Burl reviews Dark Night of the Scarecrow! (1981)

With a rustle of straw, it’s Burl, here to talk to you all about killer scarecrows! Ha ha, we’ve seen them before in pictures like Scarecrows of course, and everyone remembers the eerie dancing man o’ straw from The Wizard of Oz, but still, when you bring up the subject, everyone’s mind will instantly conjure up images from a television movie more than forty years old – ha ha, yes, I’m talking about Dark Night of the Scarecrow!

The teleplot is simplicity itself! Our setting is a small town in what I believe is meant to be the American South, although it’s patently California! Bubba, a jolly but soft-brained man played by Larry Drake from Darkman and For Keeps?, is playing in the fields with his friend Marylee, a ten year-old girl! Watching from the sidelines is venal postie Otis Hazlerigg, essayed with narrow eyes by Charles Durning from Stick and The Hudsucker Proxy! Otis impugns all sorts of unsavoury motives onto Bubba, but of course he’s projecting in the Bell & Howell style, and in fact the friendship between Bubba and Marylee is completely innocent!

The next thing you know the little girl is attacked by a yard dog and Bubba bursts in through the fence to save her, but initially he gets blamed for her injuries anyway, even though he protests that BUBBA DIDN’T DO IT! Otis rounds up a posse made up of good old boys like Harliss, played by Lane Smith from Night Game; Skeeter, who is Robert F. Lyons from Death Wish II and 10 to Midnight and other Bronsonfests; and Philby, essayed by Claude Earl Jones from I Wanna Hold Your Hand! (Ha ha, somehow I don’t think Claude is a part of the great Earl Jones acting dynasty, but as we know from pictures like A Family Thing, I may well be wrong!) The posse discovers Bubba hiding in a scarecrow and shoots the poor man to death, just before it’s revealed to them that he wasn’t only harmless but a hero for saving the girl!

Well, this hateful lynch mob is instantly acquitted in a highly unbelievable courtroom scene, and soon after this, the scarecrow vengeance begins! The stuffed anthropomorph appears in Harliss’s field and that night the beer-swilling redneck is chawed in his own wood chipper! It next shows up in Philby’s acreage and soon he’s found in his silo, drowned in grain! Panicky Skeeter gets a graveyard klonking from Otis, and there’s a pumpkin-crushing, pitchfork-poking climax wherein we discover that indeed it’s Bubba’s spirit inhabiting the scarecrow that’s behind all this vengeance! And a good thing, too – ha ha, what a disappointment if the killer had turned out to be a more corporeal presence, like the D.A., or the little girl, or Bubba’s rightfully angry mama, who’s played by Jocelyn Brando, older sister to Marlon!

Of course Drake played other soft-brained men in his acting career, most notably on the law show I never watched; and he also played a character called Bubba in his very first film role, in Herschell Gordon Lewis’s hicksploitation drama This Stuff’ll Kill Ya! He was a good actor, and he does fine work here – ha ha, he's a little broad here and there perhaps, but never unrealistic! And Durning is good too – he can play the most avuncular guy you ever saw in movies like Tootsie, but he has this way of just squinting a little bit and presto, he instantly looks evil and pædopheliac! Ha ha, and this is no small trick, given that Otis is for some reason always wearing his silly postal service outfit, complete with blue pith helmet!

So the movie has a couple of solid performances and some cornfield atmosphere (though it could have leaned harder into that I think), and there’s a Halloween costume-ball scene, which I always like in a movie – ha ha, remember Primal Rage? But it suffers a bit from a TV movie blandness, from the So-Cal locations, and also from the padding needed to fill it out to the length required of a movie in a two-hour broadcast slot! The affrights were decidedly muted this time around, but since it really did me a spook-up back when I was eleven, I want to give it some residual credit for that! Some added walking scarecrow action might have been effective, but since that one head-turn we get at the end really works, I’m not completely sure where I stand on that! So in the spirit of my somewhat confused and ambivalent feelings, I’m going to give Dark Night of the Scarecrow two flower leis!

Burl reviews Tilbury! (1987)

 

Hèi hèi, it’s Bürl, here to review some Icelandic cinema! Actually this may have been more of a TV movie, ha ha, but I’m not completely certain! If it was, then Icelandic TV was more permissive than the North American variety, because this picture contains a little bit of nudity, some bloody violence, and some salty language! It also contains a strange mythology, but then what Icelandic tale does not! The picture tells the tale of a tilburi, and it’s called Tilbury!

