Burl reviews Ernest Goes to Camp! (1987)

Ha ha, hello and howdy everybody, do you know what I mean? Yes, it’s Burl, here to review a strange star vehicle from days gone by: a feature film presenting a character who wormed his way into the public consciousness by appearing in a string of commercials in which he speaks to his invisible pal Vern! Ha ha, yes, I’m talking about Ernest, and more specifically about his feature film debut, Ernest Goes to Camp!

Strangely enough I saw this movie in the theatre, and I’ll take a brief digression to tell you why! Ha ha, it was June of 1987, and I was excited to see a new movie that was coming out that summer! I heard about a sneak preview one night, and so my pal Doug and I hurried down to the mall multiplex! In their wisdom, the theatre chain decided to pair this new movie with something they figured would go well with it, Ernest Goes to Camp! When the Ernest picture ended and the sneak preview began, you could hardly hear the sound of the movie over the din of parents rushing their children out of the theatre: for the movie was Full Metal Jacket! (Ha ha, one intrepid dad stuck it out to the end with his two young kids, though!)

So ever since then, those two movies have been inextricably connected in my mind! Watching it again, I realized there were other connections too! Both pictures have predominantly male casts, feature an incompetent who’s bad at everything but shapes up in the end, are set largely in barracks-like environments, employ actors who later participated in the Toy Story series, and climax in scenes of frenzied battle! After a preview setting up the Indigenous legend that’s the backdrop for the titular camp (and which the picture treats with surprising restraint and, by its lights, respect), we meet the halfwit camp handyman, Ernest, played as ever by Jim Varney! Varney of course is also known as the voice of the slinky dog in Toy Story!

Victoria Racimo from Prophecy is the camp’s serious-minded nurse, whom the picture never successfully turns into an object of the neutered Ernest’s romantic interest! Her grandfather is played by famous Italian actor Iron Eyes Cody, well known for his redface roles in Son of Paleface and hundreds of other movies and TV shows; his character, it seems, owns the land the camp is on! Ernest, whose dream it is to one day become a real camp councilor, is put in charge of minding a group of alleged delinquents after these scrubbed-clean teens manage to shatter the leg of their original councilor! Scenes of Ernest trying to make friends with the delinquents are intercut with vignettes involving camp chef Gailard Sartain (whom we know from All of Me and many an Alan Rudolph picture) and his gross food-flinging machine, and scenes of bad guy John Vernon, well known from Sweet Movie, Curtains, Crunch, and Herbie Goes Bananas, doing his bad guy thing without putting too much effort into it!

Vernon’s character owns a strip-mining company that wants to take over and destroy the land, and of course Ernest moronically manages to help Vernon bamboozle the camp away from its rightful caretaker, Iron Eyes Cody! In a showdown punchup with a beefy mining foreman played by Lyle Alzado from Tapeheads, Ernest is brutally beaten and ends up face down in the dirt, bleeding, and is scorned and abandoned by his charges, except of course the little boy who always liked him! This savage pounding, along with a dim awareness of the profound ramifications of his idiocy cause Ernest’s canoe smile to finally fade, and that night he sings a heart-rending ballad of infinite sadness to his turtle in which he expresses gratitude for the falling rain, as it will hide the tears streaming down his bruised and battered face! Ha ha, pretty grim!

The picture has a few bright moments, and Ernest is not wholly without good-natured charm; and the climax involves a sudden turn into the supernatural, which is a trope I usually like! The picture was a little better than I remembered it (actually, I didn’t remember it at all, other than as a way of marking time before the start of the Kubrick movie), but not much, and I was expecting it to be absolutely bottom-of-the-barrel! It wasn’t that, but it hovered not too far above, and so I give Ernest Goes to Camp one and a half turtle parachutes!

Burl reviews The Penalty! (1920)

Shh, it’s Burl! I’ve got a silent picture from a century ago to review for you today: in fact a starring vehicle for the great Lon Chaney! Ha ha, yes, this must be one of the absolute jewels in his crown, as we have on view all at the same time his astonishing physical feats, his makeup prowess, and his tremendous acting! And maybe I’m just not listening in the right places, but I don’t hear this one talked about as much as I do some other Chaney pictures! It’s The Penalty!

