Burl reviews Color Out of Space! (2019)

 

Good day goldenrods, it’s Burl, here to review some of the latest craziness! Now when I was a younger film enthusiast, one of the more interesting names circling around the cucumber patch was Richard Stanley, the behatted eccentric who made Hardware and Dust Devil! After that, and following a quickly-curtailed but legendary attempt to direct The Island of Doctor Moreau, it seemed that he simply became too strange for the silver screen, and we all feared he’d been consigned to the dust bin of film history for ever and ever! Thankfully, however, that is not the case - in the last few years he began making genial appearances in documentaries and podcasts and other such stuff, and then finally made a new movie, an adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft story Color Out of Space!

I know what you’re saying! “Ha ha, Burl, I’ve already seen the Ovidio J. Assonitis adaptation from 1987, The Curse, featuring TV’s Sheriff Lobo in a starring role! Do I really need to see this one?” My answer to that is yes, because the ways in which this version is superior to its predecessor can hardly be counted! The 1987 version is, frankly, chock full of assonitis, and while this can sometimes be a good thing, as it is with Tentacles or The Visitor, in the case of The Curse it did old Howard Phillip Lovecraft no especial favours, ha ha!

Believe it or not, the story this time is set on a family alpaca farm! Yes I said alpacas! And in the family we have dad and chief alpaca enthusiast Nathan, played by Nicolas Cage from Con Air; Theresa, a stock broker of some kind, who comes in the shape of Joely Richardson from Event Horizon; and three kids, a teenage boy and girl, and little Jack, whose spectacles give him that Billingsley look but also mark him as doomed! Hippie squatter Ezra, who turns out to be none other than Tommy Chong from After Hours, is also on hand, as well as a newly arrived hydrologist conducting some kind of research survey! The hydrologist is the audience stand in, the most normal character, and we're grateful to have him!

Well, another new arrival on the farm is a meteorite that carries with it an eerie magenta: the color referred to by the title! Ha ha! Then everything goes buggy: bizarre flowers grow, the alpacas turn odd, mom cuts off her fingers, the well glows and seems to make friends with the little boy, and dad, who was always weird since he’s played by Nicolas Cage, only gets weirder! Much of what happens next owes a great debt to John Carpenter’s The Thing, but then again, The Thing owes a great debt to Lovecraft!

All of this is deeply unpleasant for this poor family of oddballs, and by the last reel the movie weaves together an uncanny atmosphere of strange upset in true Lovecraft style! I found it effective, particularly because I watched it with my own family projected onto the curtains by a powerful 4K projector! Ha ha, I wonder what passers-by outside the house must have thought during some of the stranger and more fuchsia-tinted scenes!

Of course the movie made me think about other Lovecraft adaptations, principally the Stuart Gordon pictures! Re-Animator will always be a personal favourite of mine, but Color Out of Space gives a visual tip o’ the cap more to From Beyond, which also used the pink and purple spectrum to good effect! How this new picture compares with Dagon is unknown to me, since I have not yet seen Dagon! Ha ha, I will soon though, seeing as how it’s sitting in my VHS basement just waiting for me, beckoning come-hither with its pseudopods!

Anyway, there was a lot that could have gone wrong in bringing this picture to the screen, and it’s just so delightful to find that very few of them did! Stanley’s spiritual sensibility fits the material well, and in technical terms the picture accomplishes just exactly what it needs to! I think they really pulled something off here, and I happily award Color Out of Space three alpacas!

Burl reviews Tampopo! (1985)

 

Noodle-slurpers, hello, it’s Burl! Ha ha, when I was a younger man, working in a video store in the late 80s and early 90s, there were certain movies of which I was aware, and which I knew were supposed to be good, but which were so ubiquitously on the shelves that they became a sort of wallpaper, and I never watched them! Many of these were the sort of 80s international or independent popular favourites that would have played in art houses to sweet acclaim - ha ha, I guess something like My Dinner With André or maybe Babette’s Feast would be other examples of this sort of movie! But the one I’m talking about today is quite simply Tampopo!

Well, I recently caught up with it, and while I’d always known is was a quirky film that mixed together genres the way its characters mix together broth, I wasn’t aware of just how eccentric and culturally specific it was! I found these elements quite delightful, and at times the episodic surreality of the thing reminded me a bit of something like Holy Motors!

And like Holy Motors, this is a movie that’s highly aware it’s a movie! Ha ha! It begins in a cinema, with a white-suited gangster type, played by Kôji Yakusho from such great Kiyoshi Kurosawa pictures as Cure and Charisma, who upbraids fellow patrons for eating noisy chips, and then discovers and addresses the camera to issue a similar admonishment and to talk about the autobiographical “movie” one sees of one’s life at the moment of death! Then the story proper begins: two truck drivers, one an older, taciturn cowboy Goro, played by Tsutomu Yamazaki, known for his appearances in such Kurosawa pictures as High and Low, the other a younger fellow in white called Gun, essayed by none other than Ken Watanabe from Godzilla, stop for ramen in a little restaurant run by a widow named Tampopo, played by Nobuko Miyamoto, the Taxing Woman herself!

