Burl reviews Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers! (1980)

 

By the whiff of the stinking rose, it’s Burl, here to review a picture by the marvelous documentarian Les Blank! Ha ha, I once attended a screening of his great Leon Russell movie A Poem is a Naked Person, and that was back in the days when Blank had to be in attendance for it to be screened legally, so he was there, and afterward I and some others went out to a nearby bar with him for a few beers! He was a nice fellow and awfully good company, and those qualities can be seen in the movie under review today, Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers!

Now, whether or not that specific equivalence is accurate, the movie makes a strong case for garlic as a curative and as a flavourer of food! No scientists are trotted out to make the case; neither Julia Child nor Edna Lewis nor any other celebrity chef of the day appear; instead, Blank visits a parade of bohemian food lovers who proselytize about the aliment and its many uses and benefits! Ha ha, I’ve always used garlic in my own cooking, so I was naturally sympathetic to these arguments!

The impression left is that there must be a thriving subculture of garlic-mad neo-hippies out there, cooking like maniacs and shoveling in the allium sativum as quickly as they can! Blank talks to chefs and enthusiasts, and spends time at a California garlic festival, and all of this is arranged in a wonderfully haphazard and aptly organic manner! There are some unexpected ingredients in this concoction: for instance, a bewildered Werner Herzog, whose mug we recall from the bad-guy role in Jack Reacher appears in order to give his two cents on garlic’s efficacy on vampires, and why he didn’t include that aspect in Nosferatu!

  

The heart of the picture are its many scenes of meal preparation, which make you want to rush to your kitchen and start cooking up a feast yourself! Vegetarians will not take to the movie, though – there are plenty of dead animals here, and meat being ground up in close shots; but cuisineries both committed and, like myself, casual, will find themselves transfixed by the lovely 16mm colour images!

There’s not a propulsive or coherent story being told here, but nor should there be! It’s a grincingly effective love-chaunt to an oft-maligned foodstuff, and at 51 minutes it’s just about exactly the right length! There’s some good music being played and some wonderful eccentrics appear, and if you like the way Les Blank organizes his movies, you’ll like this one as much as Burden of Dreams or In Heaven There Is No Beer? or any of his other fine works! Ha ha, I recommend it heartily! I give Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers three staring animal eyeballs!

Burl reviews Zelig! (1983)

 

By the power vested in me, it’s Burl, here with another taste of the Woodman! Yes, it’s a Woody Allen picture, and whatever you may think of this fellow in personal terms, and deep within the chambers of your heart, he did make some good movies along the way! Broadway Danny Rose is fun, and so is Sleeper; and of course there are many others too - some of them merely okay, others very good indeed! This picture, Zelig, is one of his least typical movies, and for my money one of his best! And ha ha, I went to see this with my first girlfriend at a rep theatre on a double bill with Dangerous Liaisons! Odd but true!

It’s a faux documentary, which is a form Allen had tackled before with his very first proper picture, Take the Money and Run! But this one is much more committed to its documentary-ness and therefore much less obviously a comedy, though it’s well-supplied with jokes! It’s the tale of Leonard Zelig, a nebbish of the early 20^th century, who so desperately wants to fit in and be liked that he has gained the ability to become, in just about every way, just like the people with whom he is surrounded! By garr, he's a human chameleon!

Set (delightfully!) in the late 1920s (though almost overdoing the period detail along the way, ha ha, which I’d have thought near impossible), the picture opens with the discovery of Zelig and his strange affliction, then follows him as he’s hospitalized under the care of glasses-nerd doctor Eudora Fletcher, played by Mia Farrow, who’d made her Woody Allen debut the year before in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy! It chronicles the ups and downs of Zelig’s life as he becomes a famous oddity, then is taken into the care of his half-sister and her shady boyfriend, neither of whom give a minkling for Zelig’s well-being; then, after a murder-suicide spree among his sister and her two boyfriends, the movie tells us, Zelig is again on his own! A renewed connection with Dr. Fletcher, a cure for his condition in the offing, and a budding romance all point toward happy days for the Z man, but a sudden barrage of scandal and a complication involving Nazi Germany mix things up further for the poor chameleon!

