Burl reviews The Rosebud Beach Hotel! (1984)

 

Ha ha, it’s Burl – may I take your bags? Yes, today I have a review of a hotel picture for you, and this is a genre that can run from the trashily venerable, like Arthur Hailey’s Hotel, to the plain old trashy, like Mountaintop Motel Massacre! (A subset of the genre is the off-season hotel picture, and this would include Daughters of Darkness and of course The Shining!) This movie is none of those, however: instead, it’s an eighties comedy called The Rosebud Beach Hotel!

 

The plot is simple! A nervous nebbish called Elliot, played by bosom buddy Peter Scolari, whom we recall from Ticks, and who here stammers more than any three Hugh Grants, is invited to manage the failing beach hotel of the title! Colleen Camp from D.A.R.Y.L. and Track 29 is his foxy girlfriend Tracy, who at first appears to be the usual snooty, control-freak rich girl, but thankfully is something more! She takes it upon herself to co-manage the hotel with Elliot, unbeknownst to her swordsman father, King! King is played by none other than the magnificent Christopher Lee, whom we recall so well from Nothing But the Night and many other big roles!

 

Of course Elliot is being set up to fail by King, who has hired a professional arsonist called Matches to burn down the hotel! Ha ha, Matches, played by Hamilton Camp from No Small Affair and City Heat, takes his time getting things ready, so there’s plenty of time for Elliot and Tracy to meet and interact with the wacky employees and guests at the hotel, once the previous manager has gone; and this latter personage is a cameo appearance from Chuck McCann, whom we recall with pleasure from Herbie Rides Again and Cameron’s Closet!

 

The hotel features a pair of allegedly funny doormen, Leonard and Dennis, played by Jonathan Schmock from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and James Vallely from Some Kind of Wonderful, and two singing chambermaids played by the Currie sisters, Marie and Cherie! Ha ha, Cherie we remember from Parasite and other pictures, while Marie didn’t have much of a film career beyond this movie, I guess because she was too busy discovering radium, ha ha! Hank Garrett from The Sentinel and Johnny Dangerously plays Kramer, the basement-dwelling survivalist-custodian! Fran Drescher from UHF and The Big Picture and of course Spinal Tap is the local prostitute, who, along with her fellow working girls is recruited to the bellstaff, and Eddie Deezen from I Wanna Hold Your Hand is a freakout guest who claims to be a visiting alien! This claim is later proved correct, ha ha! Meanwhile, the torch man goes into paroxysms of orgasmic delight whenever he spies a flame, and becomes the unlikely object of Drescher’s lust!

 

The movie is a lighthearted frothcoction with a surprising amount of nudity and a professional cast apparently having fun! It’s a little disheartening to think that Christopher Lee did this and Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf in the same year, but from our twenty-first century perspective we know that Lee and his dignity are invulnerable, and that in any case his career rebounded in fine style! And I like Cherie Curie and all – ha ha, I’ve met her, been to her house, and even directed her in a movie, and I enjoy The Runaways (the band; I haven’t seen the movie) – but the songs she and her sister sing in this movie are all just terrible, and they seem to go on forever! Sometimes they go on forever in conjunction with other things that are also going on forever, like an interminable scene of drunken seductive dancing, ha ha, so that part of the movie gets you down! On the other hand, The Rosebud Beach Hotel might be your only chance to see Fran Drescher and Eddie Deezen exchange dialogue!

 

It’s got a little more going on than the usual 80s sex comedy, with some good physical comedy from Scolari, a stranger-than-usual Deezen, and Lee doing his thing in his typically committed manner! I can’t say this is a good picture – it sure could use some pep and some extra laffs, and maybe a little bit of style – but as these things go it’s fairly painless! Ha ha, I’m going to give The Rosebud Beach Hotel one and a half exploding palm trees!

Burl reviews Land of the Dead! (2005)

 

Urrgh, groww, gnarr, it’s Burl shuffling at you with a zombie movie to review! And not just any old zombie movie, but one from the acknowledged grandmaster, George A. Romero, who of course brought us Creepshow and many other horror entertainments! And Creepshow had zombies – three of them, to be precise – but it’s the …of the Dead series for which this beardsman is most thoroughly celebrated! The one under review today is the biggest-budgeted of them all: Land of the Dead!

I’m a very big fan of Night of the Living Dead and especially Dawn of the Dead – ha ha, a great favourite, that one! Then, when Day of the Dead came out, and played at the grandest movie theatre in town when I was but fourteen years old, I managed to sneak in to see it opening night, and even got myself one of the promotional badges they were handing out! It was a night of great triumph: the first time I successfully sneaked in to an R rated movie; and so Day of the Dead stands as a sentimental favourite and always will! And so, as you can imagine, when Land of the Dead came along twenty years later I was pretty excited to see it too!

So I rushed out to the movie theatre, and what I beheld there was this: a slick, enjoyably meaty zombie picture with a nicely Romeroesque political dimension to it – ha ha, in other words, almost exactly what I was hoping for! Still, it’s never ascended to the pantheon occupied by the first two in the series! It’s a lot more lighthearted than Day of the Dead, though, which, with all its yelling, is a movie that can really harsh your mellow! On the other hand, I quite enjoy the picture! But we’re here to talk about Land of the Dead, aren’t we! Yes, ha ha!

