn it’s Burl, here to give you a new film notice! Yes, we find ourselves once again in the company of the great Beardsman of Pittsburgh, the zombie maestro who brought us excellent films like Dawn of the Dead, along with some less excellent but still perfectly watchable works like Monkey Shines! It’s Mr. George A. Romero of whom I speak of course – ha ha, sadly I never met Mr. Romero, but I did once get to see him introduce a  movie close to his heart, Powell and Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffman! One fails to discern the Archers’ influence on the picture under review today, however: The Dark Half!

It’s a Stephen King tale, based a little bit on his own life and how he was outed as the maniacal overachiever who wrote so many books that he had to publish some of them under the name Richard Bachman! (I read Thinner when it was still unknown that Bachman was King, and thought to myself “Boy, this guy sure writes a lot like Stephen King!”) Timothy Hutton from Turk 182 stars as the King stand-in, Thad Beaumont: here not a gargantua-selling horror novelist but one of those cartoonishly “serious” writers King features so often, and somewhat longingly, in his stories! And yet Beaumont has a sideline in writing punchy pulp novels under the name George Stark, featuring an amoral killer as a hero, and, after Stark is revealed to be Beaumont and Thad conducts a mock burial of the pseudonym, it’s this aspect of Thad that starts to make trouble! 

Amy Madigan from Streets of Fire plays the wife who wonders what’s going on, and Michael Rooker from Cliffhanger is the cop-acquaintance who suspects Thad when the Stark persona corporealizes somehow and starts killing people in gross and violent ways! Ha ha, the parade of victims start with Robert Joy, whom Romero used again in Land of the Dead, and who plays a sleazy guy who tries to blackmail Thad about his double identity! The carnage continues with the magazine writer of the story, essayed by Kent Broadhurst who’d Kinged before in Silver Bullet; Thad’s literary agents, played by Rutanya Alda from The Stuff and Tom Mardirosian from Trading Places; and then some old geezer with a false leg! I feared for the lives of Julie Harris from The Haunting, playing Thad’s university colleague, and Royal Dano from The Right Stuff as the local gravedigger (named, of course, Digger), but needn’t have as it turns out!

Of course the premise is utterly goofy (though not the goofiest in King’s canon – ha ha, The Mangler, anybody?), but I don’t blame King, because after all the idea was designed for print, not film, and it’s much more palatable, not to mention thematically apt, on the page! Putting this concept in a movie significantly exposes the utter impossibility of it, and in response the cast all work extra hard to sell it! Rooker in particular expresses how he’d be more likely to believe the culprit was a ghost rather than a name that never was! Romero also treats the premise seriously, perhaps too much so; but now and again, as in some nice scenes early in the picture involving birds and brain operations, it pays off!

As King/Romero collaborations go, it’s no Creepshow, and Creepshow isn’t even all that great I guess! Don’t get me wrong, it’s a highly enjoyable omnibus horror picture, but it’s just no masterpiece! The Dark Half is a few rungs below that, though it has elements to recommend it: some strong autumn atmosphere (I’ll admit that I watched – or rewatched, since I first saw it in the theatre way back when – the picture this past October and am only getting around to reviewing it now, and the fall miasma struck a sweet chord at that time); nice photography from the most unlikely of cinematographers, Tony Pierce-Roberts, who usually shot highbrow British stuff like A Room With A View and Howard’s End; and a strong cast! It’s got some effective moments, but, like its antagonist, lacks the cohesion necessary to triumph! I give The Dark Half two black pencils, freshly sharpened!

Burl reviews Trucks! (1997)

 

Ha ha and double ha, it’s Burl crying vroom and giving you a review of a vehicular picture from the 90s! In fact it’s a remake of that sweet perennial from 1986, Stephen King’s one and only directorial effort, Maximum Overdrive! I suppose though that the producers of this picture might insist it’s not a remake, but rather a make of the original King short story! And to bolster their claim, the movie carries the same title as that story: Trucks!

Once again we have a little gang of people trapped by living trucks at a roadside choke-and-puke! The action allegedly takes place somewhere near Area 51, and there’s some theorizing about alien control, but otherwise we don’t get an explanation for the behaviour of these vehicles! Unlike the 1986 movie, it’s just trucks who’ve become sentient, not drawbridges, gas pumps, carving knives, video games, or bank machines, ha ha! So this effort is a little more straightforward than King's!

