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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Burl reviews 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 Deep Blue Sea! (1999)

 

Blub blub it’s Burl, here with more underwater action-horror for you! As you may recall, I have a fondness for such photoplays: the soggybottoms of 1989, for instance, like Deep Star Six and Leviathan and The Abyss! Movies that aren’t necessarily set at underwater complexes but feature water monsters are pretty good too, and the picture under review today, Deep Blue Sea, attempts to combine the charms of two such pictures, Jaws and Deep Rising! Ha ha, I’m surprised they didn’t call it Deep Jaws! And now I hear you asking: well Burl, did they succeed in grafting these two water movies into one satisfying cinematic concoction? Read on, MacDuck!

From Deep Rising they took the 90s-era digital monster effects, a little bit of tomato paste, a lot of goofy dialogue, a gang of non-characters, a big storm, and the word “deep!” From Jaws they took sharks! All of this is set at an underwater installation that differs from the above-named 1989 pictures in that it’s not at the bottom of the sea, but rather some small distance below the surface, with much of it floating like an artificial island! We explore this facility in the company of Mr. Samuel L. Jackson, known from such movies as Exorcist III and Die Hard With A Vengeance, who plays Russell Franklin, the millionairesman who funded the project!

Thomas Jane is a surly diver called Carter and Saffron Burrows is Dr. Susan; and other characters are played by Jacqueline McKenzie from Malignant, Michael Rapaport from Metro, LL Cool J from Halloween H2O (as “Preacher,” cook, parrot owner, and man of God), and of course Stellan Skarsgård from The Hunt for Red October and Dune Part One as The Doc! Their goal? Make sea sharks smart as a way of somehow curing Alzheimer’s! (Ha ha, strangely they ignore the fact that they already have an animal aboard their station that can talk, which is Preacher’s foul-mouthed parrot, so why not test on him!)

Ha ha, it’s a noble goal, but when the inevitable storm comes and wreaks havoc, and the topside portion of the facility is destroyed and the supersmart sea sharks released from their pen, the characters are left wishing maybe they hadn’t poked so much at the bitey fish! Ha ha, naturally the sea sharks want revenge, and they take it out mostly on The Doc, who gets his arm chomped off for starters, then when they’re trying to helicopter him out of there, a shark nabs him off the end of the cable, carries him around a bit underwater, then uses him as a battering ram to get through an underwater window! Oh, poor Doc!

But his hilarious death scene is not the most notable or memorable in the picture - ha ha, that honor of course goes to Samuel L. Jackson, and while since that time there have been many copycat sudden-death scenes to dilute the impact of this one, it still remains amusing, and I can assure you that it was a real gudukus in the theater back when it was new!

When I watched the picture again recently, of course the moment was not so incredible, and while one can’t blame the movie for that, one can blame it for the terrible script, the wafer-thin characterizations, the relentless borrowing from other, better pictures, and the lack of affrights! It’s one of those pictures that takes a while to get going, but once it does, it stays going, so it’s got that going for it! And it does have some moments sprinkled here and there - not many, ha ha, but some! So in the end, when all the bubbles have risen to the surface, I give Deep Blue Sea one and a half parrot-munchings!

Burl reviews Dune Part One! (2021)

 

Wey wey hep-a-hole, it’s Burl, here with another big-screen review! Yes, today I’d like to talk about the new superproduction of Dune, rather than the old superproduction of Dune made by that man David Lynch so long ago! As compromised as that older picture was, it was still a fine entertainment I thought; but it was not really the book! And as much as we all wish we could see the Alejandro Jodorowsky version that never was, it probably wouldn’t have been the book either, or at least the book that’s in my mind! This new version, brought to us by the bontempi film artist Denis Villeneuve, is the book, or at least about five eighths of it, both for better and for worse, and accordingly, with the rest of it apparently on the way, the official title of this picture is Dune Part One!

We recall the story! It’s the far future and the desert planet of Arrakis, the only source of an incredibly valuable spice that makes cosmic travel possible, is the locus of all sorts of interplanetary intrigue! The Emperor of the Universe sends the nasty Harkonnens (a name pronounced differently here than it was in the Lynch version) back from Arrakis to their greasy home planet and installs the more beneficent Atreides royal family as caretakers of the spice-mining bonanza; but this is all a plot to launch a surprise attack on the Atreides, which in turn forces the young scion of the Atreides family, along with his mother Jessica, out into the desert to make common cause with the indigenous Arrakians, called Fremen!