But Tampopo’s ramen is unsatisfactory, and so Goro and Gun embark on a quest to help the flustered woman perfect her cooking and turn her struggling business into an all-time blockbuster of a noodle shop! As in The Magnificent Seven, or, more properly, The Seven Samurai, they gather together a group of experts, all men, to help not just with the ramen recipe but with renovating the shop and refining every detail of Tampopo’s hospitality strategy! Meanwhile Goro and Tampopo seem destined from the beginning to be together, but their budding romance is remarkably tentative!

Well, that’s the main tree trunk of the plot, but branching off it regularly throughout the picture are food-centric vignettes, sometimes involving the gangster in white, at other times featuring total strangers: a group of executives scandalized by their junior’s independence, for instance, or an old lady with pinchyfingers gone a-marketing! Some of these are moral tales, others fables, and sometimes they’re just filmed jokes in the manner of If You Don’t Stop It…. You’ll Go Blind!!! I must say I particularly liked a digression involving a gang of hobo gastronomes, and I think you’ll like that bit of the movie too!

With the exception of a scene showing the slaughter of a turtle, which I most certainly didn’t like, it’s mostly a very delightful a study of kindness and generosity between humans! But it has some sharp edges too, along with punchfights, low-key pictorial beauty, and a touch of bohankie too, making it in sum a good, heady brew of noodles and broth! The attention paid to detail, and the gorgeousness of the comestibles on view add still further to the pleasures of the whole! Ha ha, it’s an invigorating filmic experience, and I give Tampopo three shared egg yolks!

Burl reviews The Ninth Configuration! (1979)

Ha ha and mop dogs, it’s Burl, here to review a truly unusual picture! Yes, it’s William Peter Blatty’s The Ninth Configuration, and it’s truly one of those movies that you ponder on - as the name of that movie podcast goes, How Did This Get Made?

Of course, the glib answer to that question is: The Exorcist! Even though he wasn’t the director, Blatty got himself some credit in the Hollywood bank with that one; or maybe the executives got confused because his name also was William! At any rate, six or so years after the big devil hit, he got to take a terrific all-dude cast to Hungary or somewhere, put them in a castle and get them to act all crazy! And then he called the result The Ninth Configuration, or sometimes Twinkle, Twinkle ‘Killer’ Kane! Ha ha!

Though later Blatty would make the strangely terrific Exorcist III, this was his first adventure behind the camera! He had the presence of mind to hire the great cinematographer Gerry Fisher, a favourite of mine (he also shot Malpertuis, which this movie resembles in some ways), but the Blattster was not what I would call an accomplished and elegant filmmaker! The picture comes off a bit stagy, which is perhaps not a surprise as much screen time is given over to one character’s attempt to adapt Shakespeare’s plays for dogs!

There’s not so much a plot as there is a bunch of fine actors doing crazy things and riffing on the usual teleological arguments for the existence of God! The setting is a castle, ostensibly in the Pacific Northwest, repurposed as a treatment center for servicemen who’ve gone bats, or possibly are only pretending to have gone bats! New psychologist Colonel Hudson Kane, played by Stacy Keach from Escape From L.A., arrives on the scene, and seems to fit in all too well with the inmates! Scott Wilson from Blue City and Malone plays Cutshaw, an astronaut who panicked during the countdown (he’s the astronaut Regan warned in The Exorcist, ha ha!); Jason Miller hams it up as the Shakespeare-for-canines point man, with Joe Spinell from The First Deadly Sin helping him out; Moses Gunn wears a Superman outfit and George Di Cenzo tries to walk through walls; Robert Loggia from Innocent Blood and Alejandro Rey from Mr. Majestyk play other patients; Ed Flanders from ‘Salem’s Lot is the physician in charge, though he's hard to differentiate from the other patients; Neville Brand from Without Warning and Tom Atkins from Halloween III play some of the guards! Whew! So you can see what I mean about that cast, ha ha!

Of course there’s the question of, first, whether the men are mad or merely pretending to be, or else, like Hamlet, fervently pretending to be in order to stave off true madness; and the old problem of whether the doctor is crazier than the patients is also raised! Ha ha, with Keach’s intensely somnolent performance, how could it not be! But even with these colourful characters and pressing problems, the grey cloud and constant rain outside this castle, and the clammy atmosphere within, become oppressive, and we’re grateful for a change of location in the third act! Yes, this new location is a biker bar, where first Cutshaw and then Kane are turned into living beach balls, and beaten and humiliated by a gang led by Stryker himself, Steve Sandor, and also Richard Lynch from The Premonition, both of them dolled up in eyeliner for some reason! But when Kane reveals his true nature, there comes one of the most cathartic bar fights ever committed to film, and the eyeliner gang is left lying in puddles of blood and beer! Ha ha!

As teenagers my friends and I were very much into this movie, ha ha! We had not one but two book versions of it, one called The Ninth Configuration and the other Twinkle, Twinkle ‘Killer’ Kane, which we traded around and quoted lines from! We were not so much into the theological arguments made throughout the picture and its literary companions, which seemed very Intro Philosophy even then! No, I think the appeal came more from how funny it all was! This was so at odds with what we expected from the guy who wrote The Exorcist that it seemed a string of delightful surprises from beginning to end!

It seems less so now, though it’s still frequently funny! Blatty’s dedicated Catholicism now feels overwrought, and Cutshaw, the chief doubter in the company, a little more like a straw man than he used to! I still feel fondly toward this unique motion picture, because where else are you going to see something like this! Ha ha, it’s a true meli-melo, and I’m going to give The Ninth Configuration two and a half moplike dogs!

