Burl reviews Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds! (1977)

 

Screech screech and aiyeeee it’s Burl, here with Japanese monster action! Ha ha, when I was a kid I had several issues of a magazine called Hammer’s House of Horror, and one of them contained a piece on a movie called Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds! The article was allegedly a review, but the author obviously hadn’t seen the movie and didn’t try to hide that fact; but the write-up, which described centipedes acting up and eels appearing in people’s beds, along with the accompanying photos of dinosaurs and monster birds, made it look like a must-see!

Now all these years later, thanks to the magic of the internet, I’ve managed to catch up with this (in my mind) legendary movie! Now, first off, the title: despite the plurals, the movie contains just one dinosaur and one monster bird! (I guess you could say it’s the titular legend speaking of multiple creatures rather than being a promise of the title itself, but I still say the plural is a bit of pocus!) Secondly, there were no centipedes or eels to be found, unless I nodded off for a minute and missed them! And, I’m sorry to say, nodding off during this picture is a definite risk!

The story is set at one of the lakes which surround Mount Fuji, and I really liked that specificity because I didn’t previously know much about this region! Dinosaurs and monster birds aside, it looks quite pleasant! Nearby is that forest you’ve heard about where people go to kill themselves, and that gets a mention in the movie too – a skeleton discovered there is dismissed as just another suicide, rather than being recognized as the dinosaur and/or monster bird victim that it is!

We open with a woman – a would-be suicide, I think – wandering in the woods! She falls into a cave (there’s a terrific shot of her plummeting toward the camera), where she finds some eggs, and then an egg cracks open and she sees a goochy eye staring back at her! Then we meet the picture’s alleged hero, a geologist called Takashi, who’s described in the film’s IMdB synopsis as an “action scientist,” and ha ha, I guess that’s what he is! On the other hand, for most of the picture he seems almost as sleepy as the Russ Tamblyn character in War of the Gargantuas, a film I was strongly reminded of as I watched this monster bird movie!

The scientist sees the story of the woman who discovered the giant eggs on TV and instantly becomes obsessed first with finding the eggs and then, once he realizes the possibility, with seeing an actual living dinosaur, which was also a pet project of his late father's! Once at the lake, Takashi hooks up with an old flame, Akiko, who is an underwater photographer! More stuff happens, not much of it having to do with either dinosaurs or monster birds though, and finally the picture borrows a scene whole from Jaws (a major inspiration on the first half of this movie) when two wiseacres panic people with a fake fin in the lake! The stunt cruelly interrupts a country music concert held on a floating barge, but thankfully the two pranksters are first swirled in the water like the turds they are, then chomped! A third fellow witnesses this, but, in a heartrending scene, no one will believe him when he reports it!

The monster rumours extend far enough to bring a Scotsman, who tells everybody that, as a Scotsman, he knows it’s no picnic dealing with giant lake monsters! Akiko can certainly confirm this once her diving buddy is chomped in half by the dinosaur, but the gruesome tragedy doesn’t prevent her from taking a shower (providing the picture with that rarity in the kaiju genre: a nude scene!) and doing a cheesecake underwear scene which concludes with a cutaway shot of a doll in diving gear with pink troll doll hair!

When the monster bird finally shows up, it’s almost worth the wait! He grabs people with his talons and then drops them like a jerk; he buffets them with his wings and slaps them with his tail, then causes them all to blow up! Inevitably the two props battle it out, bumping into each other and making screeching noises! A volcanic eruption puts a stop to this rumbustification and provides a seemingly endless final scene in which the two leads are caught in a deadly situation, dangling from a log over a river of bubbling lava!

This absurdly overstretched sequence and its uncertain terminus are frustrating but apt for a movie that’s a frequent bore and a narratively unstructured mess, ha ha! Plus, the monster bird looks like a really ugly version of one of those dino-head grabber toys, and the dinosaur has a freakishly pliable neck! Other trick effects are actually pretty good though, and the slight nudity and slightly more frequent gore give the whole thing a grindhouse feel; also we get the occasional striking shot or moment, like that plummet in the cave! Too often it’s tedious though, and sure could have used more monster attacks, more people being eaten up like junior mints, better characters, a proper story, and a heavy dose of pep! If it comes down to a choice, stick with War of the Gargantuas, but if you do watch Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds you will be able to wring at least some enjoyment from it! I give this picture one and a half depth charges!

Burl reviews Twister! (1996)

 

From within the whirling winds of the Hollywood Midwest, it’s Burl, with a review of some big-budget 1990s weather spectacle! Ha ha, the second half of the 1990s saw the rise once again of the large-scale disaster movie: we had the lava duello of Dante’s Peak and Volcano; meteor-vs.meteor with Armageddon and Deep Impact; alien blast-vasions in Independence Day and Mars Attacks; and various randos like Daylight, Titanic, Godzilla and Firestorm! But among the earliest in this cycle was the tornado drama Twister, the summertime success of which helped kick off the late-90s disaster-spasm!

Ha ha, I remember reviewing this one back in my semi-professional movie reviewing days, and I didn’t care much for it, declaring it, rather harshly perhaps, "flatulence from the sky!" But whether it’s a softening of my heart, or of my head, or the stench of nostalgia, or wistfulness for the days when Bill Paxton was alive and could headline big movies, my attitude toward this twistravaganza has improved somewhat! I still think there’s too much bickering in it and an overly healthy dose of silliness, and that it irresponsibly encouraged the goofy sport of tornado-chasing; but I must admit that on a recent re-viewing of this windy action-drama, I more or less enjoyed it!

