Burl reviews Steele Justice! (1987)

 

Killoo-killay, it’s Burl here with classic VHS action! Ha ha, there sure were a lot of action movies made in the 80s for the booming VHS market! Some of them – many of them in fact – had a theatrical release, but as the decade wore on, such a release became more cursory, more obviously just a promotion for the videocassette release that would allow wide (and double-wide) audiences to see the pictures! In the wake of Beverly Hills Cop and Rambo there was no end to the low-budget cop and war variants eager to cash in, and occasionally there were combo platters aiming to suck from both troughs at once! One of these – its glowering VHS cover familiar to many an 80s kid – is the subject of today’s review: Steele Justice!

Ha ha, is there justice of any other kind? Steele Justice begins at the tail end of the war in Vietnam, with stone-faced, rock-brained John Steele, played by Martin Kove from White Line Fever, Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, and of course Rambo, standing tall in a small hovercraft as it cruises up a jungle tributary! Steele is so tough he wears a live snake as a necktie, and accompanying him is his best pal Lee, essayed by Robert Kim from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off! They discover a bunch of dead bodies and realize their supposed South Vietnamese ally, General Kwan, played by Soon-Tek Oh from The Man With the Golden Gun and Death Wish 4, is not actually a very nice man! Kwan has Steele and Lee shot, but that doesn’t kill them, and Steele in turn shoots Kwan with a gun that shoots knives, but that doesn’t kill him either! And somehow a colonel named Harry played by Joseph Campanella from Hangar 18 figures into this preamble!

A dozen or so years later, Steele is married and divorced from Sela Ward from The Fugitive, and has been employed with and fired from the Los Angeles police department! His buddy Lee is still a cop though, and when Steele bottoms out, Lee is there to help him up! But, uh oh, Lee and most of his family (including a granny with a Moe haircut played by Kimiko Hiroshige from Blade Runner and Fletch) are murdered by Kwan’s evil son, impersonated by Peter Kwong from Big Trouble in Little China; and as a further ignominy it all happens while Steele is relaxing in a bath, so he gets very angry and figures on delivering a little Steele justice!

Kwan has become a respected American business man, and so Steele is faced with a bogomil crisis when Ronny Cox from The Car and The Beast Within shows up as his old boss on the force, Bennett! And there’s another cop played by Bernie Casey from Ants! and Never Say Never Again, who’s more sympathetic to Steele and his methods! While protecting the surviving Lee daughter, played by a terrible actress I’m sorry to say, Steele first bothers, then intimidates, then finally attacks and kills Kwan and his crime bunch!

As though a political psychodrama is lurking camouflaged within the movie, there’s a lot of real estate dedicated to showing the depths in respect, both self- and from everyone else (except for Lee and his family, who are the biggest Steele fans in the world), to which the agate-visaged hero has plummeted since the war! Killing is his only balm, and after the massacre of his only friends he seems almost gleeful at the opportunity to dispense the Steele justice I spoke of earlier! Of course his necktie snake gets involved, and the final fight against Kwan involves the old “battle-atop-a-shipping-crate-being-lifted-by-a-crane-operated-by-?” routine!

It’s a dumb, reductive, reactionary, Reagan-era movie, of minor (but hardly unique) interest thanks to the Asian gangs angle! But the bad guys are allegedly fearsome, and, ha ha, you know General Kwan is really mad when he appears on the scene wearing a floral print dress! Kwan has Shannon Tweed from Dragnet on his side as a fellow crime boss, or at least the daughter of one; meanwhile Phil Fondacaro from Phantasm II and Land of the Dead shows up as a wee bartender, and of course Al Leong henches once again, just as he henched in everything from Lethal Weapon and Die Hard to Death Warrant and Protocol!

As sedimentary as its hero, the picture does nevertheless provide a few hyocks, a modicum of confusion, a fine B movie cast, and occasionally the impression that it must have been written and directed by Clyde the Orang-utan! It sat on shelves in the Action section alongside The Patriot and Instant Justice and Born American, and there perhaps it should stay - but, ha ha, that's up to you! I give Steele Justice one RPG – Rat-Propelled Grenade! Ha ha!

Burl reviews City in Panic! (1987)

 

Ha ha, speak up everybody, you’re on the air - it’s Burl here to review a fairly obscure little Canadian mystery-slasher picture! It’s one of those grimy, vaguely giallo-inspired movies that came along regularly through the early and mid-80s – pictures like American Nightmare and Evil Judgment are close cousins, it seems to me! The movie we’re talking about today goes by several titles – among them, reportedly, The AIDS Murders – but I’m going to refer to it by the name on the VHS tape I watched: City in Panic!

The city in question is Toronto, and though they don’t name it, it’s pretty identifiable! Ha ha, there are plenty of recognizable cityscape shots, and the piles of dirty snow seen everywhere identify the climate and the season for us as well! It looks like it was a cold shoot - ha ha, as someone who has worked on movies in Toronto in the wintertime, I had real sympathy for the cast of this picture, and even more for the crew!

The panic has already begun as the story begins: enough people, maybe two or three, have been murdered for the police and the public to realize it’s a serial maniac! Because the victims are mainly gay men, the action starts outside the Oak Leaf Steam Baths on Bathurst Street, which I cheered when I saw because, even though I never went to the steam baths, they were in the same building as Mimi’s, a great restaurant at which I used to frequently eat my breakfast! Ha ha, they made a terrific French toast! Mimi’s was a marvelous place, always full of famous, semi-famous, and non-famous musicians, and Mimi herself was a real character!