Burl reviews The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai! (1984)

Burl here, and wherever that is, here I am! In media res has come to refer to scenes that begin while already in progress, like in the middle of a fight or some such! Really it means being thrown into the middle of an entire story, a thing few movies attempt! One picture that does, and which I’ve always admired for doing so with such absolute commitment, is The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8^th Dimension!

Despite this being his first adventure in any form, Buckaroo (played by Peter Weller, whose face we know so well from Robocop) is already an established hero of comic books, a hitmaking musician, a cutting-edge brain surgeon, a nuclear physicist, and the leader of a rag-tag bunch of busriders, The Hong Kong Cavaliers! He has a worldwide following of fans called the Blue Blaze Irregulars, ready to swing into action at a moment’s notice; a dead wife; and a mortal enemy called Hanoi Shan!

But all of this is background, and has little to do directly with the story, ha ha! And I love it! I love that someone was willing to spend a lot of money on a picture that almost dares you to understand it, and so esteems the intelligence of summer sci-fi action movie audiences! I think the set decoration is nonpareil, and the layered dialogue, recalling Altman at times, keeps the picture interesting over multiple viewings!

Innovative things are often said to be ahead of their time, but I think that phenomenon is much less common than is supposed! I think Ulysses was ahead of its time, and the Nude Descending the Staircase, and the Velvet Underground, but, ha ha, not a whole heck of a lot beyond that! I think Buckaroo Banzai fits this category; and the proof is not just that it suffered a serious blanketing at the box office and has now become a beloved cult item, but that so many movies have since paid fealty to it! From The Life Aquatic to Thor: Ragnarock, the Buckaroo acolyte is recognizable by the presence of Jeff Goldblum in the cast! Ha ha!

And speaking of cast, this picture’s got a dandy one! Weller and Goldblum are backed up in the Cavaliers by the likes of Clancy Brown (from Highlander) and Lewis Smith (from Django Unchained) and Pepe Serna (from Fandango), and the nasty Red Lectroids who serve as antagonists include in their number John Lithgow, who leads them, and Christopher Lloyd, Vincent Schiavelli, Dan Hedaya and the like! All these latter guys are named John, ha ha, which is a detail I’ve always treasured!

You’ll notice I haven’t said much about the plot of the picture, and that’s because there’s not a lot of plot there to speak much about! I mean, there’s a plot, but somehow it’s the least important, least interesting thing about the movie! It’s not a picture for everybody, but those who like it, like it a lot! Ha ha, I give The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8^th Dimension three and a half Small Berries!

Burl reviews Tapeheads! (1989)

Ha ha and beta tapes, it’s Burl, here to review one of the lesser-known comedies of the 1980s! Yes, it’s Tapeheads, which, while probably no one’s favourite movie, has enough charm and weirdness to make it well worth a look! And I’ll admit right here at the outset that I may be slightly biased in its favour, since it’s about two guys who decide to start up a rock video business together, and I along with a friend of mine once started up the very same sort of business! Who knows, ha ha, maybe you’ve seen some of our work!

John Cusack from Grandview U.S.A. and Tim Robbins, well known from Fraternity Vacation, star as Ivan and Josh, two lifelong chums who are dissatisfied with their lot and decide to follow their dreams! Josh is a slightly nerdy tech wizard and Ivan is the would-be sharpie with the slicked back hair and tiny moustache; and when they lose their jobs as security guards they are free to start a business called Video Aces and set up shop in a huge downtown warehouse, which they share with a cute-as-a-button multimedia artist whose father turns out to be a secretly kinky Republican senator played by the great Clu Gulager from A Nightmare on Elm Street 2!

After misadventures with a Swedish boy band and the creative triumph of an impossibly fancy chicken-and-waffle commercial, Josh and Ivan stumble into success by mixing up funeral footage for a suddenly deceased heavy metal band they’ve attempted to make a video for, which makes them look like prescient artistic geniuses! There are some plot mechanics going on in the background involving Susan Tyrrell from Night Warning and a stolen video tape with incriminating evidence of Gulager playing his bo-peep games, which is passed off to the unsuspecting Video Aces! Naturally hit men go after them, and Josh and Ivan, believing them to be a musical act called the Hit Men, make a video for the killers too! All this time our characters move toward their real dream, which is to make a video for a superannuated soul act they revere called the Swanky Modes!

Mixing the Swanky Modes into the whole thing is what really makes this movie sing, ha ha, in both a figurative and a very real sense! They’re a Sam and Dave-type duet, charmingly played by Sam Moore and Junior Walker, and Ivan and Josh’s veneration for them hits just the right note of naïve hipness! As fictional movie bands go, they’re among the best, despite the 80s production quality of their numbers! Plus there’s all sorts of other terrific music in the picture, and appearances from all sorts of L.A. music scenesters! Ha ha, you don’t get to see Stiv Bators act very often, but he’s in here!

So is Doug McClure from Humanoids from the Deep, by the way! He joins Gulager and Tyrrell in the gallery of great faces on view throughout this enjoyable trifle! Never mind that it’s not very realistic about how music videos are made! It would be pretty boring if it was, ha ha! And sure, the storytelling is sometimes lazy, and there’s an underlying clubbishness about it all! But it has some appealing dashes of weirdness, an 80s template plot, some sharp lines, and a bright 80s look from cinematographer Bojan "Pumpkinhead" Bazelli! Most importantly the love for music in this picture is real, and because I share it, I’m happy to give Tapeheads three pancakes with little squares on ‘em!

