Burl reviews The Changeling! (1979)

Boo and double boo, it’s Burl, here with a haunted house story! Now, the picture under review today is not a universally-known movie, but those who like it tend to like it a lot! Ha ha, it’s a Canadian picture, but stars perhaps the last person you’d expect to be frightened by ghosts: the carved-out-of-mahogany George C. Scott, whom we recall from Dr. Strangelove! And the movie, of course, is The Changeling!

It starts with a tragic sequence in which Scott, trapped in a phone booth, watches as his wife and daughter are run over by a dumptruck! Months later, in his bereavement, he moves to Seattle and rents the biggest and most-likely-to-be-haunted home he can find, with local historical society member Trish Van Devere, whom we know from The Hearse and Hollywood Vice Squad, and who was Scott’s real-life wife, acting for some reason as the realty agent!

Strange things begin to occur from the moment Scott moves in, ha ha! Echoing clangs, moanings and whisperings, and strange tunes from dusty music boxes fill the mansion; hidden rooms and cobwebbed wheelchairs are discovered; rubber bouncing balls materialize and roll across the floor! Scott and Van Devere put on their deerstalkers and investigate, and the clues lead them to unearth an eighty year-old scandal-mystery involving a powerful old senator played by Melvyn Douglas, who of course fought and succumbed to a phantom again in Ghost Story! The Scott-Van Devere team also pull up some floorboards in a different house to simultaneously reveal a) an old well containing a child’s bones, and b) the striking similarities between this picture and The Ring! Ha ha!

I’ve got to mention a few effective scenes! Most famous is when the wheelchair comes to life and chases Van Devere around the house - ha ha, many recall having the gumdrops scared out of them by this sequence, though it wasn’t as intense as I recalled from my own junior viewings of the picture! Better, though less showy, is the séance scene, with the scrawling hand on the paper and the husband reading out what the medium is writing down! Yes, I thought it was a fine scene, well-directed and acted by solid old pros!

There are plenty of familiar Canadian and British and British-Canadian faces in here! We get Jean Marsh from Frenzy; John Colicos from Phobia, playing his usual hard-nosed cop; Barry Morse from Funeral Home; Eric Christmas from Porky’s; Bernard Behrens from The Man With Two Brains; and Frances Hyland from Happy Birthday To Me! These folks all help the movie with its classy, mid-Atlantic bona-fides, as does the director, Hungarian-born, British-based Peter Medak, who also brought us such varied pictures as The Ruling Class, Romeo is Bleeding, and Species 2!

The Changeling, for its part, is a fine movie, but that’s all it is really! It’s not a great haunted house movie like The Haunting, nor is it quirky, weird and eerie like The Legend of Hell House! Like the house it’s largely set in, the film is solid, expansive, and foursquare; and though it’s a winter picture, it’s a good item for this Halloween season! I give The Changeling two and a half old biddies!

Burl reviews The Ring! (2002)

Approaching through your TV screen, it’s Burl, here to review a solid modern scarepic, namely the American remake of The Ring! Yes, I saw this one in the movie theatre, and never mind that it doesn’t make a lot of logical sense: it worked on me to great effect!

It was distinctly less effective this time around, which is to be expected, and is not really a reflection on the movie, ha ha! I still thought it was pretty well crafted, even if it’s even more out of date than other technology-based spookshows tend to become seventeen years on! The villain here, or the villain’s delivery system, is of course a VHS tape, and this was a superannuated medium even in 2002; and the movie is filled with answering machines and physical file folders and all manner of 20^th century information and communications ephemera! Ha ha! (Of course, I have a basement full of VHS tapes, so it can still be pretty spooky to me!)

We all know the plot, but here it is again! Some unlucky teens run afoul of a possessed VHS, which carries what appears to be a lost collaboration between Luis Bunuel and Maya Deren and a sophomore film student in a Withnail scarf; and after a scary opening sequence we meet an intrepid reporter played by Naomi Watts, well known from her appearance in The Shook-Up Shopping Cart excerpt seen in Matinee! She has a young son, and recruits the help of his photographer father to investigate the increasingly scary mystery of the tape! Ha ha, the trail leads her from damp Seattle to an even damper island, where she meets grumpy Brian Cox, well known from Manhunter and Rushmore!

After a complicated electrocution and some horse-based horror, things come to a head at the bottom of a well, and then there’s another scary scene! It’s all done fairly well, even if it doesn’t actually make any sense! Ha ha, there’s a real division between horror in the West and that which comes from regions of the world that are more connected with their own tapestries of myth and legend! “Sense” is not a particularly valued commodity in terror tales originating in the East! (The Ring is of course based on a Japanese novel and movie adaptation!) And this is as it should be: horror is an emotional genre, not so much a logical one! Anyway, many Western tales make no sense either, but they often try to pretend they do!

The bottom line is that this one works every bit as well as its Japanese forbear did! The picture was photographed in cool blue and rainy grey tones by Bojan “Pumpkinhead” Bozelli, and directed by some Hollywood slickster who, they say, used to be a punkrocker, like ol’ Burl! Ha ha, bet you didn’t know that about ol’ Burl, but yes, I used to punkrock with the best of them! But while this ex-punkrocker director is no Alex Cox, I still say he did a good job with this effort! It’s got some Special Makeup Effects from no less than Rick Baker, and the trick effects in general are superb! The Ring is a good movie to re-watch around Halloweentime with your sweetie, and I give it three clumsy horses!