Anyway, the man comes out of the steam baths looking chagrined and heads home for a shower! The killer is on his tail, and what follows is the most slavish recreation of the Psycho shower scene outside of Gus Van Sant’s weird 1998 remake! Then we’re introduced to the competent but unremarkable actors who will essay our main characters: firstly Dave Miller, impersonated by David Anderson, an anodyne talk radio host who plays with toys as he broadcasts and whose catch phrase is “Speak up, you’re on the air!” The topic du jour on Dave’s radio show is of course the murders, and his position on the matter is tough to define, but it’s apparently at odds with that of the town’s other media giant, a Truman Capote-ish columnist called Alex Ramsey!

Although these two constantly reiterate their respective opinions on the killings and on the approach the police are taking to solve the crimes, I was never quite sure what those positions were! As near as I can tell, Dave is asking the public for patience, opining that the cops have a tough job so let them do it; while Alex Ramsey just wants someone to declare martial law and do whatever they have to do to get this murderous scoundrel off the streets! Meanwhile we meet other characters: Dave’s radio producer Louise, played by Bonnie Beck from Wild Thing; Ramsay’s assistant (and, I think, Dave’s ex?) Elizabeth Price, played by Leeann Nestegard; and Dave’s best friend, who’s also the detective on the case, Barry McKee! We also get to know Barry’s partner, who is the world’s angriest cop!

But the killer seems unstoppable! Kitted out in giallo-wear (black hat, cloak, gloves and glasses), the fiend takes out He-Man, a ponky male stripper who prances about to the screams of the ladies! Ha ha, even the cops, even his best friend, even He-Man’s own physician refers to him only as He-Man! And there’s more! Every so often the killer will roll up in a sweet boogie van right out of Prom Night and put the knife to, oh, let’s say a fellow hanging upside down in the gym, or else a security guard who takes advantage of a glory hole and by garr pays the price! Arghhh, ha ha! A letter M is always carved into the victims, and later on a poster for Fritz Lang’s M provides an important if belated clue to Detective Barry McKee!

I guess I shouldn’t give away the killer or the motive, but despite the fact that the victims are almost all gay men and are afflicted with AIDS (which, in keeping with the mid-80s provenance of the picture, it assumes is an automatic death sentence for anyone who’s got it), it’s not a simple case of murderous homophobia! I suppose the movie is pretty progressive for its day, in that none of the gay folk are simple caricatures; but it’s nevertheless very much of its day, so keep that in mind and be warned if you’re thinking of watching it!

I can’t say the solution to the mystery surprised me, and, ha ha, I’m pretty easily surprised! Also, the movie is simply not terribly well made, even if it could have been worse! Some of the acting is not bad, and some of it is; and it’s not a movie with much of a sense of humour – by the end, I must say, it gets pretty grim! But then suddenly, with a bonk on the head, it’s all done, and the only thing left is to wait for the AIDS to inevitably claim any still-living infected characters, as far as the movie's medical understanding goes! As movies go it’s a bit unusual and it’s a bit Toronto, and those are its main virtues, so I’ll give City in Panic one set of gravity boots!

Burl reviews Cold Pursuit! (2019)

 

By krim-kram and by the flurries of winters past, it’s Burl, here to review yet another picture featuring an aging Liam Neeson carrying vengeance in his heart! He’s done this oh so many times before – look at movies like Next of Kin and Darkman and Taken 2, and there you’ll see that old familiar figure of Liam Neeson with vengeance reliably lodged in his heart! And the picture under discussion today is more of the same, and it’s called Cold Pursuit!

This is not just a vengeance picture but also belongs to that subset of movies which are remakes of movies made a year or two earlier by the same European director who made the original, and usually the remake is the filmmaker’s entrée into Hollywood studio picturemaking! Think of The Vanishing, (and, ha ha, then forget it – the remake, anyway), or Funny Games! Cold Pursuit is a remake of the Danish-Norwegian comedeo-vengeance film In Order of Disappearance, which I’m pretty sure I’ve seen! And like all these remakes, bar, I think, none, the original is the better one!

Old Liam plays Nels, which seems like, but isn’t, an anagram for “Liam!” Nels is a solid citizen in a little Colorado mountain town: he’s the man who keeps the roads clear with his big shed full of plowing equipment, and for this he’s being recognized as Local Man of the Year, for which his wife, Laura Dern from Blue Velvet, is proud! But then we see how their son, played by Neeson’s real-life son I believe, has, through his airport baggage job and the shabby offices of a disreputable pal, become mixed up with a drugs gang, and thanks to a misunderstanding, is kidnapped and given a fatal overdose by the gang!

Neeson and Dern each react to this in their own way: Dern takes off for parts unknown and is never seen again, while Neeson becomes vengeance-crazed, turning to his retired-gangster brother, played by William Forsythe from Smokey Bites the Dust and Extreme Prejudice, for information and advice! The tone turns blackly comic as Neeson kills his way up the Denver crime hierarchy, and with each new notch on the belt comes an intertitle memorializing the dead party and listing his gangster nickname! Ha ha, this is a bit on the cutesy side – I recall it working better in the original, where the humour was allowed to be as dry as it needed to be and the little titles didn’t stand out as much as they do in this more studio-tooled, focus-grouped remake!

The nicknames are another running gag, with a puzzled Neeson quizzing his brother about them! But, like the obituary intertitles, this aspect seems nothing more than ornamentation added later to purfle the border of an otherwise ordinary crime thriller! Ha ha, but there are a few details which seem a bit more organically integrated, like the rival gang of Indigenous mobsters! And there’s a subplot involving the son of the main bad guy, a boy-faced mob boss called The Viking, who lacks any evident Viking qualities beyond a general ruthlessness; this subplot has a mild wackiness to it, and lends the picture a bit of dualism which, for the movie’s running time at least, serves as an acceptable substitute for complexity!

