Burl reviews Hog Wild! (1980)

 

Like open pipes at midnight, it’s Burl crying vroom vroom vroom! Ha ha, remember the Quebec-shot comedy I watched about the bunch of jerks and their girlfriends who play a lot of pinball and get into an escalating prank war with a motorcycle gang? You’ll probably say “Sure Burl, ha ha, that one was called Pinball Summer!” Well, you’d not be wrong, but that description also snugly fits a picture known as Hog Wild!

It seems a military cadet called Tim, played by an apple-cheeked Michael Biehn from Aliens and The Abyss, gets himself deliberately tossed out so he can go to a regular high school! On his arrival at the new alma mater, he finds the place run by a half-goofy, half-dangerous motorcycle gang called the Rustlers, who are very much in the mode of the Pinball Summer organization, or the Nazi dunderheads from Any Which Way You Can!

The leader of the gang is Bull, played by Tony Rosato from SCTV and The Silent Partner! (Of course he was also in a lot of those bad, weird, middlebrow Canadian comedydramas, like Nothing Personal, Utilities and Improper Channels!) Much like Bobcat Goldthwait’s incoherent screaming character from movies like One Crazy Summer, Bull is unable to speak like a normal person, so his mumblings are interpreted by his loyal factotum Ben, who is well played by Angelo Rizacos from Nightstick! Rizacos does it as well as he possibly can, but this translation routine gets tired well before the picture's end!

And Bull’s lady Angie is played by Bilitis herself, Patti D’Arbanville from Time After Time! When he lays eyebones on her Tim develops an instant crush, and this puts him at odds with Bull and the gang and thus begins the escalating and destructive prank war, which targets not just Tim but his little Archie Comics-like group of pals! Ha ha, at one point the Rustlers somehow manage to hoist Tim’s car up the school flagpole! One of them also cruelly crushes and eats a pet tarantula beloved by one of Tim’s friends, whose response to this outrage is surprisingly sanguine! Of course it all culminates in a race, as is almost always the case with these pictures, and in the last few seconds, as Bull watches his ex-ladyfriend stroll off with the victorious Tim, the movie attempts to engender some sympathy and even a little respect for the mush-mouthed hooligan!

The picture is jam-packed with familiar Canadian faces who also turned up in the contemporaneous Meatballs, like Matt Craven, whom we also know from Till Death Do Us Part and Happy Birthday To Me, playing a claw-handed biker called Chrome; Jack Blum, playing, as he so often did, a glasses nerd; and Keith Knight, who was also in My Bloody Valentine and here plays a portly imbecile named Vern who desperately wants to be a Rustler! There’s also Michael Zelniker, whose presence reinforces the many connections between this picture and Pinball Summer! Karen Stephen and Helene Udy, the girlfriends in Pinball Summer, are in here too, playing smaller background roles!

John Rutter, who was in Between Friends and played the laughing cop in Black Christmas, is also a cop here, but not in this case a laughing one because, ha ha, he’s impotent! Bronwen Mantel from City on Fire plays his frustrated wife, while Sean McCann from Starship Invasions and Tulips is Tim’s military-loving father, who likes to unexpectedly smash his son across the back with a pool cue, just to keep the lad on his toes!

It’s a pre-Porky’s picture, meaning that despite its oinker-themed title, Hog Wild’s antics are mostly free of the leering sexual aspect the teen shenanigan films developed after the runaway success of the Bob Clark pig picture! That gives it a bit of novelty; and, too, you can detect thematic and stylistic holdovers from an earlier era of Canadian youth movies: pictures like Rip-Off and Homer! All of this has Hog Wild sitting awkwardly athwart several genres and eras, riding sidesaddle as it were, ha ha, and so it never really gels as a fun or uproarious movie experience! And smushing that tarantula? That was uncalled for! I give Hog Wild one and a half slams across the back with a pool cue!

Burl reviews Any Which Way You Can! (1980)

 

Ha ha, right turn Clyde, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m here to review one of the good ol’ boy apestravaganzas Clint Eastwood appeared in back in the late 1970s! In fact, the one I’m reviewing for you is not the epic that kicked it all off, Every Which Way But Loose: nope, although I did watch that one a while back (but didn’t review it for some reason), I’m skipping right to the second and final entry in this abbreviated series, Any Which Way You Can!

You might ask “Ha ha, but Burl, aren’t these movies terrible, and why are you wasting precious, precious minutes of life, which is so dear, to watch them?” Your inquiry has merit, and I’ve asked the same questions myself! But while the movies are indeed fairly terrible, they have a hominess to them, along with a little bit of nostalgia, that afford them a certain edge! They have other values as well, which I’ll get to presently!

But first: the plot! No, ha ha, there’s no plot, so I’ll give you the setup and the situation instead! It seems there’s a beer-drinkin’, engine-block haulin’ bare-knuckle fighter, lean mean and taci-tureen, who goes by the name of Philo Beddoe! He has a best pal, Orville (or is Orville his brother?), but an even better pal in his orang-utan roommate Clyde, an inveterate cop-car shitter! A hapless gang of Nazi idiot bikers are constantly after Philo, and are always outwitted by him, which, ha ha, isn’t all that impressive really, since they're dopes! He has an irascible old Ma, and in the first movie he fell for a lady singer named Lynne Halsey-Taylor, who dumped him at the end of it!

In this one, Philo decides to quit bare-knuckle brawling just as some gambler gangsters organize a big-money brawl! They want to pit Philo against their east coast monster Mr. Jack Wilson, played by Big Bill Smith from Fast Company and The Mean Season; but in the meanwhile Philo and Lynne Halsey-Taylor (played again by Sondra Locke from The Shadow of Chikara) have rekindled their romance by playing bohankie in the filthy barn where Clyde dwells, as the fascinated and horny ape watches! Ha ha, yikes! So under the influence of his family and friends, Clint decides to pull out of the fight; the mobsters kidnap Lynne Halsey-Taylor in an attempt to force the issue; Mr. Jack Wilson and Clint become friends while jogging and work together to save Lynne Halsey-Taylor; and then they have a big fight anyway! And, in an ending I did not expect, the Nazi bikers become millionaires!