Now, as I mentioned, there are plenty of odd tales in Icelandic mythology - ha ha, I myself have written a film treatment concerning the strange saga of the Necro-Pants, and I hope one day that one can be committed to film! This particular myth holds that a woman who wants more butter in her life can conjure up an imp called a tilburi, which requires that she hold a rib bone wrapped in wool between her breasts and douse it in communion wine, along with some other witchy acts! Then the goblin will appear and steal the milk from livestock at neighbouring farms, and when it returns will spit out a hideous green butter “of unusual consistency,” according to the movie’s opening narration! Then of course it desires to suck blood from a teat which grows out of the woman’s thigh!

That’s the myth in its broadest strokes, though what’s missing is an explanation of why anyone would want butter that badly! Perhaps I’m not properly appreciating the level of privation on Icelandic farms, but surely there must be more desirable commodities than butter! At any rate, the story is set at the opening of the war, in the spring and summer of 1940, when the little island nation is overrun by British soldiers on the lookout for Germans! A goonybird pastor’s son called Audun, who scarfs down dairy products as quickly as his slavering jaws can consume them, goes to Reykjavík in search of a bigger swimming pool in which to practice his distinctive leaping stroke, and also is asked to keep an eye on Gudrún, a young lady from the town whose father is worried about her in the free-living environs of the capitol!

And so he should be, because Gudrún has conjured a tilburi! He takes the form of Major Tilbury, a big-nosed British officer, who rides around in a sidecar and distributes Cadbury chocolate to the children! Ha ha! From there the tale darkens considerably, as everyone dances to the “Let’s All Go To The Lobby” intermission song and Major Tilbury begins to show off his butter-redistribution skills as well as his Freddy Krueger fingernails!

At times the picture seems like one of the early gentle comedies of Bill Forsyth, at others more like a piece of filmed experimental theatre a la Futz! At still other moments it’s downright horrific; in fact this hour-long TV drama manages more affrights in its scant running time than the entire Friday the 13^th film series! It makes plain the otherness of the creature, and its seperateness from the Icelandic population, by equating it with the British and American soldiers who have overwhelmed the country; and the more so by making the tilburi an officer rather than an enlisted man! By the end an American Tilbury has showed up, and he distributes Hershey chocolate instead of Cadbury!

I enjoyed this curious photoplay, and I recommend it to all! It’s not a lavish piece of cinema, but it’s a highly effective one, and has that great Icelandic sense of humour without diluting any of the scariness! I give Tilbury three basement Nazis!

Burl reviews Scala! (1990)

 

Taking your ticket, it’s Burl, here with a review of a movie not about movies, but about a movie theatre! I suppose that means it is about movies, ha ha, because a big old movie palace is still and always will be the best place to see one, and this movie is about just such a place! The movie palace in question is London’s late and much-lamented Scala Cinema, and the movie about it is simply called Scala!

Now, I’m no Londoner (ha ha, no, I’m not even British!), but I’ve spent plenty of time in that fine city, and when I was there for a spell in the late 1980s I discovered the Scala! And what a discovery it was! I recall seeing triple bills like Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, Daughters of Darkness and Edge of Sanity, the one with Anthony Perkins! Or, on a different occasion, a De Palma triple-header of Blow Out, Body Double and Dressed to Kill! I saw Videodrome, Un Zoo la Nuit, Danger Diabolik, Barbarella, a trucker’s double-header of Wages of Fear and They Drive By Night, David Mamet’s House of Games and Things Change, and more! Every day the program changed and so every day there were more glorious movies to see, all of them projected on 35mm film, or at least high-quality 16mm, on a big ratty old screen! Oh, ha ha, it was the purest heaven to a fellow like ol’ Burl!

I remember it was a bit scary to go there, which was part of the appeal! You’d take the tube to King’s Cross, emerge into the rat’s nest of streets surrounding that station, and see, as in a vision, a white edifice rising like a massif down the way! Mods, rockers, punks, cinéastes, skids, students, seedcakes, sketchy people of all description with heads full of high fructose skunkfire, would gather to see the show, and none of them wanted any trouble so far as I could see! You could get some food, a beer or glass of wine if you liked, and the seat you settled into would be your own little campsite for the evening! Of course, as is noted by several interviewees in this thirty-minute documentary portrait of the place, the whole cinema rumbled with each passing tube train and the sound system was not exactly double-Dolby; but again, ha ha, all of this only added to the charm!