Burl reviews Echo Park! (1985)

Welcome, friends, welcome to my neighbourhood! Yes, it’s Burl, here to review a picture that fits into a few subgenres! Ha ha, it’s called Echo Park, and, set as it is in that patch of Los Angeles by the same name, it’s one of those movies named for and defined by the neighbourhood, or district, or borough, in which their action takes place! I suppose Wicker Park, A Bronx Tale, City Island and many others would fit into this loose category!

Another subgenre into which Echo Park fits is the Eccentric Dreamer movie! UFOria is one of those pictures, and Melvin and Howard is another! The director of this movie, Robert Dornhelm, made another Eccentric Dreamer picture too, Cold Feet, starring my buddy Tom Waits! Ha ha, I’ll have to review that one sometime!

The story concentrates on three properly eccentric inhabitants of Echo Park, which back in the mid-80s was a little more downmarket than it is now, ha ha! Susan Dey, the famous TV law-lady, is the single mother who works in a bar while dreaming of being a waitress! Tom Hulce, who was in Slam Dance (a combination Eccentric Dreamer film and crime picture, also emphatically set in L.A.), is the pizza man who delivers his pies in a car shaped like a neon piece of pizza, but dreams of being a songwriter, and of entering into a romantic relationship with Dey! And Michael Bowen from The Wild Life plays the pongid bodybuilder who lives in the other part of the house, an Austrian émigré who dreams of becoming the next Arnold and who quickly does enter into a relationship with Dey!

And these three interact in various ways, surrounded by friends and employers, and go through a series of small, episodic adventures! Dey becomes a singing strip-o-grammer, ha ha, and Hulce is punched on by bikers! Dey’s son changes his name from Henry to Hank, and Bowen plays a Viking in a deodorant commercial He’s later thrown out of the German embassy for trying too hard to meet his idol, Schwarzenegger! Hulce’s boss, played by the great fartiste Timothy Carey, from Beach Blanket Bingo and The Long Ride Home, dispenses pizza-based wisdom! A Burt Reynolds lookalike wanders around! And then everyone goes to the beach!

The supporting cast features plenty of Groundlings, like John Paragon in the role of Hugo, and Cassandra Peterson from Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold! Ha ha, it’s a wonder Pee Wee doesn’t show up! Cheech Marin from Fatal Beauty makes a friendly appearance too, and gets the last word in a scene where Bowen goes nuts and can only be restrained by other bodybuilders! The saddest scene comes when Hulce, delivering pizza to a recording studio, is encouraged by the producers and musicians there to expand on one of his songs that he’s been absently singing, but he suffers nerves, and flees!

It’s a nice, enjoyable movie, with a fairly realistic indie-picture magic realism and a peculiarly 80s indie vibe! The acting is pretty good, and it looks very nice and very L.A. and very 80s, but it suffers at times from contrived situations, sitcom logic, and Bowen’s occasionally shaky Austrian accent! (Why couldn’t they find an Austrian to play the part? It was an Austrian production, after all!) It all ends somewhat inconclusively, which I like, but the version I watched included an extended ending in which the main cast all stand on top of an Austrian mountain, sniff eidelweiss and do handstands! This did not provide clarity, ha ha, but it did provide scenery! And I suppose it also satisfied the Austrian funding bodies who helped finance the picture!

Anyway, I give Echo Park two and a half bum-cakes! Ha ha! You won’t want to miss that bum-cake!

Burl reviews The Dead Don't Die! (2019)

Everyone dial Z for zombie and join me, Burl, in a little chat about Jim Jarmusch’s latest picture, The Dead Don’t Die! Yes, that’s right, Jim Jarmusch made a zombie movie, ha ha, but in a way you might say that, with their slow paces and barbiturated acting, all his movies have been zombie movies! By the end of this picture, I was convinced that it was a vehicle for Jarmusch to make this very same comment about his work!

Somehow it still seems a novelty for Jarmusch to be making such an unadulterated genre picture, but he’s been doing it for quite a while now! Westerns with Dead Man, samurai movies with Ghost Dog, vampire pictures with Only Lovers Left Alive - ha ha, many’s the time Jarmusch has taken an established form and bent it into his own shape! But the Jarmusch pictures I like best, Down By Law and Mystery Train, are their own thing, and maybe that explains why I wasn’t so much taken with The Dead Don’t Die!

He’s never made a movie quite so arch as this one, and I’m afraid that’s not meant as a compliment! The story - well, not story, but more a sort of portrait - is of a small town overwhelmed by zombies which are presumably part of a worldwide plague unleashed by the earth having been shaken off its axis by polar fracking! Bill Murray, who is well-known from Meatballs, and previously dealt with the undead in Ghostbusters and Zombieland, is the low-key town cop, and his deputies include Adam Driver from Frances Ha and Inside Llewyn Davis, and Chloë Sevigny from Gummo! They drive around the town as things get stranger and the zombies more plentiful, and Sevigny is the only one who reacts at all realistically, and she therefore seems quite out of place in this town and more especially on this police force!