See, here’s where we come to one of the virtues of this picture, to which I alluded before: the cast! Of course Clint, whom we know so well from Tightrope and Tarantula, is Philo, who is a pretty dopey guy really, and from his facial expressions frequently seems overwhelmed by a mystifying modern world that baffles him at every turn! But he’s a generally amiable dimwit, and he’s backed up by Geoffrey Lewis, familiar from Smile and ‘Salem’s Lot, in the role of Orville, the unscrupulous tow-truck driver who also lives in the compound; and Ruth Gordon from Rosemary’s Baby and The Big Bus is Ma, crotchety old Ma, ha ha!

Familiar faces abound! There’s Bill McKinney from Cannonball, Barry Corbin from My Science Project, Al Ruscio from The Naked Flame and Michael Cavanaugh from Collateral Damage! Plus the cast is filled with stuntmen of course, because the movie was directed by a stuntman, Buddy Van Horn, and so there are plenty of casual stunts to go along with the more obvious and heavily planned stunt gags! And then there are the Quinces, a Midwestern couple recently arrived in California and played by real-life spouses Logan Ramsey from The Beast Within and Anne Ramsey from Deadly Friend! They serve as completely marginal story elements, like living Sergio Aragones drawings, whose coincidental proximity to the ape-fuelled antics at first provides only alarm, but eventually reinvigorates their moribund sex life!

Digressions like this are one reason the picture runs an unconscionable 114 minutes, and musical interludes are another! In addition to the songs sung by Lynne Halsey-Taylor, we get material from both Glen Campbell and, amazingly, Fats Domino, sporting a cowboy hat and singing a country song in a shitkicker bar! And weirdest of all is the opening theme song, a duet by Eastwood and Ray Charles called “Beers to You!”

So there are items of interest salted throughout the picture, but ultimately it’s a pretty dumb good-old-boy comedy: the kind of picture that wildly over-commits to the running gag of an orang-utan befouling police vehicles! As a director, Buddy Van Horn makes an excellent stunt coordinator, and there’s a loose and ramshackle vibe to the whole thing that’s appealing if you’re in the right mood, irritating if you’re not, and in any event loses all value no matter what mood you’re in once the picture is over and you’re trying to remember it later! Ha ha, I give Any Which Way You Can one and a half flying car hoods!

Burl reviews Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3! (2023)

Ha ha and pieww-pieww, it’s Burl here with space action-comedy for you! Yes, it’s the summer blockbuster season, and the big shows are being rolled out weekend by weekend; and, seeing as how my son and I recently watched the first two entries in the Guardians of the Galaxy series of pictures, which come from the director of Super, James Gunn, we thought we might go out to catch the third in the series! The official title of this third entry seems to be Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3!

I will here and now confess that I’m no great adherent to the Marvel superhero pictures, which I mostly find cacophonous and bewildering! Well, they’re not that bewildering – I’m not an idiot after all, ha ha – but when watching one I’m always conscious there’s a whole mess of back story and relationship dynamics of which I’m cheerfully unaware, and knowing this tends to dull my enjoyment of their product! But of all the various series, the Guardians of the Galaxy ones have been among the most amusing, both because they seem to sit apart from the Avengers and all those associated heroes, and because there is for the most part a refreshing lack of reverence for the interwoven Marvel universe as a whole!

The Guardians of the Galaxy are of course a motley band of space people who live in a lumpus called Knowhere, are led by a ragamuffin called Quill, played by Chris Pratt from Jurassic World, and occasionally cruise around in their spacecraft doing missions! Ostensibly they’re flying around out there to battle evil, but most of their time seems spent on investigating their own origins and past traumas, as though the whole hero caper is really just some good old fashioned recovered-memory therapy! The first one dramatizes the origins of the group, but takes time to investigate how the battling sisters Gamora (who is green and played by Zoe Saldana from Star Trek Into Darkness) and Nebula (a mostly-blue patchwork essayed by Karen Gillan from Oculus) came to be what they are, which has something to do with their father, a rock monster! Then the second one showed that Quill’s father was secretly a space god played by Kurt Russell!

This time it’s the raccoon man’s turn to look back on his life! The character of Rocket is an irascible procyon with the voice of Bradley Cooper, and at the beginning of the picture a golden boy flies in and tries to kidnap him! After a fearsome battle the golden boy is driven off, but poor Rocket hovers on the edge of death! It turns out the only way to save him is for his pals to bust in to the scientific facility that created the raccoon: a place run by Chukwudi Iwuji from John Wick: Chapter 2 playing “The High Evolutionary,” who’s a maniac with pretensions to godhood! This is our bad guy, and the rest of the movie bounces between the Guardians’ efforts to find the information that can save him, and Rocket’s comatose recollections of his childhood, in which he was caged with three other similarly mutilated weirdo child-animal friends!

It's as melancholy a picture as Marvel will allow, meditating (ha ha, again, as much as Marvel will allow) on loss and survivor’s guilt; and it’s also got a strong anti-vivisectionist message! These things are over and again subsumed by the pieww-pieww, but you can tell Gunn means what he says because there’s significantly less joking around than in the previous installments, and a lot more talking about feelings! There’s a scene that takes place in what I took to be heaven’s antechamber that, for a conversation between two non-human CGI confabulations, is really quite touching! And eventually everyone cries, even the raccoon!

It’s a long, busy picture – ha ha, the Marvel extravaganzas all seem to be in running time and character-number competition with one another – but fairly straightforward when you break it all down! The High Evolutionary is a mean man but gets what’s coming to him, and I could never decide whether Iwuji’s performance was a minor triumph or a silly hamfest – ha ha, or maybe it was both! I liked it, though! Otherwise except for the occasionally dour tone, the movie mostly follows the pattern set by the previous volumes, including the requisite moment of fighting triumph for the tree-man; some literal-mindedness from manmountain Drax, played by Dave Bautista from Dune; a cameo appearance measurable in seconds by Sylvester Stallone from First Blood; and lots of cacophony and endless song cues! Although, ha ha, they seem to have dropped the trope of Quill listening to mix tapes his mother made him – although there are still 1970s AM radio cuts here, the selection is also watered down by what I suppose are simply songs James Gunn likes!