All of this is presented in classic documentary fashion, with a perfectly-chosen narrator ("They try to pull off his diz-guise, but it is not a diz-guise!") telling the story, and a great rush of old documentary footage, newly-shot but cleverly treated-to-look-old footage, contemporary talking head interviews with (often) real people, like Susan Sontag and Saul Bellow, providing pictorial detail and additional commentary! I must say I’m in awe of some of the technical accomplishments here – the cinematographer, Gordon Willis, and the editor, Susan Morse, have done some brainbustingly admirable work in matching the new footage to the old and spiriting Zelig into shots with Hitler and Jimmy Cagney and Josephine Baker and Tom Mix and so forth! The re-creation of the Zelig life story – clearly shot to resemble a Warner Bros. production of the 30s – is note perfect too, with Garrett Brown, the dad from Uncle Buck, looking hilariously whitebread as the actor playing Zelig!

Ha ha, the picture is probably more about Allen himself than he might admit, which adds a nice layer to it all! On the debit side, the movie feels a lot longer than it actually is, and there’s a same-iness to it that sometimes causes a little feeling of drag or repetition! But that’s only occasional, and there are enough wonderfully subtle gags and a wild array of highlights, both technical and one may say structural, to override these minor issues! The newly-created novelty songs are also brilliant, and the period music perfectly selected, right up to the wonderful tune that ends the film! I like this picture a lot, and so I give Zelig three and a half houses painted a disgusting colour!

Burl reviews Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched! (2021)

 

From deep within the creaky fen I cry “Ha ha!” Yes, it’s Burl, here to review a new documentary picture, which provides many things, not excluding a kaleidoscope of movie clips, a long list of films to watch, a great huge gallery of gabby movie nerds, and a sore bum, because the thing is well over three hours long! Ha ha! It’s a study of folk horror on film and television, and it’s called Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched!

The picture is divided into chapters: six of them, to be precise! We open with a look at British folk horror, which is a smart decision because while it’s not the fount from which all other folk horror has sprung, it’s likely the most common entry point into the genre for most viewers! Ha ha, we’ve all seen Witchfinder General, The Wicker Man, and Blood on Satan’s Claw, and so those three pictures, which interviewees refer to as the Unholy Trilogy, are tackled first, and this leads into a section on British TV horror of the 1970s, very little of which I’ve seen!

From here we spread out into other regions: North America, Asia, the Down Under areas, so forth! There’s a bit on the Icelandic picture Tilbury, ha ha, and Rawhead Rex, and mentions of the Indian Burial Ground nonsense featured in movies like The Shining and Pet Sematary, and the goofiness of this in underlined by one of the interviewees, Jesse Wente, who points out that when you’re disinterring legend on Turtle Island, remember that it’s all an Indigenous burial ground! Other interviewees include the director of The Lighthouse and, more relevantly, The Witch, Robert Eggers, and Alice Lowe, co-writer and co-star of Sightseers!

The doc goes on (and on, and on!), exploring the early works of folk horror, which are of necessity not that ancient themselves, as it takes time for story to become myth! The fifth chapter is titled something like “Folk Horror Around the World,” and it’s here that the movie becomes less of a documentary and more of an essay film, which is not in itself a bad thing, but doesn’t feel completely purposeful! Indeed, the fifth chapter is by far the longest, and one really starts to feel the running time here! But the earlier chapters, more concise and skillfully organized, at least give this one a solid foundation upon which to overextend itself!

Many clever people are interviewed, and they make many clever and worthwhile and illuminating points! Ha ha, I learned a lot! But the interviewees are frequently allowed to digress, and often these digressions are of interest, but at other times they just seem to extend things more than is necessary! And, as seems unavoidable with the weight of all this material and diverse historical knowledge, the picture eventually goes beyond its remit and includes movies that I myself would call folk horror only by the broadest and most generous of definitions!

Still, it’s not my movie, is it! And the impression one walks away with (after one has regained feeling in the buttocks and properly emptied the bladder) is that the sheer amount of effort put into this picture is stunning and very much to be admired! Like most great catalogue works, there’s a feeling of inevitability about it, and necessity, and it’s-about-time, but also the strange impression that this study has already been done, that the scholarship has previously been lassoed into just this form - that, ha ha, we’ve seen this movie before! And of course it hasn’t and we haven't, but that sense too is a testament to the project: an indicator that it badly needed doing and has indeed been done right! There’s a lot to discover here, and so I recommend catching the movie whenever you have the opportunity! For both ambition and achievement, I give Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched three wizard sticks!

Burl reviews Scala! (1990)

 

Taking your ticket, it’s Burl, here with a review of a movie not about movies, but about a movie theatre! I suppose that means it is about movies, ha ha, because a big old movie palace is still and always will be the best place to see one, and this movie is about just such a place! The movie palace in question is London’s late and much-lamented Scala Cinema, and the movie about it is simply called Scala!

