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 Nothing But Trouble! (1991)

Ha ha and ham candies, it’s Burl, here to review one of the stranger Celebrity Dream Projects ever to have been made: Dan Aykroyd’s Nothing But Trouble! Ha ha, I’ve been consuming information about this thing for years, but until yesterday I’d never seen it! Everything, but everything I’d heard was bad, though; and Aykroyd is by all accounts an unusual fellow, so the prospect of a weird-looking movie written and directed by him, and of course featuring him as some sort of bloated, scab-covered old man, was a daunting one! I was prepared for a truly terrible movie-viewing experience, ha ha!

The picture’s original title was Valkenvania, and I maintain that whatever timid, unimaginative studio exec decided it should instead be called Nothing But Trouble did both the picture and its legacy a grave disservice! Ha ha, what’s in a name you might say, especially if the film itself is as inept and pointlessly grotesque as people say it is! But movies, even bad ones, are fragile and finely-wrought creations, like pixies or unicorns, and so with them everything matters, and the slightest misstep can be like coughing on a house of cards!

There’s a strong comedy cast: not just Aykroyd from Ghostbusters, but also Chevy Chase from Vacation, who must have got along with Aykroyd when they worked together on Spies Like Us, and John Candy, with whom Aykroyd co-starred in The Great Outdoors! Demi Moore, well known from her role in Parasite (the original; accept no substitute, ha ha!), is in here too, along with familiar faces like Taylor Negron (with whom I had lunch once, and who was a garrulous and maximally entertaining dining companion) and Brian Doyle-Murray!

Chase plays some sort of Manhattan financial player who meets his new neighbor Moore, a lawyer, and almost immediately offers her a ride to some kind of event in Atlantic City! With two annoying faux-Brazillians tagging along, they detour through the town of Valkenvania, where they run afoul of local constable Candy! He escorts the BMW full of yuppies to Valkenvania’s reeve, an ancient crank played by Aykroyd in leperous maquillage, who entraps them in his mansion/junkyard/funhouse and torments them with conveyer belts, pop-ups, and piles of bones!

Malefactors whom the reeve likes even less are sent immediately to Mister Bonestripper, a big machine that grinds people into skeletons! Ha ha! Meanwhile, Moore is stuck with two enormous, filthy diaper babies, one of whom is also played by Aykroyd! Ha ha, with all that time in the makeup trailer it’s amazing he had time to direct the movie! But direct it he did, and while I won’t say he did a great job, I can say I’ve seen worse! The busy production design and experienced cinematographer (the portly Dean Cundey, who shot The Thing and many other fine films was behind the camera here) certainly help the picture seem professionally made!

It’s really just an elaborate comedy version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (which already had its elaborate comedy version, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2), but merely the fact that it was this story and no other that Aykroyd wanted to tell in his directorial debut is simply delightful! Ha ha, it’s true that Chase puts in a particularly low-key, possibly even lazy performance, and it’s true the narrative is shapeless and deflated, like something I might have written in high school, but I nevertheless found plenty of laffs in the picture! It’s weird and gross and goofy-bad, but it's undeniably ebullient, and I felt very much that I was on its wavelength, that I was picking up whatever it was Aykroyd was laying down! (I sort of wish I’d been wearing gloves though, ha ha!)

The big diaper babies alone make it an irresistible treat! There are some extremely annoying characters you wish could take a trip through Mister Bonestripper post-haste, but there’s also an obliging hip hop crew who perform a number and who are freed by the reeve possibly because one of them, like the reeve himself, wears a false nose; and there’s a second, mute performance by Candy as a lady with unearthly strength! I wasn’t expecting to like this picture, but I did! I give Nothing But Trouble, alias Valkenvania, three cans of Hawaiian Tropic!

Burl reviews Strange Brew! (1983)

Ha ha hosers, it’s Burl, here with beer and back bacon and ready to take off to the great white north with a review of the Mackenzie Brothers’ big-screen adventure Strange Brew! Ha ha, for those who don’t know, these two canuckleheads, Bob and Doug McKenzie, were mainstays on the great show SCTV, which I watched religiously in my youth! Apparently the time slot in Canada was a couple of minutes longer than it was in the US, so to fill those extra two minutes they made little segments called Great White North, in which Bob and Doug, played by Rick Moranis from Ghostbusters and Dave Thomas from Stripes, would sit on a couch, swill beer and ruminate drunkenly on some topic or another!