As all this happens, the picture’s theme song, a country tune from Sturgill Simpson, plays as relentlessly as “You Put A Spell On Me” did in Stranger than Paradise! Simpson himself is discussed so much that I thought he was going to somehow turn out to be responsible for the whole disaster! Meanwhile my pal Tom Waits, well known from Wolfen, lurks in the woods; otherworldly town coroner Tilda Swinton, from The Grand Budapest Hotel, gives zombie heads the chop with her katana; and Danny Glover plays the poor soul who finds a couple of ladies who’ve been gruesomely eaten to death by Iggy Pop and Sara Driver! Meanwhile Steve Buscemi plays a racist, boneheaded redneck, and for his sins catches quite a biting!

Something about the picture seemed comfortably familiar as it went on in its rambling, shambling, small-town way, with its homely non-characters and chonky mise-en-scene; and finally it hit me: I was watching nothing more or less than a big-budget Bill Rebane picture, or an unusually star-studded Don Dohler joint! It was Invasion From Inner Earth or Fiend writ large and played by pros, ha ha! And once I made this observation, I began enjoying the picture a lot more!

It’s true that the movie works a little too hard at irony and not at all at horror, and that Jarmusch appears to have no interest in scaring people and no discernable ability to either! There’s some bloody stuff though, and the director seems to have had fun with some of the gore gags, which is nice; but the head-choppings, with their spumes of dust released from the zombie bodies, get a mite repetitive! On the other hand, RZA from Due Date shows up at a comic shop to drop a bit of wisdom, something like “The world is perfect, pay attention to the details!” At that moment I noticed some of the background set dressing included a small poster for that greatest of pictures, The Thing! And I realized that RZA was correct, and that this was the best way to approach the movie itself! That revelation, too, led to greater enjoyment!

And all this leads me to my final point, one I hinted at in the first paragraph: while it’s obvious that Jarmusch made this picture more because he could than because he wanted to, and true too that his satire is mostly broad and shopworn, sold in bulk at the Monroeville Mall some forty years ago, and that his fourth wall-breaking is lame, he didn’t waste the opportunity for a little sharp self-criticism! I mean, after all, though almost everyone else turns, we never get to see Murray or Driver in zombiefied form, and this I believe is because Jarmusch was worried we might think we’d accidentally started watching Broken Flowers or Paterson instead of The Dead Don’t Die! Jarmusch is no dummy; he knows the score! Ha ha! So while this is very much Jarmusch Lite, a half-baked comic book adaptation of his usual fare, I’m still going to give it two and a half Cleveland hipsters, which is how many there are by the end of the picture! Ha ha!

Burl reviews White of the Eye! (1987)

Well howdee and hucklebucks, it’s Burl, here with a movie set in America’s great Southwest! The picture is White of the Eye, and it’s a movie I remember seeing when it was newly out on video, and thinking was very stylish indeed; but I was never quite sure if I really liked it much! Well, looking at it again, as I did just last night, I find a movie that’s occasionally very silly, but is strange and intense and certainly very watchable!

We’re in the sunbleached suburbs of Tucson, where bored, wealthy wives wave their petals back and forth like desert flowers, and a madman killer, whom we see only as a pair of legs and a huge eyeball, is picking them off in ritualistic murders that hearken back to Manhunter! (Ha ha, this movie was shot before the Michael Mann picture came out, so I’m certainly not calling copycat!)

In the meanwhile we get deep into the story of Paul and Joan White, played respctively by David Keith from Firestarter and The Great Santini and Cathy Moriarty from Matinee and Raging Bull! Paul builds and installs audio equipment (Ha ha, I wonder if his business card reads “Paul White, Audio Consultant!”), and, as a series of grainy flashbacks tell us, he and Joan met when Joan and her disco-loving boyfriend (played by Alan Rosenberg from Stewardess School and Miracle Mile) pass through town on their way from New York to Los Angeles!

Well, the police, led by dogged inspector Art Evans – a familiar face from Fright Night and Die Hard 2 and Class Reunion and Into the Night – start moving in on Paul, believing him to be the killer due to his truck tires, which are so much talked about in the pictures that eventually characters are begging other characters to stop talking about the tires already! Ha ha! And I’m going to drop a spoiler here, so if you don’t want to know the movie’s twist, best stop reading! But it’s a twist so expected that, for me, it hardly even counts as one! (Though that may just have been one of my rare moments of plotguessing prescience!)

Anyway, the upshot is that Paul, despite apparently in possession of a perfect alibi due to his supposed affair with lusty customer Alberta “The Keep” Watson, is in fact the madman killer! The whole last act, where he paints his mouth red and, as his little daughter says, puts on a bunch of hot dogs (ha ha, it’s actually dynamite) and chases his terrified wife around, is pretty crazy, and I would say that David Keith, despite being no Keith David, and despite being the worst actor in Firestarter by a long chalk (and that’s saying something), does a pretty good job being Mr. Loonytunes!

The whole crazy thing was directed by Donald Cammell, a fascinating, tragic figure who only got to make four movies in his whole career, or maybe three and a half because he co-directed Performance; or maybe even just two and a half because he took his name off the last one, Wild Side; and then killed himself about ten years ago! Of course we’ve all seen Demon Seed, and that’s a pretty good picture in its way, but so is this one! It gets goofy, like when Paul uses his mystical moan to determine where the speakers should go in a room, but mostly it’s a strangely realistic portrayal of an extremely unrealistic situation! All the acting is good, and I particularly liked Marc Hayashi, from Chan Is Missing and Angel, in the role of an Asian good-old-boy deputy! A very likeable character, ha ha! In fact all the cops are strangely likeable in this picture!

