Burl reviews Any Which Way You Can! (1980)

 

Ha ha, right turn Clyde, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m here to review one of the good ol’ boy apestravaganzas Clint Eastwood appeared in back in the late 1970s! In fact, the one I’m reviewing for you is not the epic that kicked it all off, Every Which Way But Loose: nope, although I did watch that one a while back (but didn’t review it for some reason), I’m skipping right to the second and final entry in this abbreviated series, Any Which Way You Can!

You might ask “Ha ha, but Burl, aren’t these movies terrible, and why are you wasting precious, precious minutes of life, which is so dear, to watch them?” Your inquiry has merit, and I’ve asked the same questions myself! But while the movies are indeed fairly terrible, they have a hominess to them, along with a little bit of nostalgia, that afford them a certain edge! They have other values as well, which I’ll get to presently!

But first: the plot! No, ha ha, there’s no plot, so I’ll give you the setup and the situation instead! It seems there’s a beer-drinkin’, engine-block haulin’ bare-knuckle fighter, lean mean and taci-tureen, who goes by the name of Philo Beddoe! He has a best pal, Orville (or is Orville his brother?), but an even better pal in his orang-utan roommate Clyde, an inveterate cop-car shitter! A hapless gang of Nazi idiot bikers are constantly after Philo, and are always outwitted by him, which, ha ha, isn’t all that impressive really, since they're dopes! He has an irascible old Ma, and in the first movie he fell for a lady singer named Lynne Halsey-Taylor, who dumped him at the end of it!

In this one, Philo decides to quit bare-knuckle brawling just as some gambler gangsters organize a big-money brawl! They want to pit Philo against their east coast monster Mr. Jack Wilson, played by Big Bill Smith from Fast Company and The Mean Season; but in the meanwhile Philo and Lynne Halsey-Taylor (played again by Sondra Locke from The Shadow of Chikara) have rekindled their romance by playing bohankie in the filthy barn where Clyde dwells, as the fascinated and horny ape watches! Ha ha, yikes! So under the influence of his family and friends, Clint decides to pull out of the fight; the mobsters kidnap Lynne Halsey-Taylor in an attempt to force the issue; Mr. Jack Wilson and Clint become friends while jogging and work together to save Lynne Halsey-Taylor; and then they have a big fight anyway! And, in an ending I did not expect, the Nazi bikers become millionaires!

See, here’s where we come to one of the virtues of this picture, to which I alluded before: the cast! Of course Clint, whom we know so well from Tightrope and Tarantula, is Philo, who is a pretty dopey guy really, and from his facial expressions frequently seems overwhelmed by a mystifying modern world that baffles him at every turn! But he’s a generally amiable dimwit, and he’s backed up by Geoffrey Lewis, familiar from Smile and ‘Salem’s Lot, in the role of Orville, the unscrupulous tow-truck driver who also lives in the compound; and Ruth Gordon from Rosemary’s Baby and The Big Bus is Ma, crotchety old Ma, ha ha!

Familiar faces abound! There’s Bill McKinney from Cannonball, Barry Corbin from My Science Project, Al Ruscio from The Naked Flame and Michael Cavanaugh from Collateral Damage! Plus the cast is filled with stuntmen of course, because the movie was directed by a stuntman, Buddy Van Horn, and so there are plenty of casual stunts to go along with the more obvious and heavily planned stunt gags! And then there are the Quinces, a Midwestern couple recently arrived in California and played by real-life spouses Logan Ramsey from The Beast Within and Anne Ramsey from Deadly Friend! They serve as completely marginal story elements, like living Sergio Aragones drawings, whose coincidental proximity to the ape-fuelled antics at first provides only alarm, but eventually reinvigorates their moribund sex life!

Digressions like this are one reason the picture runs an unconscionable 114 minutes, and musical interludes are another! In addition to the songs sung by Lynne Halsey-Taylor, we get material from both Glen Campbell and, amazingly, Fats Domino, sporting a cowboy hat and singing a country song in a shitkicker bar! And weirdest of all is the opening theme song, a duet by Eastwood and Ray Charles called “Beers to You!”