Paul Atreides, the manchild of destiny, is played by a young flyaway called Timothée Chalamet, and I don’t think he quite caught the character the way Kyle MacLachlan did back in 1984! He’s not terrible or anything, just a little flat! His father, Duke Leto Atreides, is played by Oscar Isaac from Inside Llewyn Davis, and he’s good too, but he never has a moment as poignant as Jürgen Prochnow did in Lynch’s picture, staring out at the oceans of his home planet Caladan and wistfully saying “I’ll miss the sea!”

Rebecca Ferguson from Doctor Sleep and The Kid Who Would Be King is Paul’s mother Jessica, and she’s ideal for the part, if a bit young! We get a veiled crone performance from the terrific Charlotte Rampling of D.O.A. fame, here playing a witchy Reverend Mother; an earthy, or perhaps sandy, turn from Skyfall’s Javier Bardem in the role of Stilgar; and Stellan Skarsgård from The Hunt for Red October and Deep Blue Sea is the nasty Baron Harkonnen, not quite so covered in furuncles as his 1984 counterpart, nor as demonstrative in his appetite for boyjuice, but somehow even grosser nevertheless!

In grossitude he is nearly matched by the enormous worms that plow through the desert, but in this truncated version of the story these guys don’t yet play a big role! However, ha ha, there is a very satisfying scene in which one of them gobbles up a few Harkonnens like they were junior mints, just as its distant cousin on Tatooine, the All-Consuming Sarlacc, so enjoyed to snack on Jabba’s men! Again I say ha ha!

A recurring theme is of one out of four things not working properly: we see, for example, that a carryall meant to lift a spice harvester out of worm danger fails because one of its four hooks cannot deploy properly; later, that one of the flappy wings on the ornithopter in which Paul and Jessica flee the Harkonnens becomes choked with sand and goes limp; and that ultimately, of the four allegedly loyal House Atreides councilors and men-at-arms - Thufir Hawat, Gurney Halleck, Duncan Idaho and Dr. Wellington Yueh - one of them is not to be trusted!

In some ways the movie is almost doggedly faithful to its source - one occasionally longs for some flights of imaginative fancy that come from the filmmakers alone! The only changes, additions, elisions or other departures from the Frank Herbert text are borne of utility, however, and there’s something a bit too literal and acolytic about this approach! The same goes for the musical score, which does the job effectively, but something a little more adventuresome and experimental might have been nice!

Still, it’s all very gorgeously made and properly immersive, moves at a stately pace but never bores, and seems to end prematurely, and so I find I’m looking forward to Dune Part Two! There will be lots of fighting and battle scenes and, one hopes, worms! Ha ha! I give Dune Part One three gom jabbars!

Burl reviews Deep Rising! (1998)

 

Ahoy mateys, it’s Burl, here to review some ocean-going action-horror! Ha ha, here’s yet another 90s movie I saw on the big screen with my friend Pellonpäa, and which we both thoroughly enjoyed at the time! I still think the movie is pretty fun, while not hesitating to acknowledge that it’s also plenty dumb! The picture in question is quite simply Deep Rising!

Treat Williams from Dead Heat is our wry, world-weary hero, a boatsman who rents out his captaining services to any sketchy characters who might require them! His customers are a gang of mercenaries led by Wes Studi, who was in Heat and The Last of the Mohicans and plenty of other pictures, and their mission involves being taken out into the middle of the Pacific Ocean by Treat’s fastboat! Treat’s crew is comprised of a squirrely straggle-hair called Joey, played by Kevin J. O’Connor, whom we recall from playing Hemingway in The Moderns and of course from his role as a thug in One More Saturday Night, and a tough lady played by Una Damon, who I think maybe should have been the hero of the picture instead of just another tentacle victim!

Ha ha, tentacle victim, you ask? Well, there’s plenty of them among Studi’s band of thugs, which includes Cliff Curtis from Collateral Damage and other familiar tough-guy faces like Djimon Hounsou and Clifton Powell and Jason Flemyng! But we’re getting ahead of ourselves! The mercenaries’ goal, and the location upon which most of the action takes place, is a fancy cruise ship owned by a glasses-weasel named Canton, played by Anthony Heald from The Silence of the Lambs and The Beniker Gang, and he has disabled the ship so it can be plundered by the mercenaries and subsequently sunk, and then he can collect on the insurance!

