Burl reviews Party Party! (1983)

 

Ha ha and hello, it’s Burl here to wish you a belated Happy New Year! And I’m doing that because I finally caught up to a New Year’s Eve-set youth movie that enjoys a near-legendary status among those who were in the right place and time, and at the right age, when it came along! And the name given to this formative production is not just a title, not merely a description, but serves also, even primarily, as a clear-throated, full-chested, arms-extended and head-tilted-back statement of intent: Party Party!

In the early 80s the horny teens were getting their due on screen: there was Porky’s, Spring Break, Hot Bubblegum, and oh so many more! It was all about music, sexy times, shenanigans, and consequence-free fun, and these pictures were being made all around the world! North London wanted in on the glory, so they all got together and created this picture, which takes place largely at a New Year’s Eve house party party! The host is a weedy nonentity called Larry, who organizes the party party unbeknownst to his parents and I suppose is meant to be the film’s Everyman figure! He’s played by Perry Fenwick, whom we may recall as a different sort of a party party host in Mona Lisa, ha ha!

Larry’s pals include an unbelievably awkward idiot called Toby, played by Daniel Peacock, who co-wrote the movie and later appeared in The Jewel of the Nile! His other buddy is Johnny, a grifter, a player and an inveterate advice-giver essayed by fiveheaded Karl Howman from The Long Good Friday! We meet this crew, or two of them anyway, as they race around Hendon in an alleged “fast, flash motor,” dodging angry motorcyclists, and then picking up Larry at a church! We concurrently meet a bunch of other characters who will be attending the party party also, including two gal pals, one a schlubby girl called Shirley, played by Caroline Quentin from Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire, and the other a more comely sort named Brenda, essayed by Kim Thomson from Screamtime and The Tall Guy!

Over at the station house we find a lady cop called Rebecca, played by Phoebe Nicholls, who was John Merrick’s mother in The Elephant Man; another cop played by skinless Frank from Hellraiser himself, Sean Chapman; and a third bobby called Terry, played by Gary Olsen from Outland, who announces his intention to get right pissed and follows that pledge up in spectacular fashion! And separate from all these folk is the movie’s main antagonist, Bobby, an enormous bearded bully boy played by Clive Mantle from Alien 3!

Just how old are these people, I wondered as I watched the movie! Ha ha, Larry seems like a teenager, more or less, but his good pal Johnny, with his Phil Collins-style receding hairline, seems a decade or more older! Toby, the gurning half-wit, has the ageless quality many intellectually impaired people possess; the coppers are at least in their late twenties or older; and the big bully Bobby might be forty or more! Ha ha! How did they all happen to be at this very same party party, anyway? It’s a true New Year’s mystery!

Another New Year’s mystery is the soundtrack! Ha ha, how on earth did they afford all these tunes? Somehow they convinced Elvis Costello to write and warble a theme song, and while it’s the most terrible song he ever did, it’s still amazing that it exists! There are songs by The Clash, David Bowie, Sting, Madness, The Stranglers, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, and lots more! It makes sense that the movie’s not widely available to see these days, because ha ha, how could you begin to license all that? It’s an impressive feat for a clearly low-budget picture!

But aside from that, is the movie itself any good? Well, it’s an odd thing: I really strongly disliked almost every single character in this photoplay, and didn’t give, as they say over there, a toss about any of them! Toby in particular is almost supernaturally lacking in social graces, and many’s the time he gets called a berk or a prat! And he most certainly is those things! But somehow, by the end of the movie, when the parents return to find their house near-trashed and must be fed the outrageous lie that the party party was all the time in their honour, I found myself smiling slightly and hoping it all worked out, as stupid as the situation was!

My own first visit to Blighty wasn’t until 1985 or so, but I still remember the sort of dingy chill with which Thatcher’s England was permeated at that time, and this movie captures that miasma in absolute spades! There’s no art to the picture at all, no dimension to the characters (even to the suicidally lonely dowdy-girl), and not nearly the pep such a movie should have; but it has occasional bursts of energy, shows evidence of talent in the cast, and gets the feeling of a big drunken house party mostly right! It’s not a good movie by any stretch, but I can just about see why it would be so cherished by people who caught it at the right instant in their lives! But, ha ha, where did all those pies for the big pie fight come from, anyway? I give Party Party one and a half fast flash cars!

Burl reviews Withnail and I! (1986)

 

Get in the back of the van, it’s Burl, here to review a picture that I’ll tell you right off the top is one of my favourites! Ha ha and sweet john fiddlesticks, it’s a movie I’ve delighted in ever since it was released, one I find not just beautifully written and acted and made, but extremely funny! And I know I’m not alone in these feelings, though sometimes I wish I were! Of course the film to which I refer is Withnail and I!

Along with The Maltese Falcon, Citizen Kane, The 400 Blows and Night of the Living Dead, I think it’s one of the great feature directorial debuts! That may seem hyperbolic, and it probably is, but I do find it an impressive accomplishment from someone who apparently claimed throughout the shoot that he didn’t know what he was doing! That someone is Bruce Robinson, who followed this up with the okay if not nearly as satisfying How To Get Ahead in Advertising; but he knocked it out of the park on this first go round, that’s for sure!

Our setting is London’s Camden Town in late September and early October of 1969! Two unemployed actors, the titular gentlemen, live in a squalorous flat and drink as much and as frequently as they are able, pausing only to pop pills or drag on enormous joints! Richard E. Grant from L.A. Story is Withnail, while Paul McGann from Alien 3 is I; and their sometime pal and drug dealer, Danny, is played by Ralph Brown, who was in Stoker and was also in Alien 3, ha ha! And there’s even an appearance from Chocolate Mousse himself, Eddie Tagoe of Top Secret fame, here playing Presuming Ed!