So there are items of interest salted throughout the picture, but ultimately it’s a pretty dumb good-old-boy comedy: the kind of picture that wildly over-commits to the running gag of an orang-utan befouling police vehicles! As a director, Buddy Van Horn makes an excellent stunt coordinator, and there’s a loose and ramshackle vibe to the whole thing that’s appealing if you’re in the right mood, irritating if you’re not, and in any event loses all value no matter what mood you’re in once the picture is over and you’re trying to remember it later! Ha ha, I give Any Which Way You Can one and a half flying car hoods!

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 Kongo! (1932)

Ha ha and houndstooth, it’s Burl, here to review a bit of pre-code nastiness that plays like Freaks meets Island of Lost Souls meets The Most Dangerous Game! It’s not quite the firecracker that combo makes it sound like - ha ha, it’s too stagey for that - but it frequently comes close! Anyway, it’s lurid, and the name of the picture is Kongo!

It’s a remake of West of Zanzibar, the Lon Chaney silent jungle extravaganza in which he plays a stratospherically nasty jungle kingpin known alternately as Flint and Dead Legs! Like The Penalty, which it strongly resembles, it was an opportunity for Chaney to play a paraplegic who never lets his disability get in the way of his psychotically sadistic behavior! But for the talkie version the filmmakers went for Walter Huston, both because he had already played the part of Dead Legs on stage, and because Chaney was, after all, dead! Huston is not quite as spectacularly demonstrative in the physical aspects of the part, but he does a fine job of crawling around on the floor, lifting himself into his wheelchair, or pulling himself up a knotted rope to his grimy roost in the ceiling!

I’ll back up a bit and give you the plot! Somewhere in deepest Africa, the crippled Flint has set up his palace of torment, where he keeps various sad-sacks in his thrall and from which he manipulates the local people by baffling their minds with parlour tricks! (Needless to say the movie is packed with colonialist racism, with the idea that the indigenous population would be so easily fooled and controlled being only the beginning of it!) His ragtag bunch includes a Portuguese firecracker played by Lupe Velez, a pair of dumbbells who wait on him, and eventually, as part of a long-game revenge plan later echoed in Oldboy, the convent-raised daughter of the man who originally caused his disability with a flurry of kicks to the back! This daughter, Ann, has been brought up in circumstances of absolute purity, and then at Flint’s behest is lured first into servitude in a Zanzibar brothel, and then to Flint’s compound where she is debased and diseased and kept prisoner!

Into this hellish situation stumbles a junkie doctor, Kingsland, whose addiction to some kind of jungle root is cured with swamp leeches! He becomes determined to rescue Ann (who is very well played by Virginia Bruce, it ought to be said), but matters are complicated by the arrival of her ostensible dad, who is also Flint’s greatest enemy and the real object of his vengeance plan! Certain native burial customs further heat up the situation, and a man called Fuzzy plays his part as well! Redemption and escape are in the cards, but hardly guaranteed!

Ha ha, this is a compelling picture if not the feel-good frivolity of the year! I suppose during the depression, before the Production Code came in anyway, movies could opt either to lift the spirits of audiences by presenting happy fantasies, or else make the real-life situation seem easier by presenting a twisted, corrupt, horrific vision of hell on earth! That’s the route taken by Kongo, ha ha! And while it certainly betrays its roots as a stage production, and doesn’t manage to convincingly present its jungle setting, the movie whips up a bleak atmosphere rarely matched in Hollywood and gets plenty of additional power from Huston’s relentlessly mean performance!

Kongo is imperfect, but still a little jungle horror gem, and I recommend giving it a look if you think you can take it! I give the picture three raggedy chimpanzee sidekicks!

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 Link! (1986)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burl reviews Watchers! (1988)

Hi, Burl here, and today I’m taking a walk on the iron side! Yes, Michael "Total Recall" Ironside is in this picture, and as usual he’s playing a nasty fellow on the wrong side of the law, totally bereft of any common decency! Ha ha, he’s so good at playing those guys that I sometimes wonder if he ever regrets being born with a bald head and a hawk face! But I guess he’s made a few bucks off it, ha ha!