Burl reviews Ghost Story! (1981)

Boo to you, and you, and you too: it’s Burl, here to review a ghost story by the name of Ghost Story! Ha ha, I have a long history with this picture, having first seen it several times at my neighbourhood cinema on its original December, 1981 release! I was too young to be seeing movies of this sort, probably, but I loved it, and took friends equally too young along with me for my repeat viewings! (I only got around to reading the Peter Straub book some time later, but I recall liking that too!)

Later I met, worked with and even had dinner with the lady at the center of the ghostly doings, the lovely Alice Krige! This was years later but she was as radiant as ever, and told me many stories from the set of Ghost Story, particularly about the quartet of superannuated thespians who were her co-stars! Boy, she loved those old jaspers! And moreover, I’ve spent some time in the little Vermont town which served as its primary location, and on many an occasion crossed the bridge from which she scares one of the old ducks to his doom!

So this picture, whatever one’s opinions of its quality, is woven into me somewhat, and glimpsing the poster in my viewing of Six Weeks inspired me to give it a spin once again! The quartet of elderlies referenced earlier, known as the Chowder Society, consists of Fred Astaire, whom we know from Top Hat and The Towering Inferno; John Houseman, whom we know from Bells, and who opens this picture by telling as spooky tale just as he did in The Fog; Melvyn Douglas, who was in many interesting pictures, like Being There and The Changeling and The Tenant; and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who was in plenty of movies all through the ages!

These duffers tell each other eerie tales every month, then sip their brandy! But there’s one scary tale they won’t breathe a word of, because it happened to them, ha ha, and they feel pretty bad about it too! Craig Wasson from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 appears as a moustacheman who takes a flopper out a high-rise window when his nude ladyfriend says boo to him; we next meet the moustacheman’s brother, a clean-shaven version also played by Wasson, who arrives in the little Vermont town to get to the bottom of things! But the old tartans start dying too, each of them with the dickens literally scared out of them by, you guessed it, a sinister ladyghost saying boo and turning her horrible face upon them! Ha ha, you might call these boo scenes a bit repetitive, but it gives us a chance to see the work of the great makeup trickster Dick Smith, so I myself certainly don’t mind! It’s just too bad we didn’t get to see this particular one, which he made for the film but which went unused, maybe because it was just too darn scary!

 

Ha ha, spooky! Anyway, stories are exchanged, and the ladyghost is of course a vengeful spirit whose vanquishing turns out to be a reasonably simple affair! In fact the whole movie, particularly when compared to the book, has a dumb simplicity to it, a feeling of interesting backstories, subplots and expanded scenes lurking around the margins but never shown! The ghost has a couple of helpers, a toque-wearing fellow played by Miguel Fernandes from Spasms and his little dress-wearing kid-buddy, whose presence is nearly inexplicable! Ha ha, if so much was going to be cut out of the story, they might at least have chosen an elegant simplicity rather than a forced and imperfect one!

There are a few ladies haunting the margins as well, like Patricia Neal from Happy Mother’s Day, Love George and Jacqueline Brooks from Last Embrace, but they don’t get much to do besides scold! On the other hand, the movie is determinedly classy, with terrific photography from the great Jack “The African Queen” Cardiff and a truly stellar musical score! It looks great, the old guys have a terrific presence, Krige is magnetic and the New England smalltown atmosphere is exemplary! On balance it’s a deeply flawed picture, and rarely scary, but I like it anyway! I’m going to give Ghost Story two and a half skull flaps!

Burl reviews Crimson Peak! (2015)

Booga-booga, it’s Burl, here to review the latest work from that portly master of the McBare, Guillermo Del Toro! We last heard from him with the battling robots and beasts of Pacific Rim, and now here he is down in the spookhouse, showing us some ghosts, but, ha ha, not too many ghosts!

Because, you see, this is not really a ghost picture, we are told, but a Gothic romance in the vein of Jane Eyre or Rebecca! Fair bananas says I, but I can tell you what it really is, ha ha: an updated, much overextended version of one of Roger Corman’s old Poe pictures! Shortened by half an hour, and with the insertion of Vincent Price, or even Ray “Premature Burial” Milland, into the part of the plummy Cumbrian baronet here played by Tom “Only Lovers Left Alive” Hiddleston, this would be virtually indistinguishable from one of those crushed-velvet-and-ground-fog epics! Ha ha!

Mia Wasikowska, well-known from Stoker, plays a young lady novelist from Buffalo who meets and subsequently marries the aforementioned baronet, who, with his grumpy sister, is abroad searching for investors in his clay-digging machine! The sister is played by Jessica Chastain from The Tree of Life, and her performance is the best in the picture, or at least the most in tune with its demands! Ha ha, it’s funny that del Toro hired an Englishwoman to play an Americaness, and an Americaness to play an Englishwoman! And it was all shot in Canada, which I suppose makes sense too!