Our story once again begins some unspecified amount of time after the zombie apocalypse, and society in Pittsburgh is bifurcated between the regular folk, who live in dirty slums where they indulge in every vice and yet keep it together enough to provide the children with puppet shows, and the rich, who dwell in comfort, as though nothing had ever changed, in a big tower called Fiddler’s Green! This edifice is run by Kaufman, who’s played by an unusually reserved Dennis Hopper, an actor we recall from My Science Project and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre part 2!

Pittsburgh gets its supplies by means of night raids on nearby towns that have been overrun by zombies but still have shops full of canned goods and booze! Simon Baker from Red Planet plays Riley, the good guy who designed and is in charge of the main raiding vehicle, which they call Dead Reckoning! This conveyance, an armored truck thing reminiscent of the Landmaster from Damnation Alley, can shoot fireworks, machine guns, and mortars, and becomes the central item of interest as the movie progresses!

John Leguizamo from Die Hard 2 and Collateral Damage plays Cholo, the second-in-command who first works for Kaufman, then is snubbed by him, and so in his resentment becomes compelled to steal Dead Reckoning and threaten to shell the city with it! Riley, in the company of his old buddy Charlie, a puttyface played by Robert Joy from Amityville 3-D (and looking very much like he did in the final moments of that film), and his new friend Slack, a lady played by Asia Argento from The Church, form a repo gang who intend to get it back: not for Kaufman, whom they all dislike, but to save innocent lives in the slum zone! Meanwhile the zombies are being organized, after a fashion, by zombie liberation activist Big Daddy, a gaspumping zombie played by Eugene Clark from Trial & Error! As Riley and his bunch close in on Chulo, the zombies cross the river simply by walking across it under water, and the final battle for life, freedom, and Fiddler’s Green is under way!

The movie was released in the heart of the Bush years, in the midst of the war in Iraq, and serves pretty well as a political parable in the old Romero style! Hopper’s character is the Bush analogue of course, with Fiddler’s Green and Pittsburgh in general standing in for North America; while the zombies are the foreign hordes supposedly clamoring to destroy it or at least take it over! As political parables go it’s not subtle, and it lacks the lively cleverness of Dawn, but it’s still nice to see horror movies with subtext, even if that subtext isn’t very sub! Ha ha! And is it gory? Ha ha, you bet it is, especially in the unrated edition I just watched! You get face pullings, head stompings, all manner of grue!

The picture was shot in Toronto, not Pittsburgh, so the margins are filled with familiar Canadian actors like Earl Pastko from Roadkill, Robin Ward from Flick (supplying a mellifluous voiceover extolling the bourgeois virtues of Fiddler’s Green), Heidi von Palleske from Dead Ringers, and Boyd Banks from Crash! Of course Tom Savini, whose moustache-acting we’ll recall from movies like Creepshow 2 (where his moustache is prosthetically obscured, ha ha) and Innocent Blood, turns up in zombie form as the same biker, Mr. Machete, that he played in Dawn of the Dead!

It’s an entertaining and slick picture that suffers from thin characterizations (the hero’s defining personality trait is that he’s the hero, ha ha, and a pretty bland one at that) and is narratively underbaked! It doesn’t offer all the satisfactions I might have hoped for, but it still ticks plenty of boxes, and in spite of occasional moments of profound dumnitude, I think of the picture with fondness! I give Land of the Dead two and a half skyflowers!

Burl reviews Hurray - The Swedes Are Here! (1978)

 

By all that’s Bavarian, it’s Burl, here to review one of the many, many, many sex comedies made in and around Bavaria in the 70s and 80s, usually involving hotels, burgomeisters, and Swedish girls! You might recall High Test Girls, which was about six Swedish girls arriving to take over a gas station; well, this one is pretty similar, and it goes by the English title of Hooray - The Swedes Are Here!

Of course there’s no plot, ha ha, no plot at all, but if you’ve read my reviews you know that’s not always a problem, especially with movies like this! The setting is a small Bavarian town, and it seems the burgomeister has given a strapping local lad named Niki Moser a big loan so that Niki can buy a hotel; but the agreement is that Niki will then marry the burgomeister’s perpetually nude daughter Marianne! But he doesn’t want to, and so the solution, suggested by Niki’s friend Tony, is to get a government subsidy to develop the hotel, so that Niki can repay the burgomeister and not be obliged to marry Marianne and this in turn requires that a government minister be fooled into believing the hotel is fully booked with guests so he will okay the subsidy!

The handsy old government official brings his girlfriend to the hotel for a dirty weekend while he considers whether Niki deserves the government subsidy, although he stops along the way to first get pooped on by a cow and then to take his mistress dirndl shopping! It looks bad for Niki, as, aside from a newlywed couple, one of whom is the gayest man alive, the other an understandably frustrated woman, the hotel is almost completely free of guests! Luckily a quintet of pulchritudinous Swedes shows up, followed by, out of nowhere, a marching oompah band! Everyone is soon having sex, ha ha!

The picture is full to bursting with hoary old jokes - they even try on the one about the fly in the soup! Ha ha, that one had whiskers when the Muppets did it, which I guess was around the same time as this! And of course there are pies in the face too, ha ha, because you can’t have a picture like this without pies in the face! And as the five Swedes gambol topless around the pool, a small boy in a Tyrolean hat peeks in and demands they give him a Tampax, because he’s heard that with one you can go swimming, horseback riding, hang gliding, and so forth! Ha ha, another fosselized old chestnut! And then of course there's the one about the exploding outhouse!