The revenge part works well enough, familiar as it is, though I was disappointed that Nels didn’t use his snowplow more! It figures into the last act a little bit, but not enough to make this picture anything more than a mildly eccentric and otherwise unmemorable crime picture, more notable for casting a shadow over the original foreign iteration than for any qualities of its own! Neeson does this stuff with an appealing stolidity, but he could pull that off in his sleep, and in several scenes seems to be doing so here! I say stick with the original version, or maybe Fargo, which did snowbound crime eccentricity better than any other picture I can think of; but I’ll give Cold Pursuit two Fruity Pebbles anyway!

Burl reviews Lethal Weapon! (1987)

 

Getting too old for this shit, it’s Burl, here to review 80s buddy-cop carnage for you! Of course there had been buddy cops before this movie came out, and even black and white buddy cops as we have in this picture (Number One with a Bullet, anybody? Ha ha, anybody?), but the success of this particular duo led to an explosion (often literal) of buddy cops – in only the year and change after this one’s release we had alien/human buddy cops in Alien Nation and The Hidden; living/dead buddy cops in Dead Heat; American/Russian buddy cops in Red Heat; natty/slobbo buddy cops in Tango & Cash, and army/civilian buddy cops in The Presidio! And the movie that kicked this genre into high gear? Ha ha, Lethal Weapon, of course!

And as we know, the picture canonized another tradition: setting action movies around Christmas! Earlier action pictures – First Blood, To Live and Die in L.A., Cobra – had already flirted with a touch of noel flavouring, and then Die Hard came along the very next year to solidify the trend, and Die Hard 2 to lacquer it, but I think it was Lethal Weapon that made it a thing! Certainly it popularized the use of incongruous holiday music to make some kind of ironic point! And it goes that extra Christmas mile by casting Phil Spector’s Christmas Album superstar Darlene Love as Danny Glover’s wife!

The setup and story hardly bear repeating, but here goes! Mel Gibson, whom we recall from his roles in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and Conspiracy Theory, plays Martin Riggs, so archetypally the emotionally hollowed-out cop that he seems a parody of the form; and whether he’s putting a gun in his mouth or sharing his dog’s breakfast or acting all bugeyed and crazy, he doesn’t seem much like a real person! This behaviour had more impact back when it was fresh, but it was never very realistic! Meanwhile, Danny Glover, well beloved from his role in The Dead Don’t Die, is Roger Murtaugh, whom I used to think was so old but is only just turning fifty as the picture opens! And just as Riggs is a near-parody, of course Murtaugh is the very model of the too-old-for-this-shit family-man cop still doing the job, but with half an eye on retirement and his driveway watercraft which ought to be named the Midlife Crisis! The introductory scene where he’s relaxing in his bath and the whole family bursts in to give him a birthday party while he’s in his birthday suit always struck me as odd, but I guess that’s the repressed North American in me!

The action is kicked off in the opening moments by a naked lady, zonked on the devil’s dandruff, plummeting to her doom from the top of a luxury tower! This unfortunate lady turns out to be the daughter of none other than Tom Atkins from Halloween III and Night of the Creeps, playing an old pal of Murtaugh’s called Hunsacker! Then we have the obligatory scenes in which Murtaugh meets-cop with Riggs and reluctantly becomes his partner; Riggs acts crazy and near suicidal and Murtaugh becomes upset; and Riggs comes over to the Murtaugh house for dinner and relations between the two buddy cops soften into a true partnership! Ha ha!

The baddies are a bunch of drug-smuggling army fellows led by a pocky old general played by Mitchell Ryan from Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers! The plot particulars are actually a bit murky, and there’s a sense of the filmmakers not really caring much about the mechanics of it, or how Hunsacker’s daughter's death plummet fits in! The important thing is how evil these fellows are, particularly Gary Busey from Silver Bullet playing Mr. Joshua, the general’s right-hand man, who literally offers up his right hand to be burned by a cigarette lighter on the general’s casual instruction just to make a point! And of course, ha ha, there’s perpetual hench Al Leong as Endo, who’s forgotten more about administering pain than the rest of us will ever know! Mr. Joshua’s pain endurance capabilities are not really explored beyond the cigarette lighter scene, and Endo’s legendary talents as, conversely, an inflictor of agony don’t seem to stretch beyond crude car battery electrocution, so in these senses the movie is more talk than walk!

But in other respects it’s a perfectly-wrought 80s action extravaganza, right down to the climactic front yard punchfight, complete with MTV effects provided by a spurting fire hydrant and a hovering helicopter spotlight, and cops kept at bay by only a few words from Glover! Richard Donner, who'd earlier brought us The Omen, directs the thing with about the right amount of flair, and the performances, as clichéd as they may seem to us today, are on point! It hums along like a well-tuned engine, and never mind how sketchy the plot is or how contrived the events! The bad guys all get their just desserts, and then Riggs, who invites himself over for Christmas dinner, presumably gets some dessert too! Ha ha! I give Lethal Weapon two and a half dashboard grenades!

Burl reviews Only the Lonely! (1991)

 

Hoch now, it’s Burl with a review for all the lonely people! Where do you all come from? Ha ha, just a little Beatles reference for you, but it should be said that the picture under review today is less a Beatles-type movie and more of a Roy Orbison joint! At least that’s where the title and the opening credits music comes from, and of course we can be talking about no other photoplay than Only the Lonely! (Ha ha, actually we could be talking about Pretty Woman or In Dreams, but nope, not this time!)