Paxton, whom we recall from Aliens and Weird Science and so many others, plays Bill, who does a little weird science of his own by sniffing dirt and looking at the sky to see when the tornados are going to appear! He’s a former tornado chaser, legendary for his recklessness, who rejoins his old gang, temporarily he thinks, in order to have divorce papers signed by ex-wife Jo, who’s played by Helen Hunt from Next of Kin (which Paxton was also in, actually)! Bill has in tow his fiancée Melissa, a straight arrow played by Jami Gertz from Mischief and The Lost Boys, who is initially interested in the tornado gang but, after a few close calls, is happy to walk away and let Bill have both his twisters and his old wife back!

That’s the human drama part of the movie, and too much screen time is spent on it if you ask ol’ Burl! And then there’s the antics of the tornado gang, which is to say the crew of pseudo-scientists who drive the highways and byways in their motley of vehicles in pursuit of supercells, and pine for the days when Bill was their wild and fearless leader! This group includes Phillip Seymour Hoffman from Jack Goes Boating and Mission Impossible III in the role of Dusty, the most comedic scientist; Alan Ruck from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as Rabbit, the crew's putative wise man; Sean Whalen from The People Under the Stairs as Allan; Scott Thomson from Parasite and Police Academy as Preacher; Wendle Josepher from Intolerable Cruelty as Haynes; famous director Todd Field as Beltzer; and Joey Slotnick from Plane as Joey! Ha ha!

But this rabble are unconvincing not just as scientists but as genuine human people, and their interest in, essentially, air is about all there is to them, and makes them only as substantial as that passion would suggest! A scene in which the whole gang stops off unannounced at the home of Aunt Meg, played in granny-artist mode by Lois Smith from Black Widow and The French Dispatch, and proceed to eat her entire supply of steak, is meant to be endearing and humanizing but it comes off more as just a bunch of insensitive louts mooching off an old lady, no matter how affable Aunt Meg is about it nor how much it’s implied that this has happened many times before and Meg must be used to it by now! Ha ha!

And then there are the rival scientists, who drive in shiny black trucks, have all the latest equipment, and are led by windbag showboater Jonas, played by Cary Elwes from The Princess Bride! Of course the ragtag heroes disdain them, in this Universal Pictures-Warner Bros. co-production, for accepting corporate sponsorship to fund their activities, though the script doesn’t bother detailing which corporation would want to sponsor tornado chasers, nor why! At least there’s some nuance in the presentation: Jonas is a bad guy, but not so bad that the heroes don’t try in earnest to dissuade him from blundering into an F5! But he’s still the bad guy after all, and for his sins he reaps the whirlwind! Or rather, ha ha, the whirlwind reaps him!

So it all comes down to the tornadoes, doesn’t it, and these scenes are pulled off with, if not realism, all the techno-aplomb the mid-90s could offer! The trick effects are still impressive today, and the number and length of the tornado scenes stop just short of the point where they’d become repetitive and boring! The filmmakers take care to vary the types of debris thrown at the heroes: trucks, exploding trucks, farm equipment, exploding farm equipment, cows; and there’s a good nighttime scene at which a drive-in movie screening of Psycho and The Shining is interrupted by one of the larger twisters! Still, as thrilling as these scenes often are, and as awesome as the tornadoes shown here can be, it still falls short of the one seen in The Wizard of Oz, and that was just a big black sock wasn’t it!

The physics displayed here are about as authentic as they are in Oz (a film much alluded-to in this production), and the great goal of Bill's team - to release their science instrument named Dorothy into a tornado so as to discover its characteristics and therefore be better able, somehow, to predict them - seems both unrealistic and a bit underwhelming! Meanwhile the dialogue is unspeakable, most of the characters are annoying, and the drama is flaccid! But the effects sequences remain marvellous and the atmosphere of Midwestern heavy weather is nicely achieved! There’s a summeriness to the movie that I like, too, so in the final puff I’ll give Twister one and a half handfuls of dirt!

Burl reviews Foreign Correspondent! (1940)

 

By the turning of the windmill, it’s Burl, here with a bit of Hitchcockery for you! Ha ha, this is Hitch in actionman mode, making a big old wartime crowd-pleaser with plenty of derring-do and get-‘er-done sentiment! It’s not the most finely-crafted picture old Alfred ever made, nor his most suspenseful, nor his most rollicking, but there’s a case to be made that, alongside North By Northwest, it’s the one that most effectively combines all these qualities! Ha ha, and the name of the movie is Foreign Correspondent!

It’s set in a very specific period of time, which I always appreciate in a movie! The thunderclouds of war have spread across Europe, and just about everybody knows it’s coming – and there are some shadowy figures, it seems, who want to hurry it along! But before we meet them, we are introduced to Johnny Jones, the putative hero of the picture, a Big Apple newsman who is the right guy to go find out what’s up in Europe, figures his editor, because (and the cop-phobic Hitch loved this no doubt) he once beat up a policeman!