Anyhow, it’s more enjoyable than the usual Marvel nonsense, and it has an alternate earth populated by animal people, so I’ll give Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 two blue jay men!

Burl reviews Killer Party! (1986)

Feeling somewhat the April fool, it’s Burl, here to review a horror picture that initially was called April Fool’s Day, but when that other April Fool’s Day came out, the non-slasher slasher picture which I remember the Three Dog Night version of Mama Told Me Not to Come was used prominently in the TV ads for, the title was changed to Killer Party!

The sentence above is a bit tangled and convoluted and difficult to decipher, I realize, but those are entirely apposite qualities for a review of this particular picture! It opens with a funeral scene, an EC comic story in miniature with a hateful relative and a vengeful corpse! But no, this proves to be a movie-within-the-movie being watched by a young couple at a drive-in, and when the young woman goes for popcorn, supernatural shenanigans occur and then a hair-metal band begins to play! We see now, thanks to a chyron, that this is a music video by a band called White Sister, and it’s being watched on TV by a loafing co-ed!

Finally the story proper can start, for the co-ed is one of three who serve more or less as our main characters! There’s Phoebe, played by Elaine Wilkes from Sixteen Candles, and Vivia, essayed by Sherry Willis-Burch from Final Exam, and there’s another one too, and of course they are for some incomprehensible reason trying to join a sorority house run by your basic bitchy sorority queen type! There is a lot of talk about goats, and a lot of goat noises, and everyone has to eat goat eyeballs of course! Pranks are pulled, including one involving a jar of bees and some ladies in a hot tub, and that seems to have no connection with anything except to continue the general atmosphere of prankishness!

In fact nothing seems to have anything to do with anything else, or not much at least! This disjunctive story was written by Barney Cohen, from whose quill also flowed Friday the 13^th part 4, and I think the established backstory and structure of the Jason pictures is what this particular scenarist requires in order to turn in a shootable story! The picture was directed by William Fruet, who brought us Spasms and Funeral Home, and usually (Spasms excepted of course), his movies are a lot tighter and more sensical than this!

Lots of other characters show up, but it’s often difficult to discern their narrative function! There’s a smoothtone called Blake played by Martin Hewitt from Alien Predators; a goony weirdo called Martin, played by Ralph Seymour from Ghoulies and Fletch; and an uptight English instructor named Professor Zito, played by the always-welcome Paul Bartel of Piranha and Chopping Mall and Rock n’ Roll High School! All these performances are perfectly adequate, but I for one missed the gallery of 80s Canadian actors who usually show up in these things – still, ha ha, we do easily recognize it as a Canadian film by the snowflakes that are often swirling past the camera lens!

The collegiate shenanigans take up more than an hour of screen time, and I think the beginning of the movie is meant to take place in the fall while the last part tries to justify the original title by occurring in the spring! This time jump, which many will miss, only adds to the dislocated feeling of the movie! But it seems there’s an old frat house where a frat brother was killed in, I want to say, a hazing incident? The sisters wish to hold a spring prank party in the manse, but the ghost of the frat boy, unable to abide anyone associated with the Greek letter clubs, possesses one of the ladies and there follows a series of bloodless slasher-style killings!

The picture was shot by John Lindley, a cinematographer who would go on to lens bigger-budget items like The Serpent and the Rainbow, Field of Dreams, Sneakers, Pleasantville and The Core, so Killer Party looks a little better than many such movies do! That only means that we get a better-lit look at impenetrable goings-on, however, so it’s not a great help! Also, whatever gore the movie had in its first condition – I remember shots in Fangoria of a trident-poked lady and a fellow with a chopped-off hand – has been ruthlessly excised as though by the killer frat boy ghost himself!

I’ll give it this, though: for a movie shot in 1984, it looks awfully 1986! Is that a compliment? I mean it as such – being a year or two ahead of your time counts as an accomplishment, I think! And though almost all of the scare scenes in the last act are poorly staged and free of affrights, there is one good shock moment in the last bit of it, concerning the surprise appearance of the possessed girl on a roof! The very end has some impact too, though it borrows that from Twilight Zone: The Movie! Otherwise it’s all pretty dire: poorly done, scattered, incoherent, sometimes boring, often stupid!

Some folk like it though, and I want to acknowledge them! Me, I can’t find much in it to love, ha ha, and with its pathetic shenanigan-to-carnage ratio it reminded me of Cheerleader Camp: an unforgivable crime! There’s also a theme song that will tend to make your ears bleed! But I liked Vivia, or was it Phoebe, and how she was half sexy goodtime girl, half glasses nerd! I guess I’ll give Killer Party one and a half guillotines, which I’d say is a pretty generous rating, but hey, it’s spring!

Burl reviews Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves! (2023)

 

With a rousing jig and a hoy-te-toy and a merry, merry click of the heels, it’s Burl, here with a review of the latest in theatre hits! At least I assume it’s a hit – ha ha, I don’t keep track of the box office figures, so for all I know it might be a big old flopparoo! But the people in the theatre seemed to like it, so I’m going to guess it’s doing well! Incredibly enough it’s not a sequel, but it is an adaptation of a recognized intellectual property and I guess that’s what counts for daring originality in today’s marketplace! Of course I’m talking about Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves!

Chris Pine from Star Trek Into Darkness plays the role of the roguish, not too bright, charming-scamp hero, Edgin or Ederin or something; but like the other characters do, we’ll just call him Ed! He’s in a jail with his barbarian-lady chum, and they live in a land more fantastical than, say, the world of Ladyhawke, but maybe not quite so much as The Lord of the Rings! Michelle Rodriguez from Machete is the tough gal-pal, who pines not for Pine, but for a three-footer who dwells in a glen in the forest! They escape their prison by means of a birdman even though they were about to get paroled, and immediately begin a series of enfiladed quests with their buddies!