It’s an ensemble movie, but our putative lead is the ginger-haired owner of the little ramshackle rest-a-ree-a, Ray, played by Timothy Busfield, who’s well known from movies like Stripes and Sneakers! He’s got a teenage son called Logan, essayed by Brendan Fletcher from Violent Night and Ginger Snaps 2, and the sleepy, sloe-eyed townslady is Hope – yes, it’s Brenda Bakke from Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight! There’s Jack, a portly old hippie played by Jay Brazeau from Live Bait; bickering father-daughter duo Thad (Roman Podhora from Jason X) and Abby (Amy Stewart from My Winnipeg); an old counterman played as a Canadian cross between Donald Moffat and M. Emmet Walsh by Victor Cowie from Careful; and an amorous couple essayed by Sharon Bajer from Eye of the Beast and a fellow whose name I did not catch!

From many of these actors and their other credits, you might suss that this movie was made in Canada! It seems that in fact most of it was, but at some point they decided the trucks and the truck stop and all those characters I mentioned were not enough, so they shot some additional, slightly bloodier scenes in California, and these can be identified by the fact that they contain characters which have exactly nothing to do with the plot, and by the beautiful blacktop highways, which stand in marked contrast to the rough grey concrete, spiderwebbed with tarry cracks, that are found in the Canadian scenes! Ha ha! And while I’m getting into the production weeds, I should also make special mention of the work of Ina Hanford, who does a terrific job here!

The California scenes are the movie's goofier ones, and are much less truck-centric; so points for eclecticism but debits for straying, even if slightly, from the theme! These scenes have a hydro man shaken by his boomtruck and electrocuted; a hazmat suit somehow filling with air and becoming an axe murderer; and goofiest of all, an enraged radio-controlled toy 4x4 bursting through a door and slamming a luckless postman to death! Ha ha! Meanwhile, in Manitoba, the motley group huddles in their restaurant watching a parade of about half a dozen belligerent trucks circle the place, occasionally taking out someone dumb, brave, or dumb-brave enough to venture out! All of this is shot without style or pep, is absent of wit or verve, and is certainly unburdened by affrights! The stars don’t seem to be trying too hard – Busfield comes off as a seriously slumming Paul Giamatti being forced to play the role at the point of a gun held just off camera, and Bakke appears to be heavily barbiturated throughout!

So if you thought Maximum Overdrive was pretty bad (if quite a bit of fun!) and that as a director Stephen King makes a pretty good book writer, you’ll be shocked at how much more poorly this story can be told! Trucks demonstrates this amply, having, as it does, the feel of a movie made in a gravel quarry by people with no appreciation of the genre they’re working in or, frankly, any love of cinema! I don’t wish to tar every crew member with this terrible brush, but I will spread disdain like a jam across the whole of the above-the-line personnel! Sure, there are some good movies about angry self-driving vehicles - The Car is terrific, and Christine is a near-gem too – but this is not one of them! Trucks is a cracknel biscuit and no mistake, and I award it one culvert!

Burl reviews Pet Sematary! (1989)

 

Ha ha and housecats, it’s Burl! Yes, I thought I’d review the first filmed version of Stephen King’s book Pet Sematary, which, as I recall, I saw at the theatre on a date with my first real girlfriend, Ingra! I don’t think Ingra liked it very much, as she was not what you would call a horror movie aficionado! She did turn me on to all sorts of great books though, so I have plenty to thank her for! And we also once checked into a motel under the names “Mr. and Mrs. Buster Hideaway,” and you can say what you like about this younger generation, but I don’t think the kids are doing that sort of thing any more! Ha ha! And I suppose motel clerks are more scrupulous about checking identifications than they used to be!

But on to the movie! Now, I thought it was a pretty good idea to hire Mary Lambert to direct it, even though it was originally supposed to be George A. Romero at the helm! I don’t know why Romero bowed out, or was taken off it, or what happened, but it seemed like a lady director (sadly novel in those days, and less so now but not by all that much) who’d done Madonna videos and the art-crime picture Siesta would be a pretty bold choice! But you know, though she did a perfectly adequate job, there was nothing special about her approach so far as I could tell!

Dale Midkiff from Nightmare Weekend plays a carved wooden figure representing Louis Creed, the dad who works as a university doctor! Denise Crosby from Miracle Mile, looking comely in a pinched sort of a way, is the mom; and of course there are two sweet kids: preadolescent Ellie and the charming toddler Gage, who is played by Miko Hughes from Apollo 13 and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare! Because they have kids and a housecat too, the parents know the best thing to do would be to move into a house on a road down which massive tanker trucks hurtle constantly like screaming engines of death! Ha ha, the perfect place to raise a family!

Across this road of sorrow lives the elderly neighbor, Jud, played delightfully by Fred Gwynne from The Secret of My Success! Gwynne’s performance is a real high point in the picture, with his delightful Mainer accent and old-duck mannerisms and just plain Gwynne-ness! Of course we know where the story goes from here: Jud tells his new pal Louis all about the secret cemetery back yonder, the one that has the power to resuscitate the dead! Tragedy strikes soon after, and the use of the baneful graveyard brings about a lot more death and despair to the family Creed!

