Burl reviews Thunderbolt and Lightfoot! (1974)

 

Wacka-doo, snakecharmers, it’s Burl, here to review a picture I’ve long wanted to see but somehow never got around to until now! It’s a Malpaso picture from the 1970s, and you know what that means: Clint! And most of those movies, whether Eastwood directed them or not, have that Malpaso feeling: you watch them and just know that each take is the first or at most the second, and that whether it was directed by Don Siegel, who was Clint’s directing mentor, or James Fargo, whom Clint mentored in turn, or by Clint himself, in each case the same philosophies and work methods were employed! So there’s a sameness to these films, which isn’t unwelcome – in fact it’s comforting! Nevertheless, when you see one that’s clearly operating on its own principals, it’s pretty refreshing, and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is just such a film!

Of course we know Eastwood from such pictures as Blood Work and Tarantula, and here he plays a laconic vault cracker-turned-fake-priest known as Thunderbolt, and we meet him at the pulpit just as an angry George Kennedy from Creepshow 2 and Earthquake arrives at the church and tries to shoot him dead! In his frantic escape he hooks up with a young Jeff Bridges, not yet of Starman and King Kong fame, who has just stolen a roadster from a used-car salesman played by none other than Gregory Walcott from Plan 9 from Outer Space! Bridges, of course, is Lightfoot, and soon this pair of sillynames are bombing around picturesque Montana, being buddies and, in their masculine, mid-70s manner, falling in love!

Their first adventure together involves catching a ride from a completely insane driver played by Bill McKinney from Cannonball! Ha ha, this demento keeps a caged badger in the front seat and tears it up on and off the road, and after he’s barrel-rolled the auto it turns out he’s got a trunk full of live bunny rabbits, which he starts blasting at with a shotgun! Soon we get a taste of George Kennedy again, and it turns out that Kennedy is playing Red, an old partner of Thunderbolt’s who believes the craggy longuebönes to have stolen some ill-gotten loot! Red and his confrere Goody, played by Eastwood buddy Geoffrey Lewis, whom we’ll recall from Smile and ‘Salem’s Lot, first do some fisticuffs with and then enter into a foursquare partnership with Thunderbolt and Lightfoot in order to once again take out the vault Thunderbolt et al. had robbed the previous time!

So the gang is assembled and the plan is made, but first they all have to get jobs to buy the equipment they need to do the heist! Ha ha, we get all sorts of amusing vignettes featuring famous faces like Gary Busey from Silver Bullet, looking young and handsome; Burton Gilliam from Fletch, playing the sort of grinning good old boy he made his stock-in-trade; Dub Taylor from Creature from Black Lake just being Dub; and Luanne Roberts from Simon, King of the Witches as a stark naked housewife! Lightfoot has an encounter with a motorcycle rider who’s handy with a hammer, played by Karen Lamm from Ants!; and before the heist can be pulled off, the fellow monitoring the security alarms must be taken care of by a drag Lightfoot, and the security fellow turns out to be a chubby, girlie magazine-reading individual played by Cliff Emmich, who played another chubby security officer who gets hit on the head later on in Halloween II!

The picture dwells less on the robbery details than most heist pictures do – perhaps because it’s not centrally a heist story but is organized more around buddy themes! Still, there is the unique aspect that the vault is broken into by means of a 20mm cannon, ha ha, and the use of this tool is what earned Thunderbolt his name! And then of course after the heist it all goes pear-shaped, and the tensions within the group are expressed physically (and boy-arr-dee, how great an actor is George Kennedy!), and we come to realize that a line delivered earlier in the picture (“Ate ‘im?”) was a case of Dramatic Foreshadowing!

Now, this is the first picture from Mr. Michael Cimino, who vaulted into the prestige picture business with his follow-up, The Deer Hunter! This one isn’t a prestige picture though – it’s a genre film with a higher-toned style and an almost defiant insistence on theme and subtext! The idea of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot as unconsummated lovers is not very subtle (although I’m not sure Clint was cognizant of it, Bridges was, definitely), and what it really is, once you factor in the other couple, Red and Goody, is a study in how well an all-male machine, each component having a few teeth missing from their gears, can operate; and the answer is, ha ha, not very well! I found the movie a splendid entertainment, wonderfully photographed and impeccably cast: an unsung gem of the 70s! I give Thunderbolt and Lightfoot three broken cigars!

Burl reviews Roadhouse 66! (1984)

 

With a jolly “paarp, paarp” on my motorcar horn, it’s Burl, arriving in town to do you a new review! Ha ha, we all love stranger-in-a-small-town movies, don’t we? It’s a pretty reliable microgenre, and maybe not so micro either, as, once you’ve tossed in Westerns, samurai pictures, and action movies from the 80s, there must be hundreds, nay thousands of these things! It’s a very basic formula, therefore theoretically hard to mess up, but one thing you learn when you watch a lot of movies with a critical eye: anything can be messed up! Ha ha, I wonder if that’s the case with today’s movie, Roadhouse 66!

Ha ha, I’m not going to make a joke about this being the 65^th sequel to Road House, because I expect that hoss’s been rode before! No, it’s the tale of a travelling fauntleroy called Beckman Hallsgood Jr., played by Judge Reinhold from Ruthless People and Gremlins in effete-nerd mode! Beckman is scion to a belly-bustin’ fast-food pork franchise and is driving his T-bird across the desert to scout locations or something, but as he approaches Kingsman, Arizona he’s set upon by the town goons, the result being his flivver disabled by gunfire! Luckily a wandering rockabilly who knows how to fix cars, played by Willem Dafoe from Streets of Fire and The Lighthouse, shows up to play it cool and help out Beckman in exchange for a ride into town! The rockabilly’s name, of course, is Johnny Harte, for how could it be otherwise!