Ha ha, I loved those segments! But somehow, even if they were just designed for Canadians, the magic of Bob & Doug made its way south of the border, and they became popular enough for MGM to greenlight a movie about these loveable, bickering oafs! They directed it themselves, too, ha ha, and got the fog filter-loving cinematographer Steve Poster, who’d done Blood Beach and Dead & Buried, to shoot it! And they set it explicitly in Toronto, with more shots of the CN tower than there are in Highpoint, ha ha!

Craziest of all, for this picture they decided to adapt Hamlet! It’s a pretty loose adaptation, to be sure, but they play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern types who get involved in family intrigue at Elsinore Brewery, where the paterfamilias has recently been killed under mysterious circumstances, and the prodigal daughter, Pam, returns to sort out affairs! But her perfidious uncle Claude has married her mother Gertrude, and is plotting with the nefarious Brewmeister Smith to take control of the brewery and do something involving insane hockey players, tainted beer, and the rapidly-approaching Oktoberfest!

Ha ha, modeling the story roughly on Hamlet is really the only thing that gives the picture a story at all, because the narrative is otherwise pretty sketchy and improvisational! It helps that the cast is a strange and intoxicating mix of foreign ringers - Max von Sydow whom we know from The Magician and Dreamscape, is the Brewmeister; Paul Dooley, well known from Last Rites, plays Claude - and familiar Canadian faces, like Lynne Griffin from Curtains and Black Christmas, and of course Mr. Patman, who essays the role of Pam, and Angus MacInnes, from Bells and Spasms, who is the Ophelia figure, Jean LaRose! Plus we get the hilarious National Lampoon writer Brian McConnachie as Brewmeister Smith’s passive assistant Ted, and who has a small part as a lawyer? That’s right, none other than Thick Wilson from Sex With the Stars! Ha ha!

Now I’ll say this: I love this movie and find it very funny, but I have every sympathy for anyone who might find it puerile, dumb, not funny, poorly directed, and narratively nonsensical! It’s subjectively hilarious, strictly, but if you like Bob & Doug and want to see a movie about them, this will fit the bill nicely! It’s necessary to have some beers to drink while watching it, I firmly believe, or perhaps some gingered ale if you happen to be a teetotaler! You’ll enjoy the dogbowl full of beer, the kung-fu lawyer with the delightfully ingratiating smile, the portrait of Pierre Trudeau, the van jump into Lake Ontario, the unexpected vocal cameo from Mel Blanc, and much more! I give Strange Brew two and a half Canadian Institutes for the Mentally Insane!

Burl reviews The Movie Orgy! (1968)

Hello and ha ha, it’s Burl here to review movie madness! Yes, I’ve recently watched Joe Dante’s first film, The Movie Orgy, which he made a full ten years before Piranha, back when he was a student and still wanted to be a comic artist! I guess The Movie Orgy represents Dante’s swing from comics into pictures, and as such I suppose it has historical value to those of us who appreciate the man’s work, even though one waits in vain for a clip with Dick Miller in it! But Dante's a fine director and, ha ha, you all know how I feel about Matinee!

But what is The Movie Orgy? Well, it’s a long pastiche of movies - mostly B pictures -  and television snippets, all cobbled together into a four-and-a-half hour beast that you can easily imagine the aliens from Explorers watching on their space TVs! A few pictures seem to occupy more real estate than others: Dante has distilled the likes of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, College Confidential (an Albert Zugsmith joint, natch, featuring Elisha Cook Jr. as The Angry Dad), The Giant Claw (the turkey gobbler from outer space, as big as a battleship) and something called Speed Crazy into just the good parts, and woven them all together like stripes on a mackintosh!

Laced into these are bits from other movies, like Teenagers from Outer Space, the 1933 King Kong, Beginning of the End, Moby Dick, and The Giant Gila Monster! We get many olde-tyme television moments too, like an episode of You Bet Your Life in which Groucho enacts something I’ll call The Humiliation of John Farbotnik! Other TV gold includes Andy Devine’s demented kids’ show Andy’s Gang, featuring good old Froggy; a clip of Elvis singing Hound Dog to a big basset in a top hat; US Treasury Bond appeals asking you to Underwrite Your Country’s Might; Nixon’s Checkers speech; and a series of insane Bufferin ads best described as inconclusive mini-dramas about “sensitive people” who care so much about others they need an extra edge to their headache medicine! Ha ha!