Wishing to get out of London for a time, the flatmates cadge a cottage key from Withnail’s florid uncle Monty, played wonderfully by Richard Griffiths from Gorky Park! Accompanied by the guitar stylings of Jimi Hendrix, the lads drive up to the desolate farming mountain of Crow Crag, where the cottage proves nearly as shabby as their London digs, the rain and cold are unceasing, and the promontory decidedly sterile! Ha ha! Not only that, but a rough poacher threatens to put a black pod on Withnail, which terrifies him into a babbling frenzy! Then Monty shows up with a gleam in his eye and the holiday becomes a truly threatening experience for the young, Lennon-bespectacled I!

More of the plot I won’t divulge, mainly because there is no plot really; and that the movie gets away with this so handily is merely another of its charms! It’s a portrait movie: a portrait of these two friends, of this particular moment in time, of London, of poverty, of substance abuse and dependence, of romantic desperation, of career despondency, of the end of an era and the dwindling of hope! “I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth,” soliloquizes Withnail at the end, and we realize it’s exactly that loss of mirth we’ve been witnessing throughout the movie! Ha ha, it’s not the funniest conclusion a comedy ever had, but it’ll stick with you!

Now, while it’s true I’m not a full member of the cult of Withnail and I, which is made up mostly of young (though perhaps now aging), pasty, educated, middle class white men whose principal affectation is the misplaced notion that they have no affectations, but who then go around wearing long coats and tartan scarves right out of the film anyway and quoting lines from it until you want to punch them, I will here admit that not only have I owned coats much like those each of the two titular characters wear, but that I have also, with this movie fully in mind, sat on a bench in the Regent’s Park and swigged directly from a bottle of red wine!

Ha ha, I’ll go further! Though it was not in conscious imitation of the film, I have also roared drunkenly around London from pub to pub in a clapped-out Jaguar! (I was not driving, but the fellow who was had consumed just as much booze as I had, risking not just traffic calamity but police arrest, not having one of Danny’s fresh-pee contraptions on hand!) I have in my time also complained of “a bastard behind the eyes” and bellowed “There must and shall be aspirin!” But I have never obnoxiously demanded the finest wines available to humanity, nor fretted that my thumbs had gone weird, nor wept in butcher’s shops, nor declaimed Hamlet’s soliloquy to wolves! No, I just find the movie well performed and funny and, so far, endlessly rewatchable, and for a’ that, I give Withnail and I four shag-sacks!

Burl reviews Dream Demon! (1988)

 

In the shadow of Freddy it’s Burl, here to tell all about a British knock-off of A Nightmare on Elm Street! Maybe that’s not completely fair – though it’s a rubber-reality dream picture for sure, and approaches its dream sequences much in the style of any 80s horror picture, it has its own non-Kregeresque business going on, though the exact nature of that business is a bit opaque! Yes, I’m talking about Dream Demon!

 

It comes from the director of Malone, and I won’t try spelling the fellow’s name, because I notice he himself spells it differently from picture to picture! The story is set in London, and our heroine is Diana, a young bride-to-be played by Jemma Redgrave! Her fiancé is a comically upright and squarejawed Falklands war hero, or I should properly say “hero” because everything about this guy is in doubt, called Oliver, played by Mark Greenstreet! I’ll give away now that he turns out to be a total jerk, but that doesn’t spoil much because he has that aura right from the beginning!

 

Diana is being plagued by pre-nuptial anxiety dreams in which Oliver abuses her at the altar, and she in turn decapitates him, which is frankly no more than he deserves! In her dreams the world is lit like a rock video, and she is plagued not just by Oliver, but by bugs! Meanwhile a pair of tabloid reporters set their sights on her for some reason, crowding her at her doorstep and asking impertinent questions! This duo is a reporter played by Jimmy Nail from Howling II and a crude, moon-faced paparazzo essayed by Timothy Spall, whom we recall from Dutch Girls and Gothic! The apparently near-friendless Diana then gets a new acquaintance in the form of Kathleen Wilhoite, more or less playing the same sort of psychic punkette she played in Witchboard! Wilhoite’s Jenny shows up at Diana’s door because that’s the house she lived in as a child, and where she experienced some trauma she can’t quite remember before being spirited off to America!

 

Whether Jenny has some psychic triggering ability or Diana is a powerful dream empath, or it’s something to do with the house is never made clear, but the upshot is that soon Diana and those in her orbit (except Oliver, who I suppose is meant to be so thick and imagination-free that he doesn’t even dream) are spending half their time in the oneiric netherworld of Diana’s subconscious! The tabloid jerks, especially the photographer, become the Freddy stand-ins that pop around corners and scare her; Jenny, meanwhile, has had enough and very sensibly decides to flee the scene, but it’s not so easy! By this time Diana doesn’t know whether she’s dreaming or not, and Jenny falls into a long reminiscence, or perhaps dream, of her nasty sculptor father, played by Nickolas Grace from Salomé’s Last Dance, chasing her around and forcing her to pose for a gravestone sculpture he’s making!

 

I said earlier that this was a Nightmare on Elm Street pretender, and indeed it is in many ways, but I should qualify that by saying that its dreams are much more subtly insinuated into the narrative than in the Freddy pictures! Sometimes the lighting changes, or the set becomes weird and you know it’s a dream, but other times we just ease into them and can’t be sure until something oddball happens! The debit side to this approach is that there’s rarely a whole lot of imagination pumped into the dreamscapes, and the reluctance to get funky deprives the picture of the pep it might otherwise have displayed! Clearly this was a choice made early in the production, and in the end it comes off a more mature work than the Freddy pictures, but it’s not one of those beloved gloop specials the 1980s were so good at turning out!