Conveniently enough there are two beautiful sisters living in the town who are single and sell auto parts! Kaaren Lee from The Right Stuff and Remote Control is Jesse, the older sister with the incomprehensible past, and Kate Vernon from Pretty in Pink and Mob Story is Melissa, the younger and more impulsive one! But also in the town are the louts who shot up Beckman’s car: a fearsome triumvirate led by Hoot, a meatbones played by Alan Autry from Brewster’s Millions and House! His minions are a scabie little guy named Dink, played by Kevyn Major Howard from Full Metal Jacket and Alien Nation, and Moss, played by Peter Van Norden from The Best of Times, who looks like if Mike Starr had been removed from the oven twenty minutes early!

The whole middle act is an escalating campaign of harassment from Hoot and his boys directed at Beckman, who’s stuck in town until the ladies can order up a new radiator! Luckily Johnny Harte is around to help him out of trouble, and lucky too that they have a place to sleep in the junkyard owned by old drunken Sam, played by Stephen Elliott from Beverly Hills Cop; and later, of course, they take up with the two sisters: Johnny with Jesse, Beckman with Melissa! And that incomprehensible past of Jesse’s that I mentioned? Well it turns out she used to be married to Hoot, a thoroughgoing jerk with a drywall personality and the physique of Cousin Eddie from Vacation! Who’d have thunk it! But things come to a sticky wicket when Hoot and co. start a vengeance fire that turns fatal for one of the characters!

Meanwhile I know you’re asking “Ha ha, what about this roadhouse we’ve been promised by the title!” Well some of the action, including a fight between the two heroes and the gang, does take place there, but it’s not as central to the plot as you might assume! Erica Yohn, who was Madame Ruby in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and Selma in Amazon Women on the Moon, is the roadhouse proprietor, Thelma, who observes the goings-on with wry detachment, but is there for our heroes when needed! And the roadhouse itself is a pretty bland place, free of any atmosphere or style!

The climax of the picture, once we finally get there, is one of the least exciting car races ever filmed! It starts out promisingly when Hoot sticks a scorpion in Beckman’s car, but from there it’s mostly a series of static shots of cars rolling by at moderate speeds! Ha ha, at least that gives us a good look at the nice autos – a T-bird, a Chevy, a wonderful ’66 Mustang! I won’t tell you how it ends up, but we never really find out what happens to Hoot – who, after all, is an arsonist and a murderer as well as being a scorpion-dropping jerk!

I’ll wrap it all up by saying this: Roadhouse 66 is a pretty unmemorable and unexciting small-town meller, but if you like Dafoe and Reinhold and always wondered what it would be like if they teamed up, you may wring some enjoyment from it! But I myself had never wondered that, so I didn’t get a whole lot from the picture! I liked the cars though, and the small desert-town location! I’m going to give Roadhouse 66 one new radiator!

Burl reviews Ronin! (1998)

 

With a screech and a roar and a “Hey you guys!,” it’s Burl here to review some underappreciated 90s stealth Christmas action! It’s a picture I saw and enjoyed on the big screen, and its several scenes of realistic car-crunching chaseology makes good solid sense when you take into account that the picture is a late work from John Frankenheimer, crusty gent and director of Prophecy and The Train! Ha ha, yes, naturally the picture I’m talking about is Ronin!

The movie is all about how things are done, and much less about why they are done! It’s a crime procedural, I guess, and involves a group of folk living on the grey side of the law who gather in France to wrangle a silver case, contents unknown and irrelevant, away from the shady parties who possess it, and get it into the hands of the Irish! Representing the people of the shamrock is Dierdre, played by beauteous Natasha McElhone from The Truman Show, and her crew includes Sam, an American played by Robert De Niro from Mean Streets and Mad Dog and Glory, whom the other characters take to be ex-CIA (but is he ex???); Jean Reno from Godzilla playing Vincent, the man who can get what’s needed; Gregor, a German who used to work for the Russians, played by the Swede Stellan Skarsgard, whom we know from The Hunt for Red October and The Avengers; and the clearly out-of-his-depth Spence, essayed by Sean Bean from How to Get Ahead in Advertising, who’s always good at characters like that, though he can play other types as well!

Ha ha, and we know Bean from GoldenEye of course; and the picture also includes prominent roles for Michael Lonsdale from The Day of the Jackal and Moonraker and Jonathan Pryce from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Tomorrow Never Dies! So there we have a total of three James Bond antagonists in the same movie! Here, one of them plays a bad guy, one a good guy, and one is neither! And there’s also a little smiley cameo appearance from Amidou, whom we might recall from Sorcerer!

The caper involves, or at least results in, several crackerjack car chases, which are without question the highlights of the movie! But with that terrific cast and dialogue from a pseudonymous David Mamet (“You ever kill anybody?” “I hurt somebody’s feelings once”), and a general air of what we might call “invented realism,” the picture is a totally enjoyable bit of non-comic book action! And as I say, like Cobra and Die Hard and Lethal Weapon and Die Hard 2 and To Live and Die in L.A. and Invasion U.S.A., this is an example of 80s Xmas Action – that is, it’s set over the Christmas season and features a few holiday accoutrements, in this case some carolling, a background appearance by Pere Nöel, and a few words of Christmas-related conversation here and there!