It seems Hitch wanted Gary Cooper for the role, but he got Joel McCrea from Sullivan’s Travels and Ride the High Country! This disappointed the director, who found McCrea too affable; and you can certainly see why he’d want Coop for a two-fisted role like this! Maybe the fact that they were each known by nicknames made up of the first half of their surnames was an extra attraction to Cooper for the portly filmmaker, but who knows! Anyway, I like McCrea – his affability gives a lightness to the picture that helps keep it aloft, and he’s able to get serious when he needs to, as in the Thing From Another World-style coda!

It’s late August of 1939, and you know what that means - Nazis are about to make their move! When Johnny Jones arrives in England, he finds a dyspeptic colleague played by the great Robert Benchley (who also wrote some of the dialogue, or at least his own); the leader of some kind of peace party, Stephen Fisher, played by Herbert Marshall from The Fly; and Fisher’s beautiful daughter Carol, essayed by Laraine Day from The Story of Dr. Wassell! Malarkey of some kind is going on, and things only get weirder after a diplomat called Van Meer, who is instrumental in whatever chance there may be to stave off the Germans and whom Johnny is supposed to interview, gets himself shot in the face in a surprisingly brutal moment!

Johnny also meets the real hero of the picture, or at least I thought so, a debonair newshound called Scott ffolliott (and yes, ha ha, they address the lower-case double Fs), played by the marvelous George Sanders, whom we recall from Doomwatch and Endless Night, and from his own pithy suicide note! ffolliett is a real cool customer, an adventuresman who, it seemed to me, had as much of Hitchcock’s attention as the hero! After the famous windmill scene – well, relatively famous, probably cracking the top ten or twelve of famous Hitch scenes – and Van Meer has mysteriously returned, still played by Albert Bassermann from Alraune, Johnny is hot on the trail of the story, and so naturally it’s time for the movie to hang with ffolliett for a while! Yes, ha ha, it seems for a while that ffolliett (a relation to ffolkes, no doubt!) is the new hero of the movie, and one is not unhappy to have him!

There’s some great stuff here! Edmund Gwenn from Them! and The Trouble With Harry pops up as a hitman who maybe was a bit past his prime! And there are some terrific mugs in the margins, like Mr. Krug, played by Eduardo Cianelli from Strange Cargo, who tortures poor Van Meer with hot jazz music! The special effects and sets are simply top notch, and the plane-crash climax is a corker!

You can tell Hitch wasn’t too interested in the specifics of the peace process or the ginned up McGuffin here – ha ha, as McGuffins go, this is one of the director’s most transparently immaterial! It’s a weird mix of ripped-from-the-headlines reality and the sort of picture they were making in the lead-up to the war, where the evil country would remain pointedly unnamed, perhaps in the hopes of avoiding any kind of intercontinental rile-up! I suppose that’s because history marched on as the picture was being written and prepared, and all of Fisher’s mournful references to “his country” were left over from prewar days!

It’s a chaotic movie, but all of a setpiece by the end, ha ha! I’ve seen it a couple of times now, and it sure does hold up! The plotting is maybe not completely thought through everywhere, but it’s got it where it counts! I give Foreign Correspondent three and a half phonographs!

Burl reviews Sully! (2016)

 

Heading for runway two-niner, it’s Burl, reporting birdstrike from the sky! Ha ha, it’s a real-life disaster movie – or is it? Those of us who remember watching the news in early 2009 remember that it wasn’t a disaster at all, but a heartening story of competence! Yes, it’s a picture from the man who reinvented himself as a chronicler of ripped-from-recent-headline stories, and this, as far as I can tell, is the best-regarded of them: by garr, it’s the fabulous story of Sully!

Yes, it’s Sully Sullenberger, Airport Pilot, and who better to essay him than Tom Hanks, the fellow we recall from Dragnet and Big and pictures like that! Why, Hanks already had the real-life-pilot-wrings-triumph-from-disaster angle covered in his portrayal of Jim Lovell of Apollo 13! Like Lovell, Sully keeps a calm head and is helped by his even-keeled co-workers, and from the oncoming rush of too-certain tragedy comes the joy of unexpected survival – a water landing from which the aviatrons emerge smiling!

You recall the story: in January of 2009, a flight takes off from La Guardia airport in New York, and instead of its intended destination, Charlotte, a capitol of one of the Carolinas I believe, the airplane is struck by passing birds and, bereft of thrust, is forced into the icy waters of the Hudson River! Injuries are minor and fatalities nil, and pilot Sully Sullenberger is hailed as a hero! But wait – the Red Cross blankets draped across the shoulders of the survivors are not the only wet ones in this story, because various authorities, especially those concerned about insurance costs and so forth with regards to the plane, ask whether Sully and his co-pilot could not have returned to the aerodrome even in their bird-crippled state! By the end of the picture it is revealed that the pilots did all the right things, and their reputations and hero status remain intact!

Aaron Eckhart from Olympus Has Fallen is the co-pilot of Mustache Air flight 1549, and he provides a stolid backup to Sully, a faithful wingman, someone for him to talk to! Laura Linney from Congo is the worried Mrs. Sully, whose scenes are all on the telephone and who doesn’t get to do anything but fret from a distance! Ha ha, it’s a bit of a nothing part, but Linney is a good actor and does what she can! And of course the picture is directed by Clint himself, who as a filmmaker has brought us many pictures: some of them very good, others more like Blood Work! And yes, as mentioned above, of his ripped-from-the-headlines pictures, which include one about the terrorists on the train to Paris and another about the security guard who was thought to have planted a bomb, Sully is the one people thought was pretty good!