Now, I’m no Londoner (ha ha, no, I’m not even British!), but I’ve spent plenty of time in that fine city, and when I was there for a spell in the late 1980s I discovered the Scala! And what a discovery it was! I recall seeing triple bills like Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, Daughters of Darkness and Edge of Sanity, the one with Anthony Perkins! Or, on a different occasion, a De Palma triple-header of Blow Out, Body Double and Dressed to Kill! I saw Videodrome, Un Zoo la Nuit, Danger Diabolik, Barbarella, a trucker’s double-header of Wages of Fear and They Drive By Night, David Mamet’s House of Games and Things Change, and more! Every day the program changed and so every day there were more glorious movies to see, all of them projected on 35mm film, or at least high-quality 16mm, on a big ratty old screen! Oh, ha ha, it was the purest heaven to a fellow like ol’ Burl!

I remember it was a bit scary to go there, which was part of the appeal! You’d take the tube to King’s Cross, emerge into the rat’s nest of streets surrounding that station, and see, as in a vision, a white edifice rising like a massif down the way! Mods, rockers, punks, cinéastes, skids, students, seedcakes, sketchy people of all description with heads full of high fructose skunkfire, would gather to see the show, and none of them wanted any trouble so far as I could see! You could get some food, a beer or glass of wine if you liked, and the seat you settled into would be your own little campsite for the evening! Of course, as is noted by several interviewees in this thirty-minute documentary portrait of the place, the whole cinema rumbled with each passing tube train and the sound system was not exactly double-Dolby; but again, ha ha, all of this only added to the charm!

The movie about the Scala is not nearly so exciting as the actual place was, however! It’s mostly a parade of talking heads, with very little footage of the cinema itself, though I suppose there’s only so much mileage to be had from such B-roll imagery! More pep and wit in the editing would have gone a long mile, though, and if they could have managed some footage of a screening in progress, that might have been nice! There are some clips from at least three movies though: Evil Dead, Glen or Glenda and Mona Lisa, which are cut in for little or no reason!

I suppose these were available because their UK distributor, or producer in the case of Mona Lisa, was Palace Pictures, owned in part by Stephen Wooley, who was also a major player in the Scala and provides many interesting remarks in the doc! Also interviewed are a number of other Scala employees, including Jane Giles, who later made a book about the fabled movie palace! There’s also a great gallery of London eccentrics, including an old chap who offers tribute to his favourite cinema in the form of doggerel; an old lady who likes car chases and other action antics, but not so much “bedroom scenes;” the actor Ralph Brown from Alien 3 and Stoker, who does a bit in the voice of his character Danny from the marvelous Withnail and I; and a soft-spoken, utterly sincere gent whose film obsession is total!

The movie is a bit reminiscent of Out of Print, the tribute to the New Beverly Cinema in L.A., but is only about a third the length! This subject could have supported a feature too, but not necessarily in the style we get here - it would have to be much sharper and more energetic, I think! Still, a nice little portrait of a place close to my heart, and I was glad to discover it on the YouTube! I give Scala two soiled seats! 

Burl reviews Stray! (2020)

 

Woof woof, it’s Burl, gone to the dogs! I’m here to review a pooch picture that tells the true-life tail of bowsers on the streets of Istanbul and the people who love them: a new documentary by the name of Stray!

The picture mainly follows two four-footers as they travel the streets and harbor areas of this polyglot city on the border of Europe and Asia! West and East are the warp and weft of this town, and even in its less glamourous quarters, where these dogs and their human pals mostly roam, this unique admixture is evident!

The starring hounds are named Zeytin and Nazar, both bitches of indeterminate breed! They roam the town looking for chow, stare balefully around at the tourists, poop on the grass, lounge on the roadway, fight over meatbones, eavesdrop on couples at outdoor cafes, and spend time with some glue-huffing street kids from Syria! There’s a group of construction site security guards who treat the dogs more kindly than they do the kids - the homeless immigrants are kicked out of their construction site squat, while the bowsers are given heaping bowls of tasty slops!

In Istanbul, it seems, it has lately become illegal to put down street dogs, and so the people there have a unique relationship with the canines who roam the city! In their turn, the doggies don’t seem to have become the ravening killers we see in movies like Dogs or The Pack or Wolfen, but do their best to go about the business of survival with the least possible amount of fuss!