Now I haven’t seen a lot of these German bedroom-polka pictures, but I still recognized some of the faces here! Marianne, the burgomeister’s daughter, is black for some reason, and she’s played by Scarlett Gunden from Melody in Love! Why Niki is so reluctant to marry her is anybody’s guess, because she’s good-natured and very gorgeous! Niki himself is played by Wolf Goldan, who was also in Melody in Love, and of course played one of The Three Superguys! Bea Fiedler from Summer Night Fever and Hot Chili is in here, as is Renate Langer also from Summer Night Fever! And of course there’s Rosi Meyer, the same gurning old lady who seems to be in all of these pictures, including of course Has Anybody Seen My Pants? Ha ha, in fact the movie opens with some outhouse jokes performed by her and the burgomeister!

Finally Niki realizes that Marianne is a) cute, b) nice, and c) naked all the time, so it all ends the only way it could: with the triumphant blare of an oompah band, some slow-motion running through an alpine meadow, the tearing off of a dirndl, and a tilt up to a mountain that looks like a breast! Ha ha! Because I enjoyed watching it, and because I like writing dirndl, I’m gong to give Hooray - The Swedes Are Here three dirndls!

Burl reviews Scala! (1990)

 

Taking your ticket, it’s Burl, here with a review of a movie not about movies, but about a movie theatre! I suppose that means it is about movies, ha ha, because a big old movie palace is still and always will be the best place to see one, and this movie is about just such a place! The movie palace in question is London’s late and much-lamented Scala Cinema, and the movie about it is simply called Scala!

Now, I’m no Londoner (ha ha, no, I’m not even British!), but I’ve spent plenty of time in that fine city, and when I was there for a spell in the late 1980s I discovered the Scala! And what a discovery it was! I recall seeing triple bills like Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, Daughters of Darkness and Edge of Sanity, the one with Anthony Perkins! Or, on a different occasion, a De Palma triple-header of Blow Out, Body Double and Dressed to Kill! I saw Videodrome, Un Zoo la Nuit, Danger Diabolik, Barbarella, a trucker’s double-header of Wages of Fear and They Drive By Night, David Mamet’s House of Games and Things Change, and more! Every day the program changed and so every day there were more glorious movies to see, all of them projected on 35mm film, or at least high-quality 16mm, on a big ratty old screen! Oh, ha ha, it was the purest heaven to a fellow like ol’ Burl!

I remember it was a bit scary to go there, which was part of the appeal! You’d take the tube to King’s Cross, emerge into the rat’s nest of streets surrounding that station, and see, as in a vision, a white edifice rising like a massif down the way! Mods, rockers, punks, cinéastes, skids, students, seedcakes, sketchy people of all description with heads full of high fructose skunkfire, would gather to see the show, and none of them wanted any trouble so far as I could see! You could get some food, a beer or glass of wine if you liked, and the seat you settled into would be your own little campsite for the evening! Of course, as is noted by several interviewees in this thirty-minute documentary portrait of the place, the whole cinema rumbled with each passing tube train and the sound system was not exactly double-Dolby; but again, ha ha, all of this only added to the charm!

The movie about the Scala is not nearly so exciting as the actual place was, however! It’s mostly a parade of talking heads, with very little footage of the cinema itself, though I suppose there’s only so much mileage to be had from such B-roll imagery! More pep and wit in the editing would have gone a long mile, though, and if they could have managed some footage of a screening in progress, that might have been nice! There are some clips from at least three movies though: Evil Dead, Glen or Glenda and Mona Lisa, which are cut in for little or no reason!

I suppose these were available because their UK distributor, or producer in the case of Mona Lisa, was Palace Pictures, owned in part by Stephen Wooley, who was also a major player in the Scala and provides many interesting remarks in the doc! Also interviewed are a number of other Scala employees, including Jane Giles, who later made a book about the fabled movie palace! There’s also a great gallery of London eccentrics, including an old chap who offers tribute to his favourite cinema in the form of doggerel; an old lady who likes car chases and other action antics, but not so much “bedroom scenes;” the actor Ralph Brown from Alien 3 and Stoker, who does a bit in the voice of his character Danny from the marvelous Withnail and I; and a soft-spoken, utterly sincere gent whose film obsession is total!

The movie is a bit reminiscent of Out of Print, the tribute to the New Beverly Cinema in L.A., but is only about a third the length! This subject could have supported a feature too, but not necessarily in the style we get here - it would have to be much sharper and more energetic, I think! Still, a nice little portrait of a place close to my heart, and I was glad to discover it on the YouTube! I give Scala two soiled seats! 

Burl reviews Evil Dead II! (1987)

Hi, groovy friends, and happy June - it’s Burl! Yes, I’m here to review an old favourite, a movie as comfy and familiar as an old worn hoodie! It’s Evil Dead II, and for me it was a story of triumph, because in my neck of the woods, an R rating meant no one under 18 allowed in, whether with a parent or not! The trade-off was that movies were not often rated R, but when Evil Dead II showed up in my town, it did carry that restrictive rating! It played a huge, venerable old downtown moviehouse, just about the best venue possible, and so on opening night I showed up, aged maybe sixteen but determined not to be stopped! By sheer persuasive force of will, I and my friends all got in, employing the same deep, commanding growl as the teen wolf in Teen Wolf (which, by the way, I was once forced to see instead of Return of the Living Dead because I did not yet know the trick Teen Wolf was about to teach me), and entered the cinema to find a big crowd just as pumped as we were to see it!

