Burl reviews Star Crystal! (1985)

 

Beep boop and by Gar, it’s Burl, here to review low-budget space-based VHS insanity! You know, there was no shortage of Alien rip-off pictures in the wake of that 1979 superhit, and following the grand success of E.T. a few years later there were more than several small-scale coattail riders on that one too! But there was at least one picture to manfully attempt to rip off both hits at once, and the result is just as bifurcated a narrative as you might expect! Ha ha, the movie, for reasons of its own which it keeps to itself, is called Star Crystal!

We begin on a surprisingly convincing Mars, where a pair of louts find a rock – I suppose this may be the titular crystal, but it doesn't much look like one – which they bring onto their ship! Next thing you know the rock has hatched and everyone on the ship is dead because the oxygen got turned off by somebody! The action then relocates to a space station that looks like it was, and according to an article I read about the movie in Cinefantastique magazine, actually was, constructed out of painted water bottles! Then something goes wrong and the space station blows up, and the space ship that escapes has the creature that hatched out of the rock on board!

Well, you know the drill! The crew, an uncommonly stupid and unlikeable bunch, are one by one attacked by the creature and turned into puddles of goo! And then, when there are only two of them left, the alien taps into the ship’s computer and reads all the information therein, which includes the Bible! Yes, ha ha, Holy Bible! This of course has the effect of radically changing his personality, and before you know it, the alien, whose name is Gar, is best buddies with the remaining spacefarers, even after brutally murdering all their friends! Proof of this friendship comes in a hilarious montage during which, as they work on repairing their failed systems, Gar does shenanigans like using his telekinesis to spin a wrench around in mid-air as everybody laughs! And shortly after this jaw-dropping turn of events, the picture comes to an end - an end I will characterize as "unceremonious!"   

Some really head-scratching decisions were made in the production design of this picture, ha ha! The number of sets is pretty minimal, with most of the action taking place in a single room, like a play; but to enter or leave the room the crew must use dog doors for some reason, and then they have to crawl like hens through seemingly kilometres-long tubes to get from one part of the ship to another, as though the craft had been designed by hamsters! No character mentions the absurd inconvenience of this; and one hopes the cast were issued knee pads, since collectively they must crawl a marathon’s worth of distance in those dumb tubes!

The picture reaches some sort of nadir when, after a fatal encounter in the crawl tubes leaves him with his skin melted away, the film’s lone black character turns out to have a black skeleton too! Ha ha, it’s ridiculous! So is the creature, which looks like somebody sculpted a sad-eyed E.T. out of wax and then took a blowtorch to it, and which is shown only in grotesque close-ups for most of the film – his twitchy eyeball or his undulating flesh or his goofy Beaker-like mouth! Ha ha, don't let that image on the poster fool you - it may be Gar's meaner cousin or something, but by garr, it sure isn't Gar! (There are no floating glass coffins either!)

I was really hoping for something approaching those Roger Corman Alien rip-offs of the early 1980s, like Forbidden World and Galaxy of Terror - pictures that may not be good, but show energy and imagination in their mad quest to purloin! No dice with Star Crystal though! My son, a wise old cynic at age 11, declared this the worst movie he’s ever seen and likely ever will see! He maintained that opinion even after we recently watched The Creeping Terror, so you can be certain the ineptitude on display in Star Crystal really made an impact on his young mind, and I guess maybe that’s an achievement in itself! Ha ha! I give Star Crystal one futuristic sippy-bottle of Coke!

Burl reviews Plan 9 from Outer Space! (1957)

 

Greetings, friends! I am Burl! We are all interested in movies - that is why you are here! And now, for the first time, based only on a recent VHS viewing experience and many previous viewings at home and at the cinema, I present to you a picture thought by many to be the worst film of all time! Ha ha, can your hearts stand the shocking facts about Plan 9 From Outer Space?

 

We’ve all seen it, and if you’re anything like me, you’ve probably attended a midnight screening or two of it, complete with the hooting and the howling and the sweet drifts of herbal smoke! But is this really the worst movie ever made? Of course not, and anyone who thinks it is simply hasn’t seen very many movies! It may have been made without skill or craft or art or resources, but it was made with heart and passion, and that alone puts it out in front of its deadly-dull compatriots like Manos: The Hands of Fate, or soulless and mercenary stinkers like, say, Jaws: The Revenge!

 

The heart and passion in the picture came from Writer-Producer-Director Edward D. Wood Jr., who, though it might be thought impossible, declined still further from pictures like this into worse ones – by the end, he was doing oddball pornoo of which The Young Marrieds is the ultimate example! But, if the biographical picture Ed Wood and the terrific book it’s based on, Nightmare of Ecstasy, are to be believed, Wood insisted Plan 9 was his masterpiece: his final statement on the human condition and the alien and zombie problems that occasionally beset it!