Maybe that’s because Sully himself was such a readymade white middle-aged man hero, and therefore perfect to be played by Hanks! Hanks is good in the role, but there’s not all that much to the man aside from being a good and dedicated pilot who’s certain of the rightness of his actions aside from one or two moments of doubt! The picture is assembled in such a way as to break the actual crash and rescue into sections, one of them from the perspective of the La Guardia tower; and occasionally we are privy to the explosive visions with which Sully is occasionally assailed – snapshots of how the disaster might have unfolded if everything hadn’t gone exactly right in the aftermath of the birdstrike!

Like most Eastwood pictures, it’s a competent but unspectacular work! It certainly doesn’t wear out its welcome – at 93 minutes, including credits and explanatory titles, it qualifies as a miniature in the Eastwood oeuvre! It’s a fine piece of reportage, very basic in its themes and emotions, and carries nearly to a fault an abhorrence of nuance or complication! It’s no Unforgiven, ha ha, and it's no Sully Sullenberger: Airport Pilot either, but then what is! Still, I’m going to give Sully two and a half cries of “Heads down, stay down, brace, brace, brace!”

Burl reviews City on Fire! (1979)

By the hearth, it’s Burl, here to bring you a simply disastrous review! Ha ha, well, I hope the review itself won’t be a disaster, but the movie sure is! This one came along at the very tail end of the great 70s disaster cycle, just before the twin hilarities of Airplane and When Time Ran Out pounded stakes through the heart of the genre, and I suppose you might accuse it, along with odourific contemporaries like Meteor, of contributing to the demise! The picture in question is none other than City on Fire!

It is of course the sort of movie that shows off the cast in little boxes to emphasize how special they are! The biggest boxhead of course is Mr. Henry Fonda, whom we know from On Golden Pond and Tentacles, and who plays Fire Chief Risley here, but of course there are others! Several of these are disaster veterans: we have Shelley Winters from The Visitor and The Mad Room, who appeared with Fonda in Tentacles and also swam her way through The Poseidon Adventure; here she plays a dedicated hospital nurse! Ava Gardner from Earthquake and The Sentinel is a sort of news anchor, or maybe more of a talk show host, ha ha, it’s hard to tell; either way, she’s a raging inebriate! We also get James Franciscus from When Time Ran Out, who is Gardner’s long-suffering producer!

In this ensemble cast, the default main character is probably a doctor played by Barry Newman from Vanishing Point and The Limey! But he doesn’t get much to do!  Susan Clark from Porky’s is in there as maybe Newman’s girlfriend, but definitely some kind of philanthropist donating money from her late husband’s estate to put a new wing on the hospital! Leslie Nielsen, perhaps best known for his horror roles in Prom Night and Creepshow, plays the mayor of the city (which goes unnamed but is clearly Montreal), who’s at the hospital for the new wing’s dedication ceremony! And aside from the boxheads in the cast there are plenty of familiar Canadian faces: people like Cec Linder from Explosion, Donald Pilon from The Pyx, and Jefferson Mappin from Incubus!

 

But what are the circumstances behind the citywide conflagration? It seems there’s a guy named Herman, played by Jonathan Welsh from Starship Invasions, who’s displeased with his employment situation and so goes on a sabotage rampage at the refinery conveniently located in the middle of town! Ha ha, and then he celebrates his accomplishment by purchasing a new suit! Next thing you know there are a few explosions and then an oft-repeated trick effect that looks like a leftover shot from Damnation Alley! This is supposed to represent the city being on fire, I suppose, but the bulk of the actual incendiary action takes place in and around the hospital! There are hardly as many stunts and burning things as you might find in an average episode of Emergency!

There is one full-body walking burn gag that’s pretty impressive, though, in the picture’s most harrowing moment! That’s when, eager to escape the hospital before the fire eats all the oxygen, a lady bolts from the premises before she can be sprayed by Leslie Nielsen or protected by the “water tunnel” planned by the fire brigade! She runs down the street but goes up in flame halfway there - but she keeps running! She doesn’t make it, however!

Most of the rest of the movie takes place on this one Sesame Street-style city block, with water spraying and dampened people running or being wheeled on gurneys! It’s not the most thrilling sequence ever committed to film, but at least it leads to the demise of the saboteur, resplendent in his newly purchased threads as a scaffolding falls on his head!

I can only speak plainly here: City on Fire is a bad movie! Neither the budget nor the skill required to pull it off was present during shooting, and nobody aside from Nielsen, who gets demoted from mayor to sprayboy, puts much effort in! There is a moral, however, just as in The Towering Inferno when Steve McQueen laments how much architects like to build tall towers with a tendency to inferno! City on Fire, for its part, concludes with Fonda shaking his head and murmuring: “It only takes one man to start a huge big fire!” I guess that’s true, chief! I give City on Fire one irritating newsman!

Burl reviews King Kong! (1976)

 

To the beating of a chest it’s Burl, here to tell you a tale of ape! Yes, a big ape - in fact, Kong himself! It’s not the old Kong, not the new Kong, but the middle Kong, the one brought to us by none other than old Dino De Laurentiis! It’s that big hairy Christmas release of 1976, King Kong!