And who are these buddies? Well, there’s a young wizard without, yet, the self-confidence required to master his trade, and a druid lady played by Beverly from It! They also meet a supernaturally benevolent paladin who joins them for a couple of the interior sub-quests and is a big help when it comes time to battle a porky dragon! The antagonist is none other than Hugh Grant from The Lair of the White Worm, a scoundrel of a rapscallion of a nogoodnik, formerly a chum himself, who betrays our heroes and becomes a rich mayor or something, claiming Ed’s daughter as his own, dwelling in a castle, and employing an evil witch to help with his schemes!

I didn’t expect much from this one, I have to say! I was never a D&D player, though I sat in on a game once! My son is playing it every Sunday with some pals though, and I took him and one of the chums to see it at the theatre, where the exhibitors occasionally busted out some old-style showmanship by projecting extra edges to the frame along the side walls! The effect was surprisingly un-annoying and even a little bit immersive! Anyway, I thought I was just being a decent dad by taking some kids to a movie, but darned if I didn’t enjoy myself thoroughly!

It’s no Conan the Barbarian, but it’s got some laffs along with the usual not-quite-Peter-Jackson level fantasy action scenes! Hugh Grant, whose stammery smarm was always ready and able to be put in the service of evil, gives good value here, and Pine, playing a hero halfway between Han Solo and Jack Burton, does exactly what the picture needs him to do with unshaven aplomb! It’s all nonsense of course, and nonsense with an airy, arbitrary feeling to it; and the story and structure sure could have been a lot stronger; and I for one would have liked more of the grotesque creatures - sucking worms and so forth - that I remember from the monster manuals; but it hits some emotional beats with surprising solidity and integrates the comedy with the fantasy in fine fashion!

Even though it’s machine-tooled to be the first of a series (which they’d better hurry up on before Pine ages out of his scalawag years), it’s nevertheless still at this moment a standalone film and not a sequel, remake, reboot, or requindle; and although it’s derived from an age-old and highly recognizable IP, it’s not one with which I was overly familiar; and the effect of all this on me, and of attending with a pair of 11 year-olds, was the feeling of an old-fashioned 80s-era outing to the movies, which feeling probably brought me more pleasure than the movie itself! But the film is amusing too, and so in spite of its cumbersome title, I’m going to give Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves two and a half gelatinous cubes!

Burl reviews Men At Work! (1990)

 

Good gravy and big blue bananas, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m here to review another movie, and this time it’s the famous garbage comedy Men At Work, which I saw in the theatre back when it came out in the late summer of 1990! Why did I go see such a movie on the big screen? At this late date I can’t tell you, and now, having re-watched the thing for the first time since that mysterious and long-ago evening, I’m even more perplexed about it!

Let’s take a look at some of the other comedies released that year: Loose Cannons, Madhouse, House Party, Nuns on the Run, Opportunity Knocks, Ernest Goes to Jail, Crazy People, Far Out Man, Cadillac Man, Ghosts Can’t Do It, Ghost Dad, Betsy’s Wedding, Quick Change, The Freshman, My Blue Heaven, Taking Care of Business, Sibling Rivalry, Look Who’s Talking Too, Almost an Angel, and others I’m too disgusted to bother typing out! But glance through those titles, ha ha – with a couple of exceptions (Quick Change, mostly), all of them are reportedly terrible scourges that have roundly earned their historical obscurity! I’ve seen exactly two of those movies, The Freshman and My Blue Heaven, and of those only one, The Freshman, did I see in the theatre! And that was the cheapo second-run dollar theatre, ha ha!

So what am I getting at here? Well, to its discredit, Men At Work fits right in with all those other debouchments, and yet something drew me to the cinema to fork over my hard-earned bucks and 98 minutes of my youth to see the thing even as I properly ignored all the others! Did it stand out somehow in the blasted post-apocalyptic landscape of 1990 comedy film? I couldn’t tell you! Maybe I won tickets in a radio station contest or something!

It’s the tale of two idiot garbagemen, one, Carl, played by Charlie Sheen from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and No Man’s Land, and the other, James, essayed by his brother Emilio Estevez, whom we know from Nightmares and Maximum Overdrive and who also wrote and directed this thing! Unsurprisingly they’re not very good at the job – they throw cans all over the street and make a lot of noise, and they roll discarded bowling balls all over the neighbourhood!

As a sort of probation, their boss, played by Estevez’s old Repo Man buddy Sy Richardson, assigns his brother-in-law to ride along with them! The brother-in-law turns out to be a guy named Louis, played by Keith David from The Thing and Road House, a hair-trigger Vietnam vet prone to flashbacks and general grumpy behaviour! And while all this is going on, a whistleblowing city councilman played by Darrell Larson from When Time Ran Out… and Six Weeks is threatening to grass on a corrupt slickback called Maxwell Potterdam III, who manufactures paint thinner and is played by John Getz from The Fly II! Potterdam III is dumping yellow barrels of waste into the ocean, and the councilman has the whole caper recorded on a cassette tape!

There’s a confusion of course, and the councilman’s comely campaign manager Susan, played by Leslie Hope from Crimson Peak, ends up with the herring-cassette, the councilman is killed by assassins, and the garbagemen end up with the corpse, which has been stuffed into one of the yellow barrels! Ha ha, they never go full Weekend At Bernie’s with the body, but it gets pretty close a couple of times! Then things become all about male duos, Platonic shadows of our dimwit heroes! The garbagemen have trouble with three separate pairs of antagonists: local bike cops who hassle them, essayed by John Putch from Jaws 3-D and Tommy Hinkley from L.A. Story; co-workers with whom they’re in a prank war, played by Geoffrey Blake from Secret Admirer and Cameron Dye from Fraternity Vacation; and hit men in Potterdam III’s employ who are chasing them for the cassette, and also to kill them, played by John Lavachielli from Time Walker and Hawk Wolinski from Electra Glide in Blue! And so Louis doesn't feel left out of the duello structure, he gets a comrade when he and the garbagemen kidnap a pizza man played by Chainsaw from Summer School!