The camera spends a lot of time cruising around at the dogs’ level (there’s a lot of dog anus in this picture, ha ha!), and one must admire director/camerawoman Elizabeth Lo, whose lower back must have needed great slatherings of Rub A5-35 after each day’s shoot! The footage she shot has been assembled into a film that never really coalesces into a story, but manages something rarer and more nuanced! It exudes a spell that’s very minor, and which doesn’t stay with you long after the movie is over, but is quite enchanting while it lasts, particularly for dog lovers!

The more sentimental dog lovers may find the picture unsatisfactory for a different reason, though! The movie avoids both anthropomorphizing and over-romanticizing its canine characters - they’re simply animals in the world, and while their big brown eyes give them a soulful look, they’re not particularly cute or clever! I myself think this was the right approach, and it should go without saying that the lack of narration was also the correct choice here!

The picture is spotted with quotations from Ancient Greek philosophers, mostly the dog-loving Diogenes, but frankly they don’t add much to it! It’s not a movie that will live for a tremendous long time in my memory or my heart, but I admire it for its moxie, its technical acumen, and its intelligence! I give Stray two government ear tags!

Burl reviews Volcano! (1976)

Ha ha: Burl here with a dash of reality for you! Yes, it’s a documentary, one I saw years ago and recently revisited! It’s called Volcano, but the full title is, I think, Volcano: An Inquiry Into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry! Ha ha, that’s a mouthful! But as I recall the title card on the movie itself is simply Volcano, so that’s what I’ll go with, even though some may confuse it with Volcano from 1997! That would require a good deal of confusion, and cause even more!

Because this Volcano is an almost experimental Canadian documentary about Malcolm Lowry and his great creation, and possibly my all-time favourite novel, Under the Volcano! Boy oh boy, I read the Penguin edition of that thing when I was twenty years old, and I was by golly hooked! I return to it regularly, in fact, that same battered copy! Ha ha!

The documentary, which came along seven or eight years before the John Huston adaptation of the book, with a great drunkard act from Albert Finney as the Consul, uses interviews and location footage, and one curious courtroom re-creation scene, to give a full biography of Lowry from cradle to grave, packed with every detail you might want to know and several you might not! The portrait is of a tormented genius; a desperate, devoted inebriate; a disordered emotional state and crippling lack of self-confidence! It’s not a pretty picture, but if you’ve read Under the Volcano, it’s precisely what you’d expect!

Lowry, born into comfort in England, leaves this behind to become a cabin boy on the high seas, and then, after some schooling, writes his first book, Ultramarine! Ha ha, the movie doesn’t mention this, but my understanding is that, en route to a publisher, the young author left his only manuscript in a cab, which then drove away, and he had to rewrite the entire book from scratch! Soon after that Lowry was married, and spent some harrowing time in New York where his copious mental health problems erupted into full bloom, and he ended up in Bellevue! Next he went to Mexico, where he began work on the manuscript that would become Under the Volcano, and where his wife called it quits on their troubled marriage! He married again and moved to a small shack outside Vancouver, where the book was finished, rejected by every publisher there is, and then rewritten and, after eight years, finished again!

The rest of the tale contains both triumph and tragedy, and many atmospheric shots of the Mexican volcano Popocatépetl! On the soundtrack we have plentiful narration from director Donald Brittain (who also gave us Sweetheart: The Hal C. Banks Story), a lot of Lowry readings from Under the Volcano or from letters, voiced perfectly by Richard Burton from Exorcist II: The Heretic, and an eerie avant-garde music score by Alain Clavier! Many of the interviews, and the interviewees themselves, are horribly fascinating, and are just the type of eccentric old Brits that I’ve met quite a few of myself!

On the debit side, the picture is quite definitively just a bit too long: removing just a few volcano shots and other Mexican material might have helped! And it seems to revel a bit too much in the harshest aspects of Lowry’s life! But these are very minor complaints: I find Lowry fascinating, his book spellbinding, and Volcano an exceedingly worthwhile account of both! Ha ha, I give it three and a half unnecessary photos of syphilis victims!

Burl reviews The Devil's Triangle! (1973)

Kchshsh, Burl transmitting! Can you read me! Ha ha, I think the odds are likely that I’ve flown through the Bermuda Triangle more than once, and yet here I am, having survived these risky journeys through the unknown, to write you a review for a late-70s goof-doc highlighting the final journeys of some who were not so lucky! Ha ha, yes, it’s The Devil’s Triangle!