 

Bela Lugosi, of whom we all are very fond from his appearances in pictures like Island of Lost Souls and the wonderful The Black Cat, appears in a few scraps of near home-movie footage Wood shot a short while before the drug-addled boogey-actor’s death! The main story features a stolid pilot, Jeff Trent, who, based on the set dressing, is flying around not in an airplane but in a shower stall! He’s played by Gregory Walcott from Jet Attack and The Sugarland Express, and he can hardly believe his eyes when a paper-plate saucer dips and bobs in the sky beside his flying shower stall!

 

Yes, ha ha, saucers, seen over Hollywood! Trent and his wife, who live beside a cemetery, are puzzling over the sighting when some new problems raise their heads – right out of their graves, ha ha! It seems the saucer aliens are using revivication guns to animate corpses, like the old man played unwittingly by Lugosi, and his buxom wife, essayed by the proto-Elvira known as Vampira! Soon enough these two attack and kill a giant policeman, Inspector Daniel Clay, who is of course played by the mighty Tor Johnson, and the next thing you know he’s been zombified too! A full-bird colonel played by Tom Keene from Dick Tracy’s Dilemma gets involved, and soon there are repeated visits to the old cemetery, where the alien spacecraft somehow hides in a spinney and looks like a round pie plate in long shots and like a concrete bunker when seen in close-up sitting on the ground!

 

It all comes down to a gang of fey extraterrestrials with a crazy plan that’s evidently supposed to save the Earth from the dastardly power of the solemenite bomb! Ha ha, you say solemenite, but just what is it? Well, it hardly matters! Nothing the aliens do or say makes any sense at all, and the human characters are all boneheads who use handguns to gesture with and to scratch their foreheads! The filmmaking incompetence is bone-deep in this picture – even routine accomplishments like framing an image properly are beyond Wood’s abilities!

 

But I guess that’s the fun of it! Some people no doubt watch the picture to feel superior, or to exercise their insecurity-based desire to snark and scoff, but there’s also a terrible fascination and a great deal of entertainment to be had from the experience! Wood, of course, gets kicked around a lot, but he made movies at least, and for that he’s got my admiration! Ha ha! While it really exists outside of any possible rating system, even one as abstract as my own, I’m going to give Plan 9 From Outer Space two battle-axe jerkins!

Burl reviews The Faculty! (1998)

 

Saved by the bell, it’s Burl, manfully attempting to review a very, very, very 1990s horror picture! It’s maybe not the most 90s horror movie – that might be Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer, or one of those sorts of things – but the very, very and final italicized very still apply! After all, it was written by that meta-horror specialist Kevin Williamson, directed by 90s wunderkind Robert Rodriguez, and produced by that slab-lipped, pock-faced date-rapist Harvey Weinstein, so after all, it’s pretty 90s! It’s The Faculty!

Our setting: High School U.S.A.! As in Dazed and Confused, there are different groups: jocks, criminals, brainboxes, and a put-upon freshman (not played by Wiley Wiggins, but Wiley is in the movie, ha ha, lurking in the margins), and foot-ball is the local religion! In the opening sequence we see the iron-nosed foot-ball coach, played by Robert Patrick from Die Hard 2, being approached by… something; then the coach, now possessed by… something, stalks Bebe Neuwerth in the role of the school principal; and the principal seems to be saved when she runs into colleague Piper Laurie from that classic high school picture Carrie, but then Laurie turns into… something!

So, something’s clearly up at this high school, ha ha! The student body includes Elijah Wood as Casey, the oft-abused nerd; Clea DuVall from Ghosts of Mars as Stokely, the tough loner girl; Laura Harris from It putting on the mint julip as Marybeth, the new Georgian transplant; Josh Hartnett from Halloween H20 as Zeke, an insufferable jerk who sells homemade drugs to the younger kids; and a few others, including a quarterback who may not want to play foot-ball any more, just like, again, Dazed and Confused! It seems to take an age, but eventually these characters get together and face the threat, which is the same sort of parasitic takeover aliens we saw in The Puppet Masters!

Because this was written by the same fellow who wrote Scream, it’s packed with winking meta-humour and would-be cutting edginess! It’s trying its best to be a hip and with-it high school version of The Thing, but mostly it’s trying too hard! It wants to give the same sense of pod-people menace as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but there’s rarely if ever any question about who’s who, and in any case, once the parasite leaves the host, the people come back to normal! So it’s not very scary or particularly disturbing, and it's packed with mediocre music, or mediocre covers of good music; but the picture stays afloat with a cheerful 90s-ness that makes it an artifact of its time, and a reasonably entertaining one at that!

And the cast is strong! The faculty itself includes Salma Hayek from Desperado as the school nurse; Famke Janssen from Goldeneye and Deep Rising as the shrinking violet teacher; and people like Jon Stewart and Daniel Von Bargen; and Christopher McDonald from Grumpy Old Men plays Casey’s dad! It’s a very derivative movie, but it’s frequently fun and occasionally gory! I hated the character of Zeke and was glad to see him suffer a terrible public humiliation, but mostly the picture is a good-natured romp in the classic 90s style, so I give The Faculty two collapsing bleachers!