It all devolves, as much as anything already so primitive can devolve, into a series of location shifts occasionally bridged by chases! An unforgivable lack of jokes - or, if jokes be present, they’re stolen from other movies, like Better Off Dead – keeps the thing scraping along at ground level; logic is never a consideration; there's no suspense; and the characterizations are thinner than a spaghettini! The garbagemen are half-assedly given a goal (to jointly open a surf shop) and some allegedly solveable personality problems (though the vast majority of their defects remain on display but unmentioned and unchanged), and then virtually none of this is followed through in any way! The garbagemen at the end have defeated the bad guy, sort of, we assume; but, except for a romance between Carl and Susan, they have not improved their situations in any way! In fact I think they’d be unlikely to keep their jobs and stay out of jail, if the movie had decided to cover the next six or so hours of their lives! Ha ha, of course scrupulous reality is not what I was after with this picture, but an occasional airy wave in that direction might have been nice! And, sorry Emilio, I like you man, but it’s all shot with a minimum of art and mostly, and criminally, absent the sort of peppy entertainment the 80s did so well! (Sure, this came out in 1990, but I think it was written at least a half-decade earlier - it's 80s material all right!) Anyway, I may have enjoyed it in the theatre, just because it was being projected onto a big screen, but I don’t think so! I give Men At Work one short golf clap!

Burl reviews Zapped!! (1983)

 

Bzzzztt, it’s Burl here with some science psycho-pervations for you! Ha ha, here we have a precursor to the science wizard pictures of the mid-80s, like Weird Science and My Science Project, or the more reality-based (and better) The Manhattan Project; and of course a descendant of the Dexter Riley movies of the decade before, of which The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes is an example recently reviewed! But here we have a movie that started out with the innocence of a Dexter Riley movie, or even a Flubber and Shaggy Dog-era Disney picture, but, in the wake of Porky’s, was garnished with some extra boobs and bums to bring it up to 80s code! Yes, I’m talking about Zapped!!

Ha ha, it’s always nice to review a movie that comes with its own exclamation point! Zapped! is the story of nerdly-but-dreamy school science wizard Barney Springboro, played by Cha-Chi himself, Scott Baio, well known for being The Boy Who Drank Too Much, and, more recently, for being a bit of a right-wing loon! As the movie opens he’s got mice swimming around in diving suits for some reason, and we learn that he’s growing special orchids for the school principal, played by Robert Mandan, the super familiar-looking guy from The Carey Treatment, and growing special mary-hoo-wanna for his best buddy Peyton, played by crinkle-haired Willie Aames from Paradise! Peyton is a strange amalgam of types: a horndog party animal who’s also a spoiled rich kid, and also, I gather, supposed to be sort of an unpopular nerd! I guess they just had him be whatever they felt was convenient for the movie in any given moment, ha ha!   

Felice Schachter is a nosy teen newshound called Bernadette who always wants to report on whatever Cha-Chi is up to with his science! What he’s most recently up to is falling victim to a lab accident that gives him Carrie-style psychokinesis, and when Peyton finds out about the power, he immediately enlists Cha-Chi to help him win first a baseball game, and then against the frat house boys in casino gambling! This causes complications and confusions, because at the same time, Cha-Chi and Bernadette are becoming fond of each other, and Bernadette strongly disapproves of the gambling; while meantime Peyton is trying his best with Jane, the randomly flatulent queen of the campus played by Heather Thomas from Red Blooded American Girl, who is dating Greg Bradford from Lovelines, the usual blond BMOC quasi-fascist and head of the casino frat house! Ha ha, phew, it’s a situation so complicated I had to use a run-on sentence to describe it!

Also meanwhile, Miss Burnhart, played by Sue Ann Langdon from Without Warning, is trying to make time with the principal and also to bust Cha-Chi for weed cultivation! And Cha-Chi’s prune juice-guzzling dad, played by Roger Bowen from M*A*S*H and Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home, is sleeping through everything, and his mom, essayed by Mews Small from Sleeper, stays awake, terrified, believing her son possessed by the devil and recruiting priests to exorcise him after his powers have been revealed to her in the form of a flying ventriloquist’s dummy!

Barney’s other friend is Dexter the baseball coach, played by the great Scatman Crothers from The King of Marvin Gardens and The Shining! Ha ha, it’s always nice to see him! LaWanda Page from Mausoleum plays Dexter’s wife, and is the main antagonist in an insane hophead dream Dexter has when he’s exposed to big billows of pot smoke from the furnace: he goes bicycling with Albert Einstein and chatting about relativity, until suddenly his wife comes thundering along in a chariot, dressed as Attila the Hun, bellowing threats and firing pork products at him from a bazooka!

Ha ha, and there are plenty of other familiar faces in the margins! We get Jewel Shepard from Raw Force and The Return of the Living Dead; “Boof” from Teen Wolf makes a small appearance; and there’s even a walk on from I Wanna Hold Your Hand’s Eddie Deezen, who wears a driving cap, a cardigan, a bowtie, and a shirt that reads “God’s Gift to Women,” and only sticks around long enough to accuse his friend of constant masturbation!

It sounds like I’ve been describing a parade of nonstop delights, but I’ve got to report the shocking truth: it’s not a good movie, ha ha! Sure, Cha-Chi makes dresses fly up and cardigans come apart with the power of his mind, but on the other hand Cha-Chi makes dresses fly up and cardigans come apart with the power of his mind, and it’s just all so stupid! The character of Peyton, meanwhile, is so smarmy you could spread him on toast! My goodness, what a self-satisfied, smirky, misguidedly entitled nougat he is! But you can’t argue with that supporting cast, and it does seem like a Dexter Riley movie with sleaze, which is in theory a really appealing concept! But of all the Zapped!s you could imagine might result from that concoction, the Zapped! we got would be well at the low end of those expectations! I give it one tiny scuba suit!

Burl reviews Party Party! (1983)

 

Ha ha and hello, it’s Burl here to wish you a belated Happy New Year! And I’m doing that because I finally caught up to a New Year’s Eve-set youth movie that enjoys a near-legendary status among those who were in the right place and time, and at the right age, when it came along! And the name given to this formative production is not just a title, not merely a description, but serves also, even primarily, as a clear-throated, full-chested, arms-extended and head-tilted-back statement of intent: Party Party!