The movie about the Scala is not nearly so exciting as the actual place was, however! It’s mostly a parade of talking heads, with very little footage of the cinema itself, though I suppose there’s only so much mileage to be had from such B-roll imagery! More pep and wit in the editing would have gone a long mile, though, and if they could have managed some footage of a screening in progress, that might have been nice! There are some clips from at least three movies though: Evil Dead, Glen or Glenda and Mona Lisa, which are cut in for little or no reason!

I suppose these were available because their UK distributor, or producer in the case of Mona Lisa, was Palace Pictures, owned in part by Stephen Wooley, who was also a major player in the Scala and provides many interesting remarks in the doc! Also interviewed are a number of other Scala employees, including Jane Giles, who later made a book about the fabled movie palace! There’s also a great gallery of London eccentrics, including an old chap who offers tribute to his favourite cinema in the form of doggerel; an old lady who likes car chases and other action antics, but not so much “bedroom scenes;” the actor Ralph Brown from Alien 3 and Stoker, who does a bit in the voice of his character Danny from the marvelous Withnail and I; and a soft-spoken, utterly sincere gent whose film obsession is total!

The movie is a bit reminiscent of Out of Print, the tribute to the New Beverly Cinema in L.A., but is only about a third the length! This subject could have supported a feature too, but not necessarily in the style we get here - it would have to be much sharper and more energetic, I think! Still, a nice little portrait of a place close to my heart, and I was glad to discover it on the YouTube! I give Scala two soiled seats! 

Burl reviews The Kid with the 200 I.Q.! (1983)

 

With a demand to know whatchoo talkin’ ‘bout, it’s Burl, here to review a movie featuring that undersized imp of cinema and television Gary Coleman, whom we may recall from Dirty Work! Ha ha, he had a real corner on the precocious kid market back in the 70s and early 80s, and in the movie under discussion today, The Kid with the 200 IQ, he may have hit the absolute peak of precociousness!

His characters were always supposed to be smarter than other kids that were putatively his age, but here he plays a super-genius riding an academic scholarship into big people’s college, and how could the precociousness formula be more finely honed than that? It couldn’t! Coleman plays Nick Newell, who arrives at the college with his pleasant family and then must endure scene after scene of people doing double takes at him when he explains that yes, he is enrolled in the college! He lucks into an amiable roommate in his dorm, an athlete called Steve played by Dean Butler from Desert Hearts; and because the dorm is co-ed (Wink wink! Nudge nudge!), he gets to know a young journalism student named Julie, essayed by Kari Michaelsen from Saturday the 14^th!

It seems that Nick’s area of interest is astronomy, and he’s most excited about taking a class with the imposing Professor Mills, played by Robert Guillaume from Seems Like Old Times and Death Warrant! But Mills is one of the few not charmed by Nick’s exuberance, and in fact seems to resent the little fellow’s presence! And as the semester continues so do Nick’s troubles grow, presenting some real challenges to his 200 I.Q.! Ha ha, he bombs with an astronomy project for Mills’ class, he falls in love with Julie only to be heartbroken when he sees her getting friendly with Steve (whose advances she had initially resisted due to her hatred of jocks), and he endures very mild bullying and humiliation from a toffee-nosed frat bro after beating the older fellow in a game of Defender!

He has lots of friends, though: Mills’ daughter is a friendly cutie nearly as precocious as Nick himself; there’s a kindly caretaker called Debs played by Mel Stewart from Dead Heat; and Steve and Julie stick by him resolutely, sympathizing with his romantic travails! The climax is a Road Warrior-style chase scene in which all of Nick’s friends, including an abashed Mills and the reformed frat bro, chase after the Greyhound bus Nick has hopped to take him home and away from the university he no longer feels a part of! But of course it all ends happily enough, with Nick now Dr. Mills’ number one helper, welcoming to the pre-semester party freshman Crispin Glover, well known from Rubin & Ed and Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter, in the role of a newly-arrived astronomy student!

While we must admit that Coleman is not as adept at playing a super-genius as, say, Jason Segel in The End of the Tour, he’s nevertheless not bad, and packs a lot of charm into his diminutive frame! Guillaume is required to walk a tightrope between cold and stern on the one hand, and affable and avuncular on the other, and he does it well! The TV movie-ness of the whole thing is undeniable; though Coleman did some theatrical features (I remember seeing Jimmy the Kid at my local cinema), this was assuredly not one of them! It exudes a strange charm, though, as many artifacts do by virtue of their ability to evoke the past! Ha ha, I give The Kid with the 200 I.Q. two rounds of Defender!