It looks great and pulls off some marvelous, harrowing sequences, but on the other hand I found the musical score intrusive and unappealing, and there were some slow and repetitive bits! On the whole it felt like a fancypants version of The Ghost Dance! So, not quite a masterpiece, but a very unusual work of 1980s horror! I’ll give White of the Eye two and a half piledrivers!

Burl reviews Endangered Species! (1982)

Alerting you from ranch country, it’s Burl, here with a review of that very oddball Alan Rudolph picture about cattle mutilations, Endangered Species! Now, Alan Rudolph, ha ha, there’s a director with a curious career! He’s a Robert Altman acolyte: this is well known, and pictures like Welcome to L.A., Choose Me, Trouble in Mind, The Moderns and Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle – the “real” Alan Rudolph movies – all attest to it! Then there are the director-for-hire movies he made, like Songwriter, Made in Heaven and Mortal Thoughts, the little romantic-comedy-genre movies like Love at Large and Afterglow; and he also has a number of even more genre-y pictures to his credit, like Barn of the Naked Dead, Premonition, and this one!

So I admire Rudolph for mostly doing what he wants, or else trying weird things that he must have known would be commercially dead in the water! It’s hard to know what attracted him to this story in particular, but it’s an interesting one because, despite the picture being a product of the Reagan era, it has a defiantly 70s sensibility: anti-authoritarianism (despite its cop heroes), paranoia, unconventional storytelling methods, a refusal to engage with thriller material in the expected fashion! All of this seems to me admirable, but nevertheless, ha ha, the movie doesn’t quite pull it off!

There are two stories happening in parallel through the first act! We have an abrasive, alcoholic New York cop played by Robert Urich from Turk 182, and his teenage daughter, decamping from the big city and heading west, their relationship a minefield of fractiousness and resentment! They’re pulling a big camper-trailer, but initial hopes that this will be a Winnebago Movie are ultimately dashed, as I don’t recall that we ever even see the thing’s interior!

Meanwhile, new sheriff JoBeth Williams, well-known from Poltergeist II, has her hands full with moocow mutilations! Her initial suspicion, that the dead beeves are the work of coyotes, is closer to the truth than she could possibly know, ha ha! Hoyt Axton, the great songwriter who was in Gremlins, plays a local big wheel who seems to know more than he’s telling! This is borne out when, later in the movie, he has a meeting with the big bad guy, a quasi military-man played by Peter Coyote, who has flown in by whispercopter, and still later when a fatal toothbrushing incident leads to Hoyt’s belly exploding in blood and sausages! Ha ha, graphic!

Paul Dooley from Last Rites appears as a small-town crusading newspaperman (one of my favourite archetypes, I must admit!), and the story also features Harry Carey Jr. from UFOria and Exorcist III as the local veterinarian whose nosebleeds are getting worse; Dan Hedaya from Commando and Wise Guys as the chief cowsnatcher, and Gaillard Sartain from All of Me as The Mayor! It’s a pretty solid cast! We even get the first-ever film appearance from Bill Mosely, whom we would later see in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre part 2, The Blob and The First Power!

All this bovine mystery and bellybusting is set to a musical score that sounds borrowed from a Don Dohler movie, and seems intent on lending the proceedings a cartoonish, B-movie aspect! Despite this, the revelations, when they come and such as they are, have a generally plausible feel! Scenes are short, almost to the point of feeling cut away from a little prematurely! On the other hand, Urich’s unpleasant personality, his alcoholism and his desultory romance with the sheriff are all dwelt upon a little too much!

So it’s a weird and flawed film, but I’m glad I gave it a look! It’s full of treats! For example, the actress who plays Urich’s daughter, despite being much too old for the part, holds an enormous appeal! She should have appeared in more movies if you ask me! Anyway, Endangered Species has been a movie I’ve long been curious about, and now that my curiosity has been satisfied, I give it two and a half cowcatching contraptions!

Burl reviews Comfort and Joy! (1984)

Aye, it’s Burl, ha ha! It's a new year, but I have a few seasonal holdovers to report on yet! I’ll tell you, I’ve spent some time in Scotland, and I had a marvelous time there! It’s a thoroughly charming country, and while I was there I went on a sort of pilgrimage to some of the locations used in Bill Forsyth’s marvelous picture Local Hero! Ha ha, it was a terrific little amble, magical and amazingly scenic!

So Local Hero is a favourite of long standing, but until the other night I’d never seen Forsyth’s follow-up, a semi-Christmas picture called Comfort and Joy! I ignored it back when I had every opportunity to see it on VHS, and then later it proved difficult to find! But if you beachcomb the Internet for long enough, these things will eventually wash up, and that was the case with this picture! It’s another one of those it-happens-to-be-Christmas movies, and you know how much I like to watch those, ha ha!

Our main character is a morning radio host, of the sort revered by pensioners, called Alan ‘Dickie’ Bird, and he’s not having a very pleasant holiday season! His ladyfriend, a dedicated kleptomaniac, is leaving him and taking with her all the trinkets and things she’s pilfered over the years! And then, one day not long after, Dickie catches sight of a lovely lady in an ice cream van, and, after purchasing his cone, bears witness to a terrible act of vandalism when masked men beat the truck with bars!