You won’t believe it, but my dad took me to see this one on the big screen, and let me tell you, for me it was an event! I was maybe six years old, and the movie was to my little eyes thrilling and terrifying and altogether grand, and Kong himself a figure of mythical awe with his black chest smooth as Corinthian leather and his gimlet eyes gleaming in the dark like two side-orders of jelly! It, and this iteration of Kong, no longer have that terrible power over me of course, such power having been diluted in inverse proportion to the gradual development of my critical faculties; but that original viewing, wide-eyed before a massive screen in a grand old theatre, has stuck with me!

The script, by Lorenzo Semple Jr., is not perfect of course - ha ha, who can forget, and who would not love to forget, kidnap victim Dwan’s cry of “Put me down, you chauvinist pig ape!” For that matter, who would not love to forget that silly character name, “Dwan!” On the other hand, it’s not as bad as it’s reputed to be, either - it’s a perfectly acceptable 70s update to the story, with an oil company taking the place of the movie company seen in the original! So the topical environmental themes are present and accounted for, and the outlandish outrageousness of this band of first-world pirates showing up and stealing Kong away from the island he calls home and from the people who love and fear him, is duly noted!

Jeff Bridges, well known from Starman, plays the lead, an all-purpose character whose expertise, ostensibly in primatology, extends to anything the story requires: medicine, photography, general adventuring! This was the big debut of Jessica Lange from Tootsie, and she’s required to babble about meaningful miracles involving Deep Throat, but does the best she can with it! Charles Grodin from It’s My Turn and Clifford plays the rapacious corporation man, and while he seems a little miscast, he does a fine job too! Rene Auberjonois from Walker and 3:15 the Moment of Truth, and many Robert Altman pictures besides, plays the scientist who reveals the truth about the oil on Skull Island; and meanwhile the ship’s crew features all sorts of familiar faces! The captain is John Randolph from Earthquake and Christmas Vacation, and there are sailors played by Julius Harris from Live and Let Die, Jack O’Hallorann from Dragnet, Ed Lauter from Lassiter, and John Lone from The Hunted, and then of course there’s Pahoo himself, Dennis Fimple from Creature from Black Lake, in the role of Sunfish, who so far as I can tell survives the ape’s stomping feet and his remorseless rolling of the log!

Now here’s a problem with the picture, and it’s a big one: no dinosaurs! There’s a big snake, which looks fakey in the same charming way as the one in Conan the Barbarian (another Dino production - ha ha, maybe they used the same snake!), but Kong defeats it easily and gorily, and it never eats any sailors like they were junior mints, as the dinos do in the ’33 and ’05 versions! Skull Island, or Ape Island, or whatever it’s called - actually, I don’t think they give it a name in this picture - really lacks atmosphere, ranging between location shooting in what is obviously Hawaii, and studio shots in what is obviously a studio! We do get some nice matte paintings, though, and some acceptable backlot work!

Of course, when he gets to New York and is humiliated before a crowd, the angry simian escapes and makes his way not to the Empire State Building, but further south to the World Trade Centre, the presence of which qualifies this movie as an historical document! So that adds a little retroactive interest for the nostalgic viewer, though he doesn't straddle the buildings, as on the poster, or crush a rocket or duck a fighter jet! Ha ha, I remember thinking that poster overpromised a bit!

But before the movie came out, old Dino promised, in reference to Jaws, “Ha ha, no one cry when shark die, but everybody cry when monkey die!” And do you know what? He wasn’t entirely wrong there! It’s genuinely sad when the big gorilla, shot into meatsauce by helicopters, rolls off the building and plummets to his doom! I think that’s a bit of an achievement, so whatever this picture’s faults, it’s got that! Ha ha, I give King Kong two camera hunts in the interior!

Burl reviews Backdraft! (1991)

 

Out of the way, it’s Burl, here with an emergency review! Yes, it’s a movie about firemen today, and certainly the most popular of this subgenre: Ron Howard’s Backdraft! Ha ha, Howard, it’s considered polite to excuse yourself, you know!

Now, this is not the best movie Ron Howard ever made - that would have to be either Apollo 13 or Grand Theft Auto! But it’s almost certainly the most fire-filled! It’s the tale of a Chicago fire-fighting family: the dad, back in ’71, is killed fighting a blaze, and the two sons grow up to be pompiers themselves! The older brother, played by Kurt Russell from The Thing, is known as Bull, perhaps because he’s ready to charge into any conflagration and battle the flames with his bare hands if needs be! The younger sibling, enacted by William Baldwin from Flatliners, phumphered around for a bit before deciding to have a go at the family trade, and much of the movie is made up of tiresome arguments between the brothers!

But there’s other stuff going on too! A criminal is murdering people using surprise backdrafts, which is to say quick, explosive little fires that kill their victims and then blow themselves out! Robert De Niro from Mean Streets is investigating these incidents, and the younger brother helps him out! Donald Sutherland from Heaven Help Us and The Puppet Masters plays the local pyromaniac, Ronald, who helps out Hannibal Lecter-style from his flameproof prison cell! And there’s romance, too: Jennifer Jason Leigh from Eyes of a Stranger and Grandview U.S.A. works for slimy city councilman J.T. Walsh, from Eddie Macon’s Run and Misery, and plays bohankie with young Baldwin, whereas Bull, in his grumpy, stoic way, would like to get back together with his estranged wife, played by Rebecca De Mornay from Risky Business!