Burl reviews Night of the Creeps! (1986)

 

This is Burl - ha ha, thrill me! If you’ve seen the movie I’m discussing today, you’ll know what I mean by that, and if you haven’t, well, you should! I myself saw it in the theatre, though I had to sneak in because I was several years too young according to the rules in my neck of the woods; but, as with Evil Dead II, Day of the Dead, Creepshow 2, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, and several others, I successfully broke these rules, and therefore hold some extra fondness for the picture I might not otherwise have! Though I’d probably be pretty fond of it in any case, ha ha! And the picture? None other than Night of the Creeps!

Sure, I saw it on the big screen, but I had some friends who managed to catch it at the drive-in, and I was a bit jealous because that would be the absolute perfect venue for a movie like this! And, ha ha, the movie knows it, which is part of its charm for the horror fan! It was the first effort of Fred Dekker, who later made The Monster Squad, and he’s the sort of guy who, having been struck by the idea of naming all his characters after horror directors, commits to it one hundred and fifty percent!

The picture opens in a spacecraft populated by naked munchkins, then continues with a sequence set in the late 50s and shot in luminous black-and-white! Ha ha, this part involves Sorority Row, Lover’s Lane, and an escaped axe maniac, and features a marvelously sinister use of The Stroll, that old song by The Diamonds! And then, finally, we segue into the present day on the campus of good old Corman University! We meet our protagonists: a pair of misfits named Chris Romero, played by Jason Lively from Brainstorm and European Vacation, and James Carpenter-Hooper, or J.C., played by Steve Marshall from… well, ha ha, I don’t know what he’s from!

As they walk around the campus Chris spies Cynthia Cronenberg, essayed by Jill Whitlow from Porky’s and Weird Science, and falls instantly in love! This leads to a prank attempt at the behest of some frat bros led by Allan Kayser from Hot Chili in the role of Brad, and this in turn results in the release of the space slugs that had been accidentally created by the munchkins! And of course here is where Detective Ray Cameron, played by the unstoppable Tom Atkins from The Fog, Halloween III and Creepshow, takes center stage!

From here things swiftly go magoo as a busload of frat bros become slug zombies, innocent pets are possessed by the otherworldly leeches, the axe murderer returns from the grave, the two gomers who started the whole thing, along with their sorority sister friend, make themselves variously martyrs or heroes, and Atkins repeatedly places demands on people to "Thrill me!" But the important thing to note is that while we get some familiar faces in the cast, like David Paymer from City Slickers and Robert Kerman from Cannibal Holocaust and many a pornoo, we also are blessed with a cameo appearance from the terrific, the one-and-only Dick Miller, well known from pictures like Apache Woman and Explorers! Yes, it’s a gratifying appearance too, with Miller as a police armorer coerced into giving Atkins and Lively a flamethrower with which to battle the space slugs! Ha ha, how marvelous! How truly Miller!

I’m well aware of this picture’s flaws: the lapses of logic, the dog’s breakfast narrative, the weak characterizations, the my-first-movie directing, the sometimes dicey acting, the sophomoric though not inapt move of naming all the characters after horror directors! But, ha ha, very little of that bothers me, because even today, after all these years, I find the movie tremendously enjoyable! The humour is generally well-judged, the trick effects look good, the central friendship is heartwarming, and Atkins and Miller provide all the thespian firepower you could want! It was great fun to see in the theatre when I was fifteen, and it thrills me to this day! I give Night of the Creeps three monobrows!

Burl reviews Cocoon! (1986)

 

Oh-oh-oldtimers, it’s Burl, here to review a picture that dares to ask the question “What if a bunch of pensioners met a group of benevolent, polo shirt-wearing aliens?” Ha ha, other pictures have asked this same question, but few of them managed to do it with as much box office success as this one, which is called Cocoon!

Of course it was directed by the same cunningham who brought us Apollo 13 and the firehall picture, Ron Howard! And ha ha, through the 1980s, with every fresh Howard joint, my friend Sean and I used to torment our pal Dave by telling him to meet us at the theater for the 9:30 show, while we would arrive at the 7:30 screening, watch it, and meet Dave in the lobby for the later show as though we’d just arrived! Then, as the movie played, we would whisper "guesses" about what was going to happen next, and of course we would always be right!

Ha ha, it sounds cruel and it probably was, but consider that we only did it for Ron Howard movies, and not even for all of those! And of course the joke was on Sean and I in the end, because we were the ones who had to sit though a Ron Howard movie twice! Anyway, ha ha, Cocoon was one of these, and we had a good time insta-spoiling it for our friend Dave, so I think on it fondly, even if it’s mostly a bunch of silly tripe!

