Burl reviews Night of the Living Dead! (1990)

 

It’s Burl once again with the shambling and the moaning and the munching – yes, it’s zombies all right, and not only that but it’s the same zombies, almost! Yes, last time I reviewed Night of the Living Dead, and now here I am with a review of Night of the Living Dead! Ha ha!

This is the one directed by trick effects makeup man Tom Savini, who did his gory necromancy in pictures from The Burning to The Prowler! Here he’s behind the megaphone and leaving the rubber wrangling to others, and ha ha, did you know what – he did a decent job of it! Like Stan Winston with Pumpkinhead and Tom Burman when he made Meet the Hollowheads, Savini seems to have picked up mostly the right things from being on so many movie sets before taking up the megaphone himself!

Well, it’s the same old story: Barbara and her ever-complaining brother Johnny pull up to the graveyard, a zombie man jumps them, Johnny gets a klonking, and Barbara finds a farmhouse! But this time it’s in color, and Barbara is played by Patricia Tallman from Road House and Army of Darkness, and Johnny is good old Bill Moseley from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2! And when Ben pulls up to the farmhouse, knocking over a zombie along the way and clutching a mighty hayer’s hook like he’s auditioning for Candyman, he’s played by Tony Todd from Enemy Territory!

Again we find cowering in the basement an objectionable slaphead, this time played by Tom Towles from Mad Dog and Glory, and even meaner, barkier and more crazed than the 1968 version! Ha ha, I thought this was a setup for when Ben shoots Cooper, as he did in the original – you know, make Cooper dangerously insane so we don’t consider Ben's action egregious! But that’s not where the movie goes with this particular relationship! And along with Cooper we again have the wife, the ailing daughter, and the young hayseed couple! The lad in this latter duo is played by William Butler from Friday the 13^th part VII: The New Blood, and he has about the same luck in both movies!

Aside from being in colour (though Savini’s idea, nixed by unimaginative moneymen I assume, was to start it in monochrome and gradually bring in the colour), the most remarked-upon change from the original is to reconfigure Barbara from a shock-paralyzed nobody to an actual character with agency! This is of course an improvement – one imagines that for Romero, who wrote the screenplay, offering the more badass Barbara was a sort of mea culpa for the wimpy old Barbara in his movie, ha ha! There are other small misdirects for those familiar with the 1968 version, and other welcome changes here and there, especially in the third act! But one thing they’ve kept: the incessant hammering of boards across windows! Ha ha, this update has even more hammering, I think, and it makes the middle act awfully monotonous! I also have to say that the inky, eerie, spookshow atmosphere of the original is almost entirely missing!

Most of the changes are improvements, however, even if they feel fairly strategic! Equally strategic are the things kept pointedly the same, like an appearance by Chilly Billy Cardille as a TV interviewer once again, and the return of the sheriff who says “They’re dead, they’re… all messed up!” (Ha ha, and that new sheriff is played by Russell Streiner, who was Johnny in the original, and was one of the producers of the old one too!) And of course the new movie is gorier than the original, but not as much as you'd think a movie directed by beloved goremeister Savini might be!

Altogether it turned out better than anyone could have expected it would! There’s nothing very organic or sincere about it, and I think it was at least in part a reaction to Return of the Living Dead (or maybe to Return of the Living Dead part II, which had just come out a year or two before), and generally designed to reclaim ownership of the Living Dead brand; but at least it was made by people connected to the original, who were willing and able to put some effort into it! It’s no 1968 Night of the Living Dead, but I’m going to give 1990 Night of the Living Dead two pairs of old man pants!

Burl reviews Night of the Living Dead! (1968)

 

Ha ha, they’re coming to get you Burlbra! Yes, it’s Burl here, reviewing an influential classic of independent horror cinema! Before The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, before Halloween, along came the cheap little horror movie that could, and did, give the world a new idea about where smash-hit movies might come from and what they might be like! So, in glorious black and white, here comes that all-timer Night of the Living Dead!

It’s a movie I’ve seen many times, but I showed it to my son the other day as a part of his general horror education, and was very pleased myself to watch it again! It’s a really solid piece of work, being as it is a low-budget first feature from a little Pittsburgh gang of twentysomethings whose usual line of country was commercials and industrial pictures! They went out into the rural areas on weekends, or into their jerry-built Pittsburgh studio, and made a movie that resembled almost nothing that had come before it! It was gruesome and boundary-pushing and eerie and dark, and entirely of a piece with the times into which it was released: the tail end of a decade of war, assassination, racial unrest, and riot!