 

Still, it has some gross-out moments and trick effects, most of them centering around Spall’s vile photographer character! But the filmmakers never really cracked their narrative problems or seem to have decided what their picture was really about! Obviously it’s got a good deal to do with the virginal Diana’s sexual anxieties, but beyond this dime-book Freud, as Orson Welles would call it, there’s not a lot of there there! I did like the little coda in which the tabloid jerks’ ultimate fate was revealed, and believe me when I tell you that you won’t see that one coming! I give Dream Demon two plates of red spaghetti!

Burl reviews The Lair of the White Worm! (1988)

 

With a touch o’ wurms it’s Burl, here to ponder on a late-80s horror gem that I was fortunate enough to see in the movie theatre with a big responsive crowd! Well, it was a small movie theatre so the crowd was only so big, but the audience responded as though they were watching simply the most uproarious of comedies, and of course in this case that’s entirely apposite! The picture is none other than The Lair of the White Worm!

 

Ken Russell, who brought us Billion Dollar Brain and many other strange and wonderful pictures, is the madman behind this one! Ha ha, it concerns the Trent sisters, Eve and Mary, played by Catherine Oxenberg and Sammi Davis, who are doing their best to keep the family farm-cum-guest house operating in the wake of their parents’ sudden, mysterious, and total disappearance! Digging in their yard is a young Scottish archeologist called, naturally, Angus, and essayed by Peter Capaldi from Local Hero and Paddington! He finds a big skull that appears to be from some sort of giant reptile, which Russell shoots with a wide lens to make it appear all the more monstrous!

 

At a party held by the local laird, D’Ampton, played by a voice-cracking Hugh Grant, Angus learns of the local legend of the D’Ampton Worm, to which virgins were sacrificed back in the day! Ha ha, there’s even a song about it performed in the sweaty Celtic rock style! Meanwhile a rich lady called Lady Sylvia, played marvellously by Amanda Donohoe from Starship Troopers 3, returns to her mansion and begins putting the bite on people, starting with an unfortunate boy scout! Ha ha, it seems she’s nearly as reptilian as The Reptile herself! Angus, D’Ampton, and the Trent sisters form a team to try and solve all the mysteries, like what happened to Trent mère and père, is the worm legend for real, who stole the skull, and what’s up with this weirdo Lady Sylvia?

 

It all comes to a climax with the big worm, Lady Sylvia naked in blue body makeup, one Trent sister hanging over a pit in her underwear and another chained to a wall, and Angus sporting a kilt and producing first a mongoose from his sporran, and later a hand grenade! Ha ha, the theatrical audience I saw the picture with loved all this stuff, and laughed and hooted with great appreciation! (One of the biggest laughs came in the opening credits with the reveal of the cinematographer’s name, Dick Bush! Ha ha, talented guy – he shot Sorcerer, or at least part of it, and Phase IV too – but I guess he got some ribbing at school!)

 

But the simple fact is that I like this movie! Ha ha, I’m very fond of it indeed! I like the overemphatic musical cues and the frequent use of wide lenses and the touches of wacky gore and the sometimes very goofy acting! Donohoe’s performance in particular is of note – ha ha, she really goes for it, and does a fantastic job! Russell’s tongue is jammed so firmly in his cheek that there might have been bleeding, and there’s a playfulness that most of the cast were in on as well! He maybe tries a little too hard with the hallucination sequences, which have an unfortunate video-y look to them, but they’re a pretty essential part of this eccentric enterprise!

 

To some viewers, or maybe to most, I suppose it’s all just stupid and silly; and maybe the real worm creature doesn’t look much less fake than the pantomime one seen in the party sequence; and maybe it seems like a parody of a Hammer film, which were parodies of themselves before Hammer stopped making films anyway, and is therefore redundant! I reject all this because the movie is quite simply plenty of fun! Sure, maybe they spend a little too much time loitering in that big cave, but you have to admit, the cave is pretty picturesque! And you can reasonably accuse the movie of not making sense, of being deliberately goofy, of failing to satisfy! I understand most of these criticisms, but I nevertheless give The Lair of the White Worm three games of Snakes & Ladders!

Burl reviews The Abominable Dr. Phibes! (1971)

 

At the playing of the organ, it’s Burl, here to review a popular curiosity of the Seventies! It’s a little of Vincent Price’s wonderful egg magic, and he speaks here without moving his mouth just as when he narrated The Devil’s Triangle! Of course we also know Price from his later roles, such as we find in Dead Heat and Edward Scissorhands, and we know him from his work on the AIP Poe films, and from yet earlier works like Laura and The Baron of Arizona! But this is a taste of his early-70s stuff, and of course it could only be The Abominable Dr. Phibes!

 

I saw plenty of stills from this movie before ever seeing the movie itself, because it had come out not long before a rush of picture-book histories of horror movies were published, and they all used images from it and its sequel, Dr. Phibes Rises Again! And why not? They’re well-shot movies with elaborate and unusual sets and plenty of crazy and bloody goings-on to depict, and if the truth be told, the visual delights with which the picture is well salted, along with of course the outré murders and limited but still delightful Price performance, count as the movie’s main virtues!

 

It’s a revenge story, even if the motive doesn’t make much sense! As the narrative commences the murders have already begun, and in fact we join a crime in progress as a man in bed is shredded by bats loosed into his bedroom! Ha ha, it seems that we’re located in London in the year 1925, and general purpose genius Dr. Anton Phibes, with the help of his beautiful but mute and mysterious assistant Vulnavia, is taking out the entire surgical team he holds responsible for his wife’s death on the operating table, one by one, with killings inspired by curses in the Old Testament!