Our setting is the retiree’s paradise, St. Petersburg Florida! Our most prominent characters are a trio of old ducks, Ben, Art, and Joe, played by Wilford Brimley from The Thing and High Road to China (who, it should be noted, had his fiftieth birthday during production, so was a good quarter-century younger than his co-stars), Don Ameche from Trading Places and Heaven Can Wait, and Hume Cronyn from Brewster’s Millions and Impulse! These jaspers regularly sneak to the untenanted mansion next door for a dip in the lavish indoor pool, until one day the house is rented by a quartet of space strangers!

The old cronkites don’t know these are aliens, of course, but they do know that once they sneak their next swim after the aliens have moved in, they start feeling a little rambunctious! Ha ha! Brian Dennehy from F/X and First Blood plays Walter, the boss alien, who is also the largest alien; and the other three are played by famous children Tahnee Welch and Tyrone Power Jr., along with Mike Nomad from Friday the 13^th part VI: Jason Lives! Their project involves rescuing fellow aliens who were left behind in cocoons at the bottom of the sea, which they then deposit in the pool!

Of course there are confusions along the way! Jack Gilford from Catch-22 plays another elderly, one who phumphers about and doesn’t hold with all these strange goings-on! Steve Guttenberg from The Bedroom Window plays the boatsman Jack, who not only learns the truth about the otherworlders but gets a chance to make sweet alien love in the pool! Maureen Stapleton from Interiors and The Money Pit, Jessica Tandy from The Birds, Gwen Verdon from Alice, and Herta Ware from Slam Dance and Species are the wives and sweethearts of the old jaspers, and there are various personal stories involving love, adultery, and death, all intertwined here; and then D.A.R.Y.L. himself, Barret Oliver, plays an astronomy-loving grandchild!

It’s a strange picture when you think about it, but there was kind of a geezer fad in 80s movies! Ha ha, look at On Golden Pond; and it lasted all the way through to *batteries not included in 1988! There’s even a sequel to this one, they say, in which the oldsters return to their home planet! The picture introduces big concepts like the value of mortality, but never expands upon them; and it sets up conflicts like the choice between everlasting life and ever seeing your family again, but never wrestles with them in any substantial way! The kindly beneficence of the aliens helps bleed the picture of potential drama and depth, but the saucer people’s likeability and the general good nature of the picture almost make up for that! There are a few touching scenes, achieved with no small help from the supposedly superannuated charmers in the cast! The photography and ILM trick effects are very studio-80s, so if you like that sort of thing, and don't mind geriatric comedy replacing action, you’ll like this! Ha, ha, I give Cocoon two blue-steel cannonballs!

Burl reviews It Came From Outer Space! (1953)

 

Ooo-wee-ooo, cried the theremin! Yes, it’s Burl with a 1950s sci-fi classic under review, and one from one of my favourite directors of that form, Jack Arnold! Mr. Arnold seems to have loved the desert, and as I don’t live anywhere near a desert, or at least not one of any size, my own love for the desert is really a proxy love, constructed and prosecuted not by me but by Arnold! That may seem a lot to lay on a talented director of monochromatic genre movies, but I think it’s so! At any rate, like Tarantula, this fits right into the beloved sub-sub-sub genre of Sci-Fi Movies By Jack Arnold That Are Set In A Desert, and the picture is It Came From Outer Space!

The story begins in a terrific little desert house that contains article-writer and amateur astronomer John Putnam, played by Richard Carlson from The Creature From the Black Lagoon and Hold That Ghost!, and his visiting girlfriend Ellen, as portrayed by Barbara Rush from Bigger Than Life and When Worlds Collide! Ha ha, they see a fiery object crash land out of the sky, and when they investigate, John observes a strange spherical ship embedded in the crater! There’s an open portal in the side, but as he approaches the door closes up, as though the inhabitants were saying “None for us today, thanks!” Then a big earthslide covers the orb!

Well, ha ha, nobody else has seen the thing but John, and most of the next hour of the picture is people doubting John’s story, scorning him as a publicity seeker, or just relentlessly making fun of him! He’s dismissed in the popular press as a crank or worse, and Sheriff Matt, the local law played by Charles Drake from My Brother’s Wedding, who already seems to have something against our overearnest hero, possibly fueled by romantic jealousy, almost considers him a threat to the town’s moral health!

Finally events take place which at least slightly mute the snarky comments and side-eye! An oddball creature with fish-vision floats about the desert kidnapping people and occasionally adopting their forms, as might the alien from The Thing! But fortunately these are not malevolent aliens, though they don’t hesitate to rattle their sabres a bit to make sure they get their way!

When two telephone linemen of Putnam’s acquaintance - a pair of mugs called Frank and George, played by Joe Sawyer from The Killing and Russell Johnson from Rock All Night - are snatched by the aliens, matters reach a boiling point! The sheriff has had enough, an anti-alien mob is formed, and things look dire for all concerned! Ha ha, I won’t give away the end, but those who like images of awestruck townsfolk won’t be disappointed!