It’s hardly a perfect movie, though! It somehow doesn’t fully grip in the way it should, which is probably because it’s so procedural that it doesn’t bother with any of the other niceties of drama, like characters and plot and emotional stakes! It seems at times like an exercise put together by old pros as a display item, for which they concentrated on surface effects rather than substance; but on that surface level it excels! It’s a good, grown-up crime film, sort of a spiritual stepson of Melville’s great policiers, though not their equal, and I’m a fan even as I recognize its unidimensional characters and cereal-box plot! Ha ha, I’m giving Ronin three spilled cups of coffee!

Burl reviews Trucks! (1997)

 

Ha ha and double ha, it’s Burl crying vroom and giving you a review of a vehicular picture from the 90s! In fact it’s a remake of that sweet perennial from 1986, Stephen King’s one and only directorial effort, Maximum Overdrive! I suppose though that the producers of this picture might insist it’s not a remake, but rather a make of the original King short story! And to bolster their claim, the movie carries the same title as that story: Trucks!

Once again we have a little gang of people trapped by living trucks at a roadside choke-and-puke! The action allegedly takes place somewhere near Area 51, and there’s some theorizing about alien control, but otherwise we don’t get an explanation for the behaviour of these vehicles! Unlike the 1986 movie, it’s just trucks who’ve become sentient, not drawbridges, gas pumps, carving knives, video games, or bank machines, ha ha! So this effort is a little more straightforward than King's!

It’s an ensemble movie, but our putative lead is the ginger-haired owner of the little ramshackle rest-a-ree-a, Ray, played by Timothy Busfield, who’s well known from movies like Stripes and Sneakers! He’s got a teenage son called Logan, essayed by Brendan Fletcher from Violent Night and Ginger Snaps 2, and the sleepy, sloe-eyed townslady is Hope – yes, it’s Brenda Bakke from Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight! There’s Jack, a portly old hippie played by Jay Brazeau from Live Bait; bickering father-daughter duo Thad (Roman Podhora from Jason X) and Abby (Amy Stewart from My Winnipeg); an old counterman played as a Canadian cross between Donald Moffat and M. Emmet Walsh by Victor Cowie from Careful; and an amorous couple essayed by Sharon Bajer from Eye of the Beast and a fellow whose name I did not catch!

From many of these actors and their other credits, you might suss that this movie was made in Canada! It seems that in fact most of it was, but at some point they decided the trucks and the truck stop and all those characters I mentioned were not enough, so they shot some additional, slightly bloodier scenes in California, and these can be identified by the fact that they contain characters which have exactly nothing to do with the plot, and by the beautiful blacktop highways, which stand in marked contrast to the rough grey concrete, spiderwebbed with tarry cracks, that are found in the Canadian scenes! Ha ha! And while I’m getting into the production weeds, I should also make special mention of the work of Ina Hanford, who does a terrific job here!

The California scenes are the movie's goofier ones, and are much less truck-centric; so points for eclecticism but debits for straying, even if slightly, from the theme! These scenes have a hydro man shaken by his boomtruck and electrocuted; a hazmat suit somehow filling with air and becoming an axe murderer; and goofiest of all, an enraged radio-controlled toy 4x4 bursting through a door and slamming a luckless postman to death! Ha ha! Meanwhile, in Manitoba, the motley group huddles in their restaurant watching a parade of about half a dozen belligerent trucks circle the place, occasionally taking out someone dumb, brave, or dumb-brave enough to venture out! All of this is shot without style or pep, is absent of wit or verve, and is certainly unburdened by affrights! The stars don’t seem to be trying too hard – Busfield comes off as a seriously slumming Paul Giamatti being forced to play the role at the point of a gun held just off camera, and Bakke appears to be heavily barbiturated throughout!

So if you thought Maximum Overdrive was pretty bad (if quite a bit of fun!) and that as a director Stephen King makes a pretty good book writer, you’ll be shocked at how much more poorly this story can be told! Trucks demonstrates this amply, having, as it does, the feel of a movie made in a gravel quarry by people with no appreciation of the genre they’re working in or, frankly, any love of cinema! I don’t wish to tar every crew member with this terrible brush, but I will spread disdain like a jam across the whole of the above-the-line personnel! Sure, there are some good movies about angry self-driving vehicles - The Car is terrific, and Christine is a near-gem too – but this is not one of them! Trucks is a cracknel biscuit and no mistake, and I award it one culvert!

Burl reviews Grand Theft Auto! (1977)

 

Vroom, vroom, eerrrrkkkk! Ha ha, that’s ol’ Burl burning out with a good old-fashioned car crash picture for you! Well, we all know the story: Ron Howard, the well-known ginger who would later direct pictures like Apollo 13, was, back in 1976, only an aspiring film director, and he asked Roger Corman if he could direct a movie for Corman’s company New World Pictures! “Ha ha,” Corman told him, “you sure can, just as long as you’ll first star in an item called Eat My Dust!” Well, Howard said yes to that, and then the next thing you know he was co-writing (with his dad Rance), starring in, and directing a movie called Grand Theft Auto!

When I was maybe eight or nine I’d have told you this was my favourite movie! It was on TV regularly I guess, and I sure did love all the car crashes, ha ha! But some time during that period my family happened to be hosting a bunch of people we barely knew, who’d been displaced because of a forest fire in their little town; and one evening they proposed going to a movie, Being There, and invited me along! I was torn because Grand Theft Auto was on TV that night! But ultimately I opted for Being There, and I think that experience might have been profoundly formative: an introduction to a level of movie quality of which I’d been previously unaware!