 

On his trail are the dogsbodies of Scotland Yard, represented by a blockheaded policeman named Trout, played by Peter Jeffrey from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen! Ha ha, Trout makes a few leaps of logic that initially give him the appearance of someone with a decent investigative mind, but he’s soon revealed as an incompetent who seems smart only in comparison with his even dimmer superiors! Joseph Cotton from Shadow of a Doubt plays Dr. Vesalius, the leader of the rapidly dwindling surgical team and the obvious final victim, and even he fails to see certain highly evident aspects of the revenge plot coming! And their dimwittedness even reduces the purported genius of Phibes, because we think that after all it wouldn’t take much cleverness to trick this gang of muleheads!

 

Of course it’s the goofy and horrible murders which stand as the film’s main attractions! We get the bat attack, a headsqueeze from a trick frog mask, an exsanguination (neatly bottled as in Exorcist III), rats on a plane, a freezing by snow machine, a highly unlikely brass unicorn impalement, a munching by locusts, and an attempted acid facewash! This is not strictly speaking Old Testament stuff, but we won’t mind that, ha ha! And of course Price is always a treat, but I find his charms muted here since he doesn’t speak in the accepted oral manner, and when we do hear his voice, the Priciness of it is altered by his stilted and mechanical syntax!

 

There are plenty of baffling questions, like why Vulnavia, played by Virginia North from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, is so devoted to Phibes and his plot! Is she even human, or is she one of the clockwork creations Phibes has playing music in his lair? (Vulnavia is always playing music too, so maybe that’s the giveaway!) And why does Phibes blame the surgeons so thoroughly for his wife’s death? Being so completely unaware of the risks of any surgery in the 1920s makes him come off as something of a reactive idiot! And why was a psychiatrist (the frog mask victim) part of the team at all? Just for the “headshrinker” joke I suppose, but that hardly seems worth it!

 

Anyway, the movie quite actively resists any attempt to take it seriously, and as mentioned, it has a number of pleasures you can concentrate on instead! It’s never scary, but it is comic-gruesome, and of course, ha ha, the Price is right! I’m going to give The Abominable Dr. Phibes two brussels sprouts!

Burl reviews No Time to Die! (2021)

 

With a creak of ancient bones, it’s Burl, here to review the newest James Bond adventure featuring an actor nearly as old as Roger Moore was in his last 007 show, A View To A Kill! Of course the actor I’m talking about is Daniel Craig, well-known for providing the villain’s voice in The Adventures of Tintin, and though he is getting a bit long in the tooth - ha ha, he’s older than me, for gosh sakes! - he’s still a formidable presence and looks decent in formal wear! But it’s probably a good thing that this picture, No Time to Die, is his last outing as the double-naught spy!

In fact he’s already there as the picture begins - happily retired from the spy game, or so he thinks! Ha ha, he’s on perpetual vacation with Dr. Madeline Swann from the previous picture, Spectre, again played by Léa Seydoux from Midnight in Paris and The Grand Budapest Hotel! But an apparent betrayal ends in a car chase and a melancholy parting by train, and will Bond ever learn to love and trust again? Ha ha, persistent musical and dialogue quotes from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service strewn throughout the picture would seem to make this a doomed prospect!

Various events transpire (the picture run 163 minutes, so there’s plenty of time for events to transpire!) which lead to Bond taking up his old job again! There’s a new 007 in MI6’s employ though, a lady in fact, who might be present as a paving of the way for an all-new iteration of the superspy, but they don’t give her all that much to do, nor is she provided with the kind of charisma and hard focus that would have left us with the impression that she was taking up the mantle for future Eon productions! Oh well!

Anyway, the usual gang is still there: M, played by Ralph Fiennes from Spider and Strange Days; Ben Whishaw, the voice of Paddington, as a now less pimply Q; Jeffrey Wright from Only Lovers Left Alive as Felix Leiter; and there’s even a scene for Blofeld, still essayed by Christoph Waltz from Django Unchained! Altogether there’s the feel of a classic rock band at work, reformed in 2021 to play the old hits with some new compositions salted in for the audience to fidget to! But of course it’s the old hits everyone wants to hear, ha ha!

We get a nice scene set in Cuba with a delightful, high-kicking junior agent played by Ana de Armas from Knives Out, and also a scene at a S.P.E.C.T.R.E. party that seems borrowed from toxin-based pictures like Getting Even! Ha ha! Of course there was no end to the borrowing from Bond pictures by Getting Even, so I guess that’s fair enough! And then the whole thing wraps up on the bad guy’s private island, which is nice because we haven’t seen a bad guy with his own private island since maybe The Man with the Golden Gun! (Oh, ha ha, I’m wrong - I think the glooper-faced fellow in Skyfall had his own island, but the climax of the picture wasn’t set there!)

One distinct improvement over Spectre is that, when we get an establishing shot featuring the Tower Bridge, the River Thames, the London Eye, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, they no longer feel it necessary to superimpose the label “London!” Ha ha, thanks for trusting us to recognize the city on our own, filmmakers! Your faith in us is simply awe-inspiring!

The picture looks terrific, as most of the recent Bond outings have, and the action scenes, when they come, are of a reasonably thrilling calibre! There’s a good bit set at a snowy cabin at the beginning of the picture, but later, as the movie enters its third hour, there’s a feeling that the whole thing might be going on a bit too long! Then there’s an ending that I won’t get into, but that isn’t what you might call the traditional Bond ending! It does give us Louis Armstrong warble-croaking “We Have All the Time in the World,” so it’s far from a complete loss!