In the early 80s the horny teens were getting their due on screen: there was Porky’s, Spring Break, Hot Bubblegum, and oh so many more! It was all about music, sexy times, shenanigans, and consequence-free fun, and these pictures were being made all around the world! North London wanted in on the glory, so they all got together and created this picture, which takes place largely at a New Year’s Eve house party party! The host is a weedy nonentity called Larry, who organizes the party party unbeknownst to his parents and I suppose is meant to be the film’s Everyman figure! He’s played by Perry Fenwick, whom we may recall as a different sort of a party party host in Mona Lisa, ha ha!

Larry’s pals include an unbelievably awkward idiot called Toby, played by Daniel Peacock, who co-wrote the movie and later appeared in The Jewel of the Nile! His other buddy is Johnny, a grifter, a player and an inveterate advice-giver essayed by fiveheaded Karl Howman from The Long Good Friday! We meet this crew, or two of them anyway, as they race around Hendon in an alleged “fast, flash motor,” dodging angry motorcyclists, and then picking up Larry at a church! We concurrently meet a bunch of other characters who will be attending the party party also, including two gal pals, one a schlubby girl called Shirley, played by Caroline Quentin from Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire, and the other a more comely sort named Brenda, essayed by Kim Thomson from Screamtime and The Tall Guy!

Over at the station house we find a lady cop called Rebecca, played by Phoebe Nicholls, who was John Merrick’s mother in The Elephant Man; another cop played by skinless Frank from Hellraiser himself, Sean Chapman; and a third bobby called Terry, played by Gary Olsen from Outland, who announces his intention to get right pissed and follows that pledge up in spectacular fashion! And separate from all these folk is the movie’s main antagonist, Bobby, an enormous bearded bully boy played by Clive Mantle from Alien 3!

Just how old are these people, I wondered as I watched the movie! Ha ha, Larry seems like a teenager, more or less, but his good pal Johnny, with his Phil Collins-style receding hairline, seems a decade or more older! Toby, the gurning half-wit, has the ageless quality many intellectually impaired people possess; the coppers are at least in their late twenties or older; and the big bully Bobby might be forty or more! Ha ha! How did they all happen to be at this very same party party, anyway? It’s a true New Year’s mystery!

Another New Year’s mystery is the soundtrack! Ha ha, how on earth did they afford all these tunes? Somehow they convinced Elvis Costello to write and warble a theme song, and while it’s the most terrible song he ever did, it’s still amazing that it exists! There are songs by The Clash, David Bowie, Sting, Madness, The Stranglers, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, and lots more! It makes sense that the movie’s not widely available to see these days, because ha ha, how could you begin to license all that? It’s an impressive feat for a clearly low-budget picture!

But aside from that, is the movie itself any good? Well, it’s an odd thing: I really strongly disliked almost every single character in this photoplay, and didn’t give, as they say over there, a toss about any of them! Toby in particular is almost supernaturally lacking in social graces, and many’s the time he gets called a berk or a prat! And he most certainly is those things! But somehow, by the end of the movie, when the parents return to find their house near-trashed and must be fed the outrageous lie that the party party was all the time in their honour, I found myself smiling slightly and hoping it all worked out, as stupid as the situation was!

My own first visit to Blighty wasn’t until 1985 or so, but I still remember the sort of dingy chill with which Thatcher’s England was permeated at that time, and this movie captures that miasma in absolute spades! There’s no art to the picture at all, no dimension to the characters (even to the suicidally lonely dowdy-girl), and not nearly the pep such a movie should have; but it has occasional bursts of energy, shows evidence of talent in the cast, and gets the feeling of a big drunken house party mostly right! It’s not a good movie by any stretch, but I can just about see why it would be so cherished by people who caught it at the right instant in their lives! But, ha ha, where did all those pies for the big pie fight come from, anyway? I give Party Party one and a half fast flash cars!

Burl reviews The Banshees of Inisherin! (2022)

 

With a touch o’ the shamrock, it’s Burl, here to tell of a tale from the Emerald Isle, or at least with one of the associated islets! Much like The Secret of Roan Inish, the action in today’s picture takes place exclusively on a small island off the coast of Ireland at some time in the earlier part of the 20^th century, although in this case, while the title promises some Irish myth, ha ha, there’s nothing supernatural to be found in the picture itself! The movie is called The Banshees of Inisherin!

In fact it takes place at a very specific time: the spring of 1923; so, now that we’re in a new year we can say it takes place a hundred years ago, back when life was different! Although not that different, because on this picturesque fisherfolks’ paradise there is no shortage of anachronistic lines of dialogue and behaviours! Ha ha! Anyway, the story is so: Pádraic Súilleabháin, an amiable want-wit played by Colin Farrell, whom we recall from his role as the vampire in the newer Fright Night, has a routine: call ‘pon his pal Colm Doherty at two o’ the clock of an afternoon, then proceed to the public house for ales and inane conversation! Except on this day, Colm doesn’t answer his door, and reveals later that he’s simply decided not to like Pádraic any more!

Brendan Gleeson, familiar from Cruise-capades like Edge of Tomorrow and Mission Impossible II, plays Colm, and he’s a much sharper tack than his ex-pal Pádraic, and as cultured as a person can get on a provincial island in the 1920s! So when he explains that he’s given up the friendship because he feels his creative life being stolen from him an hour of pointless chit-chat at a time, one can sympathize and understand! But the extremity of the edict, not to mention the later consequences, make Colm seem a bit crazy! Couldn’t he have simply laid down some ground rules that limit the time he spends with Pádraic rather than cutting it off entirely? The all-or-nothing gambit is in keeping with the Irish character, I suppose, and I guess that’s the point!

