Burl reviews Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves! (2023)

 

With a rousing jig and a hoy-te-toy and a merry, merry click of the heels, it’s Burl, here with a review of the latest in theatre hits! At least I assume it’s a hit – ha ha, I don’t keep track of the box office figures, so for all I know it might be a big old flopparoo! But the people in the theatre seemed to like it, so I’m going to guess it’s doing well! Incredibly enough it’s not a sequel, but it is an adaptation of a recognized intellectual property and I guess that’s what counts for daring originality in today’s marketplace! Of course I’m talking about Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves!

Chris Pine from Star Trek Into Darkness plays the role of the roguish, not too bright, charming-scamp hero, Edgin or Ederin or something; but like the other characters do, we’ll just call him Ed! He’s in a jail with his barbarian-lady chum, and they live in a land more fantastical than, say, the world of Ladyhawke, but maybe not quite so much as The Lord of the Rings! Michelle Rodriguez from Machete is the tough gal-pal, who pines not for Pine, but for a three-footer who dwells in a glen in the forest! They escape their prison by means of a birdman even though they were about to get paroled, and immediately begin a series of enfiladed quests with their buddies!

And who are these buddies? Well, there’s a young wizard without, yet, the self-confidence required to master his trade, and a druid lady played by Beverly from It! They also meet a supernaturally benevolent paladin who joins them for a couple of the interior sub-quests and is a big help when it comes time to battle a porky dragon! The antagonist is none other than Hugh Grant from The Lair of the White Worm, a scoundrel of a rapscallion of a nogoodnik, formerly a chum himself, who betrays our heroes and becomes a rich mayor or something, claiming Ed’s daughter as his own, dwelling in a castle, and employing an evil witch to help with his schemes!

I didn’t expect much from this one, I have to say! I was never a D&D player, though I sat in on a game once! My son is playing it every Sunday with some pals though, and I took him and one of the chums to see it at the theatre, where the exhibitors occasionally busted out some old-style showmanship by projecting extra edges to the frame along the side walls! The effect was surprisingly un-annoying and even a little bit immersive! Anyway, I thought I was just being a decent dad by taking some kids to a movie, but darned if I didn’t enjoy myself thoroughly!

It’s no Conan the Barbarian, but it’s got some laffs along with the usual not-quite-Peter-Jackson level fantasy action scenes! Hugh Grant, whose stammery smarm was always ready and able to be put in the service of evil, gives good value here, and Pine, playing a hero halfway between Han Solo and Jack Burton, does exactly what the picture needs him to do with unshaven aplomb! It’s all nonsense of course, and nonsense with an airy, arbitrary feeling to it; and the story and structure sure could have been a lot stronger; and I for one would have liked more of the grotesque creatures - sucking worms and so forth - that I remember from the monster manuals; but it hits some emotional beats with surprising solidity and integrates the comedy with the fantasy in fine fashion!

Even though it’s machine-tooled to be the first of a series (which they’d better hurry up on before Pine ages out of his scalawag years), it’s nevertheless still at this moment a standalone film and not a sequel, remake, reboot, or requindle; and although it’s derived from an age-old and highly recognizable IP, it’s not one with which I was overly familiar; and the effect of all this on me, and of attending with a pair of 11 year-olds, was the feeling of an old-fashioned 80s-era outing to the movies, which feeling probably brought me more pleasure than the movie itself! But the film is amusing too, and so in spite of its cumbersome title, I’m going to give Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves two and a half gelatinous cubes!

Burl reviews Troll! (2022)

Höch now, it’s Burl, here to review sweet monster madness! Yes, we’re in giant creature territory here, but not in Japan this time, nor even in Korea or North Carolina! No, this monster hails from the northern reaches of our world, up in Norway! Of course we’ve had monster troubles up there before – ha ha, we all remember Trollhunter! Well, here’s a picture in the same vein, and this one is simply called Troll!

It’s not that Empire Picture from 1986 called Troll, the one where Sonny Bono turns into a jungle! No, in fact it's a pretty basic giant monster picture, garnished with a specific mythology and featuring a more human-like monster than usual! The movie reminded me of War of the Gargantuas if it had just the more sympathetic brown gargantua and not the evil green one! Still, the giant troll in this one does, like his grouch-coloured gargantua forbear, munch down on a poor unfortunate guy, eating him up just like a junior mint!

Anyway, the story is pretty simple! After a prelude showing a girl and her father climbing to the top of a Norwegian mountain and talking about the legend of the trolls, we skip to twenty years later, the present day, by which time the girl, Nora Tidemann, now played by Ine Marie Wilmann, has become a professor of paleontology working with The Rocketeer himself, Billy Campbell! When a mountain-drilling project being protested by environmentalists suffers a strange disaster which kills drillers and protesters alike, the Norwegian government puts together a task force which includes the initially baffled Nora!

Turns out the legends her father always talked about are true, and a hundred-meter troll has awakened in a grumpy mood and is wreaking destruction across the countryside! He’s not a destruction-for-the-sake-of-it sort of a monster, but he sure doesn’t shy away from causing carnage either! He’ll kick a house down without thinking twice if the house is in his way, and his melancholy, bulbous-nosed expression stays constant! But he does start to get irritated when they start shooting at him with rockets, ha ha! And who can blame him!

Most of the time is spent with the humans, though, following Nora as she's recruited by the prime minister to help out after an anthropoid form has been spotted in the billowing dust of a panic video! She’s paired up with a nerdy assistant who’s always telling people about his crazy book ideas, then is seconded to a military unit, and it looks like a pace-crippling romantic triangle might develop between Nora, the nerd, and a handsome military man, Kaptein Kristoffer; but thankfully that never happens! The gang visits Nora’s old dad, who’s now a crazed hermit because no one would listen to his troll theories, and there’s some tension between daughter and dad that needs to be worked out!