Scott Glenn from The Right Stuff and The Keep lurks in the margins of all this, waiting patiently for his paternal fireman character to become narratively relevant! Baldwin, meanwhile, shows off an alarming aptitude for spying on men at just the moment they take their shirts off to reveal telltale scars! Ha ha! And the fire sequences and attendant trick effects are suitably spectacular, if not always crucial to the plot! It’s not The Towering Inferno, wherein the disaster is the thing; the fires here are more window dressing than anything! They're attractively shot, though, by Mikael Salomon; and just before this fire movie Salomon worked on The Abyss, a water picture, and Always, which takes place largely in the air! Ha ha, I wonder if he ever got around to shooting an earth picture, just to get all the elements in!

It’s all very much like an extended episode of Emergency!, which at one time was my favourite TV show! Except the scripts for Emergency!, which were no great shakes, were better than this one! It was written by the same fellow who brought us Highlander, and he apparently was himself a firefighter for a few years, and in the incendiary admixture of clunky dialogue and inside-baseball details, both influences show! It all wraps up with that staple of middlebrow 90s cinema: the god-awful end credit theme song!

In short, it’s bad, but with its overqualified cast and terrific fire action, also entertaining and watchable! It caused my son to think twice about his current ambition to become a forensic fire investigator, and I’m not sure what to make of that! In the event, I guess I’ll give Backdraft one and a half BMW windshields!

Burl reviews Earthquake! (1974)

With a rumble and a crack, it’s Burl, here with some more 70s disaster! Yes, it’s Earthquake, and while it wasn’t the first 70s disaster picture (Airport and The Poseidon Adventure came first), nor the best (The Towering Inferno, released the same year is a lot better, and so is Juggernaut of course), nor the most popular (Inferno beat it out at the box office), nor the worst (Ha ha, I’m looking at you, When Time Ran Out!), it is in many ways the quintessence of the form!

There are strange rumblings in the ground, and at the Earthquake Institute, the young graduate student warns of an impending quake, but receives only derisive laughter in return! There are rumblings too in the marriage of Charlton Heston, the ruddyman we know from Touch of Evil and In the Mouth of Madness, and Ava Gardner, familiar from such eccentric pictures as Pandora and the Flying Dutchman and Tam Lin! They don’t get along, and while Ava complains to her father, the only slightly older Lorne Green (well known from his cameo in The Errand Boy), Charleton seeks comfort in the ropey arms of lovely Genevieve Bujold from Dead Ringers!

That’s the soap opera part of the plot, and we have other threads too, like dedicated uniform cop George Kennedy, in trouble for destroying Zsa Zsa Gabor’s hedgerow; and Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree from The Banker, as Miles, the motorcycle daredevil who’s trying to get his spiral run right; and perm-haired creepazoid Marjoe Gortner, from Mausoleum, as the bag boy Jody, a weekend warrior who goes mad with power and also with lust for the even more perm-haired Victoria Principal!

At some point the drum and shake of Sensurround takes hold: the buildings sway, the windows shatter, the elevators plummet, and the cows jump over the moon! Albert Whitlock’s matte paintings of a shattered Hollywood are paraded across the screen as though he’s been given one of those virtual gallery openings which artists must suffer in these pestilent days; but his work is great as always! On the physical effects side plenty of concrete rains down, chasms yawn, bridges fall, the big dam begins to crack, Lorne Green succumbs to a heart attack of all things, and we get all the faux destruction that Universal Studios can provide!

Amid the rubble is a veritable terrarium of familiar faces, like John Randolph from Christmas Vacation, Donald Moffat from The Thing, Jesse Vint from Forbidden World, Kip Niven from Damnation Alley, and, in a cameo under a name I shall not attempt to spell, and wearing an outrageous outfit which I dare not describe, is none other than Walter Matthau from Bigger Than Life! Ha ha, he sits in a bar making drunken remarks, and then later, in a shelter for displaced people, he dances a merry inebriate’s jig, then falls over to the intense amusement of the crowd!

It’s not a good movie, not by a long chalk, ha ha! However, it hits all the 70s disaster bases, never gets boring despite the dumb soapy stuff, has some appealing weirdness here and there (Matthau’s hat, ha ha!), and dares to end things on a muddy, unexpectedly dour, tragically uxorious note! I award Earthquake one and a half truckloads of cows!

Burl reviews Ants!! (1977)

Beedlee-beedlee-beedlee it’s Burl, here with another movie about insects on the attack! Yes, it’s time for ants in the pants with a TV movie called, simply, Ants!, though it’s also known by the more cryptic title It Happened at Lakewood Manor! That’s the title under which I first became familiar with the movie, but I do believe Ants! is the proper and original moniker!

Anyway, Lakewood Manor is a thriving if old-fashioned resort hotel run by an old wheelchair lady played by Myrna Loy from Another Thin Man! Her daughter, Lynda Day George from Mortuary, is trying to get her to retire from the hotel business, and there’s an abrasive businessman who wants to buy the place! Meanwhile, there’s construction of an indeterminate type going on in the front yard, with boss Robert Foxworth from Death Moon and Prophecy, and his foreman Bernie Casey from Never Say Never Again running their tractors back and forth!