Burl reviews Ants!! (1977)

Beedlee-beedlee-beedlee it’s Burl, here with another movie about insects on the attack! Yes, it’s time for ants in the pants with a TV movie called, simply, Ants!, though it’s also known by the more cryptic title It Happened at Lakewood Manor! That’s the title under which I first became familiar with the movie, but I do believe Ants! is the proper and original moniker!

Anyway, Lakewood Manor is a thriving if old-fashioned resort hotel run by an old wheelchair lady played by Myrna Loy from Another Thin Man! Her daughter, Lynda Day George from Mortuary, is trying to get her to retire from the hotel business, and there’s an abrasive businessman who wants to buy the place! Meanwhile, there’s construction of an indeterminate type going on in the front yard, with boss Robert Foxworth from Death Moon and Prophecy, and his foreman Bernie Casey from Never Say Never Again running their tractors back and forth!

But right off the hop, things go wrong! A construction worker falls victim to a mysterious something under the ground, and when another goes to help him, they are both buried alive! Realizing their mistake, Foxworth and Casey dig their co-workers out, and in the process are bitten by ants! Ha ha, and when first a young boy playing in the garbage, and then a kitchen worker doing his job are found with toxic poisoning, Foxworth begins to suspect the ants are responsible for all the trouble! But people just laugh at him, in particular the government safety monitors who’ve been giving him trouble and who seem like beta versions of the EPA guy in Ghostbusters!

So, desperate to prove his formic theory, Foxworth jumps in his front end loader and bashes at the dirt in which he believes the ants are living, with the result that he enrages them so much they attack the hotel and kill several people! Ha ha, well done Foxworth! It all comes down to a scene in which Foxworth, George, and the real estate guy are all sitting in one of the hotel rooms, covered with ants and breathing through tubes of rolled-up ugly wallpaper! Then the developer gets ants in his pants and jumps out the window, ha ha! Truly a thrilling climax!

Brian Dennehy from F/X and Best Seller has meanwhile made a surprise appearance as the local fire chief who can barely believe his eyes every time he looks at the strange blurry blob that is supposed to represent millions of ants! It’s the sort of special effect you expect from a 70s TV movie, but it’s still pretty bad! (Not a patch on the spider transformation in Curse of the Black Widow, or the guy falling out of the plane in The Horror at 37,000 Feet!) But never mind the bad special effects, lousy script, barbiturated direction and robotic acting: it’s horror TV from the 70s, so I enjoyed it! I give Ants! one and a half trenches of fire!

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 Snowbeast! (1977)

It’s Bur-r-r-r-r-l! Yes, I’m here to review a winter picture, a TV movie called Snowbeast that spooked me royally when I saw it as a youngster! It was hyped for weeks in commericals, or so it seemed, and I knew I had to see it! Ha ha, I actually sat and watched it as my parents fiercely debated the wisdom of allowing me to do so in the next room! I thought it was a pretty great movie, better even than This House Possessed!

I watched it again recently, and I still think it’s pretty great, ha ha! Maybe that means I haven’t grown up in all the ways I should, but I prefer to think that I was simply able to recognize quality when I saw it, even at such a young age! I remember that it was broadcast in the summer, which made its snowy winter setting all the chillier somehow! Because winter can kill you on its own, never mind the bigfoots!

There’s a great bigfoot here, a shaggy white-furred guy who looks remarkably similar to the intentionally fake Bigfoot in Shriek of the Mutilated, ha ha! To tell you the truth, after all these years I didn’t think he’d still be scary – yeti totally was, ha ha! He rips off faces and grabs people by their heads and just mutilates as fast as he can! He’s the worst-tempered bigfoot in movies, with the exception of the one in Night of the Demon, of course!

As has been noted many times, the movie plays like one of those kiddie re-creation movies, not of Raiders of the Lost Ark this time, but of Jaws! Trade the ocean for a ski mountain, and sim sallah bim! Once again, three guys are after a monster who’s cutting into a seasonal community’s tourist trade; this time there’s a lady along too, calling to mind Jaws: The Revenge! (And there’s a love triangle, which brings to mind the original Peter Benchley book!) We have the grandson of the ski lodge owner, the deflated ex-Olympian ski guy who’s asking him for a job, and the skier’s wife, who loves them both! Add Hoss-voiced Sheriff Paraday to the mix, and you have the Yeti’s greatest nemeses!