It tries mightily to be something more than a routine spy adventure and it halfway succeeds! The bad guy’s plan is very rote and not explained very well, and he himself is something of a wet sandwich! The tormented romance between Bond and Swann didn’t affect me in the way the filmmakers clearly hoped it would - maybe I just don’t recall the ins and outs of Spectre clearly enough for that! I went through half the picture thinking she was Blofeld’s daughter, only to realize that she was actually his psychiatrist, which, as the sometime girlfriend of her patient’s arch-enemy, must violate some little-invoked clause in the Book of Headshrinker’s Ethics! Ha ha! In any case, it was a night out at the movies, and no mistake! Since I don’t seem to have picked up any covid in the course of going to see it, I give No Time to Die two slinkys!

Burl reviews It! (1967)

 

Addressing you from the Heights, it’s Burl, here with a tale of wild golemnry! Ha ha, surely you all know of the golem, that man of clay created to defend the Jewish peoples in the village! You’ve heard the legend, seen his adventures in that old cinema classic by Paul Wegener, The Golem, How He Came In To the World, probably even heard him referred to as “the Jewish Frankenstein!” Well sirs and madams, here we have a golem picture that has nothing to do with any of that, and it’s simply called It!

Ha ha, we begin with a warehouse fire in London, and this particular warehouse is filled with the overflow items from the local antiquities museum! The curator and his assistant, Pimm, played by Roddy McDowell from Fright Night and Heads, don’t seem too upset by it, but they’re fascinated to find one statue standing unscathed in the midst of the smoking rubble! It’s a humanoid thing that looks like a twisted old root with arms and legs, and Pimm and his boss identify it as a golem statue! But when Pimm turns his back for just a moment, the curator is fatally bonked by objet or objets d’art unknown! Did the statue perpetrate this senseless murder?

 

Ha ha, yes, of course he did! But Pimm so far has only suspicions, so the golem is trucked back to the museum, where, for the fussy little assistant curator, there is intrigue both of the workplace and romantic varieties! Pimm’s ambition is to become the head curator, of course, and he also has (rather unlikely) designs on Ellen, the dollybird daughter of the former curator! Ellen is played by Jill Haworth from Tower of Evil, and of course Pimm’s interest in her is not reciprocated - ha ha, that she addresses him only as “Pimm” the whole time ought to make this obvious!

But, as the revelation that he keeps his dead mother’s body in his flat, Psycho-style, makes abundantly clear, Pimm is no ordinary chap! The revelation not presented as much of a shocker though, and the dead mum has no bearing on the plot, so I suppose it's less a revelation than a quirky character note! Pimm’s twin ambitions are thwarted: career-wise by a nasty new curator played by Aubrey Richards from Endless Night, and romantically, not so much by Ellen’s indifference, which Pimm is too thick to register, but by the arrival of a manly American museumsman called Perkins, played by Paul Maxwell from The Haunting and Aliens and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade!

In the midst of all this, Pimm discovers that the conehead of clay can be made operational by the simple application of a certain scroll, and that it will do his bidding! He has the golem put a bonking on the new curator and gets it to destroy a bridge to impress Ellen! Eventually, after some inner struggles with the ethics of it all, Pimm has the statue kidnap the object of his affections and take her to a country manor house! Perkins and two or three army guys camp themselves outside and shoot at the golem a few times, but, as the poster says and also a rabbi who pops in as the only actual Hebrew representative in the picture, nothing can destroy this crazy thing! The officials settle on the only sensible solution: drop a nuclear bomb on the manor house! Ha ha!

The picture seems like something Hammer put in the oven at the Bray Studios commissary and baked only halfway, and in this it reminded me very much of The Vulture! The script is an empty thing, providing no interesting backstory or cultural detail to the golem, and no dimension at all to the characters! McDowall, an actor I like, is in full fussbudget mode here, which I must say is not my favourite mode! The picture manages no affrights and is pretty silly overall, but it's a curio, and a curio has value to a reviewer like ol’ Burl! Plus the golem suit is good! So, ha ha, I give It! one and a half uneven umbrellas!

Burl reviews Murder By Decree! (1978)

 

By the powers of deduction, it’s Burl, here to review a Sherlock Holmes tale from the director of Porky’s and Black Christmas! Ha ha, yes, Bob Clark, who made all genres of picture in his career before regrettably coming to a violent end on the Pacific Coast Highway thanks to a loathsome drunken driver, here tries his hand at a star-studded detective picture which pits the famous consulting sleuth against the terrors of Jack the Ripper! Ha ha, I suppose it’s not unlike playing H.G. Wells against the Ripper, as we saw in Time After Time, but this picture, Murder By Decree, though its hero be fictional, tries to ground its Ripper theories in as much fact as it can muster!

Like Time After Time, the picture begins with a ripper murder, and then we enter into the cozy buddy-buddy world of Holmes and his pal Watson! These worthies are played by Christopher Plummer from The Silent Partner, Dreamscape and Dragnet, in all of which he was a bad guy, so it’s nice to see him on the side of good here; and James Mason from such varied productions as Bigger Than Life, North By Northwest, and Evil Under the Sun! We meet the duo as they’re out at the opera defusing an anti-monarchist rabble, and soon enough they’re back in the velvet confines of 221 B Baker Street, mulling over the ripper murders at the behest of a group of anarchists!