This picture is called Watchers, and it’s the story of a lab that suddenly blows up and of the experimental creatures which escape the conflagration! One of them is a hyper-intelligent golden retriever and the other is a hairy humanoid monster with an ape face, a jaws mouth and a taste for human eyeballs! There’s yet a third escaped creature, but to explain that one would be to give away important third-act story points! Oh okay, the third lab creation is Ironside, who’s been genetically monkeyed with to be crazy and have no conscience! But we knew that already because, Ironside!

The dog hooks up with Corey Haim, of all people, the fellow from The Lost Boys, Secret Admirer and Silver Bullet; and he might have been able to live out his doggy life free and easy from there, but for the fact that the ape creature has been trained to kill this particular hound – it’s some sort of experimental weapons system, or some bunkum and honeydew of that sort – and also that he’s being chased by the ruthless Mr. Ironside! Corey Haim dubs the dog “Furface,” and there are many scenes of the dog showing off his incredible intelligence and trying to convince Haim and his mother that danger lurks nearby!

Of course the ape creature, who is somehow able to stroll through suburban neighborhoods and high school hallways without being noticed, is, in a series of unexcitingly-filmed killing scenes, brutalizing people in the area and stealing their eyeballs! A pot-smoking hobo, a janitor, an Australian appliance repairman (if you know what I mean, ha ha!), a computer teacher, a deputy, Jason Priestly – everyone is fair game to this voracious monster! Finally Haim gets the message that he and his single mom might be in jeopardy, so he beats feet up to a cabin in the woods where he and his pops used to go hunting!

Meanwhile Michael Ironside is causing his own havoc, and when people get in his way he just kills them and plucks out their eyeballs so people will assume the monster did it! Ha ha, very clever, Ironside! It all comes to a fiery climax at the cabin, with everything taking place pretty much as you expect it will; except that in a quiet moment before the final donnybrook the dog challenges Corey Haim to a game of Scrabble; it’s left to us to decide who would have won!

This is not a good picture! It’s a real daffodil: never scary or exciting, and there’s no character to root for aside from maybe the dog, and even he’s not that sympathetic because he just gloms onto people even knowing he’s putting them in danger by doing so! But he’s still by far the most sympathetic character in the movie! The monster is pretty much a particularly vicious Bigfoot, and it’s never explained why he likes eyeballs so much!

Ahh, I hate to sound overly judgmental, but this movie’s not really worth a cruickshank! Because I like Ironside, and because the mom was a little weird, and because after all it’s a little bit Bigfooty, and you know how much I love Bigfoot, ha ha, I guess I can muster up one half of a curiously flammable video cassette for this bumkin of a picture!

Burl reviews Island of Lost Souls! (1932)

Ha ha, am I not Burl? I am, and I’m here to review the first screen version of H.G. Welles The Island of Dr. Moreau, which was titled Island of Lost Souls for some reason! I’ve seen this one a few times, but it just gets better and better, and just the other day I saw the new DVD version that was recently released, and that was the best of all!

The story is pretty well known, I would think! A castaway ends up on Dr. Moreau’s mysterious South Seas island, where it transpires that he’s been using weird science to transform animals into human simulacra! Some of his beastpeople, like Lota the Panther Woman, are more successful than others, and some of them have Hungarian accents for some reason! Ha ha, that would be the Sayer of the Law, played by Bela Lugosi sporting the greatest beard ever filmed!

Moreau is played by Charles Laughton, who wears the second-greatest whiskers of all time! They’re shaped like an anchor, and perfectly suit Laughton’s great, haughty moon face! The whip-cracking Laughton is simply perfect in his part as the oily and sadistic but undeniably genius sawer of bones! He can be a real hambone, though I really enjoy his performances in that mode; but here, at least until the last few minutes of the picture, he plays everything pretty well down, to great and chilling effect!