I still appreciated Grand Theft Auto, though, and liked it again when I re-watched it the other day with my son, who's at the perfect age for Grand Theft Auto appreciation! It tells the tale of a young couple, Sam, played by the young Howard, and Paula, played by Nancy Morgan from The Nest! This doesn’t sit well with her richie-rich parents, who want her to marry a wealthy dork called Collins Hedgeworth, a role essayed by Paul Linke! He of course is well known from Moving Violation, Motel Hell, and his many appearances on CHiPs! Paula’s parents are played by Barry Cahill from The Groundstar Conspiracy, as her blowhard dad Bigby; and Elizabeth Rogers, who’d been involved in this sort of vehicular nonsense before in The Van, plays her mother!

Now one of the best moves Howard made, and probably one of the reasons I was so taken with it as an eight year-old, is that the action in this picture starts right from the get-go! There’s a short argument scene with the parents, then the girl steals her father’s Rolls Royce and it’s off to the races without a whole bunch of needless blah blah blah! I felt the same thing about that other big 1977 release, Star Wars – ha ha, I thought to myself, finally a movie that starts at the beginning! And as for Grand Theft Auto, except for a pointless argument scene between Sam and Paula late in the picture, it doesn’t let up ‘til the end!

Boy, they sure crashed a lot of cars in this picture! It’s pretty impressive on a Roger Corman budget, I must say! Paula and Sam (who spends most of the movie in the passenger seat, presumably to make it easier for him also to direct the movie) point the Rolls toward Las Vegas in a bid to secure a quickie wedding, and immediately become folk heroes thanks to the interest in their case taken by radio DJ Curly Q. Brown, played of course by The Real Don Steele, whose voice we know from his vocal appearances as Screamin’ Steve Stevens in Rock n’ Roll High School and Rockin’ Ricky Rialto in Gremlins! They’re also being chased by an ever-increasing number of people including but not limited to Paula’s parents; a bunch of private eyes or something in their employ; Collins Hedgeworth of course, and, separately, his mother (played by Mrs. Cunningham, natch); a pair of fortune-hunting mechanics; and police! Also worked in there is the requisite and always welcome Paul Bartel cameo!

It’s a pretty auspicious directorial debut, ha ha! There are crack-ups aplenty and the pace is good and quick! The story doesn’t amount to much, and the intra-lovebird conflict is highly manufactured and annoying, and Dick Miller should be in here somewhere but mysteriously isn’t; yet it’s nevertheless a breezy and entertaining little picture! And of course I feel a lot of residual affection from my prepubescent ardour for the movie, and, strangely, gratitude too, for I associate it with my viewing of Being There and subsequent entry into a wider world of movie appreciation! Grand Theft Auto, in this view, was not just something I appreciated, but something I had to overcome before becoming able to broaden my world! I still like the picture though, ha ha, and I give it three homemade lovewagons!

Burl reviews Endgame! (1983)

 

With a hey-ho and a hoch now, it’s Burl, here to review a little post-apocalyptic Italian insanity! Yes, we’re in the realm of Mr. Joe D’Amato, who brought us Ator the Fighting Eagle and so many more under a wide variety of fake names! Ha ha, he worked in all the genres (but especially the erotic!), and here he is taking on future action in a movie called Endgame!

We all know about the Italian predilection for borrowing from the big genre hits of the day, and this picture evidently had a long shopping list, because we find elements of Escape From New York, The Road Warrior, and, for the climactic confrontation, even Carrie! Most amazing is the opening twenty-five minutes or so, which are a terrific simulation of The Running Man – ha ha, a good trick, since that wouldn’t even come out for another four years! Maybe it’s more of a Rollerball riff, but, as though it has the psychic powers possessed by some of its characters, Endgame hews pretty close to that Schwarzenegger hit nevertheless: our hero, Shannon, played by a fluff-bearded Al Cliver from Zombie and The Beyond, is the best player of the hit television violence-show "Endgame," in which he runs from a trio of costumed hunters! Ha ha, pretty Running Man!

Of course this also closely resembles another Italian picture that psychically predicted The Running Man, the Lucio Fulci joint The New Gladiators, which came out in 1984! But after Shannon dispatches two of the hunters who are after him, and evades the third – his old frienemy Karnak, played by big George Eastman from Warriors of the Wasteland – the movie shifts more to Road Warrior territory, as Shannon is recruited to shepherd a gang of psychic mutants to a safe location! These meek folk are led by a telepathic lady named Lilith, played by Laura Gemser, who was many times a Black Emmanuelle! And there are several scenes of Lilith and Shannon communicating by mind power, which means shots of their faces looking grave and stationary as their voiceovers run on the soundtrack!

Shannon has some pals to help him with the shepherding task, like Ninja, played by Hal Yamanouchi from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and another guy essayed by Gabriele Tinti from Cut and Run, and a few more of them besides! They have to fight legions of blind monks, a gang of mini-croscronics, and of course the animal people who sport prosthetic cat muzzles or painted-on fish scales! And among the psychics there’s a young lad with extraordinary powers, leading to a terrific Carrie-inspired climax in which the government baddies who want to kill off the mutants are exploded by flames, crushed by rocks or trucks, or fired upon by rogue machine guns!