I’ve gone and immersed myself in nostalgia now, and I’m rambling; but the point is that seeing Evil Dead II on a huge screen on opening night with a large responsive crowd can be, and was, a formative experience for a young man! And I’ll admit this without hesitation: my review of it will probably not entirely be able to escape that cherished memory!

Of course it’s one of those half-remakes, half-sequels, as was the case with Phantasm II: intended equally to please fans of the original Evil Dead as well as people who’ve barely heard of it! Those of us who’d seen the first one knew the story of Ash and his friends and their holiday weekend at the old cabin in the woods, and the Book of the Dead and its demon-bothering passages! At the beginning of the new one Ash arrives at the cabin again, this time with just his girlfriend, and some audiences were confused as to how he could be stupid enough to return to the same cabin and play the same tape recording all over again! Ha ha!

But of course even Ash isn’t that dumb - it’s just a retelling of a similar story with the same character! Ash awakens the demons by playing the old professor’s tape recordings, his girlfriend is possessed, then he is, and he flies through the forest and bangs into trees, and later there’s a remarkable comedio-horror scene involving his hand! New characters arrive, a hideous bloblike basement dweller plagues them all, and many Three Stooges gags are cleverly retooled in shock-horror settings! Ash’s hand causes many problems, as does an overalls-clad hillbilly; but eventually a vortex is opened in the fabric of time-space and by the end of the movie we are left with the setup for the third film in the series, Army of Darkness!

You’ll notice I haven’t said much about the plot, and that’s because everyone knows the plot, and anyway there is no plot! Ha ha! It’s all about the gags and the trick effects (which are plentiful and impressive) and Sam Raimi’s living camera, which prowls around and spins and pushes in aggressively at just the right moments, and the performance of Bruce Campbell as the punishment-absorbing Ash! Ha ha, you can tell that Campbell himself absorbed no small amount of punishment in the shooting of this picture, and that just makes the whole thing that much more enjoyable! Sorry, Bruce! Hopefully he had it easier in later pictures like Maniac Cop, The Hudsucker Proxy, Escape From L.A., and Congo!

I find it all highly entertaining, and I think I always will! Evil Dead II may come off to some as just an exercise in trick effects and camera style and silly gaggery, and I can’t call that position unreasonable, but to me that’s a formula for success, at least in this specific case! Ha ha, I’m as fond as can be of Evil Dead II and I give it three and a half work sheds!

Burl reviews The Towering Inferno! (1974)

Snap, crackle, pop, it’s Burl, here to review that most burnt sienna of movies, The Towering Inferno! Ha ha, I saw this on TV a number of times as a kid, and though it was no Snowbeast or Curse of King Tut’s Tomb or This House Possessed, it was and is an artifact of the time with powerfully Proustian capabilities!

Of course there was no mistaking this for the TV movie it sometimes seems, for whatever reason, desperate to imitate! Ha ha, it sometimes seems like the world’s longest episode of Emergency! (That was at one time my favourite show, by the way! Still like it!) The production values are obviously, even to a kid, much larger than any TV production, and the cast of high prestige! It was the presence of Fred “Ghost Story” Astaire that most impressed me when I was young, because, thanks to my mother’s specific thespian enthusiasms, which she seems to have inherited unchanged from her own mother, I imagined that Astaire (along with Bette Davis) must be the biggest star in the history of the world!

Of course I also knew of Paul Newman and William Holden: they were after all the stars of When Time Ran Out, the subsequent Irwin Allen disaster extravaganza we all know and admire! And Steve McQueen was from The Blob, don’t forget! Faye Dunaway from The First Deadly Sin; Richard Chamberlain from Bells; Robert Vaughn from Starship Invasions; Don Gordon from The Beast Within; and Cluny Brown herself, Jennifer Jones: all of these and more were familiar and impressive faces! Ha ha: as anyone who talks about this movie says, what a cast!

The soapy stuff bogs it down a bit, as it must – as seems to be its job, ha ha! But the fire scenes are impressive, and the celebrity deaths, which frequently seem random (particularly incidents featuring Jones and, separately, Vaughn) have a certain impact! You won’t soon forget the rather blundersome demise of Wagner, who boasts of his fleet feet, then catches afire immediately he attempts to run through a burning room! It’s all rather horrific, I must say!

But the fire is eventually put out by way of enormous water tanks conveniently placed on the roof of the building, and this plan, it seems, ought maybe to have been thought of earlier! No matter! The firefighting tactics used in the picture seem fairly realistic, not just because of all the fireman advisors listed in the credits, but because they’re so frequently unspectacular! They spray water at fires, sure, they do that a lot; but they also trudge up endless stairs and wait for things to happen! McQueen, of course, gets to keep his cool throughout, and gets a chance to lecture Newman, and extract from him a plea for help! Ha ha, no wonder old Steve asked specifically, or rather demanded, to play the part of the fire chief! And then he demanded that another big star be given the architect role, so he could be filmed talking down to them! Ha ha, McQueen, you rascally Machiavellian!

Anyway, it’s a quality picture and its extreme datedness is mostly superficial! It pushes all the buttons it means to with expert fish-stick fingers, but is nevertheless a movie I look back on every year of late around the Academy Awards, as reassuring proof that fundamentally cheeseball pictures collecting Oscar nominations is not a new phenomenon! I give The Towering Inferno two and a half breeches buoys!