Ha ha, they really play up his sadism in this version! The doctor seems not to have even heard of anesthetic, and so his surgeries are conducted without its benefit; but of course it would probably be a lot easier and more pleasant for him if his subjects weren’t squirming around and bellowing in pain! I guess he’s dedicated not just to the speeding-up of the evolutionary process, which is his stated goal as a scientist, but also to the delivery of pain! No wonder he’s nicknamed his operating theatre The House of Pain!

This is a top-notch picture, and I’d put it up there with other creepy pre-Code horror classics like Freaks and The Black Cat, two pictures I’m just wild about! The climax, with the beastpeople on a vengeful rampage, recalls that of Freaks quite a bit, though it lacks that extra frisson you get from watching actual deformed people slithering through the mud with castra*ion knives clutched between their teeth! But it’s safe to say that Moreau comes to an appropriately sticky end!

The movie looks great, the acting is flavorful across the board and the makeup on the animal fellows is absolutely as good as it gets! Why, this is an excellent picture! I give Island of Lost Souls four drunken seacaptains and urge you to see this remarkable and horrific movie!

Burl reviews The Phantom of the Rue Morgue! (1954)

Hi lads and ladies, it’s your friend Burl! I thought I’d review yet another movie featuring a murderous ape, because I really am pretty fond of those sorts of pictures! Ha ha, hope you’re not tired of them!

So listen, who’s the last person you’d expect to be playing the mad scientist role in a killer ape movie from the 1950s? Probably Marlon Brando! Well, it’s not him in Phantom of the Rue Morgue, but it is the next least likely candidate, Karl Malden! Karl plays a combination zoologist/psychiatrist, which is a professional mash-up we don’t see enough of these days! He’s also a die-hard romantic, deeply in love with his young colleague’s fiancée! And he has access to a killer ape! Ach, that’s a recipe for trouble!

There’s a series of brutal ape murders up and down the Rue Morgue, and much of the picture deals with Police Inspector Bonnard’s confusion at who could possibly be responsible! Neighbors can hear crazy jabbering in what they take to be a foreign tongue, and a man in a nightcap is violently defenestrated, but nobody can catch the maniacal killer! Suspicion soon falls upon the young scientist Paul Dupin, but as much as he protests his innocence, the murders continue and the evidence piles upon him like horse blankets!

Well, eventually things sort themselves out, with the proper human varmints getting their comeuppance, and, as always, the poor ape taking a tumble! I always feel a bit sad for these unlucky simians! Ever since King Kong, or even before that actually, they’ve been handed a pretty raw deal!

Phantom of the Rue Morgue, which of course is a descendant of Edgar Allen Poe’s famous killer ape story, has also been served up a raw deal over the years if you ask ol’ Burl! You can’t find a single positive review of this lush-looking caper, and for my money it’s actually a pretty decent film! There are some fine scenes involving acrobats and other carnival folk, which, in combination with the Parisian setting, give it the feel of a lost chapter out of Children of Paradise! The movie looks great, and the sets are manifique! I think it must have been shot in 3D, like Gorilla At Large, because an awful lot of things get tossed towards the camera!

For all its virtues and for the fact that every single male character (and some of the female ones, ha ha!) has a French-style pencil moustache, I give Phantom of the Rue Morgue two and a half ape-shaped holes in the skylight!

Burl reviews Dr. Renault's Secret! (1942)

Hello to all my pals! It’s Burl here with a review for you! Sure, it’s another ape movie, like Gorilla At Large or White Pongo, but this one has a bit of a twist to it! Read on, MacDuff, and I’ll explain! Ha ha, but first, be warned! In reviewing Dr. Renault’s Secret, I’ll be revealing Dr. Renault’s secret, and it’s not merely that he doesn’t even own a Renault! It’s hard to talk about the movie without revealing the secret, so I’m a-gonna do it!

It seems that an American doctor has arrived in France to marry Dr. Renault’s niece! All very nice, or so it seems! But the bridge is washed out, and the young fellow must pass the night at a local inn, along with a few other characters! There’s Renault’s hulking gardener, played by Mike Mazurki; another American who happens to be an obnoxious drunk; and finally there’s Noel, a slab-faced fellow of few words, who turns out to be Renault’s manservant!