Well, this arouses his journalistic instincts, previously thought moribund, and Alan involves himself in what is apparently an internecine war between Glaswegian ice cream interests! The Mr. Bunny crew are the rogues, the interlopers, selling their cream rampantly anywhere in town they please, whereas Mr. McCool is the established frozen treat family! Ha ha! The violence, which is always directed toward things rather than people, escalates, and Alan attempts to broker a peace while simultaneously wooing the pretty lady! But she remains as aloof and exotic as the mermaid in Local Hero, ha ha!

However, Alan’s activities and his coded radio comments lead his listeners, friends and employers to believe he’s gone barmy! Further complications ensue on the road to the gentle and funny conclusion, ha ha, and along the way there are many wry, dry laffs, of the sort ol’ Burl appreciates very much! The gags unfold at their own pace, almost in the spirit of Jacques Tati, and most of them hit home! There are some groaners of course, and some that fall pancakewise, and some annoyances here and there too, like why Alan spends even a second pining for, not to mention erotically dreaming about, his horrible girlfriend once she’s gone! (Ha ha, she is pretty though, so I’ll grant him the erotic dreams!)

I was glad to finally track this picture down, or rather, in the manner of the internet, have it wash up on shore right to me; and if it sticks around I could see it becoming a seasonal staple for me! It was highly enjoyable and, like Summer Night Fever, it made me feel GOOD just to watch it! Ha ha, and what more could you ask for? I give Comfort and Joy three and a half creamed BMWs, or, as they're better known, Creamers! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Jungle Heat! (1983)

The jungle ferns slowly part, and peering through… it’s Burl! Ha ha, hope I didn’t scare you! Today I thought I might review a jungle movie for you! It’s generally known by the highly generic title of Jungle Heat, which makes it sound like one of those flying bamboo sliver pictures like P.O.W.: The Escape or something!

But no, it’s a weird little genre mashup, evidently modeled on The African Queen, that was originally called Dance of the Dwarves – a much better title if you ask me, even if it’s complete nonsense! Ha ha! For there are no terpsichorean homunculi in the picture, just an uptight lady, a dipsomaniacal helicopter pilot, a wandering witch doctor and a bunch of lizard people! Ha ha! That makes it sound like a pretty exciting movie, doesn’t it! With those ingredients, you must be saying to yourself, ha ha, how could it fail!

Well, you know I don’t like to be overly critical in my little reviews, ha ha, but I do have to say that the picture does not live up to the promise of its components! The beginning augurs well, however, or appears to: a man escapes from prison and runs into the jungle, but suffers the indignity of having his face ripped off! Ha ha! Then we meet the uptight lady scientist, played by Deborah Raffin from The Sentinel, as she meets up with the sweaty, unshorn helicopter pilot, a role essayed by a sweaty, unshorn Peter “Spasms” Fonda!

John Amos from Die Hard 2 pops in now and again as a random witch doctor, but the overwhelming bulk of the picture is scene after scene of the two main characters bickering! It’s true that Fonda is a truly heroic souse, always drinking straight from his beloved square-shaped booze bottles like Uncle Red in Silver Bullet! But it’s equally true that the lady doctor is an intolerable scold! In short, spending so much time with these people is not enjoyable, and it’s a great relief when the lizard people finally show up!

Ha ha, but before that, we have a scene in which the doc shoots all of Fonda’s bottles so he can drink no longer! Fonda’s enforced program of sobriety comes to a climax when he literally kicks the bottle, if you can believe that! On top of this, the movie features more talk of Mazola cooking oil than might be expected from what is ostensibly an action/comedy/romance/horror picture! Even some of the characters get tired of the constant Mazola talk! “I spit on your mother’s Mazola! Ptoo!” says one exasperated bandito!

The creatures, when they appear, look like miniature Godzillas running around, or some humanoids from the deep that wandered off course! It’s mostly too murky to tell, but I think that the special makeup effects were not too bad, and it’s unfortunate that they were so blandly presented! On the up side, the bickering is not performed badly by Raffin and Fonda, and there are some amusing moments scattered throughout!

Too bad about the longueurs, ha ha! Still, I’m feeling generous, maybe because I have a soft spot for multi-genre movies like this! (Raw Force is another such picture, in case you’re interested!) I’m going to give Jungle Heat one and a half cans of Mazola!

Burl reviews Inherent Vice! (2014)

Hi, Burl here to tell you about a mistake I made! “Ha ha, but Burl," I hear you saying, "I thought you were infallible!”  No, Burl makes mistakes, rest assured, and one I made recently was reading Inherent Vice just before seeing it! I think to properly appreciate the movie, I should have read the book a half-decade ago, when it came out, and watched the movie with only a fuzzy recollection of the story, and therefore a good deal of confusion on the plot points and dialogue, as clearly intended by the filmmaker!

Instead, owing to my very recent read of the book, I had a fairly good idea what was going on at any given time, and my viewing, I believe, was thereby compromised! This does not mean I didn’t enjoy the picture, however! It was nearly as amusing and entertaining as I’d hoped it would be, with nearly the immersive period quality and pictorial brilliance I’d, I felt reasonably, expected! You’ll notice the qualifiers! I assume some raggedy edges were left by design, but some frayed fringes seemed, well, accidental!