Meanwhile the troll attacks, or rather strides through, Lillehammer, where pesky helicopters are ringing church bells at him! Though annoyed he takes a moment to save a father and son from certain doom, and this is where everyone, characters and audience alike, realizes the troll’s primary goal actually isn’t to flatten (or occasionally eat) humans! But he doesn’t mind doing it either, and it soon appears that what he really wants is to stomp Oslo! It turns out he’s got his own agenda beyond that, but I’m not saying Oslo also doesn’t get a little stomped on in the process!

In many ways this is a Scandinavianized update of King Kong Lives, ha ha, but luckily they left out most of the stupid stuff! It’s not much more than a standard kaiju, complete with a “let nature be” message, and it has a few monster-less longeurs, but it’s never boring and pretty consistently entertaining! Plus the trick effects are solid, the troll is a sympathetic figure, and the whole thing is played at just the right pitch – not too self-serious, not too self-aware! Sure the characters aren’t much to write home about, some stuff doesn’t make sense, and a few threads are left dangling, but if you like a giant monster movie this ought to scratch the itch! I give Troll two and a half vintage Chevy pick-ups!  

Burl reviews King Kong Lives! (1986)

With a mighty roar and a monkey two-step, it’s Burl comin’ at you with sweet monster madness! Ha ha, today I’m reviewing a movie I dutifully went to see back around Christmas of 1986, because in theory there’s nothing wrong with going to see monsters and destruction on the big screen! In theory! And that theory gets a bit of a stress test when the movie in question is King Kong Lives! Ha ha!

Yes, this is the work of Dino De Laurentiis, who wanted to make a direct follow-up to his big hit from a decade before, the 1976 King Kong! In fact he starts this with footage from the ’76 picture, showing the mighty ape tumbling from the World Trade Centre – but, ha ha, turns out that didn’t kill him! No, he’s been on life support in a big warehouse, and now Dr. Amy Franklin, the world’s leading expert in giant ape transplants, played by Linda Hamilton from Dante’s Peak, is ready to fit Kong with the biggest Jarvik-7 ever seen! Ha ha, let's call it the Jarvik-7000! The problem is, to survive the procedure Kong needs a blood transfusion, but who could possibly be the donor?

Luckily at that moment a generic adventurer played by Brian Kerwin from Hometown U.S.A., sporting the generic adventurer name of Hank Mitchell and wearing the requisite generic adventurer hat, is in the wilds of Borneo running from a giant hand! The hand is attached (allegedly) to a Lady Kong, and in short order she’s been captured and shipped to a warehouse nearby to Kong's, and then Kong gets his blood transfusion and his artificial heart, which is inserted somehow without leaving a visible scar on Kong's mighty chest! Of course the apes can sniff each other out over vast distances, and once they're aware of each other, nothing, not chains, not guns, not front-end loaders, can keep these aspiring lovebirds from each other’s company!

They escape into the hills, and hard-case Colonel Nevitt, played by John Ashton from Some Kind of Wonderful, is sent after them! Of course Dr. Amy and Hank Mitchell team up in an effort to find them first and prevent the trigger-happy armyman from harming the super-simians! The apes, meanwhile, can’t keep their paws off one another, and soon it's a case of sweet monkey love, ha ha! There’s concurrent human bohankie occurring nearby in the sleeping bag occupied by Dr. Amy and Hank Mitchell! But soon the army comes with their tanks and helicopters and knockout gasses, and Lady Kong is captured!

Kong himself takes to the hills, where he broods and plans and eats gators and is briefly trapped by rednecks out for a wild time! He escapes their trap and takes a bloody vengeance upon the hillbillies, breaking one of them clean in half and popping another in his mouth like a junior mint! He then busts his ladyfriend out of the missile silo they’ve put her in, and of course it turns out she’s pregnant! Ha ha, Kongratulations! After a final climactic ruction, during which the big guy stomps Col. Nevitt into the loam, Lady Kong gives birth to a gorilla, and the giant ape life cycle continues!

Kong himself is played by Peter Elliott, who essayed many an ape in pictures like Greystoke and Congo, and here he sports a perpetually bewildered expression thanks to the stiff mechanics of Carlo Rambaldi’s apesuit! But I think he might give the best performance in the picture anyway, ha ha! The rest of the actors seem trapped in some weird limbo where they want to look at once like they’re taking this material seriously, and are also completely aware that it’s ridiculous! In trying to have it both ways they end up delivering bland and lifeless performances, devoid of the ham and the pep this kooky movie requires!

It’s a bad movie, of that there can be no doubt, and a misguided one too, but I’d be lying if I told you it had no entertainment value! There’s some good model work in it, though not all the trick effects are fully up to snuff, ha ha! The emotional stakes are genuine, though – you really do root for the Kongs! By all other cinematic or dramaturgical measures, this is a terrible movie, and even I, who saw it on the big screen at a relatively impressionable age, can’t find much to admire! I give King Kong Lives one and a half hillbilly hunters!

Burl reviews Volunteers! (1985)

 

Good day campers! It’s Burl here with a bit of mostly forgotten 80s comedy that features some of the great stars of that period, ha ha, including such ringers as Tom Hanks from Dragnet and The Money Pit and John Candy, well known from Armed & Dangerous and The Great Outdoors! So how could a comedy movie with this sort of pedigree have been forgotten after only thirty-seven years? Well, mainly because it’s not very funny! And nobody went to see it in the theatre except me I guess, so there you go! The picture’s called Volunteers!