The case proceeds from there through a gaslit, heavily fog filtered mystery that includes the royals and the anarchists, along with psychics, madwomen, and eventually to the very heart of the power structure! Ha ha, I won’t get into all the details about the whys and whos and wherefores, first because it’s a mystery you should unravel for yourself, and second because I didn’t understand it! Or if I did, I’ve become foggy on the details in the days since I watched it, and having seen it several times before in its incessant broadcasts on Canadian TV through the 80s didn’t help at all!

They say that the Ripper theories espoused here are among the most plausible, however! I myself haven’t done the research, but I wouldn’t put anything past a royal! But verisimilitude aside, the big draw with this picture is the cast, which includes not just the champs playing our lead investigative duo, but such goodniks as David Hemmings of Juggernaut fame in the role of Inspector Foxborough; Donald Sutherland from Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Heaven Help Us as the psychic; Geneviève Bujold from Isabel and Dead Ringers as the madwoman; John Gielgud from Arthur as the Prime Minister; plus the likes of Susan Clark from Night Moves; Anthony Quayle from The Guns of Navarone; Frank Finlay from Lifeforce; and Tedde Moore from Rip-Off! Ha ha, whoa baby!

Clark directs it all in the acceptably workmanlike fashion you might expect and even hope for, and the cinematography is attractive, but fuzzier than a London pea-souper! There are lots of shots of a nicely-built model of the Victorian London skyline, and plenty of extreme close-ups of the Ripper’s bloodshot madman eyeball! And, as byzantine as the plot gets, in the end it all comes to a rather frustrating naught - frustrating for Holmes and a little bit for the viewer as well! It’s got plenty of atmosphere along the way, however, and the period is well-evoked, and it’s just a pleasure to watch that cast! I give Murder By Decree two and a half deadly scarves!

Burl reviews Get Carter! (1971)

 

‘Avin’ a butcher’s, it’s Burl, here with a tale of Blighty gangsterism and blood vengeance! Yes, it’s that classic tale of the wide boys and hoodlum kerfufflement, British cinema’s own Get Carter! It’s a hard-edged limey classic, and I suppose many a junior racketeer latched on to this picture as the epitome of jolly old toughness and crikey cool!

Michael Caine from The Island and Jaws: The Revenge essays the role of Jack Carter, a London-based hard case who hears tell that his brother has been killed up in Newcastle! It was apparently an accident, but Jack doesn’t believe that for a second, ha ha, even though his brother wasn’t himself a gangster and would logically have no reason to get himself killed in a mob hit situation! In any case, Jack wants revenge and he’ll get it by crimble or by crouton!

Just about as soon as Carter gets off the train he tracks down a whole marvelous gallery of British hatchetfaces like Ian Hendry from Theatre of Blood, Tony Beckley from The Lost Continent, and the silky-toned playwright John Osborne as the pornographer Cyril! All of these fellas are gangsters, of course, and are all involved to one degree or another in the killing of Carter’s sibling! And Carter offers no quarter to these nogoodniks, pushing them into ponds or tossing them from parking structures as he sees fit! Ha ha, the climax involves a massive beachside dumping machine of the type one associates with 1970s England whether one knew they existed or not!

Britt Ekland from The Man with the Golden Gun is Carter’s ladyfriend back in the big city, with whom he makes sweet telephone love, which gets awkwardly halted - ha ha, loquerus interruptus! And then later, Carter plays a game of bohankie with his lumpy landlady, and that too gets interrupted when hoodlums bust in! Carter must grab his trusty shotgun and see them off in his birthday suit, ha ha! Carter finds the gun in the first act and carries it around all through the final act, but he never fires it, which may seem in contradiction to Chekhovian convention! Except that he does eventually use it as a bludgeon, ha ha, and I think that must count!

There’s lots to admire in this brutal and bleak picture, not least the symphony of great voices on display! Aside from Caine, there’s Hendry and Osborne in particular, and just about everyone is fun to listen to on some level! The atmosphere is exactly that I recall from my early trips to England, which weren’t until the mid-80s, but things don’t seem to have changed much! The photography from Wolfgang Suschitzky is top notch, and Mike Hodges directs it very assuredly for a chap making his first feature! There’s a lot of appealing craft on display, but it’s not always a pleasant watch, nor does it amount to all that much in the end! Still, plenty to admire here, and so I give Get Carter three appalled neighbours!

Burl reviews Evil Under the Sun! (1982)

 

With a drawing room hello it’s Burl, here with a good old-fashioned murder mystery to tell you about today! Like The Mirror Crack’d it’s an Agatha Christie story, as was the fashion in the 70s and early 80s; until Cannon took a hand in killing the loosely-knit franchise, just as they strangled others aborning around the same time, Masters of the Universe or what have you! But unlike The Mirror Crack’d, today's picture, Evil Under the Sun has as its sleuth the Belgian moustache wax enthusiast Hercule Poirot, not old Miss Marple!

Of course Poirot is played by Peter Ustinov from Logan’s Run, who had embodied the Fussles from Brussels before in Death on the Nile, and would again in Cannon’s Appointment With Death! Here he appears in a Mediterranean spa, on a sort of a busman’s holiday it seems, and in the company of, by and large, highly objectionable people! Ha ha!  Colin Blakely from The Pink Panther Strikes Again is Sir Horace Blatt, who has entreated the Belgian flatfoot to help him recover a diamond!

The location is a sun-drenched hotel run by Maggie Smith, and other guests include Roddy McDowell from Fright Night and Doin’ Time on Planet Earth as a sailor-hatted gossipmonger; Jane Birkin from Beethoven’s Nephew and Nicholas Clay from Excalibur as a seemingly ill-matched couple; an odder couple still are Sylvia Miles from The Sentinel and James Mason from ‘Salem’s Lot, playing a pair of Broadway producers! A hail-fellow-well-met sort of a chappie is played by Denis Quilley from The Black Windmill, and he’s married to the inconstant, bitchy Arlena, well-enacted by Diana Rigg from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service!