But that’s when the tentacle monster, or monsters, from beneath the sea attack! I guess it’s just supposed to be one blob-headed creature who gets into the ship somehow and devours people with its tentacles, which have mouths on them, or maybe each tentacle was its own thing! The biology of the monster is a bit confusing, frankly, because each tentacle has a mouth and seems to express emotions like rage or slyness, and then the blob has its own mouth, with which it roars and tries to eat the hero!

Famke Janssen from GoldenEye is on board the ship too, playing a jewel thief whose incarceration in the brig saves her life; and the bulk of the picture is the group of people being steadily reduced by tentacle attacks as they try to either make it back to Treat’s fastboat or else start the ship up and call for help! Ha ha, their plans are a little scattershot, frankly! But there are some good gloopy scenes along the way, like the poor half-digested fellow who can’t believe the straits he’s found himself in, as well as some moderately clever badinage here and there! O’Connor’s whiny, beret-wearing stragglehair is a bit hard to take at times, but Williams does the ethically-shaky hero bit well, if not memorably!

It’s silly but occasionally spectacular, and I recall it being a fun time at the moviehouse! It was sillier still but nearly as enjoyable to watch it more recently on home video, so I give Deep Rising two sideways windshield wipers!

Burl reviews Eraser! (1996)

 

HA-LLO DIS IZ BURL! Ha ha, as you can tell from my note-perfect Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonation, I’m reviewing an Arnie picture for you today! It’s late-mid period Arnie, after he graduated to comedies like Junior, but before he got into his Grizzled Old Muscleman phase! Evidently as the second half of the 1990s began, he felt like dipping a toe back into the R-rated action of his earlier years, when he was doing pictures like Commando and Raw Deal and the like; and the big-budget nubscrum that resulted is called Eraser!

Arnold is of course the titular Eraser: an agent with no life, back story, or personality, who works for the Justice Department, giving new identities to witnesses and informants and folk of that nature! In the opening scenes he does just that for a low-level gangster played by the late Robert Pastorelli, and then we meet the main erasee, a lady called Lee, played quite well by Vanessa Williams, who’s ready to give up the goods on the shady armaments company she works for by recording them through a hideous brooch camera! Here we get just a kiss of science fiction, because the company’s newest invention is something called a “rail gun,” which shoots pellets nearly at the speed of light! Ha ha, in reality these pellets would just pass through a body and it would take a second before the victim even noticed, while in the movie if you get shot by one of these things, then of course you fly screaming all the way across the room and crash into the wall in slow motion!

James Caan from Misery is Arnie’s mentor and work chum, but it’s pretty evident he’s the bad guy right from the start! Of course maybe it’s not so evident, because James Coburn from Hard Times, here wearing a silver cocksman’s beard, is lurking around in the office scenes looking just as suspicious! Soon Arnie is on the run from the both of them; there’s a pretty impressively-sustained level of action-suspense once Arnie realizes he’s been betrayed and must jump off a flaming jet plane to escape, and then drives like a maniac to the zoo, where he must gunfight and battle alligators!

The picture slows down a bit after this, but I suppose it had to! It’s got a little sparkle to the script, maybe thanks to the participation of Walon Green, who also wrote Sorcerer and The Wild Bunch! Of course it’s pretty hard to say who wrote this lame-o bon mot or that goofy gay bar scene, so best to spread both the credit and the blame around as far as it’ll go! The sci-fi superguns are a nice addition, because that peps things up a bit! Whenever one of the rail guns starts shooting, it leaves a trail of expanding blue smoke rings from every supersonic projectile! It’s an effect I liked well enough, but not nearly as much as the filmmakers liked it themselves: ha ha, it must happen a million times! I bet the animation artists got tired of drawing blue smoke rings!

The  climax is a pretty bog-standard shipyard shootout, with the addition of a lot of blue smoke rings of course; and then there’s a final revenge scene that’s hard not to read as a fond fantasy from people who might like to see sterner measures taken against real-life perpetrators of similar crimes! Ha ha, this is an Iran-Contra movie just the way The Parallax View is a product of Watergate, though of course Eraser is far and away the weaker film I think it should go without saying!