Anyway, the young American, named Miss Cushing of course, has met ghosts before, so when some turn up at her ludicrously dilapidated new abode, she exhibits about as much alarm as others would on espying a doodle bug scurrying across the floor! Ha ha, I’d sure be a little more alarmed than she is! Eventually just about everything you suspect is happening proves to indeed be happening, while no further plot wrinkles are explored! The only thing that really is explored is the old mansion itself, which has an open roof through which snow gently falls, and floorboards which ooze the red muck for which the crumbling old pile, and the picture itself, is named!

While the ghostly elements are a bit lacking and the scares few and far between, the romantic material is pushed as far as it can go! That’s not terribly far, but still, del Toro does weave an atmosphere of genuine tragedy, present and past! It’s just too bad it plays out in such a narritavely dull, if pictorially attractive, manner! A little bit of gore spices up the brew, ha ha, though this could easily have been elided for that important PG-13 rating, I suppose! I’m impressed with del Toro for sticking to his guns on that one, as I’m sure there was considerable pressure on him to stay in the tween-safe zone - the demographic for which the picture is ostensibly intended, remember! - and the disappointing box office is probably being held against him now!

I’m always rooting for the success of original horror projects, even ones so imperfect as this, so I was hoping it would be a hit! Ha ha, I want more R-rated big-screen scare pictures! It’s a pretty perennial genre though, so I’m not too worried! In the meantime, I guess I’ll give Crimson Peak two big vats of tomato paste and urge young Mr. del Toro to go full-throttle horror next time! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Blood Screams! (1987)

Hoy hoy muchachos, it’s Burl, here with a review of a little-known American-Mexican horror picture called Blood Screams! It was originally known as The Bloody Monks, which makes it sound a lot more like one of those Blind Dead pictures than it actually is, ha ha!

The movie opens with a scene set hundreds of years in the past, in which a cruel, gold-hungry plutocrat tosses an endless succession of monks from the top of a tall monastery tower! Then it’s the present, and we join Karen, a young American lady traveling by train through Mexico! Frank, a magician and moustacheman played by Russ Tamblyn, who’s well known from pictures as diverse as The Haunting, War of the Gargantuas and Django Unchained, has glommed on to her as an unwanted companion, but she would prefer to chat with the brooding Hymie, a young fellow who looks like a Mexican Wayne Gretzky!

Hymie gets off at the town where the monks plummeted, which is his hometown – he’s here to figure out the mystery of what he saw as a boy when he found his father dead of a slashed throat – he recalls seeing something so horrific it put him into a fugue state, but he can’t remember just exactly what it was! Karen follows him rather than stay with the jerky Frank, and of course gets caught up in the supernatural shenanigans which are plaguing the town! She also begins to have bad dreams which involve things like Hymie with an oatmeal face or zombie monks busting through the walls like unholy Kool-Aid Men!

There’s lot going on here: the Mystery Of What Hymie Saw, the zombie monks, the murderous ghost of the cruel hacendado, a witch (played by Isela Vega from Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia), a young American bartendress who is apparently under her thrall, a friend of Hymie’s who has secrets of his own which may or may not be connected to the missing gold and the murder of Hymie’s father, and of course the unstoppable Frank, who jumps off his train and spends the whole movie making his way cross country to catch up with Karen! It’s a lot to pack into seventy-five minutes!

Blood Screams also offers some of the worst acting on record, particularly from the young lady who tends the bar! We also get some overly bright cinematography (which I suppose is preferable to overly dark, ha ha), dialogue that sounds like it’s meant as placeholders for the real dialogue, and some of the worst Special Makeup Effects since Bad Meat! All of this conspires to give Blood Screams a very community theatre feel!

I do have to single out one performer, however: Russ Tamblyn! Not only can he do magic tricks, he can act! He also uses his skills as a dancer and tumbler to do some quite risky train stunts, ha ha! These are shot in such a way that there’s no mistaking that it’s actually Russ doing these things and not a stuntman, and I have to say I admire the actor and his can-do attitude!

On balance, while it’s certainly a complete zagnut, it’s an enjoyable one, so I’m going to grin, shake my head softly and give Blood Screams two completely pointless witches!

Burl reviews Dead of Night! (1945)

Ha ha, it’s Burl here, reviewing a classic anthology spookshow! Most such pictures have one or perhaps two segments they’re most renowned for – if renowned they be at all! Who remembers anything from Trilogy of Terror aside from the Zuni Fetish Warrior Doll segment, for example? And can you point me out a story from Screamtime other than the Punch and Judy chapter? Ha ha, I thought not!

Dead of Night has a most famous segment of course: it’s the ventriloquist dummy one! And, ha ha, it is pretty eerie! But I think all of them are pretty solid, even the one about the ghostly golf players, which is admittedly a hiccup in the horror! I’m not a golfer myself, but for some reason I like golfing in movies, or at least in British movies! I’m a particular fan of the golf sequence in Goldfinger! (I’m not about to run out and see Tin Cup though, ha ha!)

The mysterious mirror story, in which a young fiancé sees the domicile of a roaring old sadist’s 19^th Century parlour in the reflection of his newly acquired mirror, is a pretty good one! The racecar driver who receives a chilling premonition is not bad! The girl at the Christmas party who encounters a ghost boy is fairly minor, but benefits from thick atmosphere, solid performances and good art direction! And then there are the linking segments, typically the low points of any anthology, but here, I think, pretty solid, right up to a bone-chilling conclusion! Ha ha!