It’s a crime-horror-melodrama as rich as a ripe pear! Ha ha, it even has nudity in it! It begins in the past, with a boy who has been injured by traffic brought in to the surgery of a young and untested doctor! The sawbones lives up to that colloquial name for his profession and saws the boy’s bones! But an older doctor arrives and instantly diagnoses that the boy’s legs didn’t need to be cut off after all! The older medico reluctantly pledges to cover for the younger one’s mistake, but the boy overhears this exchange, and thus begins a lifetime of rage and resentment, and the longest-term revenge plot outside of Oldboy!

Twenty-seven years after his unfortunate dismemberment, the boy has grown into Blizzard, music lover and legless genius of the underworld! Ha ha, Chaney’s performance as this near-demonic crime czar is really something to behold, and it’s no surprise when the sculptress daughter of his great doctor enemy asks him in all innocence to pose for a bust of the Ol’ Scratch she’s making! There are times when Chaney’s face becomes so devilish you expect to see horns, and it’s impossible to say whether at those times he’s wearing one of the crazy makeups he was such a genius at, or was just harnessing the power of gurning like no actor before him or since!

The story, by Gouvernor Morris (ha ha, just what did he gouvern, if anything?), is intensely melodramatic in that crazy silent movie fashion, and if you don’t like that sort of thing this will not be for you! But if you don’t mind implausibilities stacked like cordwood, impenetrable motivations (to our twenty-first century minds, anyway), and what some may consider wild overacting, you’ll stand a good chance of loving this picture as much as I did! Ha ha, can you buy a scheme that might have inspired Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, but involves the secret manufacture of hundreds of pretty straw hats? Or a special brain operation that will transform a raging, evil lunatic into a nice and helpful guy? I did, and felt amply rewarded for my open-mindedness!

It’s got some great sets and beautiful inky cinematography, and the direction by Wallace Worsley is effective enough that you wonder why Worsley, despite his premature passing and the fame of his Hunchback of Notre Dame, he wasn’t more famous! It’s black as pitch and sports a tragic ending - the penalty of the title, in fact - and so, as silent films go, this is most certainly not The Lonedale Operator! I give The Penalty three and a half leather stumpholders!

Burl reviews Night of the Lepus! (1972)

With a hippity-hop it’s Burl, here to review a tale of bunnikin terror! Ha ha, of course I’m talking about Night of the Lepus: aside from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and maybe that Arch Hall epic The Nasty Rabbit, I can think of no other killer bunnies on film! And perhaps - I only say perhaps - that’s for the best! If you’ve seen Night of the Lepus, you’ll probably have formed your own opinion on that point!

Aside from having the cottontail horror angle all to itself, Night of the Lepus fits into a number of other microgenres of which I’m fond! I’ve always enjoyed what I call Southwestern Horror: genre pictures set in the wide desert expanses of that part of North America! I’m talking about The Car and Nightwing and The Devil’s Rain, or even lesser stuff like The Ghost Dance and Track of the Moonbeast! At the same time, with its cast of heroic grayhairs, Night of the Lepus, like Bog, comes off at times like a nursing home stage production put up to showcase the talents of elderly performers!

Thanks to some sort of serum, the specific nature of which the script doesn’t even try to explain, a test rabbit released into the wild sires a band of bunnies as big as moocows! Ha ha, and these guys are hungry and aggressive, and apparently nocturnal, which I didn’t realize rabbits were! Anyway, a loosely-knit group made up of scientist Stuart Whitman from The Deadly Intruder, his wife and helpmate Janet Leigh from Psycho and The Fog, rancher Rory Calhoun from Motel Hell, and concerned moustacheman and Star Trekker DeForest Kelly (quite able here to discern DeForest from DeTrees, ha ha), work on rabbit-ridding strategies while dodging the slow-motion hops and tempera paint-smeared incisors of the creatures!