It’s not just a movie for sasquatch lovers – fans underwhelming of ski footage have plenty to cheer about too! The theory I developed watching all this ski footage was that it was included so that different stations could cut more or less of it out to fit it into their commercial schedules without interfering in the plot! And one of the movie’s greatest assets: Sylvia Sidney, the smoker’s voice queen, as Carrie Rill, the matriarch owner of the lodge! I feel really bad for her when the Winter Carnival is interrupted by the rampaging beast, and the Winter Princess’s crown is trampled before it can even be bestowed!

There’s some fine thespian action here aside from old Sylvia – Bo Hopkins, the towering Man of Blond, is great as the depressed ski champ! He gets a fantastic redemption arc! The sheriff, played by Clint Walker after all, is fine too, and really gives it his all when he first meets up with the creature!

It could use a few more attacks and a little more footage of the creature and less of skiing! There are a few eerie shots of the bigfoot moving through the trees, but I guess they didn’t think it looked too good, so you really get only one or two glimpses of it! It’s still a scary movie, though! I give it three fades to red!

Burl reviews Death Moon! (1978)

Ha ha, it’s Burl here with another TV movie for you! Boy, I’ve never watched so many TV movies as I have since beginning this movie review blog! I don’t know why, but I’ve really been enjoying the suckers! I suppose it recalls a time in my life when movies like Curse of the Black Widow and Cruise Into Terror and This House Possessed and Snowbeast were about all I could watch, since I was too young to go to the movies by myself and there were no VCRs yet!

Unlike those other movies I just mentioned, Death Moon is not a picture I recall from the heady days of my youth, even though it was apparently broadcast in late May of 1978, which should have placed it right in my prepubescent crosshairs! Perhaps it simply wasn’t broadcast in my region! Or maybe the tumblers of fate weren’t going to click into place until I was good and ready to accept the full, fierce beauty of the movie’s concept: a Hawaiian werewolf!

Ha ha, you read that right! Robert Foxworth, whom we know so well from Prophecy and – well, that’s about all I know him from, besides his small role in Damien: Omen II and maybe his appearance in that other TV movie It Happened at Lakewood Manor, a.k.a. Ants! – plays Jason Palmer, one of those overstressed businessmen who’s always waking up shaking and sweating from accursed dreams involving a fearsome tiki! His sawbones recommends a vacation, and the next thing you know, Jason Palmer is in Kauai, wearing a tiny blue bathing suit and gamely seeking some relaxation!

But as Jason begins his program of relaxation by squiring about a blonde businesslady, and as Rick, a ladies’ man hotel detective, chases a burly room thief, the werewolf attacks begin, and people are being torn apart all over the place, a fresh outrage each night! Ha ha, it goes on for a week or so, and that’s a lot of full moons! The house dick (who with his Ken doll face and receding hairline looks like a perfect telepod cross between Crown International superstars Bill Adler and James Daughton) begs the local cop to be allowed to help solve the murders, but everyone tells him to concentrate on catching the room thief! But when the room thief becomes a werewolf victim, Rick is able to turn the full force of his investigative prowess on the case!

The unfortunate room thief, by the way, is played by Charles Haid, whom we know from Ken Russell’s great Altered States! It’s funny: Haid is so good at playing a bigmouth blowhard, and here he is in a role which gives him no lines at all, until his werewolf encounter anyway, and then he only screams! And he’s the most unsubtle sneakthief ever, too! Ha ha, he wears loud shirts, smokes a stogie and weighs about two hundred and fifty pounds, and you have to consider that Rick might be a bit of an idiot not to have been able to catch him!

He also doesn’t think there might be a werewolf loose despite coming face-to-face with the leisure suit-wearing fiend in the movie’s finest scene! Ha ha, it only lasts a second, but it’s worth a rewind on the ol’ VHS to see Rick’s lycanthrope encounter one more time, I can tell you!

The trouble with Death Moon is it’s nowhere near as good as we all want it to be, given the fantastic concept and the era in which it was made! There’s not much Hawaiian atmosphere, and if I didn’t know better I’d say it might as well have been filmed in Southern California! And Robert Foxworth without a beard is a little strange – his curly hair and weasel face put him in the Marjoe Gortner category, almost! But still, you can’t argue with the idea of a Hawaiian werewolf no matter how direly executed, and I give Death Moon one and a half fake gurning tikis!