Of course everyone is terrified of ventriloquist dummies, so it’s natural that the story of the little lap-mannequin is the most fondly recalled of the bunch! Hugo is certainly a nefarious creation, and the ending to this one, a presentiment of Psycho, must have seemed pretty grim to mid-1940s audiences! Ha ha!

The picture was directed by a few different gentlemen, among them Alberto “Went the Day Well?” Cavalcanti, Basil “The Man Who Haunted Himself” Dearden, Charles “The Lavender Hill Mob” Crichton and Robert “Kind Hearts and Coronets” Hamer! It’s a strong group, and their styles are similar enough that the picture doesn’t suffer from the lack of cohesion one might expect from a multi-director piece!

Ha ha, to me it’s not the grand, world-beating classic I’d heard it was for years before I saw it! Watching it more recently I found a well-crafted spook piece, plenty eerie and filled with good moments! I’m going to give Dead of Night three withered googies!

Burl reviews Grave Secrets! (1989)

 

WooOOOoooOOOooo, it’s Burl, here to review a tale of booga-booga from years gone by – from way back in the late 1980s, in fact! It’s called Grave Secrets, and it’s a movie that’s gone strangely unremarked upon over the years! Maybe it’s not so strange, because in fact it would not be unfair to call the picture unremarkable!

Still, it’s a movie with a certain mid low-budget gloss and some recognizable faces, and even a few effective moments, so you’d think it would have some fans! And maybe it does, but they’re just not the types to review movies, which is fair beans as far as ol’ Burl is concerned! Ha ha! In any case, I’ll do my best to let you know whether or not you should put the effort into tracking this picture down for yourself to watch!

Grave Secrets stars Paul “Strange Invaders” LeMat as a tenured parapsychologist and grieving widower! He believes wholeheartedly in ghosts and so forth, and often performs séances so he can speak to them or shoo them away, or whatever needs to be done! He’s like a quiet, small-town ghostbuster, just plying his trade! A mercurial innkeeper played by Renee “The Fourth Man” Soutendijk approaches him and asks for his help cleansing her haunted B&B! Ha ha, but then she changes her mind!

Much of the middle of the picture is Le Mat following her and just hanging around, trying to persuade her to let him tackle the problem! The ghost, in the meantime, turns out to be a big galoot who at one point bedevils Le Mat by sitting on him! And I guess the identity of the ghost – who turns out to be headless, by the way, ha ha! – is meant to be a surprise, so maybe I shouldn’t give it away here!

Well I will anyway, because when are you ever going to see this? The ghost turns out to be Renee’s nasty old dad, a horrible man entirely deserving of the beheading Renee gave him! David Warner turns up briefly as a medium (I thought maybe he was meant to be an aged and mellowed version of Roddy McDowall’s character in The Legend of Hell House - the movie you should be watching instead if you haven’t seen it - but, no) and is later carted off in an ambulance! And then the ghost finds his head (well actually Lee Ving, known from Streets of Fire and Get Crazy, found it first, ha ha!) and reconstitutes into a zombie, I think! But they defeat him using the power of a ghost baby!

It is, as I say, a not-very-remarkable movie in many ways, or rather a remarkable movie in very few; but the headless ghost is not too bad, and there are a few spooky moments scattered here and there! Paul LeMat is pretty bad in it, I’m sorry to say! He’s been fine elsewhere, like in American Graffiti, but here he’s pretty snoozy! And really, in the end, not much happens in this picture, plot-wise! It’s a bit of a blumpkin, and while you could do worse, you could also do a whole lot better! I’m going to give Grave Secrets one and a half deflating head sacks!

Burl reviews Poltergeist III! (1988)

Triple boo, it’s Burl! Ha ha, yes, it’s me, here to review a threequel! It’s Poltergeist III, the third and last in the series of ghost-popper movies that began way, way back in the summer of 1982! I saw Poltergeist in the theatre, and then in 1986 I ponied up for Poltergeist II; but by the time the third one came around in 1988, I couldn’t be bothered - until now! Ha ha, it was sort of the same thing with Robocop III, which, like this movie, features the acting of Nancy Allen, and which I'll review for you some day soon!

Ha ha, so where’s JoBeth Williams and the Coach? A.W.O.L., that’s where! Almost nobody who was involved with the first two pictures had a hand in this one, in front of the camera or behind, and even the location is vastly different! Ha ha, no Southwestern suburban dwellings here, but a tall Chicago skyscraper! (Yes, this is another high-rise picture, just like Gremlins 2, Dredd and Enemy Territory!)

It seems that Carol Anne, the little girl of the Freeling family and for some reason the locus of the ghostly interest, has been adopted into her aunt Nancy Allen’s family, which is made up of Allen, her greying spikehair husband Tom “Big Bad Mama” Skerritt, and Skerritt’s daughter Lara Flynn Boyle! No one can say why the Freelings, who several times have risked their lives and souls to save Carol Anne, would so easily give her up to relatives living in a distant city, but that’s the situation we’re faced with in the opening reel of the picture! We also learn that she goes to a special school for special children which is run by the guy who wrote Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer! Ha ha, what kind of school is that!