Brad Greenquist from The Bedroom Window and The Chair plays the world’s least-helpful ghost, who manifests in the form of a walking meatloaf much like Jack from An American Werewolf in London, but without the comradeliness! He’s clearly just there to add some affrights, or at least some goriness, to the proceedings while the main story unfolds at the pace and in the progression that it must!

The King book is one of his most emotionally resonant, but the movie comes nowhere close to replicating this! Part of the fault lies with Midkiff, who, I’m sorry to say, just isn’t a very good actor; another part with King himself, who wrote the screenplay! The whole movie seems to have gone through a studio scrubbing process, which I suppose accounts for the blunted edges of Lambert’s style! It’s got a inappropriately-bright 80s look and some goofy optical effects, and so the atmosphere so badly required by this tale is largely, though not entirely, absent!

It all hoves a bit to the mediocre side, and the remake, which I also watched recently, doesn’t improve things much! I’d like to see what Romero might have done with the story, maybe using a script written by someone with more distance from the material, but I guess we’ll never know how that might have turned out! I’m gong to give this iteration of Pet Sematary two frozen cats, and at least half of that, I’ll admit, is for Fred Gwynne! Ha ha!

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 Misery! (1990)

Good day you dirty birdies, it’s Burl, here to review a movie about a demented fan! No, though it does feature Lauren Bacall from The Big Sleep, it’s not The Fan! In fact it’s Misery, a movie that, like Stand By Me, involves Rob Reiner taking a Stephen King story and doing some of his very best work with it!

James Caan from Submarine X-1 and Elf plays a writer called Paul, whose most famous works are a series of antebellum soap operas featuring a Scarlett O’Hara character called Misery! But he’s the usual Stephen King type of writer, the kind with literary ambitions buried beneath his commercial success, which he has now exercised with a new, as yet untitled, book about street waifs! He types the last lines of his book in his Colorado winter resort cabin, enjoys a smoke and a glass of champagne, and sets off in his Mustang for New York City!

But this foolish writer has not checked the weather, and he evidently is not accustomed to winter driving, so his ‘stang flies off the road! He’s rescued by Kathy Bates, well known for playing Gertrude Stein in Midnight in Paris, a demented farm lady who loves the Misery books above all else, and who sets Paul’s shattered legs and feeds him soup, and who has a head full of cracklin' bran! When she discovers first that Paul has written a profanity-laced, non-Misery book about street waifs, and then that his latest Misery book kills her favourite character off, she’s not too pleased, yo! Ha ha!

It’s not quite the two-hander it sounds as though it might be from that synopsis: Richard Farnsworth from Into the Night plays the local lawman Buster, who slowly pieces together the clues, and… well, ha ha, have you seen The Shining? Yes, I’m sad to report he’s the Dick Hallorann of the piece! Frances Sternhagen from Outland plays his salty wife, and there’s even a little cameo from J.T. Walsh, known for his appearance in Eddie Macon’s Run, as a hilariously insensitive state trooper! But it’s the Caan and Bates show for the most part, and both of them are excellent!

It’s a marvelously crafted picture, which gets pretty grisly in parts, but doesn’t go overboard the way it probably would if someone made it now! It’s a little hokey the way Paul uses his tools as a writer - stories, writing paper, a typewriter - as his weapons against his buggy warder, but this aspect comes directly from the King book! The supporting cast, particularly Farnsworth, Sternhagen and Bacall, is made up of the sort of faces you just plain feel glad to see when they come on screen, and Reiner’s direction is restrained and strong, and William Goldman’s screenplay simplifies and externalizes only what needs to be simplified or externalized! It’s a solid picture, which I remember enjoying in the theater and which holds up well now! I give Misery three beloved pet pigs!

Burl reviews Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice! (1992)

Great cobs of corn, it’s Burl, here to review another sequel! This one is Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice, and of course it’s the Final Sacrifice in the same way as Friday the 13th part 4 was the Final Chapter! Which is to say, ha ha, there were a thousand more brain-dead sequels that came after the supposedly final one!

I have an unreasonable fondness for this ol' cronker, though, and I’ll tell you why! Certainly it’s not because the movie is any good - it’s not! - but more because of the circumstances in which I first saw it, way back in 1992 or so! My then-girlfriend and I were driving back from somebody's wedding, I remember, and we saw a movie theatre with that long title on the marquee! So we stopped the car and, still dressed up in our fancy weddin' clothes, strolled in, bought some popcorn and settled back to watch this opus! We had a great time and it’s a pleasant memory!