I still remember the experience of going to see it! It came out near the end of the summer (which might also help explain why it didn’t do very well), and just a day or two before I was to start my first day in high school! I recall feeling exactly neutral about it: it didn’t made me laugh, but I still derived some enjoyment from it, thanks mainly to the estimable Mr. Candy; and it mitigated that mild end-of-summer depression, which was the goal!

Well, I watched it again recently and it hasn’t improved much! Candy’s still good though, and it has a few bits I probably understand better now than I did then; and it still somewhat mitigates the anxieties of today’s world, which, ha ha, is the goal! It’s set in 1962, and Hanks plays a toffee-nosed fauntleroy just graduating from Yale and with all the attendant boorish manners thereby accorded; he’s a young man of privilege, a bounder, a snob, and a heavy gambler! He owes a chunk to his bookie, Allan Arbus from Damien: Omen II and The Last Married Couple in America, and if he doesn’t pay, Arbus's henchman, Ji-Tu Cumbuka from Out of Bounds (who had previously menaced Hanks in Bachelor Party, ha ha), will put a terrific pounding on the dinner jacketed lad! His rich dad, the ideally cast George Plimpton from L.A. Story, could help him out, but won’t!

The next thing you know, thanks to his roommate Xander Berkeley from Tapeheads, Hanks, or Lawrence Bourne III I should say, is on a Peace Corps plane overseas in the company of an amiable can-do character called Tom Tuttle from Tacoma, played by Candy of course, and a non-naïve idealist played by Rita Wilson from The Day It Came To Earth! “So this is hell,” moans Bourne! Peace Corps organizer John, played by Tim Thomerson from Zone Troopers, refuses to help send Bourne back, and so off he goes to the little Thai village with Wilson and Candy, where they are to build a bridge, and where the only fellow who can speak English is Gedde Watanabe from Vamp and Gremlins 2, and where in any case they don't want a bridge!

Others do, however: the local Communist soldiers for instance, and of course a drugs warlord played by Ernest Harada from Dreamscape, and a soon-to-be-revealed-as-maniacal Thomerson! Intersecting the story here and there are various characters played by such marvelous utility Asians as Clyde Kusatsu from Gimme an ‘F’, Professor Toru Tanaka from The Running Man, and Harry Yorku from Summer Rental! You’ll notice that none of these folks, as appealing a bunch of screen presences as they are, are even faintly of Thai extraction, but that’s how this movie rolls! After all, ha ha, it was shot in Mexico!

And it’s not terribly good! What it lacks most is pep, comedy pep! Maybe it’s just that Nicholas Meyer is not really a comedy director, though he managed some appealing lightheartedness in Time After Time! (I haven’t seen his other comedy, Company Business, but, ha ha, reports are not good!) Still, Ernst Lubitsch himself would have had trouble wringing comedy out of this script, which seems to put “laffs” about third or fourth down its list of concerns!

Another complaint: the period setting was every bit as convincing as the Thai locations, which is to say not much! The styling, the dialogue, the attitudes: everything seemed slightly off from where it should have been to place us firmly in the Kennedy era! And yet there are enjoyments to be had in the picture, and these, as earlier intimated, come mainly from the gangbusters cast! It’s too bad Candy gets kidnapped and brainwashed by Communists, and therefore drops out of the movie for a large chunk! At any rate, it’s probably not the worst thing either Candy or Hanks were involved with in the 80s, and there are bits and pieces I liked, so I give Volunteers one and a half college fight songs!

Burl reviews Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown! (1977)

 

Good grief, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m here to review an animated picture: one of the few I actually saw in the theatre! Growing up I had a neighbourhood theatre, what Variety used to call a “nabe” before all the nabes closed down! That's a very sad loss to me, and I expect it is to you too! Anyway, I used to go down to my nabe every wek and see whatever was playing, and if it wasn’t some weird Sunn Classics pseudodocumentary, or a genuine motion picture like The Bad News Bears or The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, it was a children’s animation just like today’s picture, Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown!

I remember enjoying it at the time, ha ha, but then I was just a wee tyke and my critical faculties had not yet been fully honed! I’ve watched it again several times over the past five years or so because my son had fallen under the Peanuts spell and so I went and hunted down a VHS copy of it! The Peanuts spell is a perfectly healthy spell so far as I’m concerned, and it was a pleasure to watch the movie again when I initially found the VHS, and an undiminished pleasure to watch it once more the other day!

We were at a wilderness cabin for the screening, and it was a very hot and summery evening, and these are the second most ideal circumstances under which to see this picture, the first most, naturally, being to see it at the nabe when you’re six years old! Ha ha! But however you watch it, the movie remains the story of the Peanuts gang, or selected members thereof, attending a summer camp and engaging in a raft race through an endless variety of landscapes such as you find described in books like Blood Meridian!

Charlie Brown proves himself a blockhead right from the opening moments, after the credits and their bad-but-catchy theme song that is, when he fails to step back on the bus after a rest stop and must travel the rest of the way riding pillion on Snoopy’s chopper, in constant screaming terror for his life! Once there, a group of camp bullies take Charlie Brown to task straight away for his round head, his bizarre name (?), and his pathetically evident need to prove himself! Only Linus cracking his blanket like a whip rescues the hydrocephalic hero from his trouble!