Pretty soon there are some appearances from that spooky reverend who was in the second picture! He’s not very scary here though, and the actor who plays him does okay, but he's no Julian Beck! It may not be his fault that he isn't scary, because nothing else in the picture is scary either! The building is getting very cold, which I suppose might be scary if you lived there, ha ha, and weird things are happening in the mirrors! The mirror trickery isn’t scary, but it certainly is quite ingenious!

Ha ha, and it’s here I should mention that another big difference with this movie is that it has none of the ghostly optical tendrils or cloud-tank thunderheads of the first two! All the trick effects here were done in camera, which mostly means they cranked up the old fog machines! You might think that would somehow help make the movie a more relatable, realistic experience, but actually it makes the thing seem like a high school play! The mirror effects are pretty neat, as I said, and the trick makeup is funny! Ha ha, there’s nothing as gruesome as the torn-off face in the first picture, but there is a scene where that little midget lady becomes a desiccated husk, then she busts open and Lara Flynn Boyle comes crawling out covered in cornflakes! Ha ha, gross!

It was one of those troubled productions, I hear, and not only because the little girl very sadly passed away just before the picture wrapped! There was all sorts of confusion, new endings were reportedly shot, and the end result is kind of bland and silly, with terrible dialogue and mostly indifferent acting, especially from Nancy Allen! It’s too bad, because the potential was there – the director, Gary Sherman, did a couple of horror pictures I quite admire: Raw Meat and Dead & Buried! But whatever he brought to those fine efforts, he left at home for this one! I’m going to give Poltergeist III one single hagface!

Burl reviews Ghostbusters! (1984)

Hi, Burl here, reviewing another picture for you, simply because burlin’ makes me feel good! Ha ha! And today’s review, as you’ve no doubt guessed from my reference, is the big-budget comedy escapade Ghostbusters, wherein three men and a fourth man chase, trap and bust the ghosts who are plaguing New York City! Ha ha, it comes from Ivan "Junior" Reitman, the director of Cannibal Girls!

Ha ha, I guess there’s no real need to go over the plot of Ghostbusters! I remember going to my neighbourhood cinema to see this picture one warm and sultry Sunday evening just as grade school was winding down for the year and final exams were beginning! I had to really plead with my parents to forego studying for a couple of hours! I really enjoyed it, and the upshot of the whole experience is that Ghostbusters has come to symbolize the beginning of summer for me, and that excellent tag line, “Coming To Save The World This Summer,” only backs the feeling up! This is why I’ve chosen to re-watch and review the picture for you now!

I have to say, as a breezy entertainment from Hollywood’s dream factory, it holds up very well! It’s still pretty funny, thanks mainly to a fine performance from Bill “Meatballs” Murray, and also some merry japery from the likes of Aykroyd, Ramis and Moranis! All the acting is pretty good, in fact, and Sigourney “Cabin in the Woods” Weaver makes a fine straightwoman! It would have been nice to see John Candy in there somewhere, but I guess you can’t have it all!

Of course Murray, well known as the brother to John “Moving Violations” Murray, epitomizes the 80s comedy hero, in that he’s a wisenheimer who does the right thing, but isn’t actually very likeable! When he puts the moves on Weaver and she says he seems less like a scientist and more like a game show host, you have to admit she’s absolutely right!

Another funny thing about this picture is that the EPA fellow is the bad guy! Sure, he’s played by William “Die Hard” Atherton, which automatically makes him a bad guy and a jerk, but when you get down to it, an EPA inspection of the Ghostbuster facilities is a pretty reasonable request, public safety and corporate oversight-wise; and, overlooking the fact for a moment that Atherton’s meddling hastens the third-act phasma libertas, the unregulated facility was, as indicated by the Twinkie analogy, a legitimate danger! And yet, in what I suppose must have been a reflexive expression of Reagan-era attitudes, the EPA – created by Nixon, remember, ha ha – is presented as a bunch of literally impotent crackernacks!

And then there’s Ernie Hudson, who does what he can with his role, but who nevertheless may as well have his picture in the dictionary under the “Token Black Guy” heading! He contributes a few lines here and there, and opens the possibility of an Old Testament reading of the antics, but contributes nothing to the actual narrative, which is itself a pretty weak concoction if you step back and think about it for more than a few seconds! Ha ha!

But it’s still somehow a fine picture, crammed full of top-flight trick effects and marvelous comedy performers! It’s also got a great score from Elmer Bernstein, and a number of mediocre pop songs! They made a sequel of course, and even though all the same people were involved, it was terrible! It makes the original look all that much better! I’m going to give Ghostbusters three flowers that are still standing!

Burl reviews The Woman in Black! (2012)

Bo-o-o-o-url here to review a spookhouse picture of quite recent vintage, The Woman in Black! Like Witchtrap, it’s a haunted house movie, but in all other respects the two movies are not really very much alike! No nak*d ladies get impaled in the throat by shower heads, so I guess you might say this is more in the tradition of a picture like The Haunting!