There are plenty of clever little editing room goof-offs, like a bit that starts with the opening title to The Naked City, followed by a short silent vignette from the 1920s involving a young inventor who has created a strange viewerscope upon which he can call up images of a topless ladies! Of course he is interrupted by his mother, which must be a familiar scenario to many of to-day’s computer-screen teenagers! Then we pop back to The Naked City, and the closing spiel: “There are eight million stories in the naked city; this has been one of them!”

We come away from The Movie Orgy with some fine quotes, like “That Skippy is too much for television!” from College Confidential, and the endlessly repeated “Everybody’s always crowdin’ me!” from Speed Crazy! There are lots of funny juxtapositions and a few editing tricks, and assorted monster movie, Western, and jungle picture clips, and lots of credits too, which I appreciated; and on top of all that the funniest Abbott and Costello skit ever: the Susquehanna Hat Company! Ha ha, great stuff!

The last reel jumps equally between 50 Foot Woman, Giant Claw, Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers and Giant Gila Monster, with other clips salted in to make an ironic point, or a joke, or an ironic joke, or no point at all! Finally there’s a bloom of The End cards, and people signing off or walking out or saying goodbye, and even Nixon claiming this would be his last press conference and you wouldn’t have Nixon to kick around any more! Cut to an audience clapping with enthusiastic approval, ha ha! And there are a few other good jokes at Nixon’s expense, and, looking forward, a couple of jabs at Ronald Reagan too! None of it's very slick - ha ha, you can practically hear the rattle of the Moviola and see the tape splices - but you can tell it was made with heart!

Dante, who created this college collage with his pal Jon Davison, remembers “great drifts of funny-smelling smoke” coming from the crowd wherever this was screened (mostly university halls), and it seems to me funny-smelling smoke is the right mindset to adopt for this experience! It’s got lots of easy jokes, sure, but it’s equally easy to forget that this would have been a lot of work to put together back in the actual-film days! Oh those glory days! The Movie Orgy is a pretty special creation, and I give it three Skippies who are too much for television!

Burl reviews The Worm Eaters! (1977)

Haghh haghh, it’s Burl! Yuck, I’m here to review a movie about worm eating, and yes, it could only be called The Worm Eaters! And yes, it’s about people eating worms! Oh, they gobble those vermiforms up with the greatest of gusto! Ha ha, and you can bet that it’s as gross as it sounds!

It seems there’s a small town in California, and there lives a clubfooted German eccentric named Herman Umgar, who runs a grimy restaurant, who keeps worms and has special names for them all, and who has built a little castle for them all to live in! He sure does love his worms! Though they patronize his restaurant, the townsfolk don't like Umgar very much, and the evil mayor is trying to steal the deed to Umgar’s land, which includes a lake near which three fisherman had something strange happen to them at the beginning of the picture! We also learn that the mayor had at some earlier point killed the wormkeeper’s father and buried him in concrete!

Well, in his slow-witted, weirdo, vaudeville way, Umgar seeks revenge! He discovers that if he feeds his worms to the townspeople at his horrible little restaurant, they will turn into wormpeople themselves! Ha ha! After they gobble on worms for a while, the victims begin to cough and choke like they’re hacking up a hairball; then they emit paste; and finally their lower halves become slimy, segmented worm bodies, and they crawl around on their bellies making yick-yack sounds! Umgar’s victims include all manner of townies, perhaps most memorably two girls obsessed with hot dogs! Well, they get their hot dogs, but not without a little extra protein added in, ha ha! By the end, of course, Umgar himself is a worm, and he becomes the victim of the three fishermen, who catch him with a hook tossed out from the lake!

If you like gross close-ups of people’s mouths as they suck up and chew on worms, this is the picture for you! It’s one of those movies that seem to have been made by an experimental theater company on their dark days, much like Futz or Godmonster of Indian Flats! Really though, it seems largely the creation of a guy named Herb Robins, well known from his appearance in The Funhouse, who wrote and directed the picture, plays the part of Umgar, and happened to know a lot of people who didn’t mind eating worms! The movie was produced by, of all people, Ted V. Mikels, a bare-chested satyr of a man who lived in a small castle near Las Vegas and kept multiple wives!