Perhaps because the oversized hares are so inherently goofy, there is plenty of blood used in the killing scenes, and they do ruthless things like mutilate entire families! Ha ha, mostly it’s just the same bright red blood smears seen in pictures like Grizzly, but, also like that picture, there are some severed limbs as well, with one victim sectioned like a butcher’s wall chart! No, a rabbit’s foot does not mean good luck to these unfortunates, ha ha! The fuzzy bunnies also rampage through a produce warehouse, which you’d think would satisfy them, but they’re eventually attracted into a trap by the headlights of some good people who were attending a drive-in screening of Every Little Crook and Nanny, and as a consequence the beasts run afoul of an electrified train track and are fricasseed!

As in Tentacles, we mostly get shots of normal-sized rabbits filmed to look large, at least allegedly! They hop through some nice miniature sets, and there are also a few quick shots of people in rabbit suits, which are worth pausing to get a better look at! If you’re a rabbit lover you may want to steer clear of this picture however, as it does include plenty of documentary footage of actual rabbits being rounded up and terrorized! Otherwise it’s a pretty good time at the movies, with lots of fun badness on offer and a few pretty shots of the barren Southwest! Anyway, it’s unique! I give Night of the Lepus one and a half panicky farmhands!

Burl reviews Gimme an 'F'! (1984)

Ha ha, it’s that dancin’ fool Burl, here to review yet another movie about a cheerleader camp! It’s not Cheerleader Camp, of course, because I already reviewed that one; today’s picture, however, features all the necessary components for a cheerleader camp picture - pom poms, gymnastics, squads competing for the big prize - except the one it could have used most: a murderous killer! Ha ha! And the movie we’re talking about today sports the vaguely unsavory title Gimme an 'F'!

I’ll say right up front that this is a slightly odd one! In some ways it presents as a raunchy sex comedy: the camp is called “Camp Beaverview” (the campers eat at the “Beaverteria”), and by the third act the antagonists are being pelted with enormous urine balloons; but on the other hand, though opportunities are rampant, there are virtually no nude ladies in the film, and the plot spends an awful lot of time on the dramatic life choice problems of Tommy Hamilton, the head counselor played by Stephen Shellen from American Gothic! (In this, I think the movie believes itself to be imitating Meatballs, but it’s not a very good imitation, ha ha!)

Tommy’s problem is that he loves antics and to teach the art of cheerleading, but feels that, at twenty-five, he’s too old for both these pursuits! He’s apparently not too old to romance sixteen year-old campers though, which he just barely manages to do without committing any arrestable offences! Tommy has a girlfriend who’s displeased with him not because of the antics, but because he wants to stop doing them! (She’s also not too chuffed about the sixteen year-old!) Tommy’s flashdancing pal is Roscoe, played by Mark Keyloun from Sudden Impact, and Roscoe, whose urine fills those balloons late in the picture, is the very definition of an anticsman, so this makes it even harder for Tommy!

Aside from the counselors, we meet plenty of the cheerleading campers too! There’s an evil team, the Falcons (pronounced “faaalcon,” as Americans will do); a sweet and inexperienced team called the Molene Ducks; and, just for good measure, a team of sympathetic tough girls! Familiar faces dot all of these squads, faces belonging to the likes of Jennifer Cooke from Friday the 13th part 6, Daphne Ashbrook from Quiet Cool, Tyra Ferrell from Tapeheads and Exorcist III, and Darcy DeMoss from Return to Horror High and For Keeps! John Karlen from Impulse plays Bucky, the owner of the camp, whose constant outrage at Tommy and his antics is perfectly within reason! It’s that Ghostbusters thing: the villain may be a jerk, but he has a solid point nevertheless!

Bucky is trying desperately to impress a group of Japanese investors led by the always-enjoyable Clyde Kusatsu from In the Line of Fire and Godzilla! And yes, this group is always introduced with the bonging of a gong on the soundtrack! Classy move, Gimme an 'F'! Meanwhile Roscoe falls in love with a member of the Faaaaalcons, and to impress the surly object of his affections, he delivers chocolates and swings down from trees, but is only made the guest of honor at a slap party for his troubles! In an extreme of desperation he dresses like Wez from The Road Warrior, and surprisingly that is what works!

After performing a long underwear dance in the shower, Tommy makes an ill-advised bet with Bucky that the Ducks, a meek bunch of klutzes, can beat the fearsome Faaaaaalcons in the big final competition all these camps seem to have! (The performance scenes seemed to me ridiculously elaborate productions for a modest sleepaway camp!) No prizes for guessing that the Ducks transform from goodie-two-shoed stumblebums to sexy professional dancers in a matter of days, and the pee-soaked Bucky loses both his bet and his sanity!