It was the first non Harry Potter movie featuring the guy who played Harry Potter, and so, since I’ve never seen any of those Potter pictures, it was my first exposure to this frequently morose and bespectacled thespian! He seems to be a fine enough actor, what with his British training and all, though he doesn’t have all that much to do in this movie except to look a little frightened in those brief moments when he’s not being morose!

He plays a mighty young lawyer in Edwardian London, and though he seems at about the age where most Edwardians lose their v*rginity to a S*ho lady and join a sportsmen’s club, he’s already a widower with a four year old son! He’s tasked by his stern barrister boss to settle the affairs of a haunted house, and so up he travels to some barren and remote seaside area, where the townsfolk make the pub denizens from An American Werewolf in London look like the hospitality staff at Disn*yland!

The spooky old mansion is situated on a property connected to the mainland only by a thin ribbon of road that’s washed right over at high tide! Strangely, however, there’s never any scene where he badly wants to leave the place because of ghosts, but is stranded by the water! Ha ha, that seems odd to me! Anyway, the town near the mansion is plagued by a rash of child suicides, which is pretty horrible! It’s no wonder the townspeople are a little weird! Daniel Radcliffe – that’s the Harry Potter actor’s name – sets about trying to figure out the mystery, which he does quite quickly, because there’s not much to this mystery, I’m afraid!

The haunted house movie this reminded me of the most was The Changeling! Ha ha, do you remember that one? George C. Scott was in it, and also a terrifying wheelchair! I haven’t seen that one for quite a while, so maybe I’ll watch  it again soon and review it for you here! There are also elements of Ghost Story in there too, and I’m going to re-watch that one soon as well!

In any case, The Woman in Black is a fairly solid little picture with a few eerie scenes and a couple of really good scares, but even with its heavy suicide theme and an ending that could fairly be described as downbeat, it’s about as substantial as the wrathful wraith of its title! It looks good, is acted well, and is overall an addition to the haunted house genre that nobody should be embarrassed of! I give this stately picture two and a half self-rocking chairs!   

Burl reviews Witchtrap! (1988)

Good day, it’s Burl! Yes indeed, it’s time for another movie review, and this time I’m going to tell you about a spooky movie, or at least a movie that’s meant to be spooky, from the director of Witchboard! I remember seeing that one at the local movie theater, which seems such an oddball proposition nowadays, it being such a low-budget picture!

This one is called Witchtrap, which proves that this is a director who enjoys working on a theme! In this case there are no Ouija boards, though; instead it’s a movie in a genre I really like, the haunted house investigation picture! The Haunting is one of the best of these of course, and The Legend of Hell House is another fine example, and the question for anyone going into Witchtrap is: how will this stack up against these ghostly classics?

Ha ha, not too well! But it’s not a simple case of good movie/bad movie, because while Witchtrap is most certainly a bad movie, it’s not without its special charms! I’ll tell you the story: after a prologue in which a rhinestone-jacketed fellow hurtles out the window of a large mansion, the guy who owns the place hires some parapsychologists and a bicker-prone security team to exorcise the evil spirit haunting it, or else prove it’s all just bunkum and honeydew!

I’ll tell you, there’s a lot of arguing in this movie! The hero, whose square-jawed, quasi-Ash appearance underlines this picture’s Evil Dead pretensions, is extremely vocal in his opinion that all this ghost stuff is just so much codswallop! He also doesn’t like his boss much, and says so at every opportunity! It’s a great relief when the killer phantom, who's an evil magician, begins killing off the gang; though he makes a tactical mistake in my opinion by starting with their cameraperson, played by that great star of horror, Linnea Quigley! Ha ha, she gets a pixilated shower head in the throat, which is an odd way to go, but it helps fulfill what I assume is a contractual demand on Quigley’s part that she take off all her clothes at least once per picture!

It’s not a very scary movie, and some of the acting is not just poor but extremely poor, and the interiors of the spook-ridden mansion are not very atmospheric, a crippling condition for any haunted house picture! It seems to have about three times the dialogue required to tell the story, and the behaviour of the characters goes well beyond simple horror movie idiocy into the sort of decision-making you might expect to find in one of Otto Muehl’s Actionist happenings! Ha ha!

But there’s a home movie charm to it, and a few moments of budget cleverness! I liked that it made game attempts to deliver the goods, even if the workmanship on those goods was a bit shoddy, and a number of them had clearly fallen off the back of Sam Raimi’s truck! For trying, I’m going to give Witchtrap a sound one and a half bulletproof handymen!

Burl reviews The Boogey Man! (1980)

Hodely-hodely, it’s Burl here! Yes, here to review another movie, this time a spookshow from the early 1980s called The Boogey Man! This was a movie that always stood out in the horror section of the video store because of its evocative box art and (for a youngster) scary title! It was made by Ulli Lommel, the same fellow who later brought us The Devonsville Terror, which is not a well-loved movie, but, to me anyway, has a certain something that raises it above the typical bad, boring horror movie!

Does The Boogey Man manage the same trick? Well, in part it does! It manages to mill its Poverty Row budget into a certain amount of regional charm, and though it’s never as scary as the poster and title promise, it has an earthiness about it that I like! And the region in which the picture is set, namely the shores of Chesapeake Bay, is not one I’ve seen used before in such a picture – it reminded me a little bit of the Long Island Sound shores seen in the early Amityville Horror movies!