It’s an enjoyable meli-melo, that’s for sure! It borrows so avidly from other movies that it becomes its own thing, and there are plenty of weird touches that make it memorable! I have a fondness for these movies – Warriors of the Wasteland, Exterminators of the Year 3000, After the Fall of New York, 1990: Bronx Warriors, Warrior of the Lost World, & c. & c., and this is one of the better ones, so I liked it! Oh sure, there are flaws – wooden acting, nonsensical dialogue, a general lack of coherence – but are these really flaws? Ha ha, that’s in the mind of the beholder, and my recommendation is that you behold this one if you get a chance! I give Endgame two and a half floating rocks!

Burl reviews Breakdown! (1997)

 

Shakedown, breakdown, it’s Burl, here to review a simple story of 90s automotive mystery-action! Ha ha, you might be thinking that this must be a review of Switchback, but no, it’s another Paramount Pictures production entirely! In fact this is Breakdown, a leanly-told tale of dastardly truckers and a missing wife!

Kurt Russell from The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China and Kathleen Quinlan from Wild Thing and Apollo 13 are a husband and wife hoping to start a new life out West! Russell here is in the same blando button-down Everyman mode he adopts in other 90s thrillers like Unlawful Entry and Executive Decision, and when, in the middle of the desert, their car suffers the titular event, Quinlan takes off to fetch a tow truck with a seemingly friendly trucker played by J.T. Walsh from Misery! But when Russell gets his vehicle started by himself and proceeds to the next service station to find his wife, he discovers she isn’t there and never was, and the local hayseeds claim they never saw no one lookin’ like her!

Well, it’s a conundrum! Russell is worried, and through a series of investigations and confrontations, and without allies on these dusty plains, he manages to overcome his tucked-in personality and track down his wife! Of course Walsh is the villain behind it all, ha ha, it’s no surprise to find that out, and he’s got a little gang of co-conspirators which includes such professional low-lifes as M. C. Gainey from Con Air! The more interesting discovery is that when Walsh is not trucking or kidnapping or demanding ransom, he’s a warm family man with a wife and son! He also has a padlocked stay-hole in his barn however, so there’s that, ha ha!

Familyman or not, he’s an altogether nasty customer, and so there’s great sadistic pleasure in watching him and his underlings get their just desserts! Along the way there are some short, efficiently-directed action scenes and a fair soupçon of suspense, and it all wraps up in a tight ninety-something minutes! This all amounts to a mid-level programmer of the old school, making up in solidity what it lacks in ambition! Everybody involved did just the job that was required of them, even if, as in the case of Quinlan, that job was far below their actual talents! She’s too good an actor just to be kidnapped and put into a bag; but on the other hand the movie serves as a very good showcase for Walsh and his particular set of skills!

This is one of the many sorts of movies they just don’t make any more, and while it doesn’t count as the greatest of tragedies, I still miss this sort of thing: that is, the kind of picture that you feel a natural urge to take the afternoon off and go see with a box of hot buttered corn in your lap! Maybe what I’m really lamenting are the bygone days when I would or could go and do that at all, movie type notwithstanding; but in any case, little hard-edged genre pictures like Breakdown come with a slight patina of reminiscence and regret! But they also come with plenty of simple pleasure, and so I give Breakdown two and a half doughnut packages!

Burl reviews Return to Macon County! (1975)

 

Yee-haw and hee haw, it’s Burl, here with some Southern-fried action-drama! Today we Return to Macon County, which is odd as I’ve never been to Macon County, either physically or by watching the picture to which this is a sort-of sequel, Macon County Line! So, ha ha, if I’ve never been there, how can I return, but return I did simply by watching Return to Macon County!

The picture, which is set in the summer of 1958, wastes no time in introducing us to the main characters: a pair of itinerant gearheads traveling to California to become auto racing stars in their self-modified lemon-yellow Chevy! And, ha ha, this duo looks somehow familiar, though younger than the versions we’re acquainted with: it’s Nick Nolte from Extreme Prejudice playing Bo, the driver, and Don Johnson from Dead-Bang, as well as novelty appearances in Machete and Django Unchained, as Harley, the mechanic!

Clever with autos they may be, but general-issue geniuses these two fellows are not! They stop in Macon County, which is their first mistake, and following this comes a whole series of subsequent mistakes, big and small! Their principal error is in hooking up with a waitress called Junell, played by Robin Mattson from Candy Stripe Nurses and Phantom of the Paradise, who is cute and cheerful but soon proves also to be completely insane! Ha ha, and she has a gun too, which is not a useful combination!

They soon make enemies: first a greaser gang whom Harley has beaten in a drag race, and who, instead of paying off Harley’s winnings, simply beat him up; and then, after Junell has secured the cash winnings from the gang at gunpoint, they irritate a cop, who instantly goes completely mad himself and declares a blood vengeance on the lads! Thanks to a scary performance by TV actor Robert Vilarho, the cop seems a formidable antagonist, even if his dogged pursuit of Bo and Harley fails to make much sense!

Junell pulls her gun a few more times, which gets them all into even more trouble, and soon she’s babbling about rabbits flattened on the highway being scraped up and used as Frisbees! Ha ha, this is recalled and used as some sort of metaphor in the film’s final scene, but that, too, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense! Neither does Bo’s troubled infatuation with Junell, though the punchfight between the friends, once they realize the depth of the trouble they’re in, certainly does make sense! Each of these dopes deserves a walloping, with the other being just the man to deliver it!