Other characters are as confused about it as poor dopey Pádraic! The latter lives with his sister Siobhán, played by Kerry Condon, and she’s a no-nonsense type who advocates to Colm on her brother’s behalf, but can’t really contradict his assertion that Pádraic is a time-wasting nonsense-talker! A twitchy village idiot called Dominic, played in a showy performance by Barry Keoghan from Dunkirk, wonders sarcastically at Colm’s maturity! (“What is he, twelve?” is one of the many lines that seem more 21^st century than of the Joycean era they’re meant to evoke!) And an old witchy lady played by Shelia Flitton, who I believe played a similar role in The Northman, watches the goings on with a knowing cackle!

 

Things start to get a little gruesome once a fed-up Colm, a devoted fiddler, threatens to cut off his fingers if Padráic keeps up with his botheration! Ha ha, I guess he settles on his fingers because cutting off his nose would be too obvious! And not to spoil anything, but yes, in the parlance of Joe Bob Briggs, fingers do roll! A lovable mini-donkey ambles through the margins of the story, and it’s this creature who precipitates the film’s final act! Things get pretty dark, but the finale may leave you pondering!

There’s lots to recommend this picture: the acting and the photography, for instance, are both top-notch, and the script is often very funny! The themes, while somewhat obvious (the Irish Civil War, a battle between former friends, is going on in the background over on the mainland), are interesting – it’s as an exploration of friendship and its liminalities that the picture is most compelling, rather than as a political allegory! And it’s always worthwhile to see what’s happening on these crazy Anglo-Saxon islets – ha ha, think about The Wicker Man, or Doomwatch, or I Know Where I’m Going, or Island of Terror, or Nothing But the Night! Kooky places, those islands, and Inishiren fits right in with them! I give The Banshees of Inisherin two and a half finger splotches!

Burl reviews Lethal Weapon! (1987)

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burl reviews Withnail and I! (1986)

 

Get in the back of the van, it’s Burl, here to review a picture that I’ll tell you right off the top is one of my favourites! Ha ha and sweet john fiddlesticks, it’s a movie I’ve delighted in ever since it was released, one I find not just beautifully written and acted and made, but extremely funny! And I know I’m not alone in these feelings, though sometimes I wish I were! Of course the film to which I refer is Withnail and I!

Along with The Maltese Falcon, Citizen Kane, The 400 Blows and Night of the Living Dead, I think it’s one of the great feature directorial debuts! That may seem hyperbolic, and it probably is, but I do find it an impressive accomplishment from someone who apparently claimed throughout the shoot that he didn’t know what he was doing! That someone is Bruce Robinson, who followed this up with the okay if not nearly as satisfying How To Get Ahead in Advertising; but he knocked it out of the park on this first go round, that’s for sure!

Our setting is London’s Camden Town in late September and early October of 1969! Two unemployed actors, the titular gentlemen, live in a squalorous flat and drink as much and as frequently as they are able, pausing only to pop pills or drag on enormous joints! Richard E. Grant from L.A. Story is Withnail, while Paul McGann from Alien 3 is I; and their sometime pal and drug dealer, Danny, is played by Ralph Brown, who was in Stoker and was also in Alien 3, ha ha! And there’s even an appearance from Chocolate Mousse himself, Eddie Tagoe of Top Secret fame, here playing Presuming Ed!

Wishing to get out of London for a time, the flatmates cadge a cottage key from Withnail’s florid uncle Monty, played wonderfully by Richard Griffiths from Gorky Park! Accompanied by the guitar stylings of Jimi Hendrix, the lads drive up to the desolate farming mountain of Crow Crag, where the cottage proves nearly as shabby as their London digs, the rain and cold are unceasing, and the promontory decidedly sterile! Ha ha! Not only that, but a rough poacher threatens to put a black pod on Withnail, which terrifies him into a babbling frenzy! Then Monty shows up with a gleam in his eye and the holiday becomes a truly threatening experience for the young, Lennon-bespectacled I!

More of the plot I won’t divulge, mainly because there is no plot really; and that the movie gets away with this so handily is merely another of its charms! It’s a portrait movie: a portrait of these two friends, of this particular moment in time, of London, of poverty, of substance abuse and dependence, of romantic desperation, of career despondency, of the end of an era and the dwindling of hope! “I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth,” soliloquizes Withnail at the end, and we realize it’s exactly that loss of mirth we’ve been witnessing throughout the movie! Ha ha, it’s not the funniest conclusion a comedy ever had, but it’ll stick with you!

Now, while it’s true I’m not a full member of the cult of Withnail and I, which is made up mostly of young (though perhaps now aging), pasty, educated, middle class white men whose principal affectation is the misplaced notion that they have no affectations, but who then go around wearing long coats and tartan scarves right out of the film anyway and quoting lines from it until you want to punch them, I will here admit that not only have I owned coats much like those each of the two titular characters wear, but that I have also, with this movie fully in mind, sat on a bench in the Regent’s Park and swigged directly from a bottle of red wine!

Ha ha, I’ll go further! Though it was not in conscious imitation of the film, I have also roared drunkenly around London from pub to pub in a clapped-out Jaguar! (I was not driving, but the fellow who was had consumed just as much booze as I had, risking not just traffic calamity but police arrest, not having one of Danny’s fresh-pee contraptions on hand!) I have in my time also complained of “a bastard behind the eyes” and bellowed “There must and shall be aspirin!” But I have never obnoxiously demanded the finest wines available to humanity, nor fretted that my thumbs had gone weird, nor wept in butcher’s shops, nor declaimed Hamlet’s soliloquy to wolves! No, I just find the movie well performed and funny and, so far, endlessly rewatchable, and for a’ that, I give Withnail and I four shag-sacks!

Burl reviews The Faculty! (1998)

 

Saved by the bell, it’s Burl, manfully attempting to review a very, very, very 1990s horror picture! It’s maybe not the most 90s horror movie – that might be Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer, or one of those sorts of things – but the very, very and final italicized very still apply! After all, it was written by that meta-horror specialist Kevin Williamson, directed by 90s wunderkind Robert Rodriguez, and produced by that slab-lipped, pock-faced date-rapist Harvey Weinstein, so after all, it’s pretty 90s! It’s The Faculty!