It sits squarely in the middle of the 90s Hollywood action pack: not nearly up there with Speed or The Fugitive, but cheek by jowl with Passenger 57 and Con Air on the ho-hum-hell-why-not shelf! It’s got a fine action look from cinematographer Adam Greenberg, a nice scene of henchmen getting crunched by alligators (which beasts are brought to life by both animatronics and rough mid-90s digital trick effects), and a reasonably brisk pace! Making a smart political thriller out of this material might have been nice, but these particular filmmakers just weren’t interested in doing that! I’m going to give Eraser two concerned bartenders!

Burl reviews Pet Sematary! (1989)

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burl reviews Big Ass Spider! (2013)

 

Ha ha and cobwebs, it’s Burl, here with a review of a big bug picture that keeps one antenna on the late-model Roger Corman DinoCrocoCentiSharknado school of filmmaking, and the other on slightly more serious-minded numbers like Tarantula and Them!! Sprinkle this concoction perhaps too liberally with Aliens, ha ha, and you’ve got Big Ass Spider!!

Our hero is a husky, good-natured exterminator called Alex, played by Greg Grunberg from Mission Impossible III! After an encounter with an old fruitcake (played by the ubiquitous horrorslady Lin Shaye) in which he suffers a brown recluse bite, Alex heads to the hospital for treatment, where, with admirable narrative economy a big, though not yet big ass, spider emerges from a mistakenly-delivered corpse! Ha ha, of course it’s the result of some kind of Army experiment, and the military is soon on the scene, led by a colonel or a major or whatever played by Ray Wise from RoboCop!

A fashion scientist played by Patrick Bachau from A View to a Kill is tagging along, making dire pronouncements about the exponential growth rate of the enormous eight-legger, which in the meantime is traveling around the hospital melting the faces of elderly patients and growing ever larger! Alex and the hospital security guard who has become his new sidekick are hot on its cribellum as the arachnid breaks out of the hospital, legs it to a park, and begins munching on picnicking families, beach volleyball girls, and Lloyd Kaufman of Troma!

The picture moves along quickly until a very Aliens climax at the top of a building, where the spidey has cocooned a number of people, including the army lady Alex has a crush on, and laid soon-to-hatch eggs all around the place! Some jet planes provide a bit of King Kong action, and Alex finishes things off at street level with a well-placed bazooka shot! Somewhere in there a groan-worthy cover of the Pixies’ great song “Where Is My Mind” fits in too, and there’s a jokey look-to-the-skies ending involving some mention of an enormous cockroach! Ha ha!

Well, right off the top I ought to say that the picture is a lot less dire than it might have been! I like big bug pictures, but it’s the old ones I really dig, from Them! right down to Beginning of the End and its ilk! New ones, with their inevitable surfeit of poor digital trick effects, do tend to leave me cold! But though there is just such a surfeit in this picture too, which occasionally annoys, there are a few impressive practical effects also, and so the movie ends up punching just a little bit above its weight!

And even though his character’s constant, desperate quest for a date is a little pathetic, Grunberg’s performance is likeable and intelligent, and that goes a long way in helping the movie! The security guard sidekick is good too, in his limited way, and Wise is always a welcome face! It’s a silly picture, at times a stupid one, very frequently derivative, and never scary or terribly exciting; but like its portly hero it has a good heart, and that goes a long mile with ol’ Burl! It has pep too, which is of critical importance! Ha ha, I don’t mind giving Big Ass Spider! one and a half spinnerets and a blue ribbon for effort!

Burl reviews Tales From the Darkside: The Movie! (1990)

 

Once upon a time, it’s Burl, here to review a multi-story, omnibus, portmanteau anthology horror picture! Ha ha, of course Dead of Night is the standard bearer for such works, and I’m here to tell you that this movie is no Dead of Night; nor, indeed, is it a Creepshow! No, in actual fact, the picture is Tales From the Darkside: The Movie!

Ha ha, I remember when this one came out in the theatres, but for whatever reason, even though I always like to see horror pictures on the big screen, I ignored it! And I continued to ignore it until recently, when a DVD of the movie came my way and I could ignore it no longer! It begins with a framing story concerning a suburban witch played by Blondie herself, Debbie Harry, well known from Videodrome, is preparing to fricassee a paperboy she has captured, played by Matthew Lawrence from Planes, Trains and Automobiles!