Of course the lead beard on the picture (ha ha, before he even had a beard) was George Romero, “creator of the living dead,” as the mall PA system tells us in Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home! Romero later brought us pictures like Creepshow, and of course many further zombie stomps, including Land of the Dead! There’d been zombie pictures before, naturally, but so far as the whole modern walking dead cycle goes, ha ha, this is the wellspring!

We all know the situation and the characters! Barbara and her jerky hip-nerd brother Johnny have driven out to a remote graveyard to visit their father, and Johnny’s complaining and joking around is interrupted by a zombie man, with the net result being Johnny’s head klonked on a tombstone! Well, Barbara is immediately reduced to a shocked jelly, but, shrieking and falling down the whole way, she makes it to a nearby farmhouse, where she sees scary things and meets up with capable Ben, played by Duane Jones! They start boarding up the windows against the gathering ghouls outside - well, Ben mostly, with a little help from the near-catatonic Barbara - and after a lot of banging and nailing it transpires that there are people hiding in the basement: angry, frightened slaphead Cooper, his wife and injured daughter; and a young hayseed couple, Tom and Judy!

There’s a lot of arguing about whether they should stay upstairs or go hide in the basement, and then, during an attempt to gas up a pickup truck as a prelude to fleeing the scene, everything starts to go terribly wrong! Frankly, nobody comes out of the situation in very good shape, and the final, cruel irony of the finale feels monumentally unfair, but also consistent with the mood of both the film and the era! It’s still a real gutpunch, however, and reading Roger Ebert’s account of the weeping and crying children at the 1968 screening he attended – children who’d been dropped off by their parents on the assumption this was another silly childish horror movie – one wonders if it was the flesh-munching and other shocks that so upset them, or the atmosphere and downer ending!

As you’ve surely gleaned, I admire this movie greatly! It’s not perfect: there’s not much respect given to the character of Barbara, who’s just dead weight to the other characters and to the film itself, really! The characterizations in general can’t be called nuanced or profound, although I found the acting to be of a very high quality! Duane Jones in particular is good, and it’s interesting, given the times, that he’s black: this easily could have been a purposeful thing, a political statement from the progressive Romero, but in fact he says that Jones was simply the best actor they knew! This is borne up by his performance, and everyone else is pretty good too, or at least acceptable! This goes a long mile in a low-budget production!

It's rough in spots (which I don’t personally regard as a debit), and the characters occasionally do dumb things, and it probably all seems quaint and silly and overly familiar to today’s zombie-soaked audiences! But it still works for me, and I have every respect for its place in horror history, so I give Night of the Living Dead three and a half keys to the gas pump!

Burl reviews Cottage Country! (2013)

 

Ha ha and welcome to the cottage, it’s Burl! I had lake cottages I could visit while I was growing up – grandparents had one, uncle had one, some friends of course – but they were either far away or could only be visited occasionally, so I can’t say I really had the childhood cottage experience! But eventually I married into one, and now I do have it, and man is it sweet! It’s a lot of work, though! I’ve built additions, sheds, decks, docks, wooden walkways and garden boxes, and have done more tree-chopping, wood-splitting, outhouse-moving and various sundry other tasks than I ever thought I would! But if that sounds like complaining, think again: ha ha, I’m very grateful to have it!

But my place is a lot more rustic than the cottage seen in the movie I’m reviewing for you today: by name, Cottage Country! It’s a Canadian picture, and at times a very Canadian picture, so as a cottaging Canuck myself, I thought this picture might strike a chord! Well, maybe it did, but a fairly dull one with little resonance and not always the most pleasing of tones! Still, it proved better than I was expecting! Read on, sweet primate, and I’ll give you the particulars!

Tyler Labine from Tucker & Dale vs. Evil and Rise of the Planet of the Apes plays Todd, a milquetoast Toronto salaryman with a family cottage in the Muskokas and a blonde girlfriend who at first seems out of his league, and to whom, this magical weekend at what Ontarians call “camp,” he plans to propose! Malin Ackerman who played Debbie Harry in CBGB is Cammie, the girlfriend, and she does a good job at immediately situating the character as a very specific type, who later in the movie will evolve into a different, but related, specific type!