After some camp gags and a few competitive activities which the bullies win by rank underhandedness, the race is under way! Our hero gang divide themselves by gender: Charlie Brown, Linus, Franklin, and Schroeder in one boat; Lucy, Sally, Peppermint Patty and Marcie in another; and of course Snoopy and Woodstock participate in the race too, using their own jury-rigged watercraft! The bullies have a powerboat equipped with radar and sonar and all manner of technology, and they, along with their spike-collared cat, engage in never-ending shenanigans in their monomaniacal effort to win!

Ha ha, I always thought the Peanuts gang were supposed to be six or seven years old, but this race, which takes multiple days and shunts them through an array of biospheres and climates, landscapes of desolation and abundance, through blasting sites, fishing villages, and over waterfalls, would test the mettle of the most cunning raftsman! On top of these hardships, the gang must not only contend with the bullies and their fiendish plots, but Peppermint Patty’s deluded, fascistic idea of how democracy works, and how it must be constantly applied by secret ballot to every decision made by the group!

The movie’s own politics are equally confused, as, after a series of highly annoying episodes in which Patty’s balloting madness results in, for example, the boys being forced to sleep outside in a (highly incongruous) snowstorm, some cohesion is only reached when she appoints Charlie Brown as Supreme Leader, singularly responsible for all decision-making! And while this doesn’t lead to triumph in the race, it at least helps prevent the bullies from winning, so there’s some semblance of a happy ending; at least, as much of one as a depressive like Charles M. Schultz could manage!

It’s a nice-looking picture, adhering to the patented simplicity of the Peanuts world, but mustering a bountiful supply of landscape and flora to spruce it up; and of course it wins points for using real children as the kids’ voices! One big debit, though, is the treatment of poor Franklin, who is given virtually nothing to say or do! I’ve always liked Franklin, so would that it were otherwise - and, I mean, just look at that poster! He doesn't even get his own little name-box! Shameful, says I! I give Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown two and a half corned willies!

Burl reviews King Kong! (1976)

 

To the beating of a chest it’s Burl, here to tell you a tale of ape! Yes, a big ape - in fact, Kong himself! It’s not the old Kong, not the new Kong, but the middle Kong, the one brought to us by none other than old Dino De Laurentiis! It’s that big hairy Christmas release of 1976, King Kong!

You won’t believe it, but my dad took me to see this one on the big screen, and let me tell you, for me it was an event! I was maybe six years old, and the movie was to my little eyes thrilling and terrifying and altogether grand, and Kong himself a figure of mythical awe with his black chest smooth as Corinthian leather and his gimlet eyes gleaming in the dark like two side-orders of jelly! It, and this iteration of Kong, no longer have that terrible power over me of course, such power having been diluted in inverse proportion to the gradual development of my critical faculties; but that original viewing, wide-eyed before a massive screen in a grand old theatre, has stuck with me!

The script, by Lorenzo Semple Jr., is not perfect of course - ha ha, who can forget, and who would not love to forget, kidnap victim Dwan’s cry of “Put me down, you chauvinist pig ape!” For that matter, who would not love to forget that silly character name, “Dwan!” On the other hand, it’s not as bad as it’s reputed to be, either - it’s a perfectly acceptable 70s update to the story, with an oil company taking the place of the movie company seen in the original! So the topical environmental themes are present and accounted for, and the outlandish outrageousness of this band of first-world pirates showing up and stealing Kong away from the island he calls home and from the people who love and fear him, is duly noted!

Jeff Bridges, well known from Starman, plays the lead, an all-purpose character whose expertise, ostensibly in primatology, extends to anything the story requires: medicine, photography, general adventuring! This was the big debut of Jessica Lange from Tootsie, and she’s required to babble about meaningful miracles involving Deep Throat, but does the best she can with it! Charles Grodin from It’s My Turn and Clifford plays the rapacious corporation man, and while he seems a little miscast, he does a fine job too! Rene Auberjonois from Walker and 3:15 the Moment of Truth, and many Robert Altman pictures besides, plays the scientist who reveals the truth about the oil on Skull Island; and meanwhile the ship’s crew features all sorts of familiar faces! The captain is John Randolph from Earthquake and Christmas Vacation, and there are sailors played by Julius Harris from Live and Let Die, Jack O’Hallorann from Dragnet, Ed Lauter from Lassiter, and John Lone from The Hunted, and then of course there’s Pahoo himself, Dennis Fimple from Creature from Black Lake, in the role of Sunfish, who so far as I can tell survives the ape’s stomping feet and his remorseless rolling of the log!

Now here’s a problem with the picture, and it’s a big one: no dinosaurs! There’s a big snake, which looks fakey in the same charming way as the one in Conan the Barbarian (another Dino production - ha ha, maybe they used the same snake!), but Kong defeats it easily and gorily, and it never eats any sailors like they were junior mints, as the dinos do in the ’33 and ’05 versions! Skull Island, or Ape Island, or whatever it’s called - actually, I don’t think they give it a name in this picture - really lacks atmosphere, ranging between location shooting in what is obviously Hawaii, and studio shots in what is obviously a studio! We do get some nice matte paintings, though, and some acceptable backlot work!

Of course, when he gets to New York and is humiliated before a crowd, the angry simian escapes and makes his way not to the Empire State Building, but further south to the World Trade Centre, the presence of which qualifies this movie as an historical document! So that adds a little retroactive interest for the nostalgic viewer, though he doesn't straddle the buildings, as on the poster, or crush a rocket or duck a fighter jet! Ha ha, I remember thinking that poster overpromised a bit!