But that’s about where the fondness stops, ha ha! If you’ve seen the original Children of the Corn, or read the Stephen King story, you’ll know that it involves the murder of every adult in town by the children of Gatlin, Nebraska, who are under the influence of a pagan corn god known as He Who Walks Behind The Rows! This picture, which came along eight years after the first one, takes things up as the outside world discovers the bodies and tries to figure out what to do with the children!

Into the world of Gatlin, and a neighboring town called Huppleburg or something, comes a tabloid reporter called John Garrett, played by husk-y Terence Knox from Lies, in the company of his near-adult son Danny, who looks a little like Emilio Estevez and with whom John endlessly bickers! Ha ha, this bickering quickly becomes tiresome, and the murder scenes with which the picture is punctuated are great respites from it!

The two Garretts have many adventures among the maize! They each find love: Garrett the Elder with Rosalind Allen from Ticks, while the Younger meets cute Christie Clark from A Nightmare on Elm Street 2:Freddy’s Revenge! An ingratiating fellow named Frank Redbear teams up to help out with the mystery, pointing out that the corn is moldy and might be making the children crazy! He equally suspects the involvement of an evil corn god, however, as well as a problem with the koyaanisqatsi! Meanwhile, there are murders: flying corn products take out two newsmen; a house squashes an old lady; a doctor is poked by knives and needles; a random fellow gets the world’s worst nosebleed thanks to some voo-doo; and a whole mess of townsfolk are incinerated in a meeting hall! Most of these crimes are committed by the children, but the cornfields themselves take on some of the work as well!

The picture proceeds on the same theory as its predecessor: that if you cast a young adult as a teenager, put him in an Amish outfit with one of those flat hats and caution him never to smile, he’ll automatically turn creepy! Also like its predecessor, He Who Walks Behind The Rows is represented by a traveling furrow of earth, as if it was the gopher in Caddyshack turned bigger and meaner! It’s too bad we don’t ever get to see this corn demon, which shoots blue lightning at people before either killing them or possessing them! We do get a brief look at a corn-demon pizza-face on the lead corn-child, Micah, before he gets swallowed up by a big corn husking combine!

The picture offers too much filial bickering; a bit of gore here and there; some squirmy, silly murders; and a happy, strangely touching supernatural ending for Frank Redbear! Altogether it’s not a great movie and not a good one, but it’s an acceptable autumn time-filler that, I can tell you from experience, plays a lot better on the big screen! I give Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice one and a half cobs of stupid old corn!

Burl reviews Creepshow! (1982)

Hi, Burl here to review a movie I’ve always kind of liked but never completely loved! Yes, it’s Creepshow, ha ha, how did you know? Or should I say Bwa-ha-ha?

Anyway, though I may feel it failed to achieve greatness, the picture nonetheless fits very well into that strong year of genre filmmaking, 1982! Whether you were the exact right age that year, as I was, or not, it must be acknowledged as something special for movie viewers! Certainly Creepshow was pushed as itself something special: this triad of terror titans, Romero, King and Savini, conspiring to petrify us in one pulse-pounding portmanteau!

So it couldn’t ever have been anything but an enjoyable if mildly underwhelming bohankie, but I nevertheless had the poster tacked with pride on my teen bedroom wall! It’s a comfort movie I suppose! And though it’s a Halloween picture through and through – it was originally released in the late fall, and of course it has the bookending scenes involving pumpkins and comic books and little badactor Joe King (who I understand has since found his true calling as a writer like his old man) and good old Tom “Halloween III” Atkins as the nasty dad – I think of it more as an early summer movie because of its first story, “Father’s Day!” Ha ha!

Yes, that’s the one with the great Viveca Lindfors, whom we know from Exorcist III and Silent Madness! It’s also got Ed Harris in there of course, and Carrie “Too Scared To Scream” Nye, and Jon Lormer from the boo-boo-Boogens, and an ambling corpse who uses corpse magic to crush Ed with a gravestone!

The next story involves Stephen “Maximum Overdrive” King himself, playing an overalled clod who finds a meteor and turns into a moss! After that is a tale of watery revenge, where we get Leslie “Four Rode Out” Nielsen planting Ted “Body Heat” Danson and Gaylen “Madman” Ross in the beach, then gibbering as they come shambling back for him! Ha ha, I’ve always liked the beach atmosphere in this one!