Well, soon enough there’s a murder! And the next day, after Noel drives the doctor to Renault’s chateau, there’s another killing, this time of a local hound! And then, as Bastille day approaches, a few other people get some pretty stiff neck-twists, or else are completely defenestrated by person or persons unknown! Actually it’s not all that unknown, since we do see Noel perpetrate some of these killings – but not all of them!

So here’s the big secret the doctor’s been keeping: Noel is in fact not a human at all, but a shaved ape who’s been taught to talk! We see a photo album of his journey from fierce-but-happy jungle ape to dour, morning-coated manservant! There are some hilarious mid-transformation pictures of the ape swathed in bandages and looking pretty grumpy about it all! And who can blame him! Dr. Renault has apparently perpetrated this weird science in order to prove some crazy theories of his, and it turns out that he’s not the avuncular figure he first appeared to be, but a whip-cracking martinet! The whole thing ends more or less in classic monster-movie style at the top of an old grist mill, but the monster isn’t necessarily who you thought it would be!

There are a few great things about this movie! One is that the director apparently saw Citizen Kane and liked it well enough to try replicating some of the shots! There are lots of low-angle close-ups of shadowed faces, and some deep focus of the sort we know and love from that movie! Ha ha, I love that kind of thing!

The other great thing is the cast, specifically George Zucco as Renault and J. Carroll Naish as Noel! Both of these guys are associated with cheap, schlocky horror movies, but they’re really good actors, and especially so here! Naish’s performance as the love-besotted Noel is highly sympathetic and rather heart-rending! I give Dr. Renault’s Secret three defenestrations!

Burl reviews Gorilla At Large! (1954)

Hi, it’s Burl here to get something straight with all of you pals: I love carnival movies! That is to say, pretty much any movie set in a carnival, and the seedier the better, will get my attention! Freaks, Carnival Rock (starring the legendary Dick Miller), Carnival of Blood (starring Burt Young), The Funhouse – they’re all great! Ha ha, I even didn’t mind that recent coming-of-age picture Adventureland! And please, don’t confuse carnival movies with circus pictures! An entirely different genre, ha ha!

Now that we’ve got that settled, let’s talk a little about another fine carnival movie, Gorilla At Large! I first saw this one on TV many, many years ago, when it was the big Television Event of the season! They were broadcasting it in 3-D, and you could get the glasses down at 7-11! Boy, was it exciting! I’m not sure why they picked this particular film, which came along toward the end of the original 50s 3-D boom – I guess it was more easily-licensed than better-known pictures like Creature From the Black Lagoon or Dial M For Murder!

I like gorilla pictures nearly as much as carnival ones, so having them doubled up like this is a real treat! Cameron Mitchell (of Without Warning) plays a barker/aspiring lawyer in Raymond Burr’s circus! Burr’s vampish wife Anne Bancroft is the trapeze artist who swings over the head of the mighty gorilla Goliath, who apparently went bad after somebody fed him a loaded banana! It took me a while to realize that Goliath was supposed to be a real gorilla and not a guy in a suit, but once I figured that out, it was no problem! Anyway, there’s quite a bit of behind-the-scenes intrigue going down at the carnival: a blackmail is in progress, Bancroft’s loutish ex-husband is giving everybody the hairy eyeball, Burr is uptight, and an amiable midget cadges cigars!

When the murders begin, it’s time for rumpled cop Lee J. Cobb, pretty much playing his Lt. Kinderman chracter from The Exorcist, to begin an investigation, aided by that other great Lee of cinema, Lee Marvin! It’s pretty charming to see the two Lees go toe-to-toe, with Cobb shouting “Ha ha, you’re a cop, not a ballet dancer!” at the gangly Marvin! And Marvin is pretty good in his minor role, but frankly you’d never guess from it that he was ever going to become a star!