Our setting: High School U.S.A.! As in Dazed and Confused, there are different groups: jocks, criminals, brainboxes, and a put-upon freshman (not played by Wiley Wiggins, but Wiley is in the movie, ha ha, lurking in the margins), and foot-ball is the local religion! In the opening sequence we see the iron-nosed foot-ball coach, played by Robert Patrick from Die Hard 2, being approached by… something; then the coach, now possessed by… something, stalks Bebe Neuwerth in the role of the school principal; and the principal seems to be saved when she runs into colleague Piper Laurie from that classic high school picture Carrie, but then Laurie turns into… something!

So, something’s clearly up at this high school, ha ha! The student body includes Elijah Wood as Casey, the oft-abused nerd; Clea DuVall from Ghosts of Mars as Stokely, the tough loner girl; Laura Harris from It putting on the mint julip as Marybeth, the new Georgian transplant; Josh Hartnett from Halloween H20 as Zeke, an insufferable jerk who sells homemade drugs to the younger kids; and a few others, including a quarterback who may not want to play foot-ball any more, just like, again, Dazed and Confused! It seems to take an age, but eventually these characters get together and face the threat, which is the same sort of parasitic takeover aliens we saw in The Puppet Masters!

Because this was written by the same fellow who wrote Scream, it’s packed with winking meta-humour and would-be cutting edginess! It’s trying its best to be a hip and with-it high school version of The Thing, but mostly it’s trying too hard! It wants to give the same sense of pod-people menace as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but there’s rarely if ever any question about who’s who, and in any case, once the parasite leaves the host, the people come back to normal! So it’s not very scary or particularly disturbing, and it's packed with mediocre music, or mediocre covers of good music; but the picture stays afloat with a cheerful 90s-ness that makes it an artifact of its time, and a reasonably entertaining one at that!

And the cast is strong! The faculty itself includes Salma Hayek from Desperado as the school nurse; Famke Janssen from Goldeneye and Deep Rising as the shrinking violet teacher; and people like Jon Stewart and Daniel Von Bargen; and Christopher McDonald from Grumpy Old Men plays Casey’s dad! It’s a very derivative movie, but it’s frequently fun and occasionally gory! I hated the character of Zeke and was glad to see him suffer a terrible public humiliation, but mostly the picture is a good-natured romp in the classic 90s style, so I give The Faculty two collapsing bleachers!

Burl reviews Dazed and Confused! (1993)

 

A happy Bicentennial to you, from me, Burl! Yes, I’m here to review a picture not made in, but rather set in, the American bicentennial year of 1976! Unlike many another period picture I could name, this one sets itself in its chosen time with the utmost conviction and credibility! Yes, it’s none other than Richard Linklater’s sophomore exercise in filmmaking, in which he tells a tale of not just sophomores, but of seniors and freshmen too, in a picture called Dazed and Confused!

Linklater’s earlier film Slacker is a great favourite of mine, and it’ll probably come as no surprise that I dig this one too! Ha ha, I find it endlessly rewatchable, and a most groovy updating of the Crown International pictures of the 70s, principally The Pom Pom Girls! And of course he followed it up later with the “spiritual sequel” Everybody Wants Some!!, and that was enjoyable too!

Anyway, we know where we’re at here: High School U.S.A., somewhere in Texas, on the last day of school, 1976! It’s an ensemble piece with different groups of students: the soon-to-be seniors doing their end of year shenanigans, and the middle schoolers on their way to becoming freshmen! The big activity for the older kids is to find the freshmen and humiliate or beat them in some way, and this is where the picture seems to me a document from some alien culture, because where I grew up, we had nothing like this at all! Ha ha, nobody around here cared about foot-ball or paddling kids on the fandini, but in this Texas town it’s an overriding and all-consuming obsession!

Luckily there are other obsessions too, like drinking beer and smoking weed! Those I can relate to, ha ha! And of course there are the cars, which are fantastic – the opening shot is a real dream for casual lovers of the 70s muscle car - and the music, which is not necessarily what I might have listened to if I was in high school in ’76, but is entirely the right stuff for this picture! I don’t think Linklater got exactly the music he wanted, but he did pretty well!

Linklater did a lot of things right with this movie, but one of his greatest accomplishments was assembling this cast! And I’m not just talking about the guys who became really famous, like Matthew McConaughey (from Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation) as the chickenhawk Wooderson, or Ben Affleck (from Gone Girl) in the role of the overall-clad bully O’Bannion! No, the whole cast is good, or at least ideal and effective, in their roles: Adam Goldberg from The Prophecy as one of the more intellectual students; Sasha Jenson from Halloween 4 as a playful jock; Milla Jovovich from Two Moon Junction in a near-silent role as a decorative girlfriend; Wiley Wiggins from Computer Chess as the main frosh on the run; Parker Posey from The Daytrippers as a bitchy, demanding senior; and Nicky Katt from Gremlins as a violent greaseball!

Ha ha, one of the few places where the movie falters is in trying to have a tiny scrap of a plot: something about a foot-ball player pressured to sign some kind of pledge form and deciding whether or not he even wants to play foot-ball at all! Otherwise the picture is mostly a series of highly entertaining vignettes which occur over the fifteen hours or so covered by the picture, giving equal weight to the concerns of the jocks, the stoners, the brainboxes, the proto-teens, the second-wave feminists, the ex-hippies, and more! (Ha ha, I’d have liked some art-punks in there, but you can’t have everything!) Even if you weren’t around or fully sentient in 1976, the odds are you’ll connect on some level with the goings-on: coming in so late from a night out that it’s early, for example; or fighting a bully; or scoring beer when you’re still under eighteen; or smoking your first joint! The picture never makes a big, After School Special-type deal out of any of this, but treats it with just the sort of nervous, pleasurable excitement I remember feeling myself!

It’s a tremendous sophomore feature: not perfect maybe, but nearly that! I enjoyed it in the theatre and have enjoyed it every time since, and plan to enjoy it further in the future! Yes, Dazed and Confused is one of the good ones, and I’m pleased to give it three and a half green things every day!