It goes without saying that the desert atmosphere is great here, and represents a major part of my appreciation for the picture! I was less taken with the character of John Putnam, who seemed too often in the helpless thrall of his own urges and emotions! He’s one of those characters who never quite say what you want them to say, but don’t surprise you either! It’s a Ray Bradbury story, and his touch seems evident; that’s all to the good as well! It’s a minor key story, told well, very theremin-flavoured, steely black-and-white with the best desert atmosphere since Them! How can you go wrong? You can’t! Ha ha, I give It Came From Outer Space two and a half Joshua trees!

Burl reviews Galaxy of Terror! (1981)

By grimbus and by garr it’s Burl, here with a review of one of Roger Corman’s early-80s sci-fi/horror hybrids! You all know about such gems as Forbidden World and Humanoids From the Deep, and you may even know about Space Raiders, but the picture I’m reviewing for you today, Galaxy of Terror, is in many ways the most special of them all!

Ha ha, when this one came out I tried to go see it with my friend Dave! We were both little kids, but we loved horror movies; and, as Galaxy of Terror was showing in a multiplex and was rated R of course, we bought tickets for a Rocky Horror Picture Show revival then tried to sneak across the hall into the cinema where the movie we really wanted to see was playing! But halfway through the opening credits we felt strong hands clamp on our shoulders, and two burly ushers hoisted us up, marched us to the door, and tossed us out into the street to roll in the gutter! It's too bad, because what a victory it would have been to see this beauty on the big screen!

It’s a Alien knock-off, of course, but only to a point! We open in the office of The Master, a fellow with a glowing red head and the voice of that fine gent Ray Walston, famous for his roles in Silver Streak and Johnny Dangerously! He’s talking to an old space witch played by Mary Ellen O’Neill from Van Nuys Blvd., and he decides the thing to do is to round up a spaceship crew and head to Morganthus, a mystery planet where a previous spaceship crew has disappeared! Thanks to the enthusiasm of spaceship captain Grace Zabriskie, whom we recall from Drop Zone and many fine David Lynch pictures, the characters find themselves on the nightmare planet in no time flat!

Our hero is an upright fellow named Cabren, played by Edward Albert from When Time Ran Out and Getting Even! Ha ha, everybody has lame space-names, like Baelon, the mildly antagonistic character played by erotic film director Zalman King, or empathy-lady Aluma, played by Joanie herself, Erin Moran! Bernard Behrens from The Changeling and The Man With Two Brains is an old man along for the ride; Taafe O’Connor from Hot Chili is the buxom lady with a fear of worms; Robert Englund, Freddy himself from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, is a little guy called Ranger; and Sid Haig, whom you surely remember as the Righteous Brothers’ drummer in Beach Ball, is the virtually mute Quuhod! Ha ha, Quuhod! And Ray Walston is along as the cook, who by an amazing coincidence has the same voice as The Master!

It turns out the planet, and in particular a big pyramid located there, is a place that makes manifest the worst fears of anyone who enters! The first to go is a whinyman played by Jack Blessing from Summer School, who gets eaten by a big doodlebug and we’re glad to be rid of him! The old commander guy goes down a wormhole and is sucked dry by vermiforms; Sid Haig has his beloved crystals turn on him and his own severed arm delivers the death-stab; Zabriskie’s Captain Trantor is incinerated; and poor Erin Moran ends up getting crushed by cable snakes in a crawlhole! Ha ha, yikes! But the worst and the goofiest of all is of course the famous maggot assault, which makes neither psychological nor physiological sense but was intended only as an over-the-top outrage designed by Corman to attract daring or depraved viewers!

There’s some good squoochy gore in here, and mixing this together with ambitious low-budget special effects, James Cameron’s tenpenny production design (and his shock-dancing maggots, ha ha), that stellar oddball cast, and some gloriously dumb metaphysics, we get a heady brew indeed! The movie cares not a fig about making sense, but it does deliver a parade of trick effects you will surely enjoy! I don’t care for the maggot rape, nor for the sensibility that concocted it, but it’s outlandish enough to be more or less ignored, and I’m only glad the actress escaped being crushed by the giant worm prop! Galaxy of Terror is not a movie for everyone, but it’s got a strange hold over me, so with some reservations I award it three redheads!

Burl reviews Predator! (1987)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burl reviews Signs! (2002)

 

Ha ha, I’ll admit it: I’ve never taken to the hushed self-seriousness of M. Night Shyamalan’s pictures! I do however think he’s often a clever writer, and that his technical chops are strong, and I certainly appreciate that! I should say that I’m not someone who tends to guess twists, because I don’t try to, and also I’m not very good at it! But I guessed the twist in The Village simply by seeing the trailer, and the one in The Sixth Sense surprised me only once I realized it was meant to be a surprising twist - ha ha, I thought we were supposed to know what was going on the whole time! His twistmeister reputation does his talents a disservice, though, and I think that’s especially the case with Signs, the picture under review today!