Anyway, after a brief encounter with a woods-hobo played by Earl Pastko from Heads and Land of the Dead and Roadkill and The Sweet Hereafter, Todd and Cammie arrive at the cottage, which is more like a regular two-story house; and before Todd can make his ill-considered proposal, even before Cammie can enact a prefatory session of whistle-dog, who should burst in but Todd’s obnoxious brother, whose name, improbably, is Salinger, along with his dour Eastern European girlfriend Masha, played by Lucy Punch from Hot Fuzz! This unwanted invasion sets up the big conflict of the picture, which comes to a head when Todd semi-accidentally puts the chop to his brother’s neck!

Things get a little Macbeth from here: Cammie turns out to be the sort of lady who won’t let anything get in the way of her personal happiness and the vision of her life which she has conceived! Ha ha, you know the type! Well, she’s soon browbeaten Todd into helping her murder Masha, and from there things get complicated with the chopping up of the bodies, the sinking of the parts, and the unexpected party which the brother had arranged before his axing! With increasingly suspicious guests – one in particular likes asking the hard questions, ha ha – the murder-happy couple’s desperation grows, and their willingness to kill, or at least Cammie’s willingness to kill, grows apace!

Eventually Todd and Salinger’s parents show up, played by Canadian acting veterans Kenneth Welsh, whom we know from any number of things including the latter-day Romero picture Survival of the Dead, and Nancy Beatty from City on Fire! They’re a pair of bickersons right out of Till Death Do Us Part, and the name “Salinger” becomes even more unlikely once these L7s appear, but the actors are talented enough that their worry for their missing son, and increasing suspicion about what might have happened to him, hits a genuine emotional note!

There are some hoser cops that include Jonathan Crombie from Bullies, and then there’s a car chase and the final dislocation between Todd and Cammie! Ha ha, in the last act the picture begins to recall the British killer-couple movie Sightseers, but it never fully commits to the heartlessness and black-comic violence of that picture! Still, there are casualties and things occasionally get bloody! The acting is pretty sharp all around, the locations pretty, and the rest of the show is perfectly functional! But it never really flies, and it never really lands either – it’s not scary and not all that thrilling, and if the intention is satirical, the targets (WASPy couples? Affluent cottagers? Families?) escape unscathed! But it has moments of sharpness, minor suspense, and gratifying humour, so it was hardly a total loss! I’ll give Cottage Country two pairs of expensive headphones!

Burl reviews Till Death Do Us Part! (1982)

 

By hidden camera, it’s Burl, here to report on a piece of oddballania from the Great White North! Ha ha, many strange concoctions have emerged from that land, and the movie under discussion today is not the strangest – but most certainly it is not the most normal, either! It’s claimed in certain quarters to be a made-for-TV movie, but I don’t think that’s true! I think it’s just a plain old freaky little mystery, and it goes by the name of Till Death Do Us Part!

I can see why some would think it’s a TV movie though – the VHS version I saw had been sort of transformed into one with some weird and very apparent editing elisions; a clearly re-cut credits sequence, which shows bits from the movie to come; and an abbreviated running time! I suppose it was chopped and reordered from whatever it started as into a post-hoc TV movie in much the same way as Dr. Moreau surgically alters people into half-animals! So it’s a bit of a mutation, this little movie, but does it still work? Ha ha, sort of!

We open in a big country house at night, with a scullery maid played by Riva Spier from Pinball Summer discovering a young man rocking back and forth in his chair as he watches a screen showing two people engaged in pre-bohankie! The maid steals the big ¾ inch video tape and escapes the house by the tried-and-true method of tying sheets together and shinnying out the window – though, ha ha, her knots are not so good and she takes a tumble! Worse still awaits her in the woods, where she is killed, has a cross carved into her forehead, and is crucified on some trees by person or persons unknown!

Then it’s the next day and we’re back at the country mansion, which proves to be a marriage counselling retreat run by a radical post-Freudian psychologist called Dr. Sigmund Freed, ha ha, who’s played by none other than the director of Mon Oncle Antoine, Claude Jutra! (Some pretty unsavory stories have come out about poor Jutra in recent years, but as they haven’t really been confirmed so far as I’ve heard, and as he’s dead anyway, drowned in the St. Lawrence, I tried not to let that bother me as I watched the movie!) His character is meant to be a crazy unpredictable obsessive wearing a thin veneer of rationality, and for a non-actor he pulls it off pretty well!