After that comes probably my fave of the bunch, “The Crate,” where janitor Don “The Car” Keefer finds a box with an ape monster in it, and after he and Fritz “The Big Fix” Weaver open it up, there’s a mild rampage! The janitor, a young brain wizard and the world’s most unpleasant woman, played by Adrienne “The Fog” Barbeau (who in real life is an extremely pleasant woman) are all munched down without delay! Finally we experience a nasty millionaire with a cleanliness fetish, played by E. G. “Christmas Vacation” Marshall, who experiences the worst sort of bug-out! Ha ha!

So there’s a lot going on, and it’s all pretty entertaining, if never very scary! Certainly, however, this is streets ahead of its poor sequel, Creepshow 2; word has it there’s even a third picture in the series, but I feel it might be wise to stay far away from that one! The original, with its funny colours and strange cast of stars, is clearly the way to go! I give Creepshow two and a half glazed hams!

Burl reviews Silver Bullet! (1985)

Aroooo, it’s Burl with another werewolf picture for you! This one’s not quite up to the standard set by An American Werewolf in London, but it’s no Howling II either, ha ha!

In fact, it’s Silver Bullet, a movie I’ve been a little fond of, but not very fond of really, for years, ever since I saw it in the theater as a young lad! It is of course a Stephen King picture, made around the same time as, and with much the same crew as, Maximum Overdrive! Except that King didn’t direct this one – it was directed by a guy with a fairly TV style, who, immediately after this picture, went into TV directing and never came back!

For some reason the picture is set in the mid-70s, in Tarker's Mills, which I suppose must be one of those little Maine towns so dear to the author! James Gammon, the hard-assed coach from The Pom Pom Girls, appears as a comic drunk who gets his melon removed with one swipe of a paw that might have been borrowed from Grizzly! “Ha ha, thus was the beginning of our little town’s long nightmare,” intones posh-sounding lady narrator Tovah “Brewster’s Millions” Feldshuh!

Then we meet little wheelchair-bound Marty, played by Corey “Watchers” Haim, and his sister Megan Follows, who have a thorny relationship! The murders continue on a menstrual cycle, and pretty soon boozy old Uncle Red, which is to say Gary “Eye of the Tiger” Busey, gets involved! Uncle Red is the sort of fellow who’ll sit around telling obnoxious jokes and swigging from a bottle of Wild Turkey on the one hand, and construct fabulously unlikely mechanized conveyances for his disabled nephew on the other!

But who is the townsperson with the hirsute double life? Ha ha, could it be Uncle Red, who, we are told, visits Tarker's Mills on a monthly basis? Could it be mom or dad, or the touque-wearing bartender played by Lawrence “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” Tierney? Or the gas station guy who looks halfway like a werewolf already? Or could it be Reverend ‘Bout Town, the district’s brooding holy man, played by Everett McGill from Dune? Well, it’s one of them, that’s for sure! The kids’ suspicions settle on Reverend ‘Bout Town, and with Uncle Red’s help they decide to set a werewolf trap!

It’s a watchable enough picture, though not a very scary one! King’s script is full of his grotesque small-town caricatures and clunky dialogue! “Ha ha, you gonna make lemonade in your pants?” demands one character of another! But occasionally the dialogue works: “Ha ha, I’m too old to play The Hardy Boys Meet Reverend Werewolf,” grouses Uncle Red! But for all its faults – including, but not limited to, a baggy structure, unconvincing nighttime cinematography, a general silliness – the worst of them all is the rubbery werewolves themselves, which look a little like the one in WolfCop crossed with a honey bear!

Altogether the picture could use a bit more pep – there’s some gore and some suspense, but a certain liveliness is sadly absent! It still occupies a place in my heart, but I’m going to give Silver Bullet one and a half de-occulations by bottle rocket!

Burl reviews Maximum Overdrive! (1986)

Vroom vroom, it’s Burl, revving up with a review of that movie Stephen King directed himself, Maximum Overdrive! Yes, that’s the one where the trucks and other random machines become sentient and get up to mischief!

All the hubbub is thanks to a comet, just like in Night of the Living Dead! The phenomenon is meant to be worldwide, but King gives us only a small corner of North Carolina! The automated havoc begins with a nifty scene on a drawbridge, which is almost certainly the high point of the movie as far as King’s untutored staging and camera direction are concerned!

From there, after a dalliance at a children’s baseball game wherein a coach is ker-thumped by flying soda cans and a steamroller makes an impression on one luckless player, we repair to the Dixie Boy Truck Stop, where ex-con grillman Emilio “Repo Man” Estevez is doing psychobattle with the crooked truck stop owner, Pat Hingle (well known for his appearances in Brewster’s Millions and The Quick and the Dead)! The truck stop fills with other characters, mainly truck drivers, some newlyweds, a bible salesman and a sexy lady, and we soon have a siege situation on our hands, with trucks circling menacingly outside like something out of Wagon Train! And you know, they just keep on wagon training!