The Bermuda Triangle was a big deal in the 1970s, and a filmmaker called Richard Winer obviously knew a winning gambit when he saw it: make a mid-length documentary about the phenomenon, use all sorts of stock footage, some po-faced interviews, a few re-creations, a droney theme tune by King Crimson, a briefly psychedelic flashback and an exploding model boat to tell the story - and then hire Vincent “Dead Heat” Price to narrate it all! Ha ha, Price does the job perfectly with that high-born voice, and sounds like he’s been offered a bonus for every time he can work in the words “The Devil’s Triangle!” in a tone of barely-controlled alarm!

It’s a little weird, actually: the words “Bermuda Triangle” are never uttered once in the picture! It’s as though Winer had decided to coin a new term for some reason, or else was prohibited by court order to use the established nomenclature! It feels like poor Price is being forced to talk around something that everybody already knows the name of, and I’m afraid the ruthless determination to speak only of The Devil’s Triangle undercuts one’s willingness to accept all of the movie’s propositions!

Many well-known cases are considered! Of course we get the full story of the Lost Squadron, the routine patrol flight that went out, send back a few cryptic, garbled messages, then vanished for all time, never to be seen again! There’s the more historical account of the Japanese freighter that only had time to radio “Danger like dagger now!” before never being heard from again! Some stories were unfamiliar, at least to laymen like ol’ Burl, and you can see why! For example, there’s the one about the guy and his buddy the priest who lay their cabin cruiser just a mile off Miami to look at the lights of the city, call in a complaint that there was a hole in their hull, and then aren’t there anymore by the time the Coast Guard comes to investigate! Ha ha, it’s not the most thrilling tale, that one!

In what was probably considered a big get for the documentary, Winer interviews the pilot who stayed behind while his Lost Squadron patrolmates went out into oblivion! There’s a real human story here, or the potential for one, about survivor’s guilt, obsession, and the unevenly-toothed gears of fate! But the movie engages with none of these, presenting instead a ghostly roll call in which the survivor’s name is repeated as though he’s the one who’s absent!

This bit is a waste of time (of which this brief picture has only fifty-two minutes’ worth in total), but where we do get a few frissons of creepy mystery is in some of the radio messages sent back from, apparently, the void; or the scary portraits of sailors in panic; or the home movie footage, which Price assures us is genuine, of a sailing yacht under the skipperage of a famous millionaire in the last few days before disappearing forever into uncertain geometries!

The picture gives equal consideration to all theories attempting to explain this terrifying isosceles! Could it be a gateway to another dimension, an electromagnetic anomaly, a curse of long standing, or simply a space alien kidnap zone? One thing it absolutely cannot be, the movie asserts with utter certainty, is coincidence, or anything so banal as rough weather! Ha ha, surely not!

When I was very young, I would be sent down to the neighbourhood movie house, the Park, every Saturday afternoon to see whatever was playing, and sometimes it would be something just like this! So I have a fondness for these 70s-era tabloid docs, even if they’re always clunky, frequently dull, and never very convincing! On balance, and largely because of Price, and this residual affection I have for the form, I’m going to give The Devil’s Triangle two sudden squalls!

Burl reviews Out of Print! (2014)

One please, for Burl! Ha ha, I was just pretending to be a movie patron there, in preparation for reviewing a new picture I just watched – a documentary called Out of Print! Ha ha, now this is a funny sort of movie: pretty much a personal essay in the form of a ninety minute doc! If it was a subject I was uninterested in, it might have been intolerable! But the picture had me from the very beginning and kept me interested all the way through!

Have you ever been to the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles, California? I have, but only once – in fact, that’s where I saw Innerspace! I can tell you that if I lived in L.A., I’d go there all the time! Ha ha, I might well have ended up in this very film, talking about how much I enjoy attending films at the New Beverly! (I did spend a lot of time in London's legendary Scala Cinema, even though I'm not and never have been a Londoner! Ha ha, that was some great place!)

Because that’s what this picture is about: how much people enjoy attending films at the New Beverly! We get some details about how it was started as a reparatory cinema back in 1978, and how the fellow who ran it, Sherman, was a very nice and quirky love hippie; and about how Sherman sadly passed on and the movie theatre was saved from becoming a fast-food restaurant by the quick-thinking action of its clientele (specifically Quentin Tarantino), and management of the place was turned over to Sherman’s son Michael!

Much of the movie is about how great it is to watch movies projected on 35mm film, and how marvelous it is to see a movie with a big audience! I agree heartily, ha ha! And the New Bev is, or was, indeed a wonderful place to see a picture! So a lot of this picture is simply people, be they filmmakers like Joe “Explorers” Dante and John “Into the Night” Landis, or simply celebrities like Kevin Smith and Seth Green! It’s all just a celebration party for a place, and a format, and a social ceremony that everyone who loves these things secretly knows is not going to last forever!