Anyway, three married couple arrive for therapy: we have the world’s rudest man, Wally, played by Jack Creley from Tulips and Videodrome, and his long-suffering wife Edna, essayed by Helen Hughes from Incubus; floppy-haired Robert Craig, played by the picture’s requisite American star, James Keach from Cannonball and Vacation, and his wife Dr. Susan Craig, who is played by Candace O’Connor from The Silent Partner; and, late to the party and therefore subject to a fearsome dressing-down from Freed, drugs aficionado Tony, impersonated by veteran summer-camp actor Matt Craven from Meatballs and Indian Summer, along with his wife, played by someone I forget who, ha ha!

Already at the big country house is Freed, of course, along with his wife Honora, played by Toby Tarnow from Utilities; Honora’s brother, who seems mute but later protests that he’s only shy, played not by an actor but by a lighting technician; and Terrence Labrosse as a crusty, gun-toting, bunny-loving handyman! The bickering couples are subjected to various mind games and constant surveillance, and are informed that they must not leave the premises for the entire weekend! Ha ha, but after Freed does things like pretend to machine gun everyone to death, it’s inevitable that they will insist upon leaving in the most strenuous terms! Except, ha ha, they don’t really – they make a lot of noise, but these are not very proactive people!

And eventually, they start dying! Wally, the world’s rudest man, is first to go: bonked on the head with a meat tenderizer, a cross carved in his forehead, and sent plummeting down a well! And it seems to take forever, but eagle-beaked Tony goes next: after a long sequence in which he’s blitzed by mind drugs given him by Freed, he relaxes in a hot tub and is heated to death! (We have to assume this – we don’t see it, but he is later found in the tub looking a little ruddier than usual!) There’s also a knife to the gut! And eventually – ha ha, spoiler alert I suppose – the killer bonks Freed on the head, and the garrulous quack goes down still talking as though nothing has happened, but dies once he’s on the floor!

Well I won’t tell who the killer is, but I will say that I, a notoriously bad guesser of such things, was not surprised at the culprit! Nor do the other characters seem terribly shocked, but this is in keeping with their reactions all throughout the movie, ha ha! They muster only the most feeble of requests to call the police once bodies start turning up! Keach, wearing a truly bizarre hairstyle, turns out to have a secret of his own, and is positioned as the hero, but like everyone else he pretty much just stands around in small-mouthed astonishment as the film’s climax unfolds! (He does deliver one minor punch to Freed, however!) We never really find out what the deal is with the crosses in the forehead, but I assume that’s just a holdover from the Duplessis era in Quebec, where the movie was shot!

It’s a strange little movie: part horror, part country-house murder mystery, part comedy! The bizarre lengths Freed is willing to go and his psychopathic egoism; and the outsized behaviour of many of the other characters, in particular the world’s rudest man and the necro-groper handyman who’s constantly fondling bunny rabbits; and the astonishing passivity of the patients, all help make up the oddballness of the picture, and are what makes it compelling despite the long stretches of not much happening and the unpleasantness of many of the characters! The acting is fine, the direction adequate if unspectacular (the director went on to a long TV career, naturally), and the screenplay eccentric enough to make it interesting! It’s no lost classic, though it is virtually lost, and I’m going to give Till Death Do Us Part two polygraph machines!

Burl reviews Greedy! (1994)

 

By the call of the ragman’s son it’s Burl, here to review yet another poor 90s comedy! Ha ha, I know I’ve been reviewing quite a few of these lately, and for that I apologize! I’d rather be reviewing the good 90s comedies, but there just aren’t very many of them! Let’s think of a few, just to put off talking about this one for a minute or two, ha ha: Groundhog Day was pretty good; Wayne’s World had its moments, as did Dumb and Dumber; the mockumentaries of Christopher Guest have merit; and there are marvelous items like Living in Oblivion and Office Space and Dazed and Confused and The Big Lebowski and Flirting With Disaster and Rushmore! And there are more good'ns I haven’t named, of course, but for a whole decade that’s not too many, is it! And you may be certain that the picture under review today, Greedy, is not one of them!