Everyone assumes it’s the gorilla who’s going around giving people some pretty stiff neck-twists, but Gorilla At Large has a few tricks up its sleeve! I can’t say I didn’t see them coming, though – I’m not usually too proficient at guessing twists, but after they make a big deal of Anne Bancroft’s brute strength, which she’s apparently gained from years of acrobatics, I had it pretty well sewn up!

There’s plenty of weird stuff in this picture, and near the top of the list would have to be Anne Bancroft’s taste in men! He ex-husband is a scowly, slobby apekeeper, her new husband is Raymond Burr (a fine-looking man but frankly no sex symbol) and she puts some heavy moves on ginger-headed Cameron Mitchell, who’s a well-built guy and a lot younger here than we usually see him, but still basically looks like Cameron Mitchell! Ha ha, Mrs. Robinson groping the Toolbox Murders killer makes for a bizarre moment in cinema, I can tell you!

The gorilla is pretty good too! The costume will look familiar to anyone who’s seen Robot Monster, or any of a million other gorilla pictures (White Pongo being an exception, of course!), and it includes what I call the Gorilla Skirt: a strange, furry fringe that hangs down around the monkey’s knees! This particular simian isn't a chest-beater, but he grunts a lot, and at one point he hides in a bathysphere! Naturally he ends up at the top of a roller coaster with a lady slung over his shoulder, and when he’s shot down, he falls like a bag of dirty laundry! The movie doesn’t try to wring any King Kong-style pathos from the moment, but I found it pretty sad anyway! That gorilla didn’t hurt anyone!

I really enjoyed Gorilla At Large, from the carnival setting to the incredible cast, and I think you’ll like it too! I award it three loaded bananas!

Burl reviews Rise of the Planet of the Apes! (2011)

Hi, Burl here to review a solid summer sci-fi action spectacular! With apes! Ha ha, I’ve always enjoyed the Planet of the Apes movies, and I was always thrilled at how bitterly misanthropic Chuck Heston’s character was in the first one! He really hated people, didn’t he! Well that was until he met the apes and was shot in the throat and captured in their nets! Then he’d have been glad for a few hairless chums!

The makeup in those movies was pretty impressive too, how they layered wrinkled rubber over coconut quarters to achieve that monkey-muzzle look! In this new movie they don’t bother with the coconut quarters – it’s all digital special effects for the monkeys! Ha ha, there’s not one real ape in it, not like Project X, another anti-animal experimentation picture in which they say (well, Bob Barker says) the animals were beaten with clubs to make them do their jug-eared shenanigans with Matthew Broderick and Helen Hunt!

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (which originally was titled simply Rise of the Apes, and still should be, you silly, overcautious studio execs!) serves as the very beginning of the Apes saga, showing us how a simple attempt to cure Alzheimer’s can lead to Global Simian Takeover! It’s all the fault of scientist James Franco, well known from Spring Breakers, who couldn’t have performed his role as GST facilitator better if that had been his goal all along – not only does he provide the loveable creatures with a formidable new intelligence, he makes sure to create an extermination virus along the way, just as a little bonus for the chimpys! It’s hard to figure how you could create something like that by accident, but Franco manages it, ha ha!

Franco’s best buddy is his chimp friend Caesar, and their relationship takes a turn for the worse when Caesar beats up a neighbor who’s been poking John Lithgow (from Buckaroo Banzai and The Manhattan Project, here playing Franco’s senile dad) in the chest, and then gets sent to a simian storage facility operated by none other than the first Doctor Lecter, Brian Cox, well known from The Ring! Although Lecter mostly sits in his office and lets his employees do the hard work of abusing and insulting the apes! Franco also has a girlfriend, but she doesn’t do too much in the movie and at times you kind of wonder why she’s even there! (She also seems rather dim, which is more the script's fault than hers! We are to believe that, after five years of close proximity to a supra-intelligent chimp, and knowing her boyfriend is working on brain drugs the whole time, it comes as a big surprise to her that Caesar's smarts are a result of Franco's crazy science! Ha ha, maybe you could use a dose of that brain drug, lady!)