Burl reviews Not Safe For Work! (2012)

Well hello everybody – it’s Burl here! You know, sometimes I like to review silly little nonsensical movies I happen to have watched at random, and here I am doing it again with a picture called Not Safe For Work! It’s a little programmer that feels very much part of a tradition of small-scale B-movie programmers of years gone by! That’s a point in its favour as far as ol’ Burl is concerned, ha ha!

It comes to us from Joe Johnston, who made Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, The Rocketeer and, of course, Jurassic Park III! A little thriller like this seems somewhat outside his bailiwick, but defining the precise lineaments of Joe Johnston’s bailiwick is perhaps outside of mine! Ha ha! At any rate, it’s a little thriller about life in a law office, and if it does nothing else, the picture reinforces my strong desire to never work in a law office!

The movie opens with a pretty standard scene of workplace violence, which makes very little sense in the larger context, and retroactively seems to exist simply as a way to start the picture off with a few literal bangs! Then we move to the highrise law office and meet Tom, a paralegal, who is one of those characters meant to be at once smart and ambitious, but also a habitual screw-up! He’s on the boss’s radar anyway, which in this case is a bad thing, and the one-two combination of being late for work and attempting a ballsy maneuver that seemed like a good idea but turned out to be a rookie mistake, gets him canned by the slab-faced senior partner in his firm! (This fellow is ably played by Christian Clemonson from Black Widow, but probably would have been played by J.T. Walsh were he still with us!)

But there are strange things afoot: the big case which has all the office aflutter has attracted a well-dressed killer with a robotic demeanor to the workplace, and suspicious Tom decides to follow him back into the maze of cubicles and hallways, just to see what’s up! Ha ha, for a few moments it seems like one of the robots from Halloween III has blundered into another movie, but regrettably that’s not the case! Anyway, from then on it’s a cat-and-mouse situation with a few scenes of mild suspense, some off-rack cleverness and one or two bon mots!

It’s all delivered with competence and solid craftsmanship, but if this were a train instead of a movie, it would be the Nothing Special! Ha ha! The acting’s fine and the inevitable silly plot points are generally kept within acceptable boundaries; but the story is far simpler than the copious background of the Big Case on offer would suggest! (The credits sequence, for example, is one of those “presenting information through headlines” things that, ha ha, seriously people, simply have to stop happening!) There are also a few dropped threads that, while ongoing, seem to hint at a picture with more on its mind than is actually the case!

Like Passion, this is an attempt at classic Hitchcockiana that embraces modern technology to an overweening and silly degree! Phones and computers are everywhere, but they all seem to work by slightly different rules than those we’re used to here in the real world! Oh well, that’s forgivable I suppose, but it does put the picture into a microgenre that it, and probably most such movies, would rather not be thought a part of!

It’s a fleecy of a movie that falls apart towards the end, and makes little to no impact while it’s on! The idea that large drug corporations are viciously unscrupulous is a solid point, if not exactly breaking news; everything else, from the title on down, is nonsense! I give Not Safe For Work one and a half fucking iPhones!

Burl reviews The Sentinel! (1977)

Boogeda-boogeda, it’s Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to review one of those 1970s devil thrillers, and this is no The Exorcist or The Omen or The Legacy or even The Car – it’s the notorious shockshow known as The Sentinel!

Ha ha, the very first thing to mention about this picture is the extraordinary cast! By garr, you’ve got to see it to believe it! It seems everybody wanted to stop by the set of The Sentinel and just make an appearance for the sake of it, and maybe to get a free lunch! The second thing to know is that it was directed by Michael “Death Wish II” Winner, for whom it seems unsuited!

The picture involves supermodel of the world Alison (played by Christina Raines, years before she would go out for smokes in Nightmares), who is not quite ready to settle down with mustachioed pre-vampire Chris “Fright Night” Sarandon, and so spends the first third of the movie apartment hunting! We see several spectacular New York apartments, and learn the outrageous rents they’re asking – sometimes six hundred dollars a month or more for a spacious midtown Manhattan flat! Ha ha, scared yet? Meanwhile Alison starts pitching fits at work, which doesn’t amuse photographer Jeff “Into the Night” Goldblum or commercial director Jerry “F/X” Orbach!

Eventually she finds a place in Brooklyn, but on the river and with a great view of Manhattan! It’s huge and only four hundred a month, but the catch is that it’s the gateway to hell! Ha ha, more immediately, the problem is weird neighbours, like a pussycat-stroking Burgess “The Manitou” Meredith, or elderly blind priest John "Sunset Cove" Carradine or leotard lesbians Sylvia “The Funhouse” Miles and Beverly “Slow Burn” D’Angelo, who only fondle one another and behave as I suppose the people who made this movie expect lesbian ladies to behave!

José Ferrer from Dune is, of course, The Monsignor, and Arthur Kennedy plays his priest-in-chief! They know what’s going on, as does sinister real estate agent Ava Gardner, but when Raines is struck by a vision of her cake-eating reprobate of a father who is dead, ha ha, but who appears prowling around her apartment in grey-skinned dishabille, and whom she tries to send back to the grave at the point of a sharp kitchen knife! Soon detectives Eli “Circle of Iron” Wallach and McBain himself, Christopher Walken, are on the case, and ha ha, somebody should have given these two their own buddy cop show!