Mel Gibson from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome plays a farmer and former friar feeling fragile from the fateful freak misfortune that befell his family! His brother, an ex-ballplayer enacted by Joaquin Phoenix from Inherent Vice, lives on the farm too, and they are fairly remarkable farmers in that they never seem to do any farming! Ha ha! Anyway, one day the crop circles turn up in their cornfield, and Gibson’s two children, well played by Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin, start acting strange; though one gets the impression this strangeness began long before the start of the story or the arrival of the aliens, or even the death of the wife that caused Gibson to remove his cassock and toss away his collar!

The picture details an alien invasion from a single rural perspective, which is a daring gambit that mostly pays off! Sure, there are plenty of questions: why would the aliens invade this particular corner of the world when they seem otherwise to hover over major cities? Are the corn circles necessary for orienteering purposes, as is speculated, and if so, how is the lack of cornfields in big cities a factor in the aliens’ plan? Of course the biggest question is a callback to The War of the Worlds: how could the aliens have skimped so much on researching the planet they’ve invaded?

I’m perfectly happy to let all these questions go, ha ha! I mean, you can pick apart any story if you’re determined to, and it’s pretty clear that this is a movie less about aliens than about faith: losing it and finding it again under extreme circumstances, as though faith is like the fabled bump on the noggin that first obliterates memory and when applied again, restores it! But right from an early shot of the outline of a removed cross on the wall (which suggests some truly heroic cigarette smoking in the house at some point), the picture is determined to handle this theme with oven mitts on! An irritatingly binary orthodoxy reveals itself, and then pounds us on the head like a hammer in one boring, pushy dialogue scene; and of course by the end Gibson’s requests not to be called “Father” have ceased and he’s back in the uncomfortable-looking cassock and collar! And of course he’s another sort of father once again to his presumably renormalized children!

So all that stuff, along with the usual barbiturated acting and general portentousness of Shyamalan, bugged me a bit; but on the other hand we have sharp lensing from Tak Fujimoto, the terrific cinematographer who shot Last Embrace and Grumpier Old Men and so many other good-looking pictures; good work from composer James Newton Howard; some nice opening credits; some fine cornfield atmosphere; welcome dashes of humour; and well-tuned suspense and spookshow sequences from the talented Shyamalan! It’s quite possible to watch this picture concentrating on those aspects rather than the exasperating thematic porridge, and I recommend doing just that! On balance I admire the film because it does the cinematic genre stuff well, and even though I don’t like what it tries beyond that, and think it does it badly, at least it tries something! I award Signs two and a half bar-b-que forks!

Burl reviews Night Beast! (1982)

 

Dateline: Baltimore! Yes, it’s Burl, returning to the wooded suburbs of that Eastern metropolis to review a work by its most famous filmmaker! Now some might say the filmmaker I allude to must be John Waters, while other, more mainstream cineastes may insist upon Barry Levinson! However, the hep among us know that I can only be referring to Don Dohler, who brought us the magic of Fiend, and then, by some unknowable wizardry, filigreed together a space monster epic called Night Beast!

Ha ha, I’ve long enjoyed this little picture, I must say, so I may not be the most objective of critics! I can still recall an all-night festival of VHS viewing held in my basement when I was about 14, in which I and a few friends watched this picture along with Taxi Driver (which we were all seeing for the first time), The Demon Lover, and one other fine film, its title lost to the mists of time! Night Beast is no Taxi Driver, but rather the simple tale of an alien with a prolapsed face and a silver jumpsuit who crash lands on Earth and starts killing the local people with either his ray gun or his fearsome teeth and claws!

The local sheriff, a Bob Ross-looking fellow called Jack Cinder, along with his contextually comely deputy Lisa and a pair of scientists, do their best to pursue and destroy the invader! Ha ha, the head scientist is played by Maryland’s version of Bea Arthur, and her assistant, Steven, is none other than the King of Baltimore himself, George Stover! Ha ha! Of course, we know George from his appearances in Female Trouble and Jan-Gel: The Beast of the East; and another familiar face from the Dohler stock company is the beastly Don Leifert, who played Mr. Longfellow in Fiend and here is a monstrous motorbiker called Drago! One eagerly anticipates Drago’s demise at the paws of the lamprey-faced alien, but he tastes the cruel blast of buckshot instead!

Also entertaining are the corrupt mayor and his addle-pated blonde ladyfriend! Ha ha, they both come to sticky ends (very sticky, considering the maraschino juice they used for blood, ha ha) when the alien busts into their house and makes mincemeat of them! Many of these characters have the same names and are played by the same actors as in an earlier Dohler picture called The Alien Factor, but all of them treat this new alien invasion as though it’s the first one they’ve ever experienced, so maybe they’re not supposed to be the same characters after all! Ha ha, such are the vicissitudes of the Dohlerverse!