There’s a fair bit of mayhem on tap, but little of it makes any impact, since as a director Stephen King makes a very good horror novelist! Ha ha, he’s unable to wring much tension or excitement out of the proceedings, even though he had a pretty big budget and lots of trucks to blow up! Unfortunately, perhaps due to the giant piles of Columbian Marching Powder that were placed liberally around the set, nobody, not even George Romero, who must have visited during the shoot, was able to help the Beardsman of Bangor figure things out!

Unfortunately, too, King was not in one of his statelier modes when he wrote this script! It’s got a few bon mots, but often seems to go out of its way to be as dumb and scatological as it can be, and the actors, particularly the female lead, aren’t really up to it! There are some pleasingly familiar faces (or voices) in the cast, like Yeardley Smith from Heaven Help Us, Frankie Faison from The Money Pit and Giancarlo Esposito from Do The Right Thing, and Estevez and Hingle are perfectly good, but the fact is King’s dialogue mostly ought to have stayed on the page!

I remember seeing this one in a movie theater in a suburb of Seattle, Washington! I was excited to see it, and didn’t even mind that it was in the wrong order – I saw the second half first and the first half second! Ha ha, I don’t suppose it mattered much! Anyway, I do recall feeling that the movie was better than I’d expected it to be, but my more recent viewing laid bare that initial impression as bunkum and honeydew! It’s really not very good at all, though it offers regular bursts of entertainment, and of course a stirring score by AC/DC! Ha ha, I give Maximum Overdrive one and a half Roger Miller-fixated ice cream trucks!

Burl reviews Creepshow 2! (1987)

Ha ha, kiddies, it’s Bur-r-r-r-rlllll here! Yes, if I was a horror host or an E.C. Comics spokesghoul, I could hardly be less frightening than Tom Savini in his role as The Creep in Creepshow 2! He’s a great bloodslinger, but Savini just looks goofy in the big-chin makeup and black cape he sports in the opening scenes of this picture! Ha ha, but then it turns to animation, so that’s okay!

I went to see the original 1982 Creepshow with my dad, I remember! Ha ha, O glorious day! By the time Creepshow 2 rambled around, I was old enough to at least make a credible attempt to sneak into an R rated picture, and in this case I was successful! But had I known going in what I would learn before I came out, I probably wouldn’t have been all that concerned about not making it past the crabby lady at the ticket counter!

The sequel offers up three horror comic-inspired tales instead of five, so already you know it’s a bit skimpy on the peanut butter! There was a game of musical chairs behind the scenes, too, with George Romero writing the script and Michael Gornick, the cinematographer of the original, manning the bullhorn! King provided the stories, which somehow feel less like they could have been original E.C. tales than did the stories in the 1982 movie!

The first tale takes place in a dusty little town, the centerpiece of which is a store owned by kindly Ray and slightly less kindly Martha! Ray and Martha, happily, are played by George Kennedy, who is of course well known from such pictures as Hotwire and Death Ship and Just Before Dawn and Earthquake, and Dorothy Lamour, famed for her role in My Favorite Brunette! Naturally a painted wooden Indian stands outside the door! Their store is robbed by a preening longhair and his slobbering pals, and poor Ray and Martha each catch some lead! Well, the Indian creaks to life and takes his vengeance using feathered arrow, tomahawk and scalping knife! Yowtch!

Next we go to a chilly pond in Maine in the middle of which four college students are stuck on a raft, trapped by a hungry garbage bag! Boy, is he hungry! He eats all the students and then the story ends! Ha ha!

Finally there is the tale of an amoral lady played by Lois Chiles, a lot more interesting here than she was in Moonraker! driving home from an assignation! She hits a sou’wester clad hitchhiker, apparently kills him, and then spends the rest of the story trying to get away from the fellow as he reappears over and over, looking more like a chili burger each time and repeatedly thanking the lady for the ride! But why is he thanking her? She didn’t even give him a ride!

The interstitial bits are something about a Venus fly trap and some bullies, but it was animated so I didn’t really pay attention! The movie as a whole doesn’t invite much attention, actually! There are a few nice bits here and there, and some tomato paste (particularly in the hitchhiker story), but frankly, ha ha, the movie is bad, or at least not very good! Its main crime, if you ask ol’ Burl, is in failing to capture the same E.C. spirit found in the original! It’s not just because they didn’t use coloured gels and canted angles, I don’t think – there was a cohesive spirit in Creepshow, with everybody on the same wavelength, working toward the same goal! To me that seemed missing here!