To distract her from her meal prep, the paperboy recounts three tales from a big volume he has found in his cell! The first is the most star-studded of them: laid on a college campus (a setting ol’ Burl always appreciates in horror movies), we meet a gang of students, including Steve Buscemi of Escape From L.A. fame as a nerdbody who has received a mummy by mail order, toffee-nosed rich boy Lee, played by Robert Sedgwick from Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home, who has cheated Buscemi out of a grant or a scholarship or something; the toffeenose’s even more toffee-nosed girlfriend, played by Julianne Moore from The Fugitive; and the girlfriend’s brother, who seems out of place in this tennis whites-wearing crew, essayed by Christian Slater of Hot Tub Time Machine 2! Soon the mean-faced mail order mummy, previously a reposing mummy, becomes a full-on walking mummy, and like his compadres in Dawn of the Mummy, exacts a little gory vengeance to the beat of the cloth-wrapped feet!

Next we meet a rich man, played by the always-welcome William Hickey from Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, who fears a local housecat and hires a gentleman assassin played by New York Doll David Johansen to take care of the fearsome feline! This one is based on a Stephen King story, but it’s one of his sillier ones, featuring as it does a scene in which the kitty forces its way into someone’s mouth and down his gullet! Ha ha!

The final story is the one that tries to pack in some emotional resonance, and it involves a downtown artist played by James Remar from Quiet Cool, who, despite being poor and unsuccessful, maintains a vast Soho warehouse studio that would tax the income of a Jeff Koons! He has a scary encounter with a gargoyle which wounds him and makes him promise never to tell anyone about it, and then leaves him be! Remar meets a pretty lady played by Rae Dawn Chong from Commando! They fall in love, get married, have kids, and if you can’t guess the twist then you’ve never read an EC Comic or a story by O. Henry!

With the stories told and the basting pan ready, the paperboy of the framing story must figure out a way to escape from the witch, and ha ha, I won’t give that part away! I will give away this fact, however: it’s not a great movie! But it’s not awful either: the cast alone (many of whom had appeared on the Tales From the Darkside TV show) ensures that! It’s slickly made, with some fine makeups and a moment here and a moment there, but it’s decidedly deficient in affrights, and in the end sits about on the level of, say, Creepshow 2! But for my money it doesn’t touch the Amicus pictures from yesteryear (though it does manhandle the later Milton Subotsky productions like The Uncanny and The Monster Club), and while it provides some fun, and the final story tries hard, I can only muster a rating of one and a half wire hangers for Tales From the Darkside: The Movie!

Burl reviews Komodo! (1999)

 

Ha ha and lizard lips, it’s Burl! I’ve got a review of a picture that seems much like many other direct-to-video creature feature of the late 90s and early 00s, but unlike many of those, this is a picture I actually had the pleasure of seeing on the big screen at the Toronto Film Festival! I say pleasure not because the movie is particularly good, but because frankly it’s a pleasure to see any low-budget genre picture on a big screen and with a good crowd! The quality of the movie is not irrelevant, but is much less an issue! And this was the case when I saw Komodo!

I watched it again recently, and can report that in most respects it’s your basic animal attack story! There’s a brief preamble set in 1980, in which a filthy, van-driving hippie is offended by the smell of the eggs he’s transporting and dumps them in the mud of some Eastern seaboard island! (Ha ha, the movie was actually filmed in Australia, and though there are few obvious tells, this fact is nevertheless somehow apparent in every frame!) Nineteen years later, a family made up of a mom, a dad, a teenaged boy and a little dog arrive on the ferry to spend time at their summer home! All are chomped by creatures unknown except for the boy, who is traumatized!

The story proper opens with a lady psychiatrist played by Jill Hennessey from Dead Ringers bringing the boy back to the island in order to face his trauma! Ha ha, of course no one believed his story about giant lizards, but they believe him soon enough when the creatures, created by a combination of CGI and practical animatronic effects, show up and begin anew their program of chomping! Meanwhile there are a couple of fellows employed by the nasty oil company which is the island’s only other denizen; they’re tasked with hunting and killing all the komodos, which it turns out the oil company is well aware of but were trying to keep secret!

There’s some back story to the main oil company guy, whose wife was chomped in some earlier encounter and is now being forced by the firm to do their dirty work; but in the main the screenplay is careful to keep all its characters as one-dimensional as possible: flatter, indeed, than the hungry dragons prowling the area! Ha ha, at least their motivations are clear!