The movie has long, boring stretches with Umgar soliloquizing and/or talking to his worms, scenes I suppose Robins thought were amusing, but which really aren’t! The vermipeople in their rubber segmented bodies are pretty entertaining though, and there are some performances (the head fisherman, the mayor, a black woman who is far and away the most intelligent and likable person in the picture) that are quite splendid! Other actors ham it up terribly - you’d see more convincing performances at your local fringe festival! The bottom line, though, is there’s an awful lot of worm eating to suffer though here, and I confess I wasn’t equal to the task! I had to look away several times, just as I had to press mute on the movie’s insufferable theme song, which occurs over the opening titles, the closing titles, and once, in a vastly overextended form, during the body of the picture! Like me, by the time you get to that point in the film you’ll probably wish someone would sneak up behind you and press a chloroform rag over your face! Ha ha, I give The Worm Eaters two hell of a lakes!

Burl reviews UFOria! (1981)

Ha ha, here’s Burl with a Quirky Cult Classic for you! I’ve known for years about UFOria, a little-celebrated character comedy made in 1980 or thereabouts! (1981 is the copyright date on the picture, but it wasn’t released until 1985!) But I never did watch it, because I figured it would be a little too self-consciously quirky, and also because I simply didn’t (and still don’t!) like the title!

But I finally purchased the VHS tape of this movie, which is what you have to do because it’s not on DVD! (Of course, like so many movies you can probably track it down online, ha ha!) And when I watched it I was most pleasantly surprised! Yes, it’s a classic 80s quirkfest, but it was probably the first classic 80s quirkfest, which makes it the godfather to pictures like Repo Man (with which it shares the great Harry Dean Stanton), Stranger Than Paradise, Rubin and Ed, and so forth! (And I realize that many of you, like me, might shy away from anything described as “quirky,” but I haven’t got a more apt descriptor handy! "Eccentric" is better, maybe!)

It takes a tone I might call realistic-quirky, at least until the end! The picture begins by introducing us to Sheldon, a drifter who steals money from con-dom machines to pay for his gas, played by Fred “Secret Admirer” Ward! He stages an Animal House-style supermarket shoplifting caper, but is eyeballed by born-again UFO enthusiast Arlene (the only name possible for this character), who is played by Shirley herself, Cindy Williams! Later Sheldon renews his acquaintance with Brother Bud, a tent preacherman played by Stanton, and while he’s playing the part of a lame man responding to Bud’s healing powers, the disapproving Arlene catches him out again! Naturally a rocky romance ensues!

Complicating things are Sheldon’s rambling tendencies and Arlene’s fervent, dream-based belief that a UFO will be landing on earth shortly and will be picking up passengers! As Sheldon and Arlene’s love affair progresses, a strange new community is born around them: Bud’s bodybuilding true-believer assistant Emile, played by Robert Gray from Innerspace and Armed and Dangerous (ha ha, muscle guys are a staple of 80s quirkomedies – remember Echo Park?); the Old Colonel, played by the terrific Hank Worden (whom you know as Shopping Cart from Big Wednesday and (I think!) the “Somebody’s fiddle!” guy from The Searchers!); a pair of New Age parents, who’ve just named their child Krishna Jesus; and an elderly couple who’ve just suffered a UFO encounter of their own, very well performed by Peggy McKay and the great Harry Carey Jr.!

This really is a marvelous and entertaining film, much better than you think it will be, even if you think it’ll be pretty good! There's a terrific country soundtrack, with songs by Roger Miller, John Prine, Emmylou Harris and of course Waylon! I’ll leave unanswered the question of whether the UFO ever arrives, but you can fit this picture beside such works as Breaking the Waves and Repo Man in the Movies In Which The Supernatural Or Otherworldy Intrude At The Last Moment category! Ha ha! Anyway, UFOria is a great, weird, affecting little picture in the dusty American Southwest tradition, and I give it three and a half heelocopters!

Burl reviews Only God Forgives! (2013)

Biff bang boom, it’s Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to review another picture for you – a particularly garish picture, all blood reds and aquarium blue! It’s a picture from the famed Scandinavian stylist Nicolas Winding Refn, who brought us Drive and Bronson and Pusher and other single-word productions, most of them pretty violent! Only God Forgives is no exception!

Ha ha, I expected it would be violent, but it was even more so than I’d thought! It’s right up there with The Mutilator and other Special Makeup Effects productions like that! It seems there’s a family of American drug dealers who’ve set up shop in the neon section of Bangkok, using a boxing club as their cover! There’s Billy, the oldest brother, Julian, the taciturn younger brother, and Mom, who holds her cigarettes like she’s watched too many Joan Crawford pictures!