Sarandon, who has his own secrets, is trying to figure out what’s going on, and he enlists the help of such figures as Martin “Spaghetti Western” Balsam and William “Christmas Vacation” Hickey! Of course it all climaxes with what this poorly-directed and ugly-looking movie is most famous for: the parade of real-life freaks who purport to be denizens of hell! Ha ha, I suppose they might have needed the job, but it surely has a different feel than Freaks, where the unusual people have personalities and agency! Here they’re merely meant to be scary and shocking, like the lesbians!

At the end, after Tom Berenger from Last Rites shows up and we see that Alison has taken Carradine’s place, you might think to yourself “What did I just watch?” It’s a crude and loony movie, and the script is terrible, but it has a few compelling ideas, one scary scene, and some great makeup from the late, lamented wizard Dick “Spasms” Smith! It also occasionally manages an eerie atmosphere, despite doing almost everything wrong in attempting to generate same! Ha ha! Still, I’ll give The Sentinel one and a half mogey leotards! It’s no good, but oh, that cast! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet The Killer, Boris Karloff! (1949)

Ha ha, numbskulls, it’s Burl! No, I don’t really mean to call you numbskulls! I’m just reviewing an Abbott and Costello picture, that’s all! And you know, I haven’t actually seen too many Abbott and Costello pictures, now that I come to think about it! Oh sure, I’ve seen The 30 Foot Bride of Candy Rock – ha ha, who hasn’t? – but not very many of the classic, actual movies featuring the two of them doing their routines!

But now I’ve seen this one, ha ha, and with a title like that, who could resist? I’ll watch anything with Boris in it, though his last few pictures are a little depressing, ha ha! But he was a great actor, and, I have it on good authority, a great fellow as well!

Now of course this picture belongs not to Boris “The Man They Could Not Hang” Karloff, but to Abbott and Costello! And these two jokesters do it up pretty well, I must say, especially Costello! He’s really pretty funny in his role as an accident-prone bumbler of a hotel porter! Abbott plays the house dick, and that makes me wonder if hotels still have detectives like they used to! Anyway, the two fellows work at the Lost Caverns Hotel, and when eminent attorney Amos Strickland comes in one night on the eve of the release of his memoirs, has Costello fired and then gets murdered, the stage is set for all manner of slamming-door shenanigans!

There are plenty of murders, and all the corpses pop up in Costello’s closet, so it looks pretty bad for him, ha ha! Karloff is lurking about as a menacing swami, and the scene everybody mentions is when Karloff tries to hypnotize Costello into committing suicide, but the tubby bellboy is simply too stupid to accomplish the task! But, ha ha, there are funnier scenes than that, or at least I thought so! I did enjoy when they finally made it into the caverns below the hotel (for what seems like forever, ha ha!) and Costello became a human drain-plug! You’ll have to see it to know what I mean, and it’s a pretty impressive feat of floor effects!

Costello’s delivery is often hilarious, particularly whenever he underplays! Abbott is pretty much the ideal of the straight man! On the other hand, the movie is pretty repetitive, and lots of the jokes are flat bananas! Costello is on the border of being a character like Bill or Sam or Radio, and I can’t say that his slow-wittedness didn’t get annoying!

I got some laughs, and the foreground matted caverns are really impressive and beautiful! Great stuff! But it goes on a little long and doesn’t make quite as much sense as it should! I’m going to give Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet The Killer, Boris Karloff two coffin-shaped laundry trollies!

Burl reviews Paradise Motel! (1985)

Hi, it’s Burl here, checking into the Paradise Motel! Ha ha, what? Well, that’s the name of both the movie I’m reviewing for you today and the motel in which much of the action takes place!

Some people might confuse this production with Pink Motel, but don’t be fooled! This is the one which features tall ginger Gary “Free Ride” Hershberger as Sam, the fellow whose dad owns the motel! And I’ll tell you something about Gary Hershberger – they say he and Jason Lively once went into a room together, and only one of them came out but nobody knows which one of them it was! Ha ha! And still to this day they don’t know!

Anyway, Sam is the lonely new kid in school, because his parents just bought the motel! He meets the local Good Time Charlie, a slickster by the name of Mick, who is from the start what I would call a real gambelpooty! But he becomes more interested in Sam when he learns about the motel and the unoccupied honeymoon suite; and very quickly poor Sam is begged, bribed and practically bushwhacked into a situation not unlike Jack Lemmon’s in The Apartment, with Mick as an even slimier Fred MacMurray!

Sam has romantic yearnings of his own, for the lovely Laura in particular, but for the nonce must settle for lying in his bed and listening to Mick and his buddies score with their various girlfriends! Ha ha! He also must suffer the humiliation of driving around in a Peptol-Bismol pink station wagon with a reclining hula dancer effigy on top! Needless to say, Sam is pretty downcast most of the time, though he has faked-up fun with his false bros now and again! Ha ha!

Things come to a low-key climax after he comes to realize the sort of fellow Mick really is – not Styles from Teen Wolf, not even Damone from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but a real and irredeemable slimeball! So Sam bops him on the nose and then a misunderstanding involving the tough coach unravels on Mick, and finally Laura, foolishly smitten with Mick, sees the light too and turns towards Sam!