John Candy, so well known and loved from his roles in The Silent Partner and Volunteers and The Great Outdoors and many more, is Danny Muldoon, a Chicago cop who, alongside a partner played by Jim Belushi of Trading Places fame, has the job of transporting dangerous felons and also, mainly it seems, carrying away the dead bodies from the crime scenes! (The picture only very slightly explores the potential psycho-emotional ramifications of such a job, and there I think it might have missed a bet, although one scene is dedicated to plumbing its comic potential!)

Danny is a big friendly fellow who’s devoted to his mother, but not quite in a Norman Bates-y sort of way – though you can tell the relationship might be headed in that direction if allowed to fester, ha ha! Mother is played by flame-haired Maureen O’Hara, whom we recall from The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation, and who was here returning to pictures after a twenty-year absence; and it must be said that she hadn’t lost a step over that two decades of whatever it was she was doing instead of acting! And of course Mother is perfectly happy for her son to while his life away in service to her, and for his social life to comprise entirely of trips to the pub with her to hang out with Doyle and Spats, two barfly buddies nicely played by Milo O’Shea from The Purple Rose of Cairo and Theatre of Blood, and Bert Remsen from McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Lies!

There’s also a younger Muldoon brother, Patrick, essayed by Kevin Dunn of Marked for Death and Godzilla, and he’s the one who went to law school and got married and had kids (one of whom is that rapscallion Macauley Culkin, ha ha), and who catches a well-deserved punching from Danny in one of the picture’s more dramatic moments! But the big transformation in Danny’s life comes when he meets funeral home assistant Theresa Luna, played by Ally Sheedy from Blue City! She’s shy and mousy and can’t get dates because of her job, but of course to Danny, who handles corpses for a living, that’s no problem! Ha ha, her death-centric career notwithstanding, as someone who had a pretty big crush on Sheedy in the 1980s I did find it a bit unbelievable that Ms. Luna couldn’t get dates!

Mother, meantime, is an old-school bigot who seems to hate just about everyone who isn’t Irish – we hear all about her anti-Italian, and in particular anti-Sicilian, prejudices, and thanks to an amorous neighbour played by Anthony Quinn from The Guns of Navarone, we learn of her anti-Greek opinions as well! Of course she has many lilting objections when Theresa comes on the scene! As Danny and Theresa get closer, she becomes so desperate that she consults a “Polack priest” played by Marvin J. McIntyre from Fandango, who has no time for her nonsense! “I know you realize it’s the nineties, Mrs. Muldoon,” he tells her! “I’m just not sure you realize it’s the nineteen-nineties!”

So that’s the conflict: Danny is devoted to Mother and is constantly stopped in his tracks by alarming fantasies in which she meets a violent doom thanks to his distractedness; while Mother continues being nasty and spiteful and racist (we never hear her thoughts on, say, Jewish and Black people, which is probably for the best); and Theresa, for her part, quickly gets tired of her beau’s mommy fixation! The picture doesn’t always go exactly where you think it will with these dynamics, and that’s refreshing, though Sheedy’s character does seem to overcome her alarming shyness in unrealistically quick order! Candy is very much in Uncle Buck mode here, and one could argue that the performances are too similar, but on close inspection I found him to have an array of subtle techniques for individuating the two characters! So I feel grateful to Only the Lonely for helping me better appreciate the big man’s craft, an appreciation that I will admit took a hit after I saw JFK!

I watched the picture because I like Candy (ha ha, who doesn’t!) and want especially to see all the movies he starred it, with the possible exception of his final bow, Wagons East!, but frankly I wasn’t expecting much! It was a little better than I thought it would be, however, and while not particularly memorable and featuring too many instances of Candy's catch phrase "It's good to be a cop," it’s a solid showcase for the big man and demonstrates how good he could have been had he survived into his later years! (Ha ha, imagine his Lear!) Still, I wish the movie was better, and that it had a bit more pep and humour and grit and real complication! It’s not much more than a pale copy of Marty, but, mainly thanks to the cast, enjoyable enough while it’s on, and so I give Only the Lonely two breakfasts in bed!

Burl reviews Police Academy! (1984)

 

Calling all cars, it’s Burl, here to update you on a popular rip-off comedy of the 1980s! Ha ha, I realize that could describe any number of movies – Up the Creek, for instance, or one of many, many others! But no, this one, which borrows liberally from Stripes and Animal House and both Privates Benjamin and Popsicle, is in fact a picture successful enough to be ripped off itself by movies like Moving Violations and Recruits and Night Patrol! And the picture around which all this rip-offery swirls is of course Police Academy!

 

Ha ha, as is so often the case, I have a little story about seeing this movie! I was thirteen, and went to a party at some friends of my parents, held at a house a street or two over from my own! There were other kids there and the party was sufficiently decadent that we were able to sneak glasses of white wine and eat all the oysters we could manage, and so we were in quite a state by the time we stumbled to the local movie theatre, just around the corner (the same one in which I’d seen movies like Xanadu and Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown), to take in Police Academy! No surprise that it turned out to be the perfect movie for a gang of just-barely teens snookered on pinot gris and seafood aphrodisiacs, ha ha!

 

Steve Guttenberg from Cocoon and The Bedroom Window portrays the hero of the piece, Carey Mahoney! Ha ha, who made Steve Guttenberg a star, you ask? This movie did! Mahoney is an allegedly charming parking lot attendant and amateur petty criminal who is forced to join the police academy lest his latest escapade - an aggressive parking job - land him in the pokey! His initial impulse is to get himself thrown out of the academy at the earliest opportunity, but after laying eyes upon the supercute Kim Cattrall, well known from Porky’s and Big Trouble in Little China, he decides to stay and become the best police cadet he can be! But the head instructor Harris, played by G.W. Bailey from Rustler’s Rhapsody and Short Circuit, takes a strong disliking for him, and herein lies the central conflict!