But before the movie came out, old Dino promised, in reference to Jaws, “Ha ha, no one cry when shark die, but everybody cry when monkey die!” And do you know what? He wasn’t entirely wrong there! It’s genuinely sad when the big gorilla, shot into meatsauce by helicopters, rolls off the building and plummets to his doom! I think that’s a bit of an achievement, so whatever this picture’s faults, it’s got that! Ha ha, I give King Kong two camera hunts in the interior!

Burl reviews Congo! (1995)

 

Burl here, going ape again! And believe me, the movie I’m reviewing today has a lot of ape in it! Gorilla after gorilla in fact, whole swarms of them! No, we’re not talking about Greystoke or Gorillas in the Mist, and we’ve already talked about Link! No, the picture in question is Congo, the monkey mash from the mid-90s that I recall seeing in the theater and even reviewing! My old review is around somewhere, but this one is all new, ha ha, and is moreover based on a very recent re-viewing of the picture!

There’s trouble in Africa! Colonialindustrialists are searching for rare purity diamonds with which to power their lasers, but their expedition is interrupted by simian viciousness of some kind! Meanwhile a vanilla primatologist and his lily-livered pal are planning to return their pet talking ape to the wild, and they are joined by the lady from the tech company who wants to find both the diamonds and her missing ex-fiancé who was on the original diamond quest! It’s a rather charmingly old-fashioned set up, straight out of Allan Quartermain and the Lost City of Gold, gussied up with 90s technology!

There are so many apes, they can be divided into subcategories! We have our hero ape, Amy, who wears a contraption that turns her hand signals into spoken speech; and then there’s a group of regular mountain gorillas; and of course there are the mutant white apes, straight out of White Pongo, but uglier, who are the real plot drivers here! By the end there are seemingly dozens of pongos, all warty-faced, jumping on the secondary characters like they were luggage! But speaking of human characters, the leads are not the most interesting bunch of people! The scientist fellow makes little to no impression, his buddy is a darn pest, and the tech company lady, although played by the good actor Laura Linney, doesn’t fare much better! Linney never really gets a handle on her character, because there isn’t much to get a handle on, ha ha! She must at different points be a cynical executive and a die-hard romantic, a hardy adventuress and a humourless scold, a tough Linda Hamilton type and a damsel in distress; and so it’s a wonder to me that Linney could pull together anything at all!

The cast gets more interesting as you go down the billing! Ernie Hudson from Ghostbusters is particularly good as the gentleman scoundrel safari leader; Tim Curry from The Hunt for Red October does a double ham on rye; and Joe Don Baker from Joysticks gets to kill a TV with a golf club! And, ha ha, there’s more! Bruce Campbell from Army of Darkness shows up at the very beginning, not proving as resilient here as he is in the Evil Dead pictures! And a parade of familiar faces follows: Joe Pantoliano from The Mean Season and Delroy Lindo from The Core show up in quick succession, and sprinkled throughout are appearances from Peter Jason of Prince of Darkness; James Karen from Time Walker; John Hawkes from Future-Kill; and even Jimmy Buffett of Jurassic World fame! Ha ha, the Buff plays an airplane pilot who bails out of his craft and we never see him again! I’ll bet you could make a whole other movie just about his adventures after landing in the jungle in a country in civil war into which he has flown illegally! Buff On the Run, we could call it, or War On Buffett! Ha ha!

But really it’s about ape action, and there’s a lot of it towards the end! The gnarly-faced ‘rillas make jolly adversaries, and it’s almost sad to see them falling into lava by the properly Edgar Rice Burroughs/ H. Rider Haggard erupting-volcano climax! The movie is a slick studio product, dumb as a bag of hammers, curiously old-fashioned, and largely enjoyable! And if you like fake apes, this is your movie! It’s got a lot of ‘em, pretty well done but maybe just a notch below the best Rick Baker work! Anyway, I give Congo two sesame cakes! Ha ha, put down my sesame cake!

Burl reviews City Slickers! (1991)

 

Yee-haw girls and boys and all points in between, it’s Burl, here with a tale of city-slick friendship and cowpunching! Ha ha, I recall that this was a big fat hit when it came out back in June of ’91, but, as with Backdraft, Point Break, and The Rocketeer, movies released that same summer, I didn’t bother seeing it for years and years! I didn’t go to see all that much that summer, as I believe I myself was working on a movie through pretty much all of July and August, but I did make it out to see such gems as Barton Fink, Terminator 2, Slacker, The Commitments, and What About Bob!

All of this is just plain beside the point, because the movie we’re talking about is City Slickers! It’s the simple tale of three New York buddies, each with their own problems, who take two weeks and join a dude ranch cattle drive led by a stern and leathery trail boss! Ha ha, and guess who plays the boss? Well, he won an Oscar for it I guess, so you probably remember that it was none other than Jack Palance from Without Warning!

The middle-aged trio are played by Billy Crystal, whom we remember from the time he was slathered in oldman makeup for The Princess Bride; Bruno Kirby from The Young Graduates and Between the Lines (and of course both Crystal and Kirby were in When Harry Met Sally together); and Daniel Stern from Get Crazy and C.H.U.D.! Stern’s problem is that he has a monstrous wife and that he might have impregnated Yeardley Smith from Maximum Overdrive; Kirby’s conundrum involves resolving whether to settle down with his latest girlfriend and have kids, or continue his life as an aimless, unlikely stickman; and Crystal is, at forty (ha ha!), feeling old and used up and, in the words of his long-suffering wife, has “lost his smile!”