The story is a little different than the usual sort of thing as well, which is nice! It seems that twenty years ago, Lacey and her brother Willie saw their mother making love to a man in a panty-hose! Ha ha, he had the panty-hose on his face, I mean! Anyway, he gets the chop, and the whole thing is witnessed by an ugly mirror! Twenty years later Lacey and her Wonder Bread of a husband live on a farm with her grandparents and Willie, who is now a mute! Lacey starts having flashbacks to That Night, and her psychiatrist, John Carradine (whom we know and love from Satan’s Cheerleaders of course!) advises her to visit the house where it all happened! Well, the mirror gets broken by a chair-wielding Lacey, and then evil things start to befall random teenagers!

Ha ha, those are the good parts, really! One teenager, a fellow wearing a Triumph shirt, gets a poke through the neck! Another one runs afoul of a scissors, and, as in The House on Tombstone Hill, an annoying youth learns the mortal dangers of leaning in through a sash window! It all wraps up back at the farm with some pitchfork impalings and a touch of possession, and these climactic scenes reminded me how much I like it when movie characters in some horrific situation have to run from the house to the barn and back and forth again! Here are some movies with scenes like this: Critters, Deadly Blessing, The Strangers, Blood Massacre and Friday the 13^th part III! There are probably more, but that’s all I can think of for now!

On the debit side, The Boogey Man is a pretty lame movie that makes very little of its interesting concept! Ulli Lommell may have worked for Fassbinder in his younger days, but that didn’t stop him from making some pretty bad movies! I’m going to give this one one and a half lazy susan hiding spots!

Burl reviews Poltergeist II! (1986)

Ha ha, BOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, ha ha! No, it’s just me, Burl, here to review a ghost picture! No, not Poltergeist, but Poltergeist II! Ha ha, that’s the one with the evil preacher, though maybe the third one, which I’ve never seen, has an evil preacher too! I guess I’ll find out someday, because the DVD of Poltergeist II that I have has the third one on the other side, but I’ve never watched it! Ha ha, the same thing goes for the Robocop movies – I have all three of them, but have never bothered with the third installment! It’s a Nancy Allen thing, maybe!

Anyway, if you remember the original Poltergeist, it concludes with the Freeling family fleeing their haunted house and ending up in a motel, where the first thing they do is roll the TV out the door! But in this second one we discover that the TV wasn’t the problem; it’s just that ghosts don’t like the Freelings! Now they’re living with Granny in Arizona, and what do you know, the supernatural is soon literally knocking at their door, aiming to start up their shenanigans once again! The evil preacher is played by Living Theatre co-founder Julian Beck, and he’s the best, creepiest thing in the whole picture by a very long shot!

Other guest stars include Will Sampson from The Outlaw Josey Wales as the mystical Aboriginal gentleman, and the return of the diminutive ghost whisperer Tangina, whose performances in these movies always have me half suspecting it’s meant as some sort of joke or put-on! Ha ha, people talk about a curse on the Poltergeist movies because so many of the actors passed on before their time, but I think Tangina is the real curse! (Ha ha, the dying actors thing doesn’t seem like a curse so much as just a sad turn of events, and calling it a curse doesn’t really show much respect to the poor dead actors!)

Many strange things occur! For one thing, Granny sports a distinctly un-Arizona accent! Then the young boy’s braces run amok for some reason; and the little girl, who barely looks older than she did in the first movie even though this one was made four years later, is kidnapped by spooks once again! Also, the dad becomes a possessed Bad Dad for about five minutes: a little tip of the hat to The Shining, I suppose! There are some mildly Lovecraftian creatures in the mix, and I appreciated those! I liked the monster mezcal worm too!

It’s pretty amazing how much this family drinks, by the way! The dad is always slugging on his bottle of mezcal, and that stuff is pretty potent! The mom, on the other hand, likes her Jack Daniels, which she sips casually in the afternoons as though it were tea! Well, when ghosts are on the attack, maybe it’s best to counterattack with some spirits of your own, ha ha!

The dad is a bit of a numbskull in this one, playing the part of the skeptic once again despite all that happened to him before! Well, he never struck me as too smart a guy, and the actor who plays him is even dumber, I think! Ha ha, that guy was on some kind of right-wing talk show not too long ago, telling all the poor people out there that they should simply pull up their bootstraps and not expect any handouts from the government or anybody! After all, he says, in his younger days he was on welfare and food stamps, and no one ever helped him! Ha ha! That welfare and food stamps was the help, you tetherball, and was the reason you survived long enough to become the Coach!

Well, sorry for my little rant – Craig T. Nelson may be a bit of a blockhead, but his performance in this picture is pretty good, if you like ham! The stuff involving the preacher's back story is pretty creepy, and nicely anti-clerical to boot! Too bad the movie wraps up with a bunch of bunkum and honeydew on the so-called Other Side, with the family rescued by a combination of their great love for one another and a surprise granny ex machina! It’s a really so-so movie, and gets even sillier than you might imagine! There's no finality to the conclusion of this one either, and after all the random, goofy, pointless Freeling torment, it's got a wet cruickshank for an ending! I give Poltergeist II one and a half Freaky Freelings, and that's mostly for Julian Beck, who died as the movie was still being made! Too bad, he could have had all the great horror roles he wanted after this one!