I’d never seen this movie before but had the DVD lying around, and, because the cast looked pretty impressive, thought I’d give it a look! And it starts out a little blandly, but not badly: we’re introduced to a bunch of different family members as they visit their old Uncle Joe, who is very, very rich, and to whom they act with nausea-inducing obsequity, while trying to sabotage each other to get in good with their elderly ballcapped relation! There are some fine black-comedy moments with a dead doctor confusion, and with the desperate ruthlessness of the nephews and nieces and cousins or whatever they are, but by the end of the first act most of this wears off and is forgotten!

It’s worth pausing a moment and examining the actors who play these family members! Of course old Uncle Joe is essayed by Kirk Douglas from Eddie Macon’s Run and The Fury and Two Weeks in Another Town, and he’s the major reason I watched this thing at all! Then we have talented folks like Phil Hartman from ¡ThreeAmigos!, Ed Begley Jr. from Get Crazy, Colleen Camp from Smile, Bob Balaban from Moonrise Kingdom, Joyce Hyser from Just One of the Guys and Mary Ellen Trainor from The Monster Squad; and Olivia d’Abo from Bullies plays Molly, the pizza delivery gal who has become Uncle Joe’s live-in companion for him to leer at, and whose presence at the mansion sends all the aforementioned relatives into a tizzy!

Into this roiling stewpot of venality comes Michael J. Fox from Teen Wolf in the role of Danny, the nice-guy bowler (a chronic bedposter, though) who used to be Uncle Joe’s favourite when he was a little kid performing Jimmy Durante routines, but who has become estranged from the money-grubbing branch of the family thanks to the high-minded activism of his father! Danny has a ladyfriend called Robin played by Nancy Travis from Eight Men Out, but she doesn’t serve much purpose here except to frown at questionable behaviour!

It’s a scheme movie, meaning everyone has schemes, sometimes schemes within schemes, and Uncle Joe is the biggest schemer of them all! The cousins bring in Danny as a way to divert Joe’s attentions from Molly to someone who's at least in the family, and whom they figure can be browbeaten into sharing the inheritance! But several things happen to Danny: he becomes aware of the grotesqueness of his extended family; he becomes a puppet/plaything of crafty Uncle Joe; he begins to exhibit some proprietary feelings for the fortune himself; and the previously latent scheme-gene within him reveals itself, erupting from him like crab legs from a Norwegian husky!

I think the movie is trying to grapple with the situation in a realistic way rather than a comedy-movie way – ha ha, you can sense that the screenwriters, one of whom is called “Babaloo,” were trying to keep each other in check in this regard! And yet in doing so, they created a bunch of manifestly synthetic characters who behave not as humans, but as figures who act only as they must to serve the moral the writers had clearly settled on before writing word one; and therefore end up seeming not human or realistic at all, but just crudely-conceived figures, and meanwhile there’s no jokes! Ha ha, taking out the gags is not a way to achieve insightful profundity, fellows; but perhaps I should have expected no more from the authors of the laffless anti-union comedy Gung Ho!

So instead of a jolly and pointed black comedy we end up with a scattershot bunch of scenes driven by whatever artificial behaviour is necessary to get to the next scattershot scene, and all of it as watered down as an airport cocktail! As an exposé of the darker chambers of the human heart it strives for the heights of Von Stroheim, but doesn’t even hit the level of Birkinshaw; while the presence of accomplished and compelling actors doesn’t provide pleasure so much as underline how meagre the pleasures are! Like Black Sheep and Toys and Junior and so many other 90s comedies, it seems to have been shot before they got to a satisfactory final draft of the script, and regularly confuses hysteria for humor and finger-wagging for profundity! Still and all the actors are fun to watch, the very occasional gag hits home, and I liked Kirk’s old ballcap, so I suppose if I grit my teeth I can muster a rating greater than nought for this anodyne piece of work! I’ll give Greedy one grip like a bear!

Burl reviews From Beyond! (1986)

Well slap my bucket, it’s Burl! Ha ha, remember how good Re-Animator was? Well, on the basis of that, I recall in the mid-80s becoming very excited at each new Stuart Gordon picture that got mentioned on Fangoria’s Terror Teletype: movies like Dolls and Robo Jox, and the sadly never-to-be made Gris-Gris, and of course the picture under consideration today: another H.P. Lovecraft adaptation, and therefore the most direct follow-up to the great Re-Animator, and therefore the most exciting of them all, From Beyond! Ha ha, I had a one-sheet for this one up on the wall of my teenage bedroom, and it was a prized possession indeed!