 

Such as it is, anyway, ha ha! Mahoney is only nominally the hero of the piece, because this is really more of an ensemble production featuring all manner of misfits who've joined the academy all at once! Bubba Smith from Black Moon Rising is the towering florist; Donovan Scott from The Best of Times is portly Leslie Barbara; David Graf from Suture is a frothing, dimwitted gun nut; Bruce Mahler from Friday the 13^th part 4 is a clumsy briefcase oaf; and of course Michael Winslow from Grandview U.S.A. is The Man Who Can Make Machine Gun Noises With His Mouth (And Often Does)! George Gaynes from Altered States and Tootsie gives a terrific performance as dotty Commandant Lassard, in charge of the atheneum, while Leslie Easterbrook from Private Resort is Harris’s sexy sub-lieutenant!

 

When I was a wine-drunk thirteen year-old this movie seemed rollicking and uproarious, but in the cold and sober light of day I’m sorry to say it doesn’t provide quite the laffs it once did! But rather than listing its faults, it would take a lot less time to list the things I still like about it: Gaynes’s performance; the Kensington Market locations used in the climax; the random appearances from familiar Canadian character actors like Michael Reynolds and Don Lake; and maybe a few of the gags here and there, but not many! Otherwise it’s pretty dire, my fond memories of the original cinema screening notwithstanding! I’m going to give Police Academy one and a half podiums!

Burl reviews The Abominable Dr. Phibes! (1971)

 

At the playing of the organ, it’s Burl, here to review a popular curiosity of the Seventies! It’s a little of Vincent Price’s wonderful egg magic, and he speaks here without moving his mouth just as when he narrated The Devil’s Triangle! Of course we also know Price from his later roles, such as we find in Dead Heat and Edward Scissorhands, and we know him from his work on the AIP Poe films, and from yet earlier works like Laura and The Baron of Arizona! But this is a taste of his early-70s stuff, and of course it could only be The Abominable Dr. Phibes!

 

I saw plenty of stills from this movie before ever seeing the movie itself, because it had come out not long before a rush of picture-book histories of horror movies were published, and they all used images from it and its sequel, Dr. Phibes Rises Again! And why not? They’re well-shot movies with elaborate and unusual sets and plenty of crazy and bloody goings-on to depict, and if the truth be told, the visual delights with which the picture is well salted, along with of course the outré murders and limited but still delightful Price performance, count as the movie’s main virtues!

 

It’s a revenge story, even if the motive doesn’t make much sense! As the narrative commences the murders have already begun, and in fact we join a crime in progress as a man in bed is shredded by bats loosed into his bedroom! Ha ha, it seems that we’re located in London in the year 1925, and general purpose genius Dr. Anton Phibes, with the help of his beautiful but mute and mysterious assistant Vulnavia, is taking out the entire surgical team he holds responsible for his wife’s death on the operating table, one by one, with killings inspired by curses in the Old Testament!

 

On his trail are the dogsbodies of Scotland Yard, represented by a blockheaded policeman named Trout, played by Peter Jeffrey from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen! Ha ha, Trout makes a few leaps of logic that initially give him the appearance of someone with a decent investigative mind, but he’s soon revealed as an incompetent who seems smart only in comparison with his even dimmer superiors! Joseph Cotton from Shadow of a Doubt plays Dr. Vesalius, the leader of the rapidly dwindling surgical team and the obvious final victim, and even he fails to see certain highly evident aspects of the revenge plot coming! And their dimwittedness even reduces the purported genius of Phibes, because we think that after all it wouldn’t take much cleverness to trick this gang of muleheads!

 

Of course it’s the goofy and horrible murders which stand as the film’s main attractions! We get the bat attack, a headsqueeze from a trick frog mask, an exsanguination (neatly bottled as in Exorcist III), rats on a plane, a freezing by snow machine, a highly unlikely brass unicorn impalement, a munching by locusts, and an attempted acid facewash! This is not strictly speaking Old Testament stuff, but we won’t mind that, ha ha! And of course Price is always a treat, but I find his charms muted here since he doesn’t speak in the accepted oral manner, and when we do hear his voice, the Priciness of it is altered by his stilted and mechanical syntax!

 

There are plenty of baffling questions, like why Vulnavia, played by Virginia North from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, is so devoted to Phibes and his plot! Is she even human, or is she one of the clockwork creations Phibes has playing music in his lair? (Vulnavia is always playing music too, so maybe that’s the giveaway!) And why does Phibes blame the surgeons so thoroughly for his wife’s death? Being so completely unaware of the risks of any surgery in the 1920s makes him come off as something of a reactive idiot! And why was a psychiatrist (the frog mask victim) part of the team at all? Just for the “headshrinker” joke I suppose, but that hardly seems worth it!

 

Anyway, the movie quite actively resists any attempt to take it seriously, and as mentioned, it has a number of pleasures you can concentrate on instead! It’s never scary, but it is comic-gruesome, and of course, ha ha, the Price is right! I’m going to give The Abominable Dr. Phibes two brussels sprouts!

Burl reviews Cameron's Closet! (1988)

 

Hello closeteers, it’s Burl, here to catch up on some 1980s horror I missed the first time around! Or else I may have seen it and then completely forgotten it, ha ha! At any rate, I got my hands on a VHS copy of Cameron’s Closet and recently watched it, and I’m here to tell you all about it!