(Ha ha, an extra note: do those fade marks on the movie poster look like skeleton hands reaching out of the darkness for that little girl to anyone else? They do to me! Ha ha, creepy!)

Burl reviews The Haunting! (1963)

Ha ha, hi, it’s Burl here, reviewing another movie for my blog, and whoever reviews here, reviews alone! Ha ha, even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to review! But for now, let’s have a look at the original film version of The Haunting!

Of course it was based on Ms. Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, which is a corker! Naturally it made for a spooky movie, and thank goodness the making of it was taken up by someone with at least a passing acquaintance with the films of Val Lewton, which is to say the director Robert Wise! Of course, Wise had more than a passing acquaintance with Lewton’s works, having directed one and a half of them, but I’d still like to see the film Jacques Tourneur would have made of it! That’s a bit churlish of me to say, since Wise did a fine job, but it’s still fun to speculate!

The Haunting is a classic haunted house movie, perhaps the template for the particular strain of them that I especially love! I really appreciate those movies where an investigative team is assembled which includes a heady admixture of psychics, skeptics and scientists, and where there’s a scene in which everybody sips port in the parlor as they listen to the unsavory history of the house they’re investigating! And after that, it’s on! Boogety-boogety of all sorts is unleashed!

There are other movies in this vein, including The Legend of Hell House and The Evil, and of course a reportedly misbegotten remake of The Haunting which I’ve never seen; but of them all this might be the one to beat! The main character, Eleanor, is perhaps too pathetic by about half, but Julie Harris makes it work! The rest of the acting is strong also, even that of noted oddball Russ "Blood Screams" Tamblyn! And the design of the house is about as spooky as it gets!

Eleanor becomes convinced that the house wants her to stay, and that she’d be happiest if she did indeed stay, as she has nowhere else in particular to go; and of course a variation on that is exactly what happens in the end! The head scientist and instigator of the whole experiment is played by Richard Johnson, and it’s hard to see what his actual investigative plan was intended to be, besides inviting some particularly sensitive people to the house and seeing what happens! It would be nice to read his post-experiment paper on the subject, ha ha!

I’ve heard the remake is simply dreadful, but I’ll tell you one thing I think might have been improved, and that’s the sound design! It’s purely a technical thing: all the times in the older movie when the unearthly thumping comes up and down the hallway, the characters have to tell us where it’s supposed to be! Aiieee, it’s at the top of the door! Ahhh, land o’ Goshen, it’s on the other side of the hallway! Things like that! Whereas modern cinematic sound mixing techniques would allow us to hear it for ourselves, and let the characters be frightened in a more realistically nonverbal fashion!

Of course I haven’t seen the new one, so I don’t know if they took advantage of that! And even if they did, I’ll bet the old one is still far and away the better version! I give the original Robert Wise production of The Haunting three and a half desperately creepy housekeepers!

Burl reviews The Fog! (1980)

11:55! Almost midnight! Enough time for one more review! Ha ha, no, it’s not old Mr. Machen, it’s Burl, here to review the original version of The Fog! (I’d almost forgotten there even was a remake, you know – I saw it, I think, but insofar as I can recall it, it was really bland!)

That’s not the case with this one, which was stylishly made by a director I really like, John "Prince of Darkness" Carpenter! He starts it off with a ghost story, excellently told by John Houseman as a sea captain named Mr. Machen! He sets up the whole story, and if the movie isn’t quite able to live up to that first five minutes and the possibilities it raises, well, it truly does its best! Almost right away, as the clock strikes twelve and it’s been exactly a hundred years since this little seaside community fooled a bunch of lepers into steering their ship into the rocks, sword-wielding leper-ghosts begin stalking the town and popping out of the ever-present, you guessed it, fog!

There’s a great cast, with lots of choices for heroes and heroines! If you don’t like Adrienne "Creepshow" Barbeau, then you can pretend Jamie Lee "Halloween" Curtis is the female lead; and if you don’t like that particular donkey girlscout, just focus on Adrienne instead! (And Adrienne was married to John Carpenter at the time, so fat chance she wasn’t going to be in it, ha ha!) And you’ve got guys like the great Tom Atkins as the hero who doesn’t really do much of anything, Hal Holbrook as a whiskey priest, that ol’ houndog George ‘Buck’ Flower as a doomed sailor-man, and John Carpenter himself as Bennett! Add to that Houseman and the legendary Janet Leigh and you’ve got the best bunch of actors to appear in a low-budget horror movie in some time!

Great location, too! The movie was shot in Northern California, near the Point Reyes lighthouse, and boy does the area look great! The scene with Adrienne Barbeau walking down a million stairs to get to the radio station she’s set up in her lighthouse (weird, I know!) is beautiful, so congratulations to that portly and bearded cinematographer Dean Cundey!

I should note that I sure wish there was a radio station like hers in my town, by the way! It seems to be largely Adrienne talking in a sexy voice, interrupted occasionally by tootling songs that sound like 1940s elevator music! I’d have that station on all the time! Anyway, many thanks to all of you who helped make this delightful minor classic, which I would like to give three and a half grizzled sea captains!