After a long New York build up, she commands him to go and find his smile with his buddies on this cattle drive caper, and then the string of incident begins! Other dude ranchers on the trek include Helen Slater from The Secret of My Success, as the lone pretty lady; Tracey Walter from Repo Man, in charge of the chuckwagon; Josh Mostel from The King of Marvin Gardens and David Paymer from This House Possessed, playing ice cream brothers modeled on Ben and Jerry; and Bill Henderson from Silver Streak as a dentist on the outing with his adult son; and the ranch is owned and operated by Noble Willingham from Butch and Sundance: The Early Days!

The trip is full of gaggery and straight talkin’ 90s man discussions, and the script tries hard to be relatable and sometimes even comes close! There’s also some death and a cow birth and a stampede and assorted other such stuff! Ha ha, I just made up a term for movies like this, which have all the trappings of Westerns but really aren’t themselves Westerns: we’ll call them “faux-ters!” As in oaters, but faux! Do you think the term will catch on, and we’ll soon see it used in all the new academic stuff as well as on random blog posts? Well anyway, it’s a professionally put together comedy movie, quite likeable despite its whole “it’s tough being a straight white guy” vibe, occasionally funny, sometimes cheesy, but for all that, pretty entertaining! Nothing about it is great (though the cast is pretty exceptional) and nothing about it is surprising, and it could have jacked up the Palance a bit, but it’s okay! I’m going to give City Slickers two smiley-faced moons!

Burl reviews The Guns of Navarone! (1961)

Like a false Englishman it’s Burl, here with a review for you! It’s a World War II picture today, a purely fictional one, but a reasonably thrilling and involving tale of derring-do nevertheless! Yes, I’m here to tell you now about the big-budget Columbia Pictures British-American superproduction The Guns of Navarone!

Ha ha, you’ve probably heard of this one! It was a big hit in its day, with a multinational cast of stars and a solid hook on which to hang its story! We start with Gregory Peck from Spellbound, arriving on a plane to meet up with the jolly-looking James Robertson Justice! Ha ha, now there’s an actor I’d like to see more of! Anyway, the mission is to destroy two giant guns the Nazis have set up in the Aegean Sea so that a British flotilla is able to sail past and rescue a couple of thousand stranded soldiers! Ha ha, David Niven from Murder By Death, Anthony Quinn from The Last Action Hero, Anthony Quayle, Stanley Baker, and Moondoggie himself, James Darren, make up the rest of the commando brigade!

The urgency of the mission, the near-impossibility of it (enhanced by the assumption by chief planner Justice that it is impossible), and the consequences should it fail, are set out with great clarity in the early part of the picture! From there it’s a series of suspenseful near-misses and daredevil cliffclimbing actions and bursts of gunfire and unfortunate setbacks! Ha ha, it truly seems like an ill-fated venture for the sextet, even after they meet up with two lady members of the Greek Resistance, doughty Irene Papas and beautiful, mute Gia Scala!

Perhaps to offset the presentation of wartime as a grand, if risky, boys’ adventure story, there is plenty of dialogue about the ethics of doing this or that ruthless action on behalf of the greater good! Ha ha, there’s perhaps a bit too much of it, in fact, though I appreciate the general anti-war sentiment that is the cumulative effect of these often heated discussions! And you didn’t often see Peck shout and bluster and wave his gun around, but by the last act, wracked with guilt and uncertainty, that’s what he’s doing all right!

A curious thing about Peck’s character: he’s supposed to be an Englishman, but Peck makes no attempt whatever to put on an accent or use English phraseology! Ha ha, this lack of limey jargon could be because the script was written by American screenwriter/producer Carl Foreman, then fresh off the blacklist! In any case, I spent most of the movie assuming Peck was supposed to be a visiting American, and I assume many other viewers assumed the same!

In the end, The Guns of Navarone is nothing more than a solid Hollywood product with pretty fair trick effects (though the cliffclimbing scene is pretty obviously just the actors flat on their bellies!) and some noble intentions! It’s thoroughly middlebrow, reasonably entertaining, and fun to pair up with something like 10 to Midnight or Happy Birthday To Me, which came from the same director, J. Lee Thompson! The big guns at the end are a little creepy, but impressive; and it’s satisfying to see the Nazis who’ve been running the things get blown to flinders! Ha ha! I give The Guns of Navarone two and a half surprise popout seagulls!

Burl reviews The African Queen! (1951)

Good day, Miss! It’s Burl here to review one of those movies that are not great classics, not unimpeachable favourites, but simply solid entertainments! The movie I’m talking about is The African Queen, the fine adventure-romance made in Africa by Mr. John "Under the Volcano" Huston! Ha ha!

We all know the story! It’s the dawn of WWI and there’s a brother-sister team of missionaries doing their thing in German East Africa! Their village is serviced by expat Canadian river rat Charlie Allnut and his creaky old launch the African Queen, who deliver supplies, mail, news of current events, and so on! But one day the Germans arrive, and, with their usual subtle grace, burn the village to the ground, kidnap every man of soldiering age and effectively kill the brother-reverend! That leaves the sister, Rose, and grizzled old Allnut chugging down the river on the boat, on a mission (a reluctant one on Charlie’s part) to reach a lake and blow up the German vessel which patrols it! Ha ha!

Of far more importance than this contrived story is Huston’s lush location shooting (photographed brilliantly by the great Jack Cardiff and, backing him up, Teds Scaife and Moore) and of course the two principal actors, Humphrey Bogart as Allnut and Katherine Hepburn as Rose! Both of them are good, if occasionally a little bit hambone, but Bogie in particular surprises with his boozy deference! Ha ha, his hangdog expressions, particularly the one he throws when Rose kicks him out of the minimal shelter the Queen offers during a rainstorm, are priceless and affecting!