Here’s an interesting thing! The synth score of Night Beast was in part composed by J.J. Abrams, director of Super 8, and one assumes his work on this picture informed his own later stab at the invading-alien genre, ha ha, and the amateur moviemakers of the picture may well have been inspired by Dohler and his gang! The ugly night beast himself was designed by a fellow named John Dods, who did up the trick effects in The Deadly Spawn, and that really underlines the connection I think the two pictures have!

In the end the characters crib an electricity-based trick from The Thing From Another World to get rid of their unwanted visitor, but not before he’s raygunned dozens of people, including the director’s children, and savaged many others! There’s plenty of great goopy gore on display, and lots of cheap optical effects, and while the alien zapping scenes get a little repetitive, the picture is never boring! It’s eighty rural minutes of rubes-vs.-monster action, with a little bohankie and a lot of tomato paste thrown in, and how can you go wrong with that! It is, in its modest way, an exemplar of low-budget 80s genre filmmaking, and the poor script, indifferent direction and variable acting are all a part of that! Perhaps it could use a little more Evil Dead-style pep, and maybe it’s not the most original screen narrative ever produced, but gosh darn it the thing has heart, and I like it! I give Night Beast two and a half salt-and-pepper afros!

Burl reviews Body Snatchers! (1993)

 

Once again, it’s the actual Burl and not an amazing facsimile, ha ha! Really, I promise; but after reviewing yet another adaptation of the sturdy and always-relevant Jack Finney story about drifting moss from outer space that absorbs people and recreates them as emotionless simulacra, I can understand your doubts! This time the director behind it all, somewhat surprisingly, is the auteur behind Fear City, Abel Ferrara, and, reflecting the streamlined approach, his version is called simply Body Snatchers!

The Don Siegel picture was set in a small town, and Philip Kaufman’s excellent remake, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, took place in the big city, but this one is laid on an army base, which turns out to be an extremely apt location even if the movie doesn’t exploit it to its full potential! On the other hand, if they’d pushed the dehumanization inherent to the military too much, it might have seemed preachy or at least overbaked, so maybe Ferrara and his screenwriters (including Stuart Gordon, who was originally supposed to direct it, I believe) got it right!

We join a non-military family as they arrive at the base: dad works for the EPA, and is not a supercilious bureaucrat like the EPA guy in Ghostbusters, but a shaggy ex-hippie type; mom, or rather, stepmom, is played by Meg Tilly from Psycho II and Impulse (and who's particularly effective once she turns counterfeit); and there’s a teenage daughter who’s more or less the main character; and then there’s a little guy too, maybe five years old, played by one of the best child actors I’ve ever seen! Ha ha, he’s really terrific! Ferrara must have liked him too, because he used the young chap again in his next picture, the Madonna vs. Harvey Keitel one that I've seen, and completely forgotten, called Dangerous Games!

Anyway, one guy on the base who sure hasn’t been taken over yet is the post’s chain-smoking doctor, played with much nervousness by Forest Whitaker from Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai! On the other hand, R. Lee Ermey from Full Metal Jacket is the commanding officer, and there’s no discerning that guy from a pod version, is there, ha ha! Billy Wirth from The Lost Boys plays a sympathetic soldier who becomes a co-hero along with the girl!

As always when I see little kids in horror movies, I dreaded what might happen to the little brother; and indeed one of the most effective scenes in the early part of the picture has him becoming heartbreakingly alarmed when every other kid in his classroom has made the exact same finger painting! You can see it in the eyes of this fine little actor: the dawning awareness that his own very different painting has made him an object of suspicion and maybe even of attack from his zomboid classmates!

While it’s no House By the Cemetery, my worst fears for the young character were indeed realized, though his part in the tale is wrapped up with the goofiest plummeting effect since Link, so that eased my anguish a bit! Of course there are no happy endings in the pod stories, but this version does present a little bit of payback before the inevitable! Ferrara keeps it all moving quickly, and orchestrates a few decently suspenseful or suitably gross spaghetti sequences, and thanks to cinematographer Bojan Bazelli, who shot The Ring and Pumpkinhead, the picture looks pretty good too! It’s not up to the standards set by the first two cinematic adaptations, but it doesn’t embarrass them either; and it’s better than The Puppet Masters, and almost certainly better than the more recent official adaptation of the Finney story, simply called The Invasion, which I’ve not seen and currently have no plans to! I think three solid versions is enough for me, and so I give this one, Body Snatchers, three solid versions!

Burl reviews Alien Nation! (1988)

 

Hello outlanders, it’s Burl here to review a picture set in the far-off near-future world of 1991! Like Independence Day and V, it’s a story that begins with an enormous metal frisbee hovering over Los Angeles, but this time the aliens aren’t here to blast us or turn us into vittles - they’re refugees from some slave planet, looking for safe harbor! And they have big heads so of course you know the movie I’m talking about is Alien Nation!

The story proper takes up several years after the initial landing, with James Caan from Misery playing a human cop who loses his partner to the incredibly powerful shotguns of two duster-sporting alien criminals! He takes a nerdy alien played by Mandy Patinkin from The Princess Bride as his new detective partner! (Maybe on the set Patinkin told Caan “Ha ha, that guy Rob Reiner is a nice fellow! You should work with him some time!”)