But right off the hop, things go wrong! A construction worker falls victim to a mysterious something under the ground, and when another goes to help him, they are both buried alive! Realizing their mistake, Foxworth and Casey dig their co-workers out, and in the process are bitten by ants! Ha ha, and when first a young boy playing in the garbage, and then a kitchen worker doing his job are found with toxic poisoning, Foxworth begins to suspect the ants are responsible for all the trouble! But people just laugh at him, in particular the government safety monitors who’ve been giving him trouble and who seem like beta versions of the EPA guy in Ghostbusters!

So, desperate to prove his formic theory, Foxworth jumps in his front end loader and bashes at the dirt in which he believes the ants are living, with the result that he enrages them so much they attack the hotel and kill several people! Ha ha, well done Foxworth! It all comes down to a scene in which Foxworth, George, and the real estate guy are all sitting in one of the hotel rooms, covered with ants and breathing through tubes of rolled-up ugly wallpaper! Then the developer gets ants in his pants and jumps out the window, ha ha! Truly a thrilling climax!

Brian Dennehy from F/X and Best Seller has meanwhile made a surprise appearance as the local fire chief who can barely believe his eyes every time he looks at the strange blurry blob that is supposed to represent millions of ants! It’s the sort of special effect you expect from a 70s TV movie, but it’s still pretty bad! (Not a patch on the spider transformation in Curse of the Black Widow, or the guy falling out of the plane in The Horror at 37,000 Feet!) But never mind the bad special effects, lousy script, barbiturated direction and robotic acting: it’s horror TV from the 70s, so I enjoyed it! I give Ants! one and a half trenches of fire!

Burl reviews Juggernaut! (1974)

Welcome aboard, it’s Burl, here to review shipboard suspense! Ha ha, of course we know that the mid-1970s was a time of much disaster at the movies, with The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, and many other such pictures! The movie under review today must have gotten lost among these releases, even though it’s not very much a disaster picture itself! No, it’s a suspense exercise about bombs on a ship called Juggernaut!

The situation is pretty simple, and reminds one a bit of ffolkes! After much ticker-tape tossing, a passenger ship (ha ha, one hesitates to call it a “luxury liner,” as its appointments range somewhere between the black sheep of the Cunard Lines and a WWII troop ship) called the HMS Brittanic hoves out of her English port with Captain Omar Sharif at the helm, bound for New York City! But a mad bomber with extortion on his mind has left seven complicated barrel bombs scattered in passages all over the ship! The weather is too rough for the 1200 passengers (an easy figure to remember, as it is repeated dozens of times in the picture) to be debarked at sea, so, despite tweedy admonitions from Her Majesty’s Government, the company (represented by Ian Holm) and its insurers lean toward paying the money, the more so every time they look at the stoic face of Inspector Anthony Hopkins, the cop on the case, whose wife and two kids are on board the Brittanic!

So they send some bomb specialists out to the ship, and these are led by the sardonic, hard-drinkin’ Richard Harris, whom we remember as a sardonic, hard-drinkin’ flier in The Guns of Navarone! David Hemmings, much more relaxed here than he was in Blow Up or Deep Red, is Harris’s pal and lieutenant; sadly, I have to report that, where Hemmings is concerned, the title of one of his previous films becomes all too apt! The second half of the picture is largely given over to quiet, tense, close-up shots of Harris trying to defuse the bomb! Ha ha, it’s very nicely done: clearly the writer and art department did their research on this one!

All the while, the ship’s social director, very well played by Roy Kinnear, does his best to keep up the spirits of the passengers, who are, improbably, all gathered and in costume for a fancy-dress ball! Ha ha, there’s a really rather remarkable sequence in the ballroom when Kinnear’s forced, increasingly desperate merrymaking reaches a crescendo, and, answered only by the crowd’s glum acceptance of impending death, gives up! Then he has a dance with Shirley Knight from Our Idiot Brother, and this impulsive act, rather than his hysterical pleas to roll out the barrel, is what leads to the crowd making their own doomsday fun! Of course, the fun is interrupted by an explosion or two, ha ha, but what are you going to do!

Three things stand out in this marvelous picture! One is the cast, which is astonishing: in addition to those named, we also get Clifton James from Live and Let Die as a shrewd U.S. Senator; Julian Glover from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as a member of the ship’s crew; Freddie Jones from Dune in a crucial, bitterly grumpy role of his own; and a further gallery of great British actors like Roshan Seth, Michael Hordern, Cyril Cusack, and even Simon MacCorkindale from Jaws 3-D! The second thing is the interweaving of drawn-out suspense and a particular attention to detail, which proves an uncommonly effective dramatic admixture! And third is a sort of end-of-an-era allegorical quality the picture has, in which it depicts, in relative miniature, the crumbling of a once-glorious empire, Brittania itself, no longer ruling the waves but ruled by them, and being destroyed bit by explosive bit at the hands of an internal rot brought on by its own hegemonic inhumanity!

As a further bonus we get typically marvelous cinematography from one of my favourite cameramen, Gerry Fisher, who also shot Wolfen, Highlander, Malpertuis and The Ninth Configuration! Richard Lester, a director who is frequently and unfairly underrated, at least by me, does a grand job of keeping the scale and the focus right where it ought to be! So, yes, I recommend Juggernaut as an under-seen 70s gem, and give it three five-mile turning radii! Furthermore I urge you to have a look at it whenever you get a chance! Ha ha, boom!