Hepburn, meanwhile, is uptight and rather more patrician than one might expect of a dedicated missionary of presumably modest birth, but she’s still her usual live-wire self! I myself have never quite bought the romance in this picture, other than academically; Bogart and Hepburn are perhaps too iconic for me to see them as just two slobs in love! Ha ha! Of course this is largely a two-hander, relying heavily on the aforementioned icons, but there are other people in the picture too, including Robert Morley as the brother – he’s well-known of course from his role as the bad guy in the African Queen rip-off High Road to China – and the great, only recently late Theodore "I Bury the Living" Bikel in the role of the German first officer! And Walter Gotell, so well known from Bond pictures like Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only and The Living Daylights, is in there too!

It’s a crackerjack entertainment, and if it doesn’t achieve brilliance, that’s because brilliance was never really on the menu! It’s as solid as a house and about as comfortable! Ha ha, I give The African Queen three rumbles of the tummy!

Burl reviews Cloak & Dagger! (1984)

Hi everybody, Burl here, finally! Yes, I’ve been away, but I do mean to keep reviewing movies for you, ha ha! And I have one for you now, a kiddie adventure from the mid-80s called Cloak & Dagger! That’s the one with Henry Thomas, who’s still today, maybe even to his own family, known as The Kid From E.T.; and the picture also features a double helping of Dab! Yes, that’s Dabney Coleman, famed for his role in Dragnet!

The picture is a would-be Hitchcockian adventure retooled for kids, and the premise is that a little nerd boy, Davey Osborne, is so wrapped up in his fantasy world (one part D&D, two parts James Bond) that he has an ever-present imaginary buddy called Jack Flack, who advises him on strategy when things get hairy! Jack Flack is of course played by Dabney Coleman in a beret!

Naturally his widower dad disapproves, and who do you think plays the dad? Why, it’s Dabney again, ha ha! Meanwhile the adventure commences, with the McGuffin being some kind of microchip planted in an Atari cartridge (which everyone except Jack Flack refers to as a “tape” for some reason), disguised of course as the very game with which young Davey is obsessed, which, again of course, is called Cloak & Dagger! (Ha ha, I smell a failed tie-in!) Naturally nobody believes Davey for even a minute, due to his history of fantasy-based storytelling! Davey is pursued by Michael “Manhattan” Murphy and a duo of off-the-rack thugs played by Tim Rossovich from The Ninth Configuration and Eloy Casados from The Best of Times, who are later joined by an old couple, one of whom is, shall we say, ha ha, digitally challenged, through a series of locations no doubt approved by the San Antonio Board of Tourism! Ha ha!

The job of paying fealty to San Antonio done, the ending of the picture becomes a love letter to fathers! Davey finally sees the futility of Jack Flack, and ultimately finds him unnecessary too, since Davey has a real hero living right in the house with him: his dad! Yay, dads! Ha ha, the opening logo says Universal Pictures, but the picture seems more to have been financed by a consortium made up of Atari, the City of San Antonio and the National Council of Average-Guy Dads!

Having the old couple played by pros like John McIntire, from Psycho and Herbie Rides Again, and Jeanette Nolan, from The Manitou, should in theory result in the sort of delightful, eccentric frissons provided by Dame May Whitty in The Lady Vanishes, but somehow it does not! (It does briefly provide the picture with a mildly Joe Dante vibe, however: a good thing!)

But the attempts at suspense and action are generally flat and boring and bad! This is incredible to me, as the director is Richard Franklin, who made Road Games, a corker as I recall; and Psycho II, which I’ve always been fond of! I even enjoyed Link, at least a little bit! And back in his happy college days Franklin met Hitch, and was a lifelong student and fan of the portly suspense-master, and so I can’t imagine what happened with the theoretically Hitchcockian Cloak & Dagger! Maybe it was just too hard to make a nighttime picture like this with not one but two kids! (Davey has a little girl friend, played by Christine “Sword and the Sorcerer” Nigra, who shares in his adventure; he also has the requisite adult nerd friend, who is played by none other than William “Smokey Bites the Dust” Forsythe!) Even the daytime scenes are lame, like Davey’s debarkation from a slow-moving little boat almost too wide for the stream it’s floating in! Ha ha, Hitch would have told San Antonio where to go and relocated the whole thing to Niagara Falls so he could shoot that scene at the crest of the Horseshoe Cascade!

I guess the movie is for gamers, or ex-gamers, neither of which I am! I was never even sure if the game Cloak & Dagger was a sort of role-playing game, what with its many-sided dice and painted lead figures, or a video game, or some amalgam of the two! I give Cloak & Dagger one incredibly large nerd die! Two such dice appear in the picture, but I only give the movie one! Sorry, Cloak & Dagger, ha ha!

Burl reviews Jungle Heat! (1983)

The jungle ferns slowly part, and peering through… it’s Burl! Ha ha, hope I didn’t scare you! Today I thought I might review a jungle movie for you! It’s generally known by the highly generic title of Jungle Heat, which makes it sound like one of those flying bamboo sliver pictures like P.O.W.: The Escape or something!

But no, it’s a weird little genre mashup, evidently modeled on The African Queen, that was originally called Dance of the Dwarves – a much better title if you ask me, even if it’s complete nonsense! Ha ha! For there are no terpsichorean homunculi in the picture, just an uptight lady, a dipsomaniacal helicopter pilot, a wandering witch doctor and a bunch of lizard people! Ha ha! That makes it sound like a pretty exciting movie, doesn’t it! With those ingredients, you must be saying to yourself, ha ha, how could it fail!