The alien fugees are Newcomers to most people, and “slags” to bigots like Caan, but despite his distaste for the otherworldly immigrants, Caan wants Patinkin along because he thinks the big-domed detective can help him find the aliens who killed his buddy! Terence Stamp from Link plays the most likely suspect, an alien businessman/drug dealer who seems like the kind of guy Axel Foley might come up against in one of his pictures; while Kevyn Major Howard from Full Metal Jacket and Death Wish II essays the role of Stamp’s scowly lieutenant!

Most of the movie is a very so-so investigation plot with a little sci-fi and the inter-species tension salted in here and there! It does work a bit to fill in the sociological details of the alien arrival, but that only goes so far! There’s a not-bad car chase, and then some lame would-be monster attack stuff at the very end! Ha ha, this is another 80s picture with buddy cops of course, and as such it follows a formula, and let me tell you, it stays the course on that formula, never deviating for a second! There are, in other words, no surprises to be found here!

It’s too bad, because the potential for them is rich! But the movie sticks to its guns, quite literally, and despite the odd moment of wit, the ingratiating performance from Patinkin and the properly gruff one from Caan, the very late-80s photography from Adam Greenberg, and the fine, if rather boring, trick makeup effects on the aliens, it’s still little more than a routine police meller; and as far as human-alien buddy cop pictures go, The Hidden, which came along a year before this one, is a much better bet! There’s not much that’s memorable here; indeed, I saw this in the theatre on its release and by just a few days later could have told you very little about the movie! Revisiting it this summer, I can see why! It has a few nice touches and it doesn’t stink, but it doesn’t do much else either! I give Alien Nation one and a half cartons of sour milk!

Burl reviews The Abyss! (1989)

Blub blub it’s Burl! yes, I’m underwater again, and it’s 1989, so I must be reviewing Leviathan! No? Oh, ha ha, then is it Deep Star Six? No? The Rift? Endless Descent? Full Fathom Five? Okay, last guess: The Abyss!

Of course it is the James Cameron picture, famous for its difficult shooting conditions and the subaqueous martinet at its helm, that we’re discussing today! It was partly shot in an abandoned cooling tower owned by Earl Owensby, where a big model undersea base was built, and the actors and crew had to swim around like crappies! Ha ha, it’s funny to think of even the least little touch of Owensby on this big giant Fox production!

Anyway, the tale tells of a gang of roughbusters who man an underwater oil drilling unit; and never mind the environmental sketchiness of this idea, but the blue-collar posse somehow ingratiates where the analogous roughbusters in Armageddon make you hope their oil rig will be hit by advance meteor shards as soon as possible! The guy in charge is Ed “Creepshow” Harris, playing Bud, and he’s just a regular fella, regular as a bowl of prunes! His ex-wife, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, the lady from Scarface and Slamdance, and who happens to have designed the underwater oil drilling base, descends to the rig with a bunch of marines led by a mustachioed Michael Biehn, well-known from Navy Seals and other Cameron pictures, like Aliens! The idea is that they’re all going to cooperate to find the missing submarine!

Biehn, already kind of a jerk, is busy getting worse from some kind of pressure madness! The appearance of underwater aliens hastens this process, and soon (well, not soon: this is a three-hour movie!), he’s sending a recovered nuclear torpedo on a collision course with the alien ship! Along the way there’s plenty of yelling, bubbles, a punchfight or two, miraculous alien water tendrils, a lot of salt-of-the-earth grassroots-folk stuff, and the surprising revelation that salt-of-the-earth grassroots folk, in addition to being good with tools and fond of jargon, are committed pacifists! Ha ha, that’s a message I can get behind!

The aliens themselves look like angelic parameciums and are not completely ungoofy, especially in a shot of one of them taking Ed Harris by the hand and guiding him Peter Pan style toward their big ship, but this almost doesn’t ruin the movie! Ha ha! Most of the picture holds together well, plays with reasonable seriousness, and serves as a solid underwater adventure! All the acting is good - Harris channels Ralph Kramden, Mastrantonio creates a unique "likeable bitch" character, and honestly, I think this is Biehn’s finest hour - and the verisimilitude Cameron was going for is there in spades! Whether Ed Harris, who vowed never to talk about the experience of making this picture, now considers that it was worth the trouble is unknown to me! Probably not! He probably thinks more fondly on something like The Right Stuff, where he was way up high instead of way down low, or Apollo 13, in which he got to wear a snazzy white vest!

I tend to credit the underwater pictures more than they deserve, and maybe that’s true of The Abyss also! But the fact remains that I both enjoy it and am impressed by its determined physicality! For the first two thirds anyway, ha ha! And the death of Biehn, smashed like an egg, is particularly memorable! I give The Abyss two and a half elbows to the tape player!