It comes from the director of He Knows You’re Alone and The Supernaturals, and I suppose it represents a slight step up from those works! It’s a bit more elaborate at any rate, but not to any great effect I’m afraid! The picture opens by introducing us to Cameron, a ten year-old boy with astonishing psychic powers who’s being studied by his father and a scientist pal! Cameron can put marbles in a jar or rearrange plastic letters merely by will alone, ha ha, but evidently his talents also extend to raising evil closet demons!

This is where his dad, played by Tab Hunter from pictures like Ride the Wild Surf and The Kid From Left Field, and the researcher pal, essayed by Chuck McCann from Herbie Rides Again and Lunch Wagon – in truth a good actor, but also the poor man’s Robert Prosky – start to get worried! Soon Tab is dead, his head cut off by an errant machete, and Cameron is off to live with his mom, played by Kim Lankford from Malibu Beach! The mom has a meathead boyfriend who venerates his car above all else, and one night he gets his eyes burned out and is fired out Cameron’s bedroom window as though from a cannon, landing of course, ha ha, on his beloved car!

Well this brings Detective Talliaferro, played by Cotter Smith from The Post, in on the Cameron closet case! He’s been having waking closet nightmares, which annoys his partner Leigh McCloskey (from Inferno and Fraternity Vacation), and is being forced to attend sessions with police psychiatrist Dr. Nora Haley, played by Mel Harris from Wanted: Dead or Alive! After Talliaferro’s partner runs afoul of the demon in Cameron’s closet, the investigation is on, and after further deaths, including one by interior superboil, and a near-chopping by ceiling fan of Cameron himself, the final confrontation is on!

Ha ha, this is an American picture, but there are a lot of Italian names in the credits, and the pastaland influence is everywhere evident! Cameron himself isn’t an evil child, but there are enough glowing eyes and psychic shenanigans to recall The Visitor (though it never gets as loopy, of course, because what could), and Cameron himself is terrorized nearly as much as little Bob in The House by the Cemetery! Thanks to the competent work of later-to-be-superstar cinematographer Russell Carpenter and a generally solid set of actors (even Cameron is pretty good!), the movie rises above its budget; but it’s when the demon itself comes onto the scene that things falter! He’s a creation of Carlo Rambaldi, who brought us such lovable animatronics as E.T., but on this job I think he may have been a bit drunk! The thing looks like a big raisin with teeth, as though he brought his creature from Possession out of a long, imperfect storage and gave it a quick coat of red-brown housepaint before shoving it in front of the camera! Ha ha!

It’s narratively incoherent, frequently derivative, and often stupid, but it’s got some zest and pizazz here and there, with the eyeless meathead shooting out the window a particular highlight! The trick makeup effects range from mannequin-style (the machete decapitation) to sort of scary (a smiley zombie creature), but are pretty delightful at either extreme! It’s dumbbell horror and there’s no denying it, but I give Cameron’s Closet two refitted He-Man dolls anyway!

Burl reviews Stone Cold! (1991)

 

Popping a wheelie, it’s Burl, here to review a movie about biker antics! It’s an action picture from the early 1990s, which means it’s really an action picture from the 80s, as there was a bit of a lag at that time from the previous decade into the next when it comes to action! Ha ha I blame Steven Seagal for this, insofar as I think blame should be assigned at all, which really isn’t much! Still, movies like Terminator 2 and Hard Boiled helped pull the action genre into a new decade, while Seagal's works, along with today’s picture, Stone Cold, very much have the feel of late 80s shootemups!

Like Firestorm, this is a picture that tried to make an action hero out of a big husky foot-ball player, and, due to the foot-ball player being a foot-ball player and not an actor, didn’t succeed! That doesn’t necessarily mean they made a bad movie, though! (In this case anyway - Firestorm is terrible!) The pigskin pal in question here is Brian Bosworth, late of the Seattle Seahawks, and he plays a cop who plays by his own rules, has an encyclopædic knowledge of biker gang culture, loves and hugs his pet monitor lizard Fido, and wears the goofiest hairstyle ever seen on a man! His name is either Joe Huff or John Stone – ha ha, I can’t remember which is his real name and which the undercover alias, so we’ll just call him Huff-Stone!

An FBI guy played by the coroner from Jason Goes to Hell seconds Huff-Stone to infiltrate an out-of-control biker aggregation, and pairs him up with a nebbish cop played by Sam McMurray from C.H.U.D. and L.A. Story! Huff-Stone is of course a lone wolf who is less than pleased to be saddled with a partner, never mind one that’s such a flat tire; but with gratifying speed and friendliness he comes to accept his new buddy, and then sets about becoming a member of the gang! Ha ha, and how does he do it? He rolls up and more or less asks to become a member!

Well, there’s more to it than that I guess, but not a lot! Lance Henrikson from Pumpkinhead and The Horror Show plays Chains, the jerky-skinned biker gang leader, and his second-in-command is the perpetually (and justifiably) suspicious Ice, essayed by William Forsythe from Smokey Bites the Dust and Extreme Prejudice; and these fellows, along with their bearded and be-duragged army of two-wheeled miscreants, are planning all manner of mischief, chiefly the assassination of an anti-biker gang senator! They pass the time in the meanwhile by shooting at each other recreationally, or else doing other psychotically macho activities!

Craig R. Baxley, the stuntfellow-turned-director who brought us Action Jackson and I Come In Peace, was behind the megaphone here (that is, after original director Bruce Malmuth, who jodhpured Hard to Kill, was served his walking papers), and he gives it his all, ha ha! There are plenty of punchfights and budda-budda and explosions and chases, though you do wonder in the end what it’s all about! It’s well done enough that you wish it was a bit better – a little John Woo style, for instance, would have gone down a treat! But that’s just grousing I suppose, because there’s plenty of lumpenaction here to enjoy!