So it’s your basic misunderstanding-based teen comedy, though the central confusion – that is, the fact that Laura is Mick’s girlfriend – is absurdly thin and unlikely, based as it in on the habit of both Mick and Laura happening to never say each other’s names when they’re with Sam, and nobody else in the school happening to mention their relationship over a period of months!

Other than that, it’s not a bad picture as these things go! Hershberger is an affable presence and an okay actor, and the guy who plays Mick is perfectly cast! And there’s a perpetually horny kid, of the sort memorably played by Billy “Hospital Massacre” Jacoby in Just One of the Guys, here competently essayed by Jeffrey Jay “Secret Admirer” Cohen! Ha ha, he gets himself and Sam in trouble due to some cockamamie theory or other!

Because it’s got a general competence reminiscent of The Malibu Bikini Shop, and a couple of weird bits (always a plus, ha ha!) and some okay performances, like from Sam’s dad and from Sam himself, and because it doesn’t try too hard, to the point where I’m not certain it tries at all, I’m going to award Paradise Motel two bikini adjustments!

Burl reviews The Grand Budapest Hotel! (2014)

Ho ho, it’s Burl here, reviewing a new Wes “Moonrise Kingdom” Anderson picture, The Grand Budapest Hotel! I was really looking forward to this one, because its particular milieu, which is to say Central Europe between the wars, is a time and place which fascinates me and always has! Ha ha, such rich and marbled tales have come out of this twenty-year period: curdled fairy tales arising from a new era of fatalism!

Evidently Anderson feels the same way, because he’s plunged into this storied environment with the enthusiasm of Steve Zissou exploring a sea cavern! Ha ha, like some other stories I know and love, specifically Roald Dahl’s “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” The Grand Budapest Hotel contains stories within stories, each of them reaching farther back in time! (Ha ha, I suspect this movie to have been influenced as much by Dahl as it was by Stefan Zweig and Bruno Schultz!)

The core story, told by F. Murray “Inside Llewyn Davis” Abraham to Jude “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows” Law, concerns the legendary, perfumed concierge of the titular hotel, M. Gustave H,. played by Ralph “Skyfall” Fiennes! He takes on a protégé, young lobby boy Zero, and is promptly accused of the murder of an old lady, one of the many old ladies with whom he dallies! Soon he’s on the run, and a veritable galaxy of characters are either chasing him (the old lady’s savage, greedy son, Adrien “Midnight in Paris” Brody, his murderous factotum Willem “Streets of Fire” Dafoe, and a policeman played by Edward “Fight Club” Norton) or helping him (young Saoirese “How To Catch A Monster” Ronan, a baker’s assistant; Jeff “Into the Night” Goldblum, a lawyer; Mathieu “Cosmopolis” Amalric, a butler; Harvey “Mean Streets” Keitel, a prisoner; and Bill “Meatballs” Murray, another concierge and a member of The Society of the Crossed Keys)!

A curious thing about many of these actors is that almost all of them have worked for David Cronenberg at one time or another! Ha ha, I found that curious and amusing! At any rate, the picture is fast-paced and madcap and as overstuffed as a goochie-cake! It may lack the immediate engagement invited by some other Wes Anderson pictures, but there sure is a lot to look at! Ha ha, I liked the (ostensibly) old-style trick effects, straight out of Guy Maddin’s great picture Careful or even Ernst Lubitsch’s Eternal Love, both mountain movie like this one; the funicular train (which didn’t get enough screen time if you ask me!); the sudden moments of violence or gore; the performances; and the great scene with all the concierges calling one another!

Altogether a fine and entertaining night out at the movies, and I’m certainly going to see this one again, just to catch all the details and gags I must have missed the first time around! I’m going to give The Grand Budapest Hotel three and a half severed fingers!

Burl reviews Attack the Block! (2011)

Ha ha, trust, it’s Burl here again wif anuvver movie review for ya! This is yet another picture set largely in a single tall building – ha ha, after Skyline, Die Hard, Enemy Territory, Gremlins 2, Poltergeist III and Dredd, you must think I’ve been seeking them out! But no, they come to me, and quite willingly too!

This one, Attack the Block, is a picture I’d been hearing marvelous things about for some time, so I thought, ha ha, let’s see what’s up here! It takes place in a block of council flats in South London, among the aimless, hoodie-clad youths who roam there! The movie starts out all Harry Brown, with a perfectly nice lady getting street-mugged by what appears to be a pretty unpleasant youth gang! Ha ha, the robbery is cut short by the arrival of a fireball from space, which lands in a car and disgorges a varmint of some kind! (Nobody notices the fireballs because, cleverly, the movie is set on Guy Fawkes’ night – and by complete chance I watched the movie on Guy Fawkes’ night! Ha ha!)

The kids manage to best the space varmint, but close on its tail are more of them, bigger in size and meaner in temperament, and they want revenge! They retreat into their block, where weed grower Ron (played by Nick Frost, who of course is famed for his role in another alien comedy from the same year, Paul) and several other characters reside! Ha ha, but there really aren’t that many people around for such a huge residential complex! I guess they couldn’t afford too many extras!

Anyway, the movie moves along pretty quickly and has some terrific laffs – Nick Frost has probably the single funniest line, ha ha! The critters are pretty basic, but look great – furry, deep-black gorilla-dog things with glowing blue lamprey teeth! They bound around like the Terror Dogs from Ghostbusters, snarling and slashing and biting off one poor fellow’s face! Ha ha, there are some nice, nasty moments! It’s a little like another kids–vs.–alien movie from 2011, Super 8, but in this one not all the kids make it to the end!