Burl reviews Curse of the Black Widow! (1977)

Hi, Burl here with a review of a TV movie! I haven’t reviewed too many of these old boys so far – This House Possessed and The Horror at 37,000 Feet are probably about it – but I usually enjoy watching them! Like This House Possessed, this is one I watched on or near its original broadcast, and it scared the terwilligers out of me! I’ve mentioned my gut-churning terror of giant spiders before, in the review of The Strange World of Planet X, I think, and it’s my belief that my viewing of Curse of the Black Widow as an impressionable young chap was the inspiration for this life-long phobia! (I’m not scared of spiders in general though, just enormous ones that might try to eat me! Ha ha!)

As in any TV movie of the era that had to stretch itself out to 104 minutes, there’s an awful lot of padding filling out this Naugahyde package, but the basic story of Curse of the Black Widow runs as follows: a glamorous mystery lady is stalking Los Angeles bars, picking up men in sport coats and then terrifying them in some unspecified manner and leaving them drained husks, often swathed in mysterious webbing! Ha ha, turns out she’s a were-spider, and hot on her trail is smooth-operating consulting detective Tony Fransciosa, well known from Death Wish II, and a gruff police investigator played by Vic Morrow from Humanoids From the Deep! Ha ha, Vic Morrow’s character is named Conti, but for some reason Fransciosa always calls him “Gully!”

Anyway, as per many TV movies and most Dan Curtis productions, there’s a lot of family drama woven into this situation, along with several strange time-wasting digressions and an often-inappropriate musical score, as well as many hideous sport coats! This is why I’m a big fan of so many Dan Curtis productions, in particular Trilogy of Terror, which was the first horror movie I ever saw, and Burnt Offerings, one of Dan’s rare theatrical efforts! (I never was a Dark Shadows fan, however – it just seemed like any other soap opera to me, with a few extra drifts of fog here and there!)

I became pretty confused about two thirds of the way through Curse of the Black Widow when a number of older ladies started showing up and the family drama bit really kicked in! I must not have been paying enough attention, because I really had no idea who was who, what their relationships to one another were and what the conflicts were all about! But being totally at sea didn’t diminish my enjoyment of the picture one bit, ha ha!

And what a cast! Vic Morrow always plays a good grouch, and Max Gail plays, yes, a disheveled cop, this time named “Rags” instead of Wojo! The mysterious old ladies are played by the likes of June Allyson and June Lockhart! Sid Caesar and Jeff Corey play two of the padding-providing ancillary characters, Pinky Tuscadero plays “Flaps,” the secretary, and there’s a great cameo from none other than Hard Boiled Haggerty, playing a man who once saw the giant spider but no one believed him!

The actual giant spider, when we finally see it at the end, is a little bit fake looking, I have to say! It’s still plenty scary though, especially when you’ve got a phobia like mine! I give Curse of the Black Widow two and a half bargain-basement arachnoid transformations!

Burl reviews This House Possessed! (1981)

Hi, Burl here! I don’t know what it is about made-for-TV horror movies, but they sure are weird sometimes! The Horror at 37,000 Feet was strange enough, but get a load of This House Possessed! Ha ha, I saw this one when I was a wee sprout, and I remember being very impressed by it to be sure, but boy is it an odd one!

Parker Stevenson stars as a feather-haired softrocker who collapses in the middle of one of his most popular and stool-softening numbers! Why does he collapse? Well, somehow a haunted house miles away has contrived a plan to reunite itself with its beloved little-girl mistress from years ago; and somehow the house has decided that the now-grown girl will fall in love with Parker Stevenson if given a chance; and somehow it has caused Parker Stevenson to pitch his fainting fit by remote control; and somehow it ensures that Parker Stevenson recuperates in the very hospital, on the very ward, where the now-grown girl works as a nurse! Phew, ha ha!

If you can swallow that series of horse pills, here’s another whopper for you! It seems the evil abode can watch anyone it wants on television at any time no matter where they are! Ha ha, for all you know that house might be watching you on TV the next time you’re astride the toilet! Think about that one for a moment!

Well, the house’s plan works perfectly, and the next thing you know Parker Stevenson has hired the nurse as his private caregiver and they’ve moved into the ultra-modern haunted house! It has an extensive security camera system, which seems quite redundant in light of the special TV powers already mentioned, and it also has a high security fence and shatterproof windows! Ha ha, I wonder if all that will cause trouble for our softrocker later on!