One expects a full and drama-filled breakdown from Junell before the end of the picture, and perhaps a climactic institutionalization, but that seeming inevitability never happens! Instead we get a fatal case of mistaken identity between the vengeance-crazed cop and the nasty greasers, followed by the complete psychotic dislocation of the lawman! Ha ha!

Return to Macon County was part of a rich tapestry of low-budget cornpone action dramas in the 70s: stuff like Redneck County and Eat My Dust and Smokey Bites the Dust, and so many more! I guess these things played well on the drive-in circuit, ha ha! With its stars-to-be and its willingness to go dark, it stands out slightly from the crowd; but like so many of its brethren, it frequently threatens to get dull! That it never quite follows through on this may be more a function of my own mood when watching it than the movie’s own innate pep, but it can’t be denied that the picture is competently made by writer-director Richard Compton, whose work I’m otherwise unfamiliar with!

I suppose one of these days I ought to see the original Macon Count Line, which was auteured by Jethro his own self, but I guess I’m in no real hurry! Meantime I’m going to give Return to Macon County two exploding gumball machines!

Burl reviews Crash! (1996)

Beep beep, it’s Burl, here to review a car-crash picture! But it’s sure not one of your hayseed yee-haw skid-out epics like Redneck County or Smokey Bites the Dust, ha ha no sir! If those movies have a polar opposite, David Cronenberg’s chrome-blue, super-citified, anti-action drama Crash is it!

Videodrome is good and weird, but I think Crash was Cronenberg’s first real return to experimental filmmaking since the early half-features Stereo and Crimes of the Future! So for that reason I think it’s a noteworthy work, and of course it’s a serious-minded sex picture with more than sex on its mind, and also tremendously funny! I’ve been watching Cronenberg pictures for a long time, and have loved them over the years on different, highly varied plains, receiving renewed doses of satisfaction from them multiple times for each different genre cloak in which they appear to me! First, horror or science fiction movies! Then Important Cultural Artifacts! After that, perfectly crafted cult pictures! And finally, and I think ultimately, comedies! Cronenberg has claimed it himself, ha ha!

Not only is Crash based on a J.G. Ballard book, but the lead character, played by James Spader from Team-Mates, Tuff Turf, and Pretty in Pink, is named James Ballard! He’s married to Deborah Kara Unger from The Game, and both of them are so jaded by their high-rise Toronto lives that they play games of bohankie with whomever they come across in their daily lives, be they strange men in airplane hangars or simple, sexy camera assistants! Ha ha! But one night a distracted Spader loses control of his auto and runs into a car containing Holly Hunter from The Burning and also her husband! The husband is killed and Hunter injured, and she and Ballard end up recuperating in the very same hospital! They meet a local car-crash enthusiast named Vaughan, played marvelously by Elias Koteas from Some Kind of Wonderful, and become enmeshed in a strange subculture of people obsessed by the remaking by car crash of both the human body and human culture!

Rosanna Arquette from After Hours and Nowhere to Run appears in a small role as one of these subcultists, but she doesn’t have much to do except show off her leg braces and scars, accrued from the many crashes her character has endured! Meanwhile, Vaughan and his cohorts restage famous crack-ups, notably the one between James Dean and Donald Turnipseed! Meanwhile again there is lots of, ha ha, autoerotica going on, with all the characters having car sex with each other, and even old Vaughan catching a bummy at one point! But things take a turn for the alarming, and Spader and his wife are finally consumed by the fender-bending obsession!

This picture worked its automotive magic on me when I saw it in its big-screen run! I think I saw it at some kind of preview screening, and when I came driving up from the parking garage after the show, it seemed to me, as it had to the characters after their near-fatal freeway accidents, that there was now at least three times as much traffic on the road and that a collision was surely imminent! Even if this doesn’t happen to you, you’ll surely be caught up in the strange, defiantly unique atmosphere the movie induces! Ha ha! Some might call it goofball, but I think the movie knows more than its critics do, and I count it as a real accomplishment - perhaps one of Cronenberg’s finest! I give Crash three and a half hood ornaments!

Burl reviews Stryker! (1983)

From out on the wasteland it’s Burl, here with a review of one of the many Road Warrior rip-off pictures of the early 1980s! Ha ha, most of those were Italian, like Warriors of the Wasteland, Warrior of the Lost World and Warriors of the Year 3000, but some came from other lands! New Zealand gave us Battletruck after all, and from the Philippines came today’s picture, Stryker!

Ha ha, of course it’s a direct and shameless hatchling from Mad Max 2, aka The Road Warrior, but in some ways it predates Mad Max: Fury Road! In The Road Warrior the precious fluid was oil, and here, more sensibly, it’s all about water! For after the global destruction and the environmental catastrophes, it’s a world of thirst, and even though nobody ever looks particularly parched, they’re all fighting about the H20!

There are several different groups on the trail of a mysterious and bountiful spring, with a lone wolf in a fine fastback Mustang sort of noncommittally along for the ride! This of course is Stryker himself, a beefsman played by Steve Sandor from The Ninth Configuration! Along comes another lone wolf, the simian Bandit, played by William Ostrander from Christine, who joins up with Stryker so they can be lone wolfs together! They rescue Andrea Savio from House of Death, who represents the group who already live at the spring, and who is being pursued by the baddest of the gangs, which is led by a devil-bearded headbald called Kardis, played by Mike Lane from A Name For Evil! And there’s also a gang of ladies, featuring such familiar faces as Monique St. Pierre from Motel Hell and Julie Grey from Gimme an F, and of course a group of midget monks who make pipsqueak noises and turn out to be a good bunch to have on your side!