The picture begins with a long pre-credit sequence that dramatizes the entirety of the Lovecraft story the movie is based on! Ha ha, we meet young and earnest science assistant Crawford Tillinghast, played by the committed Jeffrey Combs from The Man With Two Brains and Cellar Dweller, and his boss, the voluptuary and radical sybarite Dr. Edward Pretorius, impersonated here very well by Ted Sorel of Basket Case 2 fame, and who, a trivia, was the nephew of famed Universal monster makeup man Jack Pierce! Pretorius has invented a machine, the Resonator, which opens up mutually accessible pathways to normally extra-perceptible dimensions that are populated by monsters!

When a flying eel puts a biting on Tillinghast he knows it’s all gone too far, but before he can destroy the machine Pretorius has his head chomped off, and after a neighbour lady’s dog finds the body and licks the head stump, Tillinghast is thought mad and accused of the murder! (The neighbour lady, it should be noted, is essayed by Bunny Summers from The Kid With the 200 I.Q.!) Cue the arrival of a comely psychiatrist, Dr. Katherine McMichaels, played by Barbara Crampton from Fraternity Vacation and Chopping Mall!

The next step, of course, is to have the putative axe-murderer Tillinghast released into the custody of good Dr. McMichaels so they can return to the Pretorious house and figure out what happened! This may seem an unlikely happenstance, but the authorities aren’t fools: for security they send along an ex-football player-turned-cop called Bubba Brownlee, played by Ken Foree, whom we remember so fondly from shopping centre-based pictures like Dawn of the Dead and Phantom of the Mall! The trio set up camp in the house, and as soon as dials are fiddled with and giant tuning forks start glowing purple, the extradimensional creatures show up, accompanied by a now-bestial Pretorius!

Things don’t go well from there – there are locust attacks, an encounter with bondage gear, and a giant lamprey eats off Tillinghast’s hair! Moreover, pineal glands start acting up and an officious doctor played by Stuart Gordon’s wife Carolyn Purdy-Gordon has her brains sucked out through her eye socket! Yuck! This is a scene which was depicted in the pages of Fangoria, but was cut out of all prints of the movie until fairly recently! I was glad to finally see it, but I have to admit the scene is gross!

And what of the movie itself? I like the creatures a lot, Combs is a nervous pleasure as ever, and it’s always terrific to see Foree on screen! Plus I like the pink-and-purple colour scheme (popular hues for Lovecraft apparently – remember The Color Out of Space?), and the craft across the board is very strong for a low-budget horror picture! And yet it doesn’t measure up to its predecessor! The story is fairly limp, the characters not terribly well-developed, and there are a few ropey trick effects! I don’t accuse the picture of being overly ambitious – ha ha, I admire ambition in low-budget pictures! – but they might have bit off a little more than they could chew with some of the dimensional effects!

Still, that’s not a big problem; the trouble really is the “That’s it?” feeling we’re left with at the end of the picture! It gets darker than I remembered – the conclusion has something of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre feeling, or maybe more of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 feeling, ha ha! But despite any shortcomings, the pleasures here are many; and if it’s not a revelatory experience like Re-Animator was, it’s nevertheless a fine chunk of 80s horror with some terrific monsters! I give From Beyond two and a half ill-fitting bald caps!

Burl reviews Dream Demon! (1988)

 

In the shadow of Freddy it’s Burl, here to tell all about a British knock-off of A Nightmare on Elm Street! Maybe that’s not completely fair – though it’s a rubber-reality dream picture for sure, and approaches its dream sequences much in the style of any 80s horror picture, it has its own non-Kregeresque business going on, though the exact nature of that business is a bit opaque! Yes, I’m talking about Dream Demon!

 

It comes from the director of Malone, and I won’t try spelling the fellow’s name, because I notice he himself spells it differently from picture to picture! The story is set in London, and our heroine is Diana, a young bride-to-be played by Jemma Redgrave! Her fiancé is a comically upright and squarejawed Falklands war hero, or I should properly say “hero” because everything about this guy is in doubt, called Oliver, played by Mark Greenstreet! I’ll give away now that he turns out to be a total jerk, but that doesn’t spoil much because he has that aura right from the beginning!