For a low-budget movie of the late 1990s, the trick effects are impressive! The digital komodo dragons seen in Skyfall are a bit more convincing, it’s true, but still, these ones are not bad! The picture was directed by a trick effects fellow, Michael Lantieri, and while he’s not the best trick effectsman-turned-director out there (Stan Winston’s Pumpkinhead is a lot better), he’s not the worst, either! (Ha ha, remember John Bruno’s Virus? Stink, stank, stunk!) And for a PG-13 picture, there are a few moments of pleasingly goopy gore, too! Not much, but more than the nil I was expecting!

The picture is fine enough for most of its running time, though unremarkable and largely tension-free! The ending hobbles it particularly: there are opportunities for a big climax, but they clearly didn’t have the dosh for it so the movie just kind of ends! The evil oil company fellow, whose entire role thus far had been delivered over the telephone, finally shows up on the island, but we’re denied any meaningful closure with this jerk! Ha ha, it would have been nice to see his head crushed in the jaws of a komodo, but no!

I can’t say it’s much more than what many would call a time-passer (a term I don’t care for, though one up from “time-waster” at least), and in no category does it ever rise above the level of acceptable! I still carry some residual pleasure from seeing it on the big screen, however (I would imagine I’m one of the few to have done so, for what it’s worth), and it was a nice experience this time around too, watching it with my family with a fire in the fireplace and a frosty beer in hand! Given all that, I award Komodo one and a half shattered doggy doors!  

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 The Birds! (1963)

 

Cheep-cheep and bad birdseed, it’s Burl, here to Hitch your wagon to a new review, ha ha! Today I want to review a movie I’ve seen many times, but always enjoy; and ha ha, you know, though it’s not perfect, I think it just keeps getting better! It’s Alfred Hitchcock’s tale of avian disturbance, The Birds!

I think you all know the story: birds attack, nobody knows why! But it’s also a people story, with flighty (ha ha!) San Francisco socialite Melanie Daniels, played by Tippi Hedren from Marnie, acting like a complete maniac and following handsome lawyer Rod Taylor, whom we remember from The Time Machine, up the coast to Bodega Bay in order to teach him a lesson by gifting a pair of lovebirds to his little sister! Ha ha, yes, her plan is as insane as it sounds! She sort of reminds me of Marion Crane and her little pile of cash in Psycho!

Up in Bodega Bay, Melanie rents a boat from none other than Doodles Weaver from The Errand Boy! It seems that Rod Taylor, playing the rather smug Mitch Brenner, is up for the weekend visiting his mom Lydia, essayed by Jessica Tandy from Cocoon, and his little sister Cathy, a pubescent performance from Veronica Cartwright of The Witches of Eastwick! Meanwhile the local schoolmistress, Suzanne Pleshette from The Shaggy D.A., is obviously carrying a torch for Mitch, but lets Melanie rent a room for the night in her house anyway! Ha ha, they even become friends, after a fashion!

Given that Melanie has some growing up to do (but also has done some growing up previous to the opening moments of the story), and frosty old Lydia, the world’s primmest chicken farmer, has her own obvious if obscure son-related issues, and Pleshette’s character Annie Hayworth is jealous, sad, and stoic all at the same time, there’s plenty of soap opera material available here! But Hitch knows how to do all this stuff in his own way, and the drama and the bird attacks are somehow all of a piece!

And those bird attacks! Ha ha, this surely must have been a heck of a shoot, especially for old Hitch, who was afraid of birds! But the technical wizardry from such accomplished trick effect folks as Ub Iwerks and Albert Whitlock, and many others besides, still dazzles after all these years, and so the movie is a great pleasure to watch from a technical standpoint! It looks good too, except for the odd dud of a studio shot, ha ha!

There’s an artifice to the human element that the picture never really overcomes, but that really does get swept aside by the principal element, as underlined by the title itself: The Birds! Those flappers and squawkers and beakéd beasts really do their stuff, ha ha, and as a result the movie is a grand entertainment in the way only Hitchcock could create! They peck out eyes, they go after old folks and children, they bust through doors and swoop down chimneys and blow up gas stations, and if I were to list all the ways in which this picture is superior to Beaks: The Movie, we’d be here all day! Ha ha! I give The Birds three and a half old lady berets!