There’s a little bit of road warrioring, but lots of gunfights too! As in the Italian variants there are some chunky gore effects scattered here and there, but not too many of these really! Still, the few that we get certainly help add that necessary pep, but good car chases certainly would have, too! Almost every major character seems to need rescuing at least once, ha ha, and there’s a scene where somebody pees on somebody else’s head; and in a world without water you wonder whether that’s an insult or a favour!

It was directed by that stalwart Cirio H. Santiago, who brought us all sorts of pictures, from T.N.T. Jackson to Cover Girl Models to Vampire Hookers to Final Mission! He does a fine job with the material he’s got, and who could deny that! Sandor is a bit of a cummerbund as the hero, and of course it’s all very silly, especially the monks, but it’s energetic and mildly compelling nonsense! And I was glad the cars didn’t have that whining noise you hear so often in the Italian ones! Ha ha! I give Stryker two leather diapers!

Burl reviews Planes, Trains & Automobiles! (1987)

Ha ha and best of Thanksgivings to my Yankee Doodle friends! Yes, here for you is one of the quintessential American Turkey Day movies, Planes, Trains & Automobiles, which has no particular holiday resonance for me, being Canadian as I am, but is a perfectly enjoyable picture simply on its own merits! I like it better than Uncle Buck, anyway, ha ha!

Anyway, a viewer looking for Canadian content need look no further than John Candy, who alone provides a great deal of content, ha ha! This beloved comedy star, admired for his appearances in pictures like Summer Rental and Armed and Dangerous, and of course that other holiday classic The Silent Partner, plays shower curtain ring salesman Del Griffith, who travels around hawking his wares and making friends everywhere he goes! Meanwhile, uptight Chicago ad man Neal Page, in New York for a presentation, wants to get back to Chi-town to be with his picture-perfect family for the holiday! Neal is played by silver-domed Steve Martin, famed for roles in All of Me and ¡Three Amigos!

This picture is the story of their trouble-filled journey from Wichita, where foul weather forces them to land, to Chicago, and of course there are many delightful happenings along the way, and strong performances from both Martin and Candy! Ha ha, in fact, I think this may be Candy’s best work! Alongside the delights there are plenty of patented John Hughes moves, like the ascension of minor inconvenience to high tragedy when the victim is a white upper middle-class fellow; the absolute fealty to bourgeois family ritual; sudden sledgehammer blows of sentiment; and the use of horror movie tropes like musical stings and oblique cinematography to introduce working class characters, who are supposed to be naturally terrifying, I guess, unless they’re founts of wisdom like Carl the janitor in The Breakfast Club! Ha ha!

It’s a two man show for the most part, but Hughes sprinkles in plenty of cameos and familiar character faces! Kevin Bacon, well known for his appearance in Friday the 13th, shows up as a young businessman trying to get the same cab as Neal; Michael McKean from D.A.R.Y.L. turns up near the end as a highway patrolman; Larry Hankin from Escape From Alcatraz is Doobie the cabbie; Richard Herd from Summer Rental and Gary Riley from Summer School are in there too, along with plenty of others! There are even familiar voices, like that of Chino ‘Fats’ Williams, who is an unseen bus driver here, and was one of the old boys in the blues bar in Weird Science!

Anyway, we all know the story and we all know the jokes, and probably most people feel Planes, Trains & Automobiles is as much a comfy blanket to put on in a cold season as it is a movie! Ha ha! But it raises a lot of questions, too - things that are maybe explained by the rumoured four-and-a-half hour original cut, ha ha! I wonder if that wouldn’t have been a bit much? Anyway, I wonder how it works out after the concluding freeze frame on John Candy’s face: did Del stay for Thanksgiving dinner? Did the in-laws all accept him? Where did he go after that? Who paid for the destroyed rental car? Ha ha, I give editor Paul Hirsch a lot of credit for putting it all together and leaving room for all the comedy smash cuts Hughes was so fond of!

Well, it’s a solid little picture, not beloved by me, but I admit it has a comfy feeling to it! I saw it at the theatre, maybe on not exactly a date but one of those little co-ed gang outings that sometimes happened! Ha ha, I saw The Breakfast Club that way, too, which was apt! In any case, it gave me a fondness for both these Hughes works that I might not have otherwise, and so I give Planes, Trains & Automobiles two and a half pillows!

Burl reviews The Car! (1977)

Beep beep, it’s Burl, here to review one of the great concoctive movies of the 1970s, The Car! It’s like someone saw Jaws and The Exorcist, and heard about the then-upcoming Smokey and the Bandit, and said ha ha, let’s do it! Let’s mix ‘em all up and see what we get!

What they got was a picture about a small desert town terrorized by a devil-possessed sedan, a concept which I consider sort of brilliantly stupid! Ha ha! The dastardly auto, a big ugly thing of indeterminate make, roams the mesas and barrancas around Santa Ynez, a little community with a seemingly inexhaustible police force! The hero of the piece is James Brolin, well known from Von Ryan’s Express, looking very Marlboro Man as deputy sheriff Wade Parent! (Boy, Brolin had a great run in the 1970s! Westworld, The Car, Capricorn One, The Amityville Horror: none of them great movies, but all pop gems in their own right!)