It’s well-loved in action circles, I should note, and it does indeed boast a zippy pace and more pep than any two Seagal pictures! The climax, in which the biker gang invades a state capitol building and machine guns nearly everybody inside, has a different resonance since those people invaded the U.S. Capitol building a year or two ago – ha ha, one can see how it might have gone down had the real-life invaders been able to plan as well as a bunch of fictional dim-bulb bikers! Fortunately the real-life people were even dimmer bulbs! I give Stone Cold two of the grossest milkshakes ever seen (but which, thankfully, in a clever fake-out, turns out to be sustenance for the lizard, not Huff-Stone)!

Burl reviews Dick Tracy vs. Cueball! (1946)

 

With an all-points bulletin it’s Burl, here to review another Dick Tracy VHS tape! You’ve already heard what I think of Dick Tracy’s Dilemma, and now, continuing to work completely out of order with this little series, I’ll provide you with thoughts on Dick Tracy vs. Cueball!

Here Dick is played by Morgan Conway, whom we know by his appearances in The Kid From Kokomo and other such pictures, and who also played the iron-nosed detective in the first Tracy picture (Dick Tracy, Detective), but not in the second two (Dilemma and Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome)! Anne Jeffreys from Clifford is the long-suffering Tess Trueheart, whose dinner dates with Dick are always interrupted by some crime or another – no Dick for Tess, ha ha! - but whom Tracy is happy to use casually as bait for the monstrous criminals he encounters!

The particular monster here of course is Cueball, who’s really just an ordinary thug with a baldness problem! He’s after some jewels and in league with some crooked jewelers, who realize they’re in over their heads when the glabrous hoodlum starts strangling people with his hat band! Dick and his pathetically incompetent sidekick Pat Patton, whose catch phrase is “It’s just a bump on the head,” are forever arriving just a little too late to save the victims or catch the killer slaphead, so the middle part of the picture gets a little bit repetitive!

But as we know from our Wodehouse, however murkily the clouds may seem to gather, a keen eye can usually discern the blue bird, ha ha, and such an eye can tell there are plenty of familiar Poverty Row mugs to appreciate in here! Singular performer Skelton Knaggs from The Scarlet Claw is present, as is Byron Foulger from Ridin’ on a Rainbow, and Milton Parsons from Another Thin Man; and then of course Esther Howard, who was in lots of Preston Sturges pictures, appears as Filthy Flora, owner of the grim waterfront dive The Dripping Dagger, with its great neon sign, scarfaced clientele, and hidden chambers! And lest we forget, Ian Keith from It Came From Beneath the Sea is here playing Vitamin Flintheart, just as he does also in Dilemma!

The picture is efficiently made by Gordon Douglas, who also directed Them!, and he gives the mise-en-scene just a little bit more pizazz than might be expected in a picture like this! Unfortunately Cueball himself is a bit of a dud – a dimwit with a corrugated forehead, limited dialogue, and no pep; and moreover he comes to a sticky end only through his own clumsiness and inattention! The detective work that puts Tracy finally onto the smoothpate’s trail is simple-minded and uninvolving, but at least it sort of gives Junior something to do, briefly, as well as Junior’s little buddy! And just who is Junior anyway, and why is he always hanging around? Ha ha, there’s a mystery Tracy never solves!

It’s another decent little crime picture, but not a memorable one! It’s got a car chase, and I always like seeing olde-tyme car chases, but it ends quickly thanks to Pat Patton’s terrible driving! Somehow Tracy never blames Pat for his endless blauchups, and I guess there’s something touching about Tracy’s great and endless patience for his friend’s non-stop boobery! So there are a few things I liked, and so I give Dick Tracy vs. Cueball two phones off the hook!

Burl reviews The Laughing Policeman! (1973)

 

Beyond human belief, it’s Burl, here to review a tough-guy Matthau movie! “Ha ha,” I hear you say, “but Burl, how could the star of Grumpy Old Men and Grumpier Old Men ever play a tough guy?” Well, not only has Walter Matthau proved his versatility in such varied pictures as Bigger Than Life and The Bad News Bears, but you’ll be delighted to discover he had a brief period in the mid-1970s in which he seemed ready to become something close to an action hero! Ha ha, I guess these are all more crime pictures than action extravaganzas, but still, the 1973-74 one-two-three of Charley Varrick, The Laughing Policeman and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three would mark a noteworthy period in any actor’s career!

The picture begins with one fellow following another fellow for reasons we can’t fathom, and this pursuit leads to a city bus! Soon enough a mysterious passenger pulls out a machine gun and rat-a-tat-tats everyone aboard the public conveyance, including the driver, the pursuer and his quarry, and at least a half-dozen other passengers! Of course the police are soon on the scene, the most rumpled of them being Matthau; but we also have Bruce Dern from The King of Marvin Gardens and Smile, playing a younger cop who looks a little snappier but whose occasionally crude behavior rubs Matthau the wrong way! And then there’s Louis Gossett Jr. from Jaws 3-D, another detective, who doesn’t get as much to do, but who has a great tough-guy moment when he takes down an abusive pimp!