Gimme an F seems like a movie made by strippers and pornographers who, jaded by years of exposure to skin and sex, get their biggest thrill from clothing being left on! Ha ha! It was written by Jim V. Hart, whose next credit would be Steven Spielberg’s Hook, another movie with weird tonal shifts! The filmmaking is nothing to write home about, and while there are some impressively athletic performances, the lack of charm in the leads is everywhere evident! They come off as a bunch of jerks: Bill Murray could prank Morty in Meatballs and not seem too mean about it, but these guys can’t even fire a pissbomb at a nasty crank without coming off as despicable! Ha ha, Gimme an 'F' is a pretty poor and forgettable movie and I award it one locker room flashdance!

Burl reviews The Twentieth Century! (2019)

With great prime ministerial gravitas it’s Burl, here to review a picture that purports to tell of an episode in the life of Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King! Ha ha, the picture’s called The Twentieth Century, and indeed it begins at the dawn of that storied hundredyear!

The picture presents King as a milquetoast mama’s boy with a shoe-sniffing fetish! His mother, played by Louis Negin from Keyhole, is an unpleasant old haggis who stays locked in her room, where she abuses a nurse! The nurse, meanwhile, pines for King, for reasons unknown (he’s a weirdo and surely nobody’s dream date ha ha!), and King himself pines for the daughter of Lord Muto! Muto is played by Seán Cullen, who has done comedy on the CBC but is nevertheless very good in the role here! In fact, ha ha, everybody in the cast does a terrific job!

The main thrust of the plot is King’s desire to qualify for his party’s nomination for the federal election! To this end the picture presents an uproarious series of tests, from gopher pounding to snowbank micturition! Ha ha! It’s a terrific scene, and one in which, as in so many scenes in this picture and in other pictures like it, fake snow swirls around the personages as though to give physical form to their roiling emotions! Ha ha! King goes through many trials, including a stint with the terrifying Dr. Milton Wakefield, but as with any true-life tale we know in advance where the story must go! Students of Canadian history that we are, we know it will end with King winning not just the nomination but, eventually, and for a record-breaking period of time, the prime ministersy!

Now, one of the swirling-snow pictures that The Twentieth Century is like is Careful! Yes, I would guess that the director is very much a fan of the 1992 Guy Maddin movie I so recently reviewed for you! I think it’s a fine thing to use as an inspiration, and the new movie is so fiercely imaginative in its realization that one readily forgives the truly dedicated and uninterrupted nature of the hommage! Ha ha! As well, the movie often looks like a painting by the Canadian artist Simon Hughes come to life, which is no bad thing!

Lovely to look at in its 16mm glory, well-performed, funny, full to bursting with whimsy and inventiveness, The Twentieth Century is an only somewhat alloyed joy! It has a simple and repetitive story, and wears its inspirations like shoulder braid, but it’s nevertheless something very special! I award the picture three masturbation alarms!

Burl reviews Ticks! (1993)

Buggy-wuggy, it’s Burl! Ha ha, yes, I’m here to review a bug movie, and a pretty slimy one it is too! The picture is called Ticks, and although it comes from the director of Amityville 1992: It’s About Time, it contains no appearance from the great Dick Miller!

But it most certainly contains ticks! The story is pretty unimaginative: a group of city youth are transported for vaguely therapeutic purposes to a broken-down Jason-style summer camp in the wilderness! Meanwhile, Clint “The Paper” Howard is using special steroids to grow pot, and these produce gloopy things that break open to release giant wood ticks! There are almost as many of these gloopy things in the picture as there are ticks, ha ha!

Meanwhile extra trouble is caused by a separate group of “cash croppers,” a drooling, moss-toothed über-redneck and his plummy, ascot-wearing partner! The latter looks like a low-rent Gary Busey, but turned out to be Richard “The Premonition” Lynch’s brother! There’s lots of highly ignorable character interplay, and then many scenes of slime and gloop and tickbites!