Burl reviews Volcano! (1997)

Boom boom it’s Burl, here to review some disaster for you! This is the other volcano movie of 1997, the one that wasn’t Dante’s Peak! No, this one is simply called Volcano; but was it the better or the worse of the two? Well, they’re just different enough from one another to make that question meaningless! Each has its champions, though, and for a long time I might have told you that Volcano was the better one! Now I’m not so sure!

What probably made it seem better was the slightly innovative location: downtown Los Angeles! Dante’s Peak was set just where might expect a volcano movie to be located: in a small town at the base of a volcano! In Volcano, an earthquake opens a caldera to the molten core, and soon it’s lava bombs, magma rolling down the streets, a massive cone rising from the La Brea tar pits! Emergency manager fellow Tommy Lee Jones, clearly saving his best stuff that year for Men in Black, tries to manage the emergency and his pouty daughter at the same time, and an artificially spiky relationship with geologist and Lady Who Saw It Coming, Anne Heche!

There are other characters too, like Tommy Lee’s underling, played by the very solid actor Don Cheadle, from Moving Violations, in a fine but largely wasted performance in which he virtually never leaves the office! John Carroll Lynch, that old son-of-a-Gunderson, plays a subway construction guy who takes the Murray Hamilton role of irritated nonbeliever until he redeems himself by horribly, hilariously, saving a subway driver by jumping knee-deep into lava, into which he melts like the Wicked Witch of the West! Ha ha! And Childs himself, Keith David from The Thing, turns up as a cop!

But the real star is of course the volcano and all its attendant spectacle! The trick effects hold up fairly well, and there are a few satisfactorily suspenseful sequences! The destruction is relatively small-scale when you compare this movie to, say, one of Roland Emmerich’s exercises in wanton ruination, or even something like Pompeii, but that’s not a problem! The problem, I guess, is the script, and the by-the-numbers approach to the whole thing! Ha ha, there’s a real sense that they figured the L.A. location was plenty enough innovation for one movie, and from there they coasted!

I do remember enjoying this one when I saw it in the theater, but really it’s one of the prototypical bland 1990s products! I give Volcano one and a half K rails, but most of that is for explosions and slow-flowing lava! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Godzilla! (1998)

Grr grr and growl, it’s Burl, with a review of the Godzilla picture they made in the 1990s! Yes, it’s simply called Godzilla, and when it was announced that this would be the next movie from the fellow who brought us Independence Day, the world’s response was “Ha ha, of course it is!”

Now, this one took a different approach from the 2014 Godzilla and its more recent sequel! In those pictures, the G man seems to be part of a cabal of god-like Ancient Ones who ruled the world until they decided they would rather live underground, like Titans! There’s a bit of that in the old Toho pictures too! In this 1998 version however, he’s just a big lizard, grown size large because of nuclear testing conducted by the French! Ha ha!

Our unlikely hero is a fellow who’s been studying worms for three years, called Nick Tatopolis, played by the open-faced actor, Matthew Broderick! Ha ha, great sport is made of his supposedly complicated Greek name, which I suppose is in tribute to the monster designer, Patrick Tatopolous, who works regularly for this director! Another dubious tribute the script attempts is to hire Michael Lerner, well known from Class Reunion and Strange Invaders, to play callow Mayor Ebert! I suppose Roger Ebert must have given this guy a bad review for something, so he chose this non-clever revenge, over-extending the gag to include a scene in which his very Siskel-like assistant rates the mayor a thumbs down!

There are a few other characters, some of them played by voice actors from The Simpsons, which is a pretty 90s thing to do! Ha ha! Broderick, wearing a beret for some reason, is carrying a pretty unconvincing torch for a lady who would like to be a reporter, played by Maria Pitillo from Wise Guys; and some non-Godzilla drama results from her stealing Broderick’s secret research materials!

None of the bad guy types - not Mayor Ebert, not the nasty anchorman - get squished by Godzilla, or even get particularly close to him! I assumed both would feel the weight of Godzilla’s bottom, but I was wrong! I guess I have to give it to the picture - it surprised me! Ha ha, I’ll bet they thought about squashing both characters, but just couldn’t fit it those scenes around all the stuff they borrowed from Jurassic Park!

I try to be a positive sort of fellow, so here are a few things I liked about the movie, ha ha! There’s a good deal of carnage, so the picture keeps its end of that bargain; and the trick effects have not dated as much as we might expect! Also, and I’m an easy touch with these things, they did manage to create some empathy for the lizard, and some pathos when he dies! I’m usually on the monster’s side in these things, and so it was here!

On the other hand, the characters were a bunch of nundinckers, not a one of them with much to offer the discerning viewer! Broderick is a likeable enough fellow I suppose, and Jean Reno is the only interesting fellow on view here, and that just barely! The whole thing shuts down for a while to do the raptor scenes from the Jurassic Park movies, and spends so long with the baby dinosaurs in Madison Square Garden that I was reminded of Gremlins 2!

It achieves no surprises except in how narratively unambitious it is! Ha ha, maybe I’m just bitter, because this came out the same day as a movie I made, and it made a lot more money than mine! Well, that was no surprise! I give Godzilla one cup of poor American coffee!