Anthony Zerbe from The Dead Zone plays their angry and excitable captain, of a type very familiar from many policiers, and by garr he wants results! Making it all the more difficult is that one of the bus victims, the fellow who’d been pursuing the other fellow, turns out to be Matthau’s partner Dave Evans, a tall drink of water played by Anthony Costello from Night Moves! Cathy Lee Crosby from The Dark is Evans’ girlfriend, but she can’t shed much light on the matter, and quite reasonably gets upset when barenaked pictures of her are found on the dead cop’s desk! Matthau and Dern do some very realistically drab detective work, in one instance hassling the denizens of a gambling establishment wherein one of the background extras is dressed exactly like Freddy Krueger! Ha ha!

Matthau’s search for the truth brings him into contact with a long, vaulted gallery of familiar faces, including Matt Clark from Buckaroo Banzai, Joanna Cassidy from Blade Runner, Gregory Sierra from The Towering Inferno, Val Avery from Cobra, Clifton James from Juggernaut, and Frances Lee McCain from Gremlins; and there’s a typically creepy lowlife role for Paul Koslo, who did the same sort of thing in Mr. Majestyk! It’s all done in a very gritty 70s way, with as much verisimilitude as they could cram in there! Ha ha, it’s the kind of movie you know employed plenty of consultants in order to keep it real!

 I thought Stuart Rosenberg, an inconstant filmmaker if ever there was one, did a terrific job here! Also it looks marvelous thanks to cinematographer David M. Walsh, who went from this into a long string of mostly comedies, Neil Simon and otherwise; and there are a few rousing action scenes, like a hostage situation fairly early in the movie! Of course Matthau is typically great, getting in plenty of curmudgeon business years before the Grumpy pictures! The picture gets a bit murky near the end, I found, and though I know it must be my own fault, I couldn’t really figure out the motive for the massacre! I might have been a bit sleepy! Anyway, if The Laughing Policeman isn’t quite in the top tier of 70s thrillers, it’s sure within kissing distance! Ha ha! I give it three grease guns!

Burl reviews The French Dispatch! (2021)

 

Eh bonjour friends! Yes, Burl has returned to review another picture, and this is yet one more movie I saw on the big screen, to my great joy! I’ve been hitting matinees mostly, so there’s nobody around and things feel pretty safe, pestilence-wise! Ha ha, and for this particular matinee I went with an old pal, one of my very oldest in fact, and he’s probably a fellow I haven’t been to a movie with since the 80s or early 90s! That’s a long time! The picture was of course the newest Wes Anderson joint, the one generally known as The French Dispatch!

Like The Life Aquatic, it has an actual title that’s longer than I care to write out in full, ha ha, and like The Grand Budapest Hotel, it takes place mostly in the mid-Century Europe with which Anderson is evidently obsessed! Ha ha, I recognize a fellow enthusiast! And we know the picture tells the tale of the magazine after which the picture is named, which is of course based on the New Yorker and the staff and writers of that venerable publication!

Bill Murray, famous from Ghostbusters and of course many other Anderson pictures, from Rushmore on up, is every writer’s fantasy editor, indulging his scribes to a degree never seen in reality! (Though he’s not, it should be noted, the ideal employer if you’re a mere copy boy!) As a former newspaper editor myself, I appreciate the near-deification such a character is accorded simply by casting Murray to play him!

Life around the French Dispatch office, located in “Ennui-en-Blasé, France” (which name, thank goodness gets the bad French jokes out of the way quickly) provides the picture’s exoskeleton, and the meat of it is the three feature stories printed in the magazine’s final issue! First up is a jailhouse tale featuring Benicio Del Toro from Inherent Vice as Moses Rosenthaler, a near-feral prisoner accused of the gruesome attack-murders of three bartenders, who proves to be an accomplished painter once he finds a subject, muse, and lover in guard Simone, played by Léa Seydoux from No Time to Die! Adrien Brody from Midnight in Paris is the art dealer Cadazio, who champions the artist while ignoring his wolfman-like growls; this tale is related by correspondent J.K.L. Berenson, played by Tilda Swinton from The Dead Don’t Die!

Another writer, this one called Mrs. Krementz and played by Frances McDormand from Darkman, tells the next story! This one is set during a fictionalized take on the student uprisings of the late 60s, with Timothée Chalamet from Dune Part One leading the intellectual faction, meanwhile having his first affair with Mrs. Krementz and then his second with a pretty fellow radical!

The author of the third story is played by Jeffrey Wright from Only Lovers Left Alive, here affecting a Roscoe Lee Browne accent to play Roebuck Wright! His tale involves a kidnapping and the involvement of an accomplished police chef, and features Mathieu Amalric from The Forbidden Room as the police chief and Steve Park from Fargo as Nescaffier, the police chef! Ha ha!

Owen Wilson from Anaconda, Bob Balaban from Moonrise Kingdom, Henry Winkler from Night Shift, Christoph Waltz from Django Unchained, Fisher Stevens from The Burning, Liev Schreiber from The Daytrippers, Willem Dafoe from Streets of Fire, Edward Norton from Fight Club, and Griffin Dunne from An American Werewolf in London all appear in smaller roles, so it must be noted that the cast is a pretty thrilling one! More thrilling still is the wealth of detail woven into each of the stories as well as the wraparound business, and the pictorial amusements with which the picture is well stuffed! There’s some great model work, marvelous gags, and an animated sequence that perhaps goes on a little long! Ha ha, and if you’re at all a student of the New Yorker, its history, and its writers, you’ll get that much more out of the whole thing!

I must admit I thoroughly enjoyed myself at this movie, and do you know what? My childhood friend, Rob by name, did too, notwithstanding the lumpenproletarian that he is! Whether it all comes together in the end is more of a personal decision than a critical one, I think, but I myself had a terrific time, and so I give The French Dispatch three and a half pop stars named Tip-Top!