It’s a little surprising that the nasty street gang, who in another picture would probably be among the first victims of the otherworldly invaders, end up as our heroes! Turns out they’re not as bad as they first appear, and the lady they mugged actually teams up with them to battle the ape-nines! Ha ha, how the world turns! The other interesting thing is that the accents and slang are thicker than muesli, but I for one never had a moment’s trouble understanding what was being said! That’s a testament to the actors and to the general mise-en-scene too, I’d say!

Ha ha, as a little slice of space invasion the movie works very well, but it does seem strangely limited in scope too! Naturally there was no budget for a London-wide invasion, nor the desire for it either, and the focus on the kids and their narrow world is appreciated, but I guess what’s missing is the sense of greater potential or a vaster threat, as well as some idea why a bunch of dogs would arrive from space anyway! One of the kids, or maybe the trust-fund stoner who appears now and again, ventures a theory that they just drift through space like the Body Snatchers, alighting on whatever planet gets in their way, but this seems so unlikely as to be immediately dispensable! The Thing pulled off a similar scene, in the midst of a similarly focused invasion, with much better results, and even Invasion From Inner Earth managed to make you consider the implications of its alien invasion!

That’s not a very constructive critique, but the upshot is that, to ol’ Burl, there was an ineffable something missing from this picture - maybe just the sense of something ineffable, if you follow! Nevertheless, it was tremendously enjoyable and strongly accomplished in almost every department! The creatures are especially impressive! Altogether a great addition to the alien-invasion genre, and I offer Attack the Block three parties at the zoo!

Burl reviews Olympus Has Fallen! (2013)

Ha ha, attention citizens! It’s Burl here with a review of some Contemporary Action Cinema! This picture is called Olympus Has Fallen, and it was one of two Die Hard-in-the-White House movies to come out in 2013! It’s a classic re-run of the Meteor Syndrome of 1998, with Deep Impact in May of that year and Armageddon coming in July, and Volcano Syndrome of 1997, when Dante’s Peak and Volcano came out within two months of one another! Ha ha, in the latter case, as I recall, I went to see them both! There was also Dinosaur Syndrome four years earlier – ha ha, I went to see both Carnosaur and its later imitator, Jurassic Park! And of course there was Mars Syndrome in 2000, President’s Daughter Syndrome in 2004 and Magician Syndrome in 2006, and many other examples too!

Of the two White House pictures, I’m guessing Olympus Has Fallen is the Carnosaur of the pair – the cheaper, scrappier, more violent iteration! It certainly has lots of CGI bloodshed and collateral damage! North Koreans, you see, mount a frontal assault on the presidential domicile, attacking it first with a plane (and shooting many a pedestrian in the process), and then with ground forces who’d been milling around disguised as tourists! And of course Gerard Butler, the man who used to guard the prexy before an unfortunate event involving the First Lady plunging into a river, happens by just as all this is taking place; and the next thing you know he’s skulking around the body-strewn corridors of power, having punchfights with any North Koreans he happens across!

Meanwhile President Aaron Eckhart is trapped in the bunker with members of his cabinet and a bunch of the bad guys, and a terrible punching is put on Secretary of Defense Melissa “Deadtime Stories” Leo; and on the other side of the Potomac, Speaker of the House Morgan “Outbreak” Freeman, Secret Service Director Lady Angela “Innocent Blood” Bassett and General Robert “Alligator” Forster all crease their brows as they try to figure out what to do! Strangely, as they chat with lone wolf Butler, not a one of them says “You know, ha ha, this is just like in Die Hard, right down to the terrorist henchman who sports the scraggly, stringy-haired look of Al Leong!”

And it is, except of course Butler is not only an ex-Secret Service man, but an ex-Elite Forces Agent or whatever! Ha ha, that’s the thing about Die Hard – Bruce Willis wasn’t an ex-anything, except an ex-husband! He was a cop, but a pretty meat-and-potatoes one! That’s because the makers of Die Hard had confidence in their material, and the people who made this one realized they were just doing a slavish, inspiration-free copy, so they had to make their hero a superman!

They also had to gin it up with some of the most egregious flag-waving seen in recent times! Ha ha, maybe that stars-and-stripes stuff works on Americans, or some of them anyway, but the rest of us are all, like, “Move on to the carnage, please!” But at the same time you can’t accuse the movie of lacking carnage! The White House invasion scene, wherein most of that ingredient is stored, is the most exciting part of the picture, that’s for sure, and the number of casualties is pretty high! Everything that comes after that is kind of anti-climactic, especially the relatively low-key final fight scene!

There’s not much style or panache here, and everything is as by-the-numbers as you can possibly imagine! The simpleton geopolitics fail to gain credibility even with Freeman’s impeccable diction, and the notion of putting vaguely Occupy-esque sentiments into the mouth of traitor Dylan McDermott (who has a previous Secret Service prexy-in-peril drama, In The Line Of Fire, to his credit) is just silly! Ha ha, they should have made him one of those Tea Party clowns!

Altogether, Olympus Has Fallen is a particularly blockheaded action picture with a few decent scenes and several unsavory ones, and for its all-star disaster movie vibe and surprisingly unannoying First Kid, I give it one and a half bullet-riddled flags tumbling sadly through the twilight’s last gleaming!