It was a disappointment, I’ll admit! But for a few performances, particularly that of George Kennedy, and some spirited Special Makeup Effects, I’d like to give Creepshow 2 one and a half fresh stripes of war paint!

Burl review's 'Salem's Lot! (1979)

Bluh bluh, it’s Burl, here to tell you all about the vampires! Yes, I’m reviewing ‘Salem’s Lot today – the full length 1979 mini series, which I came across on VHS recently, and of course which was sequelized by none other than Larry Cohen in A Return to 'Salem's Lot! Ha ha, I got a whole box of VHS tapes through the kindness of a family member, all of them like new, and this double cassette was among them! (There was also a double cassette special edition of Hellraiser, and naturally Children of the Corn was in there too!)

Anyway, I was one of the millions of youngsters terrified by ‘Salem’s Lot on its original airing! At least I think that’s when I saw it, though I would have been pretty young! I remember some of the key scenes, like the kid whose younger brother appeared floating at the window (extra scary for me because I had – well, still have! – a younger brother of the same type!) and Mike the gravedigger jumping down into the grave and opening up the coffin! But the scariest scene for me was when the two guys (Mike and somebody else, I think) are transporting the big crate which we know contains the Nosferatu-esque hemogobbler Mr. Barlow!

Ha ha, it was all pretty scary at the time, and while it’s not so much any more, it remains a creepy and well-done television movie, which feels a lot quicker than its three hour running time would indicate! The story, for those who require it, has a writer returning to the small Maine town he was born in (ha ha, yes, as a matter of fact this is a Stephen King story!) and investigating the creepy house he once got spooked by as a child! Coincidentally, a vampire and his friend have just moved into that very house, and soon the townspeople are looking a mite pastier than before! Ha ha!

The picture was directed by Tobe Hooper, the man who later brought us such gems as The Funhouse and Lifeforce, and who at that time had just been fired from directing The Dark! He does an okay job on what must have been a tight schedule and low budget! The real draw, at least nowadays, is the cast, specifically the great James “Bigger Than Life” Mason as the vampire’s friend! Ha ha, he’s a lot like the handyman in Fright Night, in that he isn’t himself a vampire, but appears to have some superstrength and possibly other powers as well! And both of those fellows go down hard as they’re descending a staircase in a menacing fashion! Very similar scenes, ha ha!

Also in the cast we find Bonnie Bedelia, the lady from the Die Hard pictures, as the writer’s ill-fated ladyfriend; Geoffrey “The Fat Black Pussycat” Lewis as the ill-fated gravedigger; George “Massage Parlor Hookers” Dzundza as the ill-fated cuckold; Fred “Moving Violations” Willard as the ill-fated realtor; Ed “Exorcist III” Flanders as an ill-fated doctor; Kenneth “Dune” McMillan as the surprisingly not ill-fated town constable; and a bunch of fine old-timers like Lew Ayres, Marie Windsor and Elisha Cook Jr., who also battled Blacula and is of course well known from his role as Grandpa in The Trouble With Grandpa! Phew, that’s a lot of actors! And I haven’t even mentioned scary-faced Reggie Nalder, who plays the ghoulish head vampire, or Hutch himself, who plays the rather bland hero!

Ha ha, that was one of the big changes from the King book that improved things, I thought – making the vampire more of a hideous bloodsucking animal than the urbane, sarcastic man-‘bout-town he is in the novel! It’s sort of the opposite of Christine, where they got rid of the backseat corpse of Roland D. LeBay! But ‘Salem’s Lot goes for the gusto with this great vampire; and it also pushes the violence about as far as it could go in a 1979 TV movie!

It’s an entertaining and engaging watch, a little chintzy and flat here and there, and too willing to let loose threads flap around everywhere; but overall it’s not too bad! I’m going to give ‘Salem’s Lot two and a half glowing bottles of holy water!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burl reviews The Shining! (1980)

He-e-e-e-ere’s Burl! Ha ha, it’s me, back finally with another review of a horror classic! I have a long history with the story of The Shining, since before the movie was made even! My schoolteacher in some very early grade, perhaps four, perhaps five, read the book to us in short installments over the year! I remember really enjoying it, though I’m not sure about the rest of the class!

Famously, of course, Stephen King was mighty disappointed in the movie, calling it “a big beautiful Cadillac of a movie with nothing under the hood,” or words to that effect! I can understand his chagrin, to a degree anyway, but I think he was too close to his own novel to be able to distinguish the book from the movie as clearly as might be required to fully appreciate Stanley Kubrick’s effort! Ha ha, I’ll bet he started to appreciate it a little more after Firestarter and Children of the Corn and The Lawnmower Man came out, though!