It’s a shaggy-detective story, which of course is a subgenre I like! From The Long Goodbye and Night Moves, through The Big Fix and up to The Big Lebowski, the peaks of this style are hard to beat, and I’ve mostly avoided the (no doubt copious and profound) valleys! Here, in the newest jewel of the shaggy-detective crown, we have Doc Sportello, hippie shamus, and his plunge into mystery with disappearances and murders swirling about him; and all of it somehow connected to the Golden Fang, which is at once a boat, an international hero*n syndicate and a generalized representation of the baneful forces arrayed against nature’s children!

Joaquin Phoenix plays Doc, and Josh “Goonies” Brolin, in one of the film’s most uproarious performance, essays the role of his cop nemesis, “Bigfoot” Bjornson! Many, many other characters are trotted out through the long running time, including an addled dentist played by Martin Short from ¡ThreeAmigos! and Innerspace; a chronically tractable surf-sax player played by Owen Wilson of Midnight in Paris fame; a construction baron embodied by Eric Roberts from Runaway Train and A Talking Cat?!?; and a receptionist played by Maya Rudolph from The Way Way Back! And unfortunately I knew who all of them were and was able to keep them straight in my mind through the whole picture, which is not as it was meant to be! No, I should have been confused by this kaleidoscope of characters and clues and events, and by this confusion made malleable and porous, and thereby infected with the spirit and atmosphere, and copious doobiesm*ke, of the picture!

Oh well! A few dodgy performances and some clumsy or anachronistic bits of dialogue aside, I enjoyed the movie! It was clearly made on a budget, but they made the most of it, and the period details are pretty well arrayed! It shares with Withnail & I a shocked wistfulness for an era suddenly past, along with a hearty cynicism for the decade just beginning! As the first Thomas Pynchon book to be made into a movie (no, that miniseries V doesn’t count!), Inherent Vice holds up its end of the deal, and it makes me feel groovy to give it three descendents!

Burl reviews Only Lovers Left Alive! (2013)

Bluh bluh, it’s Burl, here to review a vampire picture for you! But yes, you’re right, it’s not quite the usual vampire picture, but a vampire picture made by Jim Jarmusch! And if you’re now making the assumption that the vampires in Only Lovers Left Alive are louche, international sophisticates who consume culture as hungrily as they do blood, you’d be entirely correct! Ha ha!

I have a long and fulsome relationship with Jarmusch films! For example, I saw Mystery Train at a premiere festival screening – the North American if not the world premiere, in fact – and at the end of it, after Jarmusch did a little Q&A, they rolled a piano out onto the stage and Screamin’ jay Hawkins ran out and jumped on top of it, pounding on the keyboard upside down and shooting fireballs from his fingertips! Ha ha, it was great! Another time I saw Year of the Horse at a midnight screening where Jim and, of all people, Henry Silva came out and did a marvelous talk! I’ve seen as many as possible in the movie theatre: Stranger Than Paradise, Dead Man, Ghost Dog and so forth! In short, I’m a fan!

And so along came Only Lovers Left Alive, and it did not disappoint! The picture stars Tilda Swinton, who has of late been populating Wes Anderson films like Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Tom Hiddleston, of The Avengers and Midnight in Paris fame, as two vampires named Adam and Eve, married but living apart, and still very much in love! They don’t put a biting on people, but get their blood from hospitals, and each of them have spent centuries reading, listening to music, learning about science and so forth! The only area of interest they don’t pursue is history, since, ha ha, they’ve lived it!

Eve dwells in Tangiers and hangs out with aging grampire Christopher Marlowe, who really did write Shakespeare’s plays and who is portrayed by that aging old grampire John Hurt! Adam, on the other hand, is a mopey postrocker living in the wildernesses of Detroit; his Renfield is an eager-to-please longhair named Ian, played by Anton Yelschin from Fright Night and Star Trek Into Darkness! We get a sense of their lifestyles and the things they enjoy doing, and after a while Eve journeys to Detroit to visit her hubby! (She books nighttime flights to get there, and the movie ignores the fact that there’s no such thing as a transatlantic flight which takes place entirely at night! But never mind!)

Soon, as foretold by dreams, Eve’s sister-buddy arrives to shake things up! Ha ha, she’s played by Mia “Stoker” Wasikowska like a vampire version of Ian Holm’s daughter from The Sweet Hereafter! A crisis point is arrived at and the two hemogobblers recuse themselves to Tangiers, where more problems await!

But you can forget about all the character and plot stuff I just told you, because really this movie is about what Jim Jarmusch would do if he was a vampire, and more particularly a movie about appreciating cool stuff! They’re really just a pair of superfans, immortal observers of the great cultural tapestry mankind is weaving just (it seems) for them, and which they embellish regularly themselves!

Some of the dialogue and the stuff struck me as rather obvious or hamhanded; but many other times I was pleasantly struck by a flourish or an idea! There’s a marvelous scene in a movie palace that felt almost like a centerpiece or Holy Motors-style entr’acte! The punchline to this scene made me actually wince, for I saw the movie in a cavernous theatre which is, in a few days’ time at this writing, due to close its doors forever! I have a real history with this particular downtown threeplex – a movie of my own premiered there, after all – and will miss it most heartily!

I enjoyed this vampire picture, so different from and yet so indebted to the Hammer vampire pictures of yore! I’ll give Only Lovers Left Alive three faces melting in acid!