Well, you know I don’t like to be overly critical in my little reviews, ha ha, but I do have to say that the picture does not live up to the promise of its components! The beginning augurs well, however, or appears to: a man escapes from prison and runs into the jungle, but suffers the indignity of having his face ripped off! Ha ha! Then we meet the uptight lady scientist, played by Deborah Raffin from The Sentinel, as she meets up with the sweaty, unshorn helicopter pilot, a role essayed by a sweaty, unshorn Peter “Spasms” Fonda!

John Amos from Die Hard 2 pops in now and again as a random witch doctor, but the overwhelming bulk of the picture is scene after scene of the two main characters bickering! It’s true that Fonda is a truly heroic souse, always drinking straight from his beloved square-shaped booze bottles like Uncle Red in Silver Bullet! But it’s equally true that the lady doctor is an intolerable scold! In short, spending so much time with these people is not enjoyable, and it’s a great relief when the lizard people finally show up!

Ha ha, but before that, we have a scene in which the doc shoots all of Fonda’s bottles so he can drink no longer! Fonda’s enforced program of sobriety comes to a climax when he literally kicks the bottle, if you can believe that! On top of this, the movie features more talk of Mazola cooking oil than might be expected from what is ostensibly an action/comedy/romance/horror picture! Even some of the characters get tired of the constant Mazola talk! “I spit on your mother’s Mazola! Ptoo!” says one exasperated bandito!

The creatures, when they appear, look like miniature Godzillas running around, or some humanoids from the deep that wandered off course! It’s mostly too murky to tell, but I think that the special makeup effects were not too bad, and it’s unfortunate that they were so blandly presented! On the up side, the bickering is not performed badly by Raffin and Fonda, and there are some amusing moments scattered throughout!

Too bad about the longueurs, ha ha! Still, I’m feeling generous, maybe because I have a soft spot for multi-genre movies like this! (Raw Force is another such picture, in case you’re interested!) I’m going to give Jungle Heat one and a half cans of Mazola!

Burl reviews Sorcerer! (1977)

Careful… careful… careful… it’s Burl! Ha ha! Yes, today I’m reviewing a movie that will have you handling things very carefully for several days after watching it! It’s called Sorcerer, and it’s William “To Live And Die in L.A.” Friedkin’s remake of the Henri Georges Clouzot classic The Wages of Fear!

Now, if you’ve never seen The Wages of Fear, by garr, run out and find it! Great picture! It’s a classic, and a superior film to Sorcerer, but not by that much! I saw the Friedkin version years ago and liked it, but I was affected by the general impression that it was bad, so for years never made any effort to see it again! Until recently, ha ha! And let me tell you, I enjoyed it!

It’s really the type of picture that could only have been made in the 1970s and by someone coming off of two massive hits, which in Friedkin’s case were The French Connection and The Exorcist! And I do tend to like that sort of picture, the ones that beat the odds, that could not have been made but under extremely specific circumstances! As you all know, I also like fugitive expat pictures, movies in which a group of desperate strangers from around the globe are exiled in some dingy, purgatorial backwater! The Lost Continent was such a picture, in spirit at least, and this one is too, in spades! On top of this it’s a very manly picture, with lots of guys sweating and working hard and acting tough, and virtually no ladies to be seen! That it gets from Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a movie to which this one is certainly indebted!

You all know the story, ha ha, but it takes a while to get to! First we meet our characters: Roy “Jaws” Scheider is Jackie Scanlon, a functionary in the Irish mob fleeing from a New Jersey church heist gone wrong! Bruno Cremer plays Victor Manzon, an investment banker from Paris whose shady deal went just as wrong! Francisco Rabal, whom we know from Treasure of the Four Crowns, is Nilo, a hit man, whose latest hit doesn’t seem to have gone wrong, but from which he flees anyway! And Amidou, a one-name-only actor whom we know from Ronin, plays Kassem, a Palestinian whose Jerusalem bomb-blast plot very definitely goes wrong!

All of these fellows end up in some unnamed South American jungle town where an oil company is plying its trade! A well blows up and suddenly they need explosives to blast it out, but the only explosives around are dynamite sticks which have leaked and become terribly unstable! The slightest jolt can set it all off, ha ha! Why they can’t order some explosives in from somewhere else is a mystery, but the upshot is that these four desperate fellows must drive two big trucks many miles through the jungle to the well site, and they will be amply rewarded for their efforts—if they survive!

What follows is all sorts of sweaty suspense, with all of these fellows demonstrating what I assume are previously untapped wells of resourcefulness, mechanical knowledge and driving prowess! The cooler-looking of the two trucks is named ‘Sorcerer,’ so I guess that’s where the movie got its rather misleading title! (I think people back in the day were expecting another blood-and-thunder horror picture like The Exorcist, and when they heard it wasn’t that, they just went to see Star Wars again instead!)

But the movie’s great, and it gets as violent as any horror movie in parts! It looks marvelous of course, all electric jungle green and burnished charcoal grey, and the pillar of orange-red flame that is the oil well fire; and the supporting cast, all playing very realistically, includes ringers like Ramon Bieri from Grandview U.S.A. and Joe Spinell from The First Deadly Sin! The performers are terrific and Friedkin does a terrific job with the suspense and the physical details! (Pity about all that fake superimposed rain in the one scene, though, ha ha!)

There are some explosions and some gunshots, and a crazy scene on a lunar landscape, and it can’t wrap up without the most nihilistic 1970s ending since The Parallax View! All of it is scored with thumpy, frowny Tangerine Dream music, which really works for the picture! There might be better meditations on the caprices of fate out there, but Sorcerer is still utterly unique, which is high praise for a remake! I give it three and a half of the unluckiest blown tires in memory!