But Kubrick, famous for movies like Killer’s Kiss and Full Metal Jacket, undeniably took some liberties with King’s novel! I can only imagine how crushed the poor bearded author was when he saw Jack Torrance leap out with that axe and nail poor Dick Hallorann right in the parka! Or when he realized that the hotel’s frondescent threat would be a simple hedge maze and not ambulatory topiary animals! Or when Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson, appeared well on his way to crazy right from day dot!

The maze, I think, was an improvement over the book, and the living hedge creatures would likely have been too much for the trick effects teams of the day, even the team Kubrick would have assembled! Ha ha, it was certainly too much for the makers of the TV movie remake, and they even had CGI capabilities! But I was very sad to see old Dick Hallorann buy the biscuit! I wanted Kubrick to show them all relaxing at the pool in Florida at the very end, just like in the book!

I’ve seen this picture a few times now, ha ha! What really struck me this go round was how impressive the sets were! Boy oh boy, those must have cost a pretty penny to make! I can’t blame Kubrick for wanting to shoot fifty or sixty takes of each shot, although I have heard that he wore out poor Scatman Crothers at one point, and that I can’t condone! He was getting on in years at that point, but at least he hadn’t made that rat picture Deadly Eyes yet! That was still in his future!

I’ll just say that I think this is a really fine adaptation of a book I also like, and I for one am content to have two very different takes on this story! The movie has great photography, a really brilliant use of music, great performances all around, even from young Danny, and many creepy scenes! Those two girls sure were eerie, ha ha! Come play with us, Danny! I give The Shining three and a half crash zooms into Redrum!

Burl reviews Christine! (1983)

Beep beep, it’s Burl! Ha ha, yes, I’m here to review a movie about a haunted possessed killer car, and no, I don’t mean The Car! Not yet, anyway! I’m talking Christine, a movie that I and my friend Dave won tickets to see a special preview of from a radio station contest! Ha ha, we felt pretty lucky, being big Stephen King fans at the time!

I’d read the book, and so was very eager to see what John "Halloween" Carpenter, whose previous picture The Thing had rocketed instantly onto my Favourite Movies Of All Time list (and, remarkably, has stayed there all these years!), had done with the killer car story! All the ingredients seemed present and accounted for: the glasses nerd Arnie, his unlikely BMOC best pal Dennis, the new girl in town Leigh, and of course the murderous conveyance itself, Christine! There are assorted parents, bullies, cops and garage owners in there as well, all trying to figure out why Arnie has fallen in love so deeply with his ’58 Plymouth Fury, and how he has transformed from a glasses nerd into a weasel of cool!

Well, it’s because the car is possessed! In the book, it’s more or less possessed by the rotting corpse ghost of its original owner, Roland D. LeBay! And this is where I was knocked for a bit of a loop when I saw that radio station promo screening lo those many years ago: no Roland D. LeBay! Ha ha, I was really looking forward to that creepy back-seat corpse, but he was nowhere to be found! The great Roberts Blossom, so creepy as the killer farmer in Deranged and so gentle as the painterman in Escape From Alcatraz, plays his brother, George LeBay, and he’s excellent in the role, but it was still disappointing at the time!

Now I can see the logic: it would have been distracting from the simple concept of a possessed auto! Ha ha, the movie more or less leaves the idea of where the car’s powers come from to us, the viewers, to figure out! I myself settled on the notion that it’s simply a car with more personality than most, rather than some sort of bedevilment or ghost scenario!

The movie itself is what I’d describe as a solid piece of work! The acting is of a generally high quality, and there are great character performers decorating the fringes: guys like Roberts Blossom, Robert Prosky (from Gremlins 2 and The Keep), the great Harry Dean Stanton (who was also in Escape From New York, don't forget, and the fabulous Repo Man), and even Kelly Preston from Secret Admirer! John "The Fog" Carpenter pulls off some stylish scenes (Christine blazing down a dark highway on fire after a fleeing John Travolta lookalike is a doozy!), but mostly keeps it pretty basic! Donald M. Morgan’s cinematography is really quite good, and there’s plenty of golden oldies on the soundtrack, courtesy of Christine’s anachronistic radio!

It’s funny that the two lead guys, Keith Gordon and John Stockwell, both became directors a while after making this picture! Quite different directors too: Gordon, whom we know from his performances in Jaws 2, Dressed to Kill and Back to School, ended up making movies like Mother Night, which was based on my favourite Kurt Vonnegut book, while Stockwell, the star of the teen science picture My Science Project, made Blue Crush and other such cheesecake pictures!

I feel an affection for Christine even though there’s not much horror action in the movie and no Roland D. LeBay, and I appreciate the movie a lot more now than I used to! I give it three lunchbags filled with yogurt!