The story begins when Billy, who is apparently crazy, murdering a teenage girl! An unprepossessing policeman, Chang, allows the girl’s father to take his delight in Billy, which in this case means clubbing the young psycho to a pulp with a table leg! Then Chang metes out a little more rough justice on the father, who was also his daughter’s pimpsman! And then comes Mom’s retribution for her son’s death, after which further bloody events take place! Ha ha, it’s Chang who retains the upper hand and commits most of the mayhem!

At one point, Julian, whom we assume to be a real punch-artist, challenges droopy-dog Chang to a fight! Well, ha ha, the young roundeyes lands not a single blow, and the elderly Thai puts such a punching on Julian, ha ha, such a punching! Chang then doles out more of his signature punishment (some of it quite welcome!), and by the time he’s done, there aren’t many characters left, and those who remain are short a limb or two!

All of this is enacted with a rather hilarious air of self-seriousness, but also a great deal of pictorial beauty! There was not much ol’ Burl could hang his hat on as far as emotional engagement went, which was clearly by design! Ryan Gosling, who plays Julian, could have stirred embers with his facial expressions, and he speaks hardly a word through the whole picture!

It’s a gaudy, sleazy, nasty and frequently gorgeous world the young Refn has created, but one with about the half-life of good latte art! It’s pure and unashamed genre pulp, which is what I liked about it, but it was missing the energy one associates with the form, and that I didn’t like so much! And the puffery was a bit too much! It almost fits into that category in which I place movies like Enter the Void and Holy Motors, a category I call Ha Ha, How The Heck Did This Ever Get Made??? But it’s rather a thin broth compared to those, so I’m going to give Only God Forgives two and a half horrible pokings!

Burl reviews Rubin & Ed! (1991)

Well hello there, stranger! It’s Burl! I’m here to review a picture that many of you won’t have seen or even heard of, and yes, I’m talking about Rubin & Ed! Ha ha, it’s a buddy picture, and a little bit of a road movie too, and it’s set in Utah to boot, just like Sweater Girls and The Boogens; and while neither buddy, road nor Utah pictures are in my list of top movie subgenres of all time, I can certainly appreciate them when they’re done well!

Rubin & Ed will remind viewers of catholic tastes a little bit of the Gus Van Sant movie Gerry, in which two guys drive out to the middle of nowhere for reasons that are at best hazy, and then start walking through the desert toward some ambiguous goal, having nonsensical conversations all the while! Ha ha, that’s pretty much what happens here! Ed, played by Johnny Fever from WKRP, is a lifelong loser whose last chance for success and self-respect, he thinks, will come from a guru-like sales seminar, and so to achieve his sales goal he tries to recruit Rubin, a reclusive longhair in mourning for his recently deceased cat, into the obviously shady sales organization! It goes without saying that Rubin is played by Crispin "Friday the 13th part 4" Glover, ha ha!

Next thing you know, Rubin and Ed are marching through the desert with the dead frozen cat packed in ice! Rubin drinks the melted catwater from the cooler every now and then, or else wrings out his Odor Eaters for further liquid sustenance, while Ed just gets thirstier and thirstier! Eventually Rubin ends up in the Cave of the Echo People and has hallucinations in which his huge shoes get even bigger! And for those who ever wondered why Crispin Glover ever tried to kick David Letterman in the head, this movie will answer all of their questions!

Ha ha, I guess this is what they mean when they talk about cult films! There’s a cult for this one and no mistake, and the watchword among its members is “My cat can eat a who-o-ole watermelon!” I like the film because it’s often pretty funny – a lot funnier than Due Date, which seems to have modeled itself on this one almost as much as on Planes, Trains and Automobiles –  and because it seems possessed of a genuinely humanistic spirit! Both characters seem like they'd be genuinely difficult to get along with, and neither of them change all that much in the end, just to achieve some contrived rapprochement as we see in more mainstream buddy movies, where personalities are often altered completely somewhere in the third act!

Plus I love the dedication Crispin Glover shows! It helps that he’d been doing the character for years before the movie was shot, but nevertheless, there’s no winking and nodding to the audience from Rubin! He’s a genuine eccentric, and a Republican too! Ha ha, somehow that makes sense in the context of the movie, even though I’m fairly sure that by and large Republicans don’t like cats!

I heartily recommend this picture to any and all who appreciate movies which set modest goals for themselves and achieve those goals very handily! I give Rubin & Ed three whole watermelons!