So there’s a certain melancholy hanging over the picture, and a few touching moments in there too, like when New Bev regular Clu “A Nightmare on Elm Street 2” Gulager reveals just how important the place is to him! But really, there was and is more drama surrounding this modest movie palace that’s taken place since the movie was finished! The lady who made it, Julia Marchese, was an employee there, and was briefly made a manager before the powers that be – Tarantino’s assistant, apparently – decided she wasn’t management material!

She may well not be, and she may be right about the wrongheaded approach they’re taking in running the cinema! On the other hand, she may be totally wrong, and I hope she is! I don’t know for sure, but I do know that the picture of the New Bev she paints in this movie is so appealing that I can hardly conceive of any change that would be for the better! The word is that Tarantino will only screen 35mm prints there, and that’s fine, but I sure hope he doesn’t lean as heavily on his own work as it appears he might!

Out of Print itself is not a great documentary – it’s poorly organized, chatty and repetitive! It’s also a sterling example of preaching to the choir, which I don’t mind so much! There are some nice images – at least some of it appears to have been shot on 35, which is grand – and it makes an excellent case for preserving that format! So as a call to arms it’s not bad at all! It also has a nice parade of New Bev regulars, and some good stories! I’m not sure how I’d feel about the movie without knowing the backstory, which certainly gives it an extra dimension! Anyway, you can watch it yourself and see what you think, and then go out to your local independent cinema or rep house and see a movie, ha ha! I give Out of Print two golden Gulager plaques!

Burl reviews Jaws of Death! (1977)

Blub blub, hello, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m here to review a movie about terrifying underwater killers of death, one of the many pictures that swirled about in the wake of the mighty Jaws! The best of these by common agreement was Piranha, though ha ha, a stubborn minority will champion Tentacles! At any rate, this one is about orcas – but it’s not Orca, ha ha, it’s Jaws of Death!

And it’s probably not even the Jaws of Death you’re thinking of! That one was a most studious impersonation of the Spielberg picture, whereas this one only probably got made because of it! Otherwise it’s got absolutely nothing in common with Jaws except the presence of huge, toothy marine creatures and four letters of the title!

Jim and Erich are two young go-getters, very 1970s fellows, who are obsessed with proving their theories about the killer whale! Their field experiments seem to consist exclusively of playing synthesized whale cries from a keyboard sampler and out through underwater speakers! They meet up with another research party led by the avuncular slaphead Stan Waterman, a famed submariner, cinematographer and adventurer! The two teams join up and try to find the whales, while periodically a narrator pops out of the bushes, holding a microphone and looking like a member of Team Zissou, to tell us how frustrated everyone is! (The narrator, by the way, is played by Arthur "Monster on the Campus" Franz!)

Then there’s a climax: The whales appear and Jim kayaks out to them; but a mini-sub spooks the mammals and Jim is capsized! Will the mini-sub reach him in time? No, he flounders around in the chilly water and sinks out of sight! It looks like Jim’s a goner – but wait, a killer whale surfaces beneath him and guides the dazed researcher back to his craft! No, far from delivering death at any point in the movie, all these creatures do is save a life! So those of you hoping for a killer killer whale movie will have to go crawling back to Mr. Dino de Laurentiis, just like you always do! Ha ha!

Some would say that not much happens in this movie, and to those people I can only echo the hilariously Zen sea captain, who only appears in one scene and counsels “Patience, patience!” Ha ha, the fellows in this movie do plenty! Jim and Erich visit Stan’s boat, then later Stan visits Jim and Erich’s boat! They talk about how exciting it would be to see some orcas! They wrestle octopi quite a lot! They torment giant sea stars and chase fish around either by swimming after them or chasing them in the mini-sub!

It’s nicely photographed by James “The Wild Life” Glennon, and I really liked the horror movie score they used to try making us feel some kind of suspense about the mellow goings-on! This is one of those movies like Malibu Beach, where there’s no discernable narrative motion, and you just sit back and watch people do things and talk about doing them! But unlike Malibu Beach there’s an absolute dearth of ladies – you'll find more pulchritude in The Thing, ha ha!

I enjoyed this picture, and even though it never convinces as a documentary, which I think it’s pretending to be, it’s actually something better, some sort of mutant hybrid picture like that movie Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot! I give Jaws of Death two and a half forehead wrinkles out of a possible ten million on Stan Waterman’s brow alone!