Eventually the house starts acting up! Whenever someone gets close to its secrets, such as a nosy librarian or Parker’s manager, Slim Pickens, the demonic dwelling simply engineers a gruesome demise! Ha ha, things get pretty bloody for TV, I can tell you! Slim Pickens, who I could barely believe was in this movie at all, let along playing the cowboy-hatted manager of a limpsy-stricken softrocker, gets impaled by flying glass! The librarian is crushed and burned by the front gates! A goggle-eyed bag lady is parboiled in the swimming pool! Yikes, that’s got to smart!

Even if you just annoy the house slightly you’re in for an unpleasant surprise! A teenage couple attempt to make sweet love on the grounds and are chased away by a spraying garden hose! A nasty lady tries to steal Parker away and gets a shower full of blood for her trouble! (I’d have thought the house would want to encourage this relationship so that it could have the nurse all to itself, but what do I know about the motivations of a house?) And a police officer investigating the mystery is himself annoyed when he tries to pin down the genre of music Parker Stevenson trades in! “Ha ha, not exactly rock,” Parker says, and I’m inclined to agree with him!

I do have to admit that the movie was not quite the masterpiece of terror and bizarre shock that I remembered from my youth! And boy oh boy, are those soft rock songs horrible! Ha ha, “Sensitive Burl's Not!” I guess! Nevertheless, it’s a weird and eventful enough motion picture that I enjoyed it thoroughly! I also thought Lisa Eilbacher, in the role of the nurse, did a pretty good job! I give it two pulsating fireplaces!

Also: you can read more about this curious motion picture here!

Burl reviews The Horror at 37,000 Feet! (1973)

Hi good pals, it’s Burl chatting at you again! It’s time to review a TV movie from way back in 1973, featuring William Shatner as a whiskey priest and Buddy Ebsen as The Unpleasant Millionaire! This one was a little before my TV movie-watching time, but I understand it managed to scare a lot of people! I’d heard the title for years, but never really knew what the movie was about! What was the “Horror,” exactly? Was it vampires? A mummy? Some sort of flying Meatloaf-looking guy like in that Twilight Zone episode which also starred William Shatner?

Well, now that I’ve seen the movie, I’m still a little shaky on what exactly the Horror was! I tried to maximize the terror by actually watching this on an overseas airplane ride, but I’m not sure that helped! I was really just jealous of the passengers in the movie plane, which was a luxurious 747 with wide aisles, a bar overflowing with fine alcohol, and lots of room to move around and visit the other passengers! There were easy chairs and swivel chairs and all sorts of comfy seating arrangements, and also some beautiful and friendly stewardesses! And plenty of legroom too! Ha ha, it’s a little frustrating to watch while you’re crammed into a tiny space beside a stranger, the flight attendants ignore you and the guy in front of you has his seat rammed back as far as it’ll go!

Anyway, the movie shows what happens when the altar of an old English abbey is loaded onto a transatlantic flight from England to New York! Almost immediately, Captain Chuck Conners has to deal with a headwind that renders the plane pretty much stationary in the air! The other passengers take this more or less in stride, with Dr. Paul Winfield, from Blue City, remaining particularly equitable! But the altar is apparently cursed by Druid demons or something, and slime and goo and freezing temperatures begin to manifest themselves! The first victim is actually a helpless pooch, and I thought that was pretty sad! The second victim is The Professor from Gilligan’s Island, straight off the island of the Mushroom People, I guess!

Anyway, things get pretty dire, with Shatner’s cynical ex-priest character not helping much even though everybody keeps asking him to put down the bottle and start saying some prayers or something! One faction of the passengers, led by Buddy Ebsen, come to believe that the altar needs a sacrifice before it’ll let them get to New York, and the others are trying to figure out some less homicidal solution! The theme of the movie seems to be how thin a veneer our 20^th Century civilization really is, and how quickly we can slip into pagan barbarism when things turn nasty! Well, in the end it’s up to Shatner again, of course, and he performs a hilarious act of self-sacrifice which results in one of the finest special effects ever seen on television! Ha ha!

Even though we never see The Horror – though there are plenty of reaction shots from characters who do – I kind of enjoyed this goofy little enterprise! It would make a pretty good off-Broadway show, I think, as long as you could assemble a great cast of has-beens and sub-B character actors to play the roles, as they did for this one! I give the movie two oozing green goo fountains!