Everyone but Poirot has a reason to hate Arlena, and the only surprise about her murder is that it takes so long to happen! But everything that occurs while we’re waiting around for her to fall victim to one or more or all of the other characters isn’t boring, though some of it is a bit repetitive! Ha ha, I have to admit that I was kept enthralled simply by the location - it’s very cold where I am right now, and a little Mediterranean sun goes a long way! (I think the island is supposed to be in the Adriatic, but they shot the picture much farther West, on Majorca!)

Of course we’re all just waiting for the moment when Poirot gathers all the characters in the siting room and explains in his usual self-celebratory terms how he solved the mystery, and we the audience get flashbacks to all the clues we missed! It’s done perfectly well here, though the whole sequence seems a bit mechanical - possibly from our over-familiarity with such detective-driven climaxes! But Usinov is good, as always, and this may be the place to mention that I actually got the chance to meet him once, and needless to say he was delightful!

The movie is directed by Guy Hamilton, who had just made The Mirror Crack’d, and would go on to Remo Williams after this! Ha ha, he’d also done several Bond pictures, of course - The Man With the Golden Gun, Live and Let Die, so forth; and he evidently loved the Majorca location so much that he retired there and, in 2016, died there! Most of the actors had appeared in murder mysteries before, Christie or otherwise: Ustinov, of course, but also Blakely and Quilley in Murder on the Orient Express, Mason in The Last of Sheila, Smith in Murder By Death, and Birkin in Death on the Nile!

So there was plenty of mystery experience on this set, and the result is a film of absolute competence, but little excitement! It’s never quite thrilling while it’s on, but it’s consistently exactly what you hope for when you choose this as the picture you want to watch! So that’s something, certainly - or at the very least, it’s not nothing! It gave me a nice break from the winter chill, and so I give Evil Under the Sun two disappearing eggs!

Burl reviews The Man From Toronto! (1933)

 

I say and what ho and bosh, it’s Burl! Ha ha, yes, I’m here to review a veddy British picture, which is veddy veddy British, perhaps even veddy veddy veddy British, despite being entitled The Man From Toronto! Indeed, however, the colonies are well represented, as the titular Man is not only Canadian, but is played by South African-born Ian Hunter, whom we know from Strange Cargo!

The Man From Toronto’s real name is Fergus Wimbush, so naturally I found myself thinking of him exclusively as The Man From Toronto instead of by his name! Now, I may have a bit of trouble explaining the situation that kicks everything off, but I’ll try! Ha ha, somewhere in England a young widow, Leila, is left a quarter of a million pounds, but she only gets the money on the condition that she marries a certain Man From Toronto! The Man From Toronto is eligible for the same inheritance, but he must marry Leila, who, incidentally, is played by the cute and charming Jessie Matthews, known for her portrayal of Celia Newbiggin in Midshipmaid Gob!

Neither she nor The Man From Toronto are happy about this weird legacy that requires them each to marry a stranger! Leila complains about it endlessly to Mr. Bunston, her solicitor who is also her uncle, or some such thing, and who is the most I Say What What kind of a fellow you could ever hope to see on a motion picture screen! The Man From Toronto travels from Toronto to England despite his disgruntlement and prepares to install himself in a cottage owned by the redoubtable and proudly homely Mrs. Hubbard! Taking advantage of the fact that The Man From Toronto doesn’t know what she looks like, Leila reinvents herself as a parlour maid called Perkins so that she can observe The Man From Toronto before considering marriage!

So begins a sitcom-style comedy of misunderstanding that stretches well beyond the breaking point, and engulfs both Mr. Bunston and Mrs. Hubbard in the web of deception and confusion! Because he doesn’t want to be cornered into explaining to The Man From Toronto what’s going on or revealing Perkins’s true identity, old Bunston is forced into endless, punishing countryside strolls, perambulations he refers to as “these infernal walks,” and which seem nearly to kill him! Ha ha, he’s chased by cows into a pub, where he discovers he doesn’t hate beer quite so much as he thought he did, nor darts; and then he gets sauced on pints, makes a bunch of new mates, and goes home to slap his pudding! Ha ha!

As Bunston, Frederick Kerr, whom we may recall from Frankenstein, gives a delightful performance filled with well-timed little laughs and “bah’s”, and features a perfect delivery of the line “She’s not a bad looking woman, if you don’t look at her!” And Bunston sure does a lot of phumphering around! Oh, ha ha, he can phumpher all right! I’ve rarely seen such phumphering! If there was an Oscar for phumpering, Frederick Kerr would have won it in a walk! Sadly, however, this was his last role, and afterward he phumphered no longer!

The picture also offers an early role from George Zucco of Dr. Renault’s Secret fame, and a brief cameo from the kind of band that ends all its numbers with “Shave and a Haircut!” It’s delightful and frustrating in equal measure, and crudely made in that early British programmer way, but charming and summery and every bit as villagy as A Canterbury Tale! It shyly approaches the idea of addressing class issues, but aside from shots of “Perkins” looking overworked, it doesn’t much stress the challenges a rich layabout would face doing manual labour all day! Still, it’s a fun little number, and I give The Man From Toronto two old fashioned speedometers, as seen in close up during a crazy car chase scene! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Morgan - A Suitable Case For Treatment! (1966)

Hello friends and sweet draculas, it’s Burl, here to review a picture from the Great Swingin’ 60s in Old London Town! Ha ha, I took a course once in postwar British film, and we saw some Ealing works and pictures like The Fallen Idol, but then we moved into the Dishpan Hands Era, which is to say Britain’s own New Wave, and were treated to gritty slices of life like Room at the Top, Billy Liar, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and so forth! But we never got to this movie, Morgan - A Suitable Case For Treatment, which was made by Karel Reisz, the same director who brought us Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and, later, the oddball Everybody Wins!