The police force also includes alcoholic deputy Luke, played by the fine Ronny Cox from Total Recall and Beverly Hills Cop! The boss sheriff is leathery John Marley, and then there’s my favourite character Chas, another deputy, played by Henry O’Brien! Ha ha, I won’t be breaking a confidence to reveal that one or more of these gentlemen may end up flattened by the car! There’s also a nasty, abusive demolition man played by R.G. Armstrong, who would reunite with Cox five years later to battle The Beast Within, and whose fate in this picture will surprise you! And Wade Parent’s girlfriend is played at once winningly and hammily by Kathleen Lloyd from Best Seller!

The sequence of events is very Jaws, with the car claiming its first victims right off the hop, and then on the reg after that! Unlike the shark, however, the car begins targeting specific people, at one point jumping through a house Grand Theft Auto-style to wheel-butt someone it has a grudge against! Ha ha! The car starts exhibiting supernatural abilities, like going into a barrel roll, crushing a couple of police cars, righting itself and cruising on without so much as a dented fender! It also demonstrates a disinclination to drive on hallowed ground, which apparently cemeteries are! Yet for all this, most of the force refuses to believe they’re dealing with anything but a maniac driver!

Ha ha, the Santa Ynez police force has a rough go of it here, suffering untold personnel losses beneath the wheels of the constantly honking vehicle! But a series of events involving truckloads of dynamite, a motorcycle fleeing from the car, a big cliff, and a dodging out of the way at the last moment (the oldest trick in the book), conspire to lead the car into a fiery explosion supposed by some to contain a demonic face, though I’ve never been able to see it in there!

To my great enjoyment The Car is a desert picture, the sort of thing Jack “Tarantula” Arnold should have been doing in the 70s instead of Black Eye! But director Eliot Silverstein does a fine job in Arnold’s stead, keeping the car as scary and imposing as he can under the circumstances, ha ha, the circumstances being that he’s making a movie about the devil’s towncar! The car design helps: King of the Kustomizers George Barris did a good job here; and there’s some marvelous photography from Gerald Hirschfeld of both the car and its environs!

But the killer car idea, dusted off later for Christine and one segment in the anthology Nightmares, is pretty silly! Points go to all participants for taking it seriously and making it more or less work! The car hardly ever claims victims at night, probably because it was difficult to photograph in the dark; but even with this restriction the movie manages an aridly creepy atmosphere! I’m fond of this picture and I’m not afraid to admit it! I give The Car three French horns!

Burl reviews Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome! (1985)

Vroom vroom, it’s Burl, here to review one of those Mad Max pictures that we all love so well! Now, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is not the best of them, and in fact is almost certainly the worst! It’s certainly the most off-brand, as there’s hardly any car racing in it at all, relative to the other entries at least!

But for all that, I’m fond of the picture! Certainly the scenes in the thunderdome itself are dynamic and exciting, and what chase material there is toward the end is darned enjoyable! Plus we have a dynamic performance from Tina Turner, looking great in a chain mail dusset, and a fine twilight appearance from the great and small Angelo Rossitto, from Smokey Bites the Dust and The Dark!

The problem really is that the movie engages too freely in this trend known as “world building,” and while this is always assumed to be a positive and worthwhile effort in series pictures, I don’t myself believe it necessarily is, and moreover I feel it can be a real drag on the stories they’re trying so hard to expand upon! I prefer Max and his world to be a sort of abstraction, I think! He and his stories should be simple and suggest much!

I guess what it comes down to in this case is that, whereas the gangs in Mad Max movies (headed by The Lord Humongous in The Road Warrior and The Immortan Joe in Mad Max: Fury Road) usually claim to be a civilizing influence while in fact operating as neo-fascists, Turner’s Aunty Entity, and her pop-up city of Bartertown, genuinely are a step forward in this post-apocalyptic wasteland! This undercuts their menace a great deal, as does, incidentally, the picture’s PG-13 rating!

The movie opens with Max caravanning across the desert when suddenly Bruce Spence (playing a post-pockyclypse aeronaut just as he did in The Road Warrior, but a different post-pockyclypse aeronaut) swoops down out of nowhere and steals all his stuff! Max ends up in Bartertown, meets Tina and the Master Blaster (which is Rossitto piggybacking on a big guy’s shoulders), and some terrific side characters played by Frank Thring and Edwin Hodgeman! After his big thunderdome fight, Max busts a deal and faces the wheel, which decrees that he be gulaged out into the wasteland! Ha ha, this involves plunking him on a horse and sticking a Big Boy mask on his head for some reason! Anyway, he comes across a civilization of children who live in a verdant crevasse, then comes into conflict with the Bartertownians again, which leads to the final chase, and Angry Anderson hanging off a speeding train and dodging ironbars! Ha ha! 

On this most recent viewing of the movie, which I watched with my son, I was not as scornful of the kids as I had been previously! Before I’d considered them no better than Ewoks, but now, with a child sitting beside me, I could appreciate their power and how desperately they cling to storytelling as a way to maintain their humanity! I especially liked the 2.35:1 ratio portable frame they use to help dramatize their origin story!

So it’s no action classic like Road Warrior, and it tries too hard to situate Max in a plausible environment (the plausibility of which is undercut by the array of pointless, arbitrary accoutrements that would in truth be low priorities for apocalypse survivors), but Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome has on the other hand a wealth of entertaining details, a terrific score from Maurice “Dreamscape” Jarre, fantastic photography from Dean Semler, a nice dollop of wit, and some miniature model work at the end! I give it two and a half Angry Andersons!