Ha ha, the head of the camp or socio-therapy program or whatever it is, is played by the fellow from Newhart! No, not Bob Newhart, not Larry or Darryl or Darryl, but the other one, the bosom buddy! And the main kid is the junior Woody from Radio Days, Seth Green! Otherwise the cast is mainly unknowns or relatives of more famous people!

At this point in the great and ever-evolving history of low-budget sci-fi/horror pictures, things were pretty dire! There was not a lot of high-quality material showing up at that time, and the idea that Ticks, a mediocre picture at best, is one of the high points, bears this opinion up!

On the other hand, the picture appeared at the end of an era, trick effects-wise! Ha ha, if it had been made a year or two later, those bugs probably would have been computer-made, would have looked no better than a packet of honeycrunch corn, and consequently there would be little to no reason to watch it today! But for those of us who love little rubber monsters and blood and slime, it works pretty well, because they did a fine job with those tick effects! Ha ha!

A lot of the footage – anything involving Clint Howard, for instance – was shot after the bulk of the movie was made, and it does indeed have a pasted-on feel! But thanks to these shots we get a lot of extra goop and more of the goop sacs too! Ha ha, and that certainly helps!

I can’t suggest this is a very good picture overall, though, and boy do its defects in craft show when you’ve just watched Aliens, with which it shares a scene involving people in a room menaced by a skittering crablike creature! In Aliens it’s scary and suspenseful, and in Ticks, well, it’s not! Ha ha! I give Ticks one and a half flit combs!

Burl reviews Friday the 13th part VI: Jason Lives! (1986)

It’s mid-summer, and so naturally it’s time for ol’ Burl to tackle one of these Friday the 13^th movies! Jason Lives seems like a pretty good place to start, since it’s the one that makes me go “Ha ha!” the most! By that I mean it’s the funniest of all the movies, though not necessarily the best – I’d have to say that if I were going to pick a favorite, it might be that old standby The Final Chapter! Ha ha, the fact that its subtitle is an outrageous falsehood only makes it better!

This one caught a bit of heat for taking Mr. Jason out of the realm of the living and making him a completely supernatural zombie killer! You could easily argue, as many who actually care have done, that since he drowned in the first movie he was already a zombie, but that’s splitting hairs, ha ha!

Anyway, the movie starts with Tommy Jarvis, who was the kid who shaved himself bald in Part 4, and I forget what he did in Part 5, and his friend Horshack driving out to the cemetery to see what they can do about Jason! The thing to do would have been to totally leave him be, and even Horshack knows this, but Tommy is far too stupid to realize it! So he digs Jason up and manages to get him reanimated through the power of lightning! Ha ha, a dumber move could hardly be imagined, and it doesn’t really serve to get you in the character’s corner! Unfairly enough it’s Horshack who pays the ultimate price – he gets his heart ripped out and is dumped back in Jason’s coffin to be munched on by maggots!

Well, the rest of the movie goes back and forth between Tommy trying to undo his dumb move by convincing an incredibly angry and aggressive police chief that Jason lives again, and scenes of Jason poking people with sharp implements! He cuts off three heads at once, rips off arms, impales some people and gives other ones a pretty stiff neck-twist! Ha ha, one old jasper gets a broken bottle in the throat!

Eventually Jason makes his way to the old camp where he used to dwell – it’s been fixed up and reopened for some reason – and terrorizes some councilors and the smart-alec kids in their charge! I have to give this movie credit for including kids, because in most of these movies there are usually a bunch of teenagers and you’re not sure whether they’re campers or councilors or something in between! There’s a pretty good little scene between two of the kids: in the middle of Jason’s rampage, one of them turns to the other and asks “What were you going to be when you grew up?” Ha ha!

I remember that this movie was actually released in the middle of the summer of 1986 – there must have been a Friday the 13^th on the calendar! I snuck in and saw it in the theatre, but by then my tastes were refined enough that, while I enjoyed the movie, Aliens, The Fly, Stand By Me, Big Trouble in Little China and Manhunter were pictures I held in much higher esteem! Ha ha, I think I even preferred Maximum Overdrive! Nevertheless, this was a fairly enjoyable effort as Friday the 13^th movies go, and I award it two overturning RV campers, and an extra ha ha for the Alice Cooper fans out there!