Morgan is the tale of Morgan, a painter who hasn’t painted anything in a long time, and has instead been going crazy! David Warner from Nightwing, The Island, The Man With Two Brains, and many others, plays the part, and does it with at least some of the sensitivity a movie about mental illness would seem to demand; but remember, ha ha, this is 1966, so at some moments Morgan’s crazy behavior is simply there for us to laugh at! His frequent daydreams of stock animal images sit somewhere in between!

This was Warner’s big break, and he delivers a roller-coaster performance that renders Morgan a fully dimensional human while still extremely annoying! Vanessa Redgrave from Mission: Impossible, The Devils, and Blow-Up, plays his exasperated ex-wife Leonie, who at times displays what I can only describe as a superhuman tolerance for Morgan’s antics! Robert Stephens from The Asphyx and The Shout plays Leonie’s new boyfriend, Charles Napier, who was also Morgan’s gallerist and friend, once upon a time! But now Morgan is always busting into his office and threatening to kill him, or simply scrawling “Charles Napier Go Home” on the back of a painting!

Ha ha, that delighted me when I saw it, because I at first assumed he was referring to Charles Napier the actor, who hadn’t even entered the Russ Meyer stage of his career at the time of this movie, and was still a long way off from Jonathan Demme and Rambo! Irene Handl from Two-Way Stretch and The Wrong Box plays Morgan’s ardently Marxist mother - ha ha, a character type I frankly adore! You’ll no doubt recall the similar Aunt Sonya character in The Big Fix! She has Morgan take her to Marx’s grave on his birthday, and despairs of his union with Leonie and her very bourgeois family! Morgan, too, is a Communist, and really, that‘s one of his most admirable traits! He’s got emotional problems and is frequently in distress, but he’s also extremely selfish!

The film follows Morgan’s efforts to win his ex back, and though he comes close to it at least once, Leoni ultimately marries Charles Napier (ha ha!) instead, and this is what puts Morgan farther ‘round the bend than he’s ever been before and lands him, in fact, in the bughouse! But you still come away convinced that you’ve seen a happy ending!

Ha ha, it’s a pretty enjoyable picture, with nice black and white imagery, jumpy New Wave-y editing, solid performances, and some laffs! Morgan himself never became an appealing presence, but I could hardly doubt the sincerity of his pain! That he kept it together long enough to get married is astonishing, and the gorilla suit finale feels inevitable! Ha ha, I give Morgan - A Suitable Case For Treatment three big knit jumpers!

Burl reviews Link! (1986)

Chee-chee-chee it’s Burl, here with a bit of monkey business for you! Ha ha, actually it’s ape business today, and what I’m talking about more specifically is a picture from Richard Franklin, who directed Psycho II and Cloak & Dagger, and then followed these works up with another Hitchcock-inspired photoplay called Link!

In a story that seems like a dream you might have after reading the Thornfield Hall segment of Jane Eyre and one of the chimp books by Jane Goodall on the same night, we have yet another Jane, an American anthropology student in the UK played by Elizabeth Shue from The Karate Kid, who goes to work for monkey professor Terence Stamp, whom we well remember from Alien Nation, at his large Cornish seaside mansion! Stamp also employs a trio of apes: two chimps, Imp and Voodoo, and a sour old orangutan in a morning coat called Link! I suspect Link is meant to be a chimp too, but he’s all orang, baby!

Stamp’s relationship with the simians is well drawn, but unfortunately this means our neo-Rochester is doomed to be their victim! After he mysteriously disappears, amid a lot of frenzied hooting and screeching from the apes, and the body of Voodoo is found, Jane very slowly comes to realize that all is not right, and she must choose to face either the wild dogs that roam the surrounding moors, or the increasingly demented Link!

The slow pace of this realization comes thanks to the Shue character being about as clever as a sack of wet mice! And, just to invoke yet another famous Jane, Link begins to see himself as her Tarzan, and he saves her from the dogs and from one of the professor’s more unsavory acquaintances! But all ape really breaks loose, in a reserved, Cornish sort of a way, when Jane’s boyfriend and his two doltish buddies come driving up to find her, and on arrival they suffer the full-throated wrath of the monkeybutler! Ha ha!

Shue is not a bad actor, but here she radiates all the wit and intelligence of a size nine shoe and from start to finish wears an expression suggesting somebody just asked her to explain relativity! Ha ha, her character’s greatest ambition, she earnestly explains, is to run an island preserve where chimps and badgers might run free! Stamp is good though, giving the performance of an actor who knows what’s going on, and the orangutan who plays Link is excellent, outmatching Shue in every scene they share!

This cocktail of Brontë, Goodall, Hitchcock and Poe is an odd cup-a-soup to be sure, but I retain a fondness for it! Ha ha, I saw it in the theatre with some pals, maybe that’s why! I also appreciate that Franklin was trying something eccentric, and knew it could easily tip into goofy, so sort of leaned in to that while still trying his best to make a straight suspense picture! And there are a few bad special effects, like Link’s final cigar-in-hand death plummet, and it could have used some extra pep, a little tomato paste, and a better coda; but on the other hand they did a decent job of turning Scotland into Cornwall, ha ha! I give Link two and a half impromptu mail slot widenings!