The star of the show is Caesar and his rambunctious simian pals, though, so the people don’t matter so much! (Although it’s always great when a movie starring both John Lithgow and Brian Cox comes along!) There are several fine characters of the hirsute variety, like a daggy old orangutan named Maurice, named after the actor Maurice Evans; and Buck, a giant gorilla who seems like he might be King Kong’s brother-in-law!

The movie caught a bit of heat for being in the apes’ corner rather than the humans’, and for cheering on the end of all people! But that’s a silly complaint, first because it just is – this is a movie, you people, ha ha! – and second because it’s perfectly in line with the Hestonian attitude found in the original Planet of the Apes movie, as I mentioned earlier! So we really get the feeling of these damn dirty ape events leading from this movie right through to the net-carrying apes on horseback that we know and love so well! And I have to say, there is genuine joy in seeing the apes wreak havoc with the cops, taking them out using a number of clever stratagems, or just plain bashing them when the situation calls for it!

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is hardly a perfect movie or anything, but it’s entertaining, engaging and has its heart in the right place! And the special effects and performances are superb! I give it two and a half chimp bites!

Burl reviews White Pongo! (1945)

Hi, Burl here with another movie review, this one from legendary megaphonesman Sam Newfeld, who brought us Terror of Tiny Town! This movie, White Pongo is a jungle picture, and I can already hear you saying “But Burl! Ha ha, aren’t all jungle pictures the same, filled with endless shots of pith-helmeted people tramping through the brush, occasionally pointing out stock footage shots of wild animals?” Well, that’s certainly true, and White Pongo is no exception! But I’ll tell you what makes White Pongo stand out from the pack, and that’s White Pongo!

For you see, White Pongo, who is played by Ray Corrigan from Zombies of Mora-Tau, is a jungle gorilla of a different color – he’s a totally white ape! He’s ferocious, and he’s also tender-hearted – near the beginning of the picture, he rescues a chimpanzee who is kept on a leash by a native African couple – the wife runs off at the first sight of the ivory behemoth, then Pongo stomps the husband like he was luggage, gathers up the chimp and knuckle-walks his way out of there! All this is witnessed by a dude who had just escaped being kept like a pet by that very same tribe! I can’t help but think they were going to get all Naked Prey on his behind, so lucky for him he found a chance to bolt!

The fellow makes it to civilization and reports his sighting of White Pongo before succumbing to some jungle malady or other! Ha ha, then, as you might have guessed, a safari is rustled up to go find our dear friend Pongo! Well, that’s not the only drama going on, because this safari contains a) a love triangle, b) a secret agent, c) a turncoat, d) a criminal, e) a crazy Cockney comic-relief fellow, and f) a spear carrier named Mumbo Jumbo! It was this last component that was the most interesting, because sometimes Mumbo Jumbo would speak in “him big boss man” B-movie African speak, and sometimes he’d talk like a normal guy! Ha ha, I couldn’t figure it out!

There’s lots of walking through the jungle of course, and some pretty spiffy pith helmets, and then finally, just as White Pongo finally kidnaps the pretty blonde and slings her over his shoulder, a regular black gorilla shows up, and you know what that means – gorilla fight! The mighty pongos, or pongi, uproot a couple of small trees and use them as quarterstaffs! But ultimately White Pongo prevails, and for his trouble he gets shot by the rifle carrier / secret agent fellow, caged up and sent to the so-called civilized world! I call that a pretty sad ending!

Luckily no other animals are shot! I was afraid the whole movie would be scenes of elephants, leopards and other fine beasts being pointlessly slaughtered, but thankfully no! The lady tries to kill a leopard at one point, but she’s a really bad shot and he gets away! Ha ha on you, lady! Of course White Pongo kills his black counterpart in the climactic fight, but that was probably meant to be symbolic of the way the Europeans treated their own black counterparts all across Africa at that time! Or maybe not!

The movie was similar to King Kong in a lot of ways, so at the end when they capture Pongo, I thought maybe there would be another forty minutes where he escapes in London, grabs the lady and climbs Big Ben! But no, it just ends with sad Pongo in a cage! Maybe they had a sequel planned, but it just never worked out, who knows! I give White Pongo three tips o’ the hat!