 

Diana is being plagued by pre-nuptial anxiety dreams in which Oliver abuses her at the altar, and she in turn decapitates him, which is frankly no more than he deserves! In her dreams the world is lit like a rock video, and she is plagued not just by Oliver, but by bugs! Meanwhile a pair of tabloid reporters set their sights on her for some reason, crowding her at her doorstep and asking impertinent questions! This duo is a reporter played by Jimmy Nail from Howling II and a crude, moon-faced paparazzo essayed by Timothy Spall, whom we recall from Dutch Girls and Gothic! The apparently near-friendless Diana then gets a new acquaintance in the form of Kathleen Wilhoite, more or less playing the same sort of psychic punkette she played in Witchboard! Wilhoite’s Jenny shows up at Diana’s door because that’s the house she lived in as a child, and where she experienced some trauma she can’t quite remember before being spirited off to America!

 

Whether Jenny has some psychic triggering ability or Diana is a powerful dream empath, or it’s something to do with the house is never made clear, but the upshot is that soon Diana and those in her orbit (except Oliver, who I suppose is meant to be so thick and imagination-free that he doesn’t even dream) are spending half their time in the oneiric netherworld of Diana’s subconscious! The tabloid jerks, especially the photographer, become the Freddy stand-ins that pop around corners and scare her; Jenny, meanwhile, has had enough and very sensibly decides to flee the scene, but it’s not so easy! By this time Diana doesn’t know whether she’s dreaming or not, and Jenny falls into a long reminiscence, or perhaps dream, of her nasty sculptor father, played by Nickolas Grace from Salomé’s Last Dance, chasing her around and forcing her to pose for a gravestone sculpture he’s making!

 

I said earlier that this was a Nightmare on Elm Street pretender, and indeed it is in many ways, but I should qualify that by saying that its dreams are much more subtly insinuated into the narrative than in the Freddy pictures! Sometimes the lighting changes, or the set becomes weird and you know it’s a dream, but other times we just ease into them and can’t be sure until something oddball happens! The debit side to this approach is that there’s rarely a whole lot of imagination pumped into the dreamscapes, and the reluctance to get funky deprives the picture of the pep it might otherwise have displayed! Clearly this was a choice made early in the production, and in the end it comes off a more mature work than the Freddy pictures, but it’s not one of those beloved gloop specials the 1980s were so good at turning out!

 

Still, it has some gross-out moments and trick effects, most of them centering around Spall’s vile photographer character! But the filmmakers never really cracked their narrative problems or seem to have decided what their picture was really about! Obviously it’s got a good deal to do with the virginal Diana’s sexual anxieties, but beyond this dime-book Freud, as Orson Welles would call it, there’s not a lot of there there! I did like the little coda in which the tabloid jerks’ ultimate fate was revealed, and believe me when I tell you that you won’t see that one coming! I give Dream Demon two plates of red spaghetti!

Burl reviews Haunted Honeymoon! (1986)

 

Oh boo, it’s Burl, here with a goofnugget tale of shrieking terror! Well, ha ha, not really – in fact there’s no terror to be had here, because it’s meant to be a comedy! The trouble is, there are no laffs either! There’s a lot of confusion, quite a bit of yelling and screaming, plenty of hambone acting and no little mugging, but laffs, as the Cockney shopgirl said, we ‘ave none! The picture, which you may vaguely recall from the mists of the past, is called Haunted Honeymoon!

Now, the summer of 1986 stands out in my mind as a particularly enjoyable one at the old movie palace, as I tell you every time the year comes up! Gems of varying luster came rolling down the plankway at regular intervals, and I took in as many of them as I could manage! Aliens, The Fly, Stand By Me, Manhunter, Big Trouble in Little China, Friday the 13^th part 6, Maximum Overdrive, Night of the Creeps – all of these I went to see, and all of them I enjoyed! Mixed in there was Haunted Honeymoon, which I did not go to see, but the ads and posters for which I always saw in the company of the pictures I was more interested in! I had a suspicion it was bad, but still, there was always a nagging feeling that I should check it out, just in case it had been dusted with a little of that summer-of-’86 pixie dust if only by proximity to the rest!

Well, I finally did see it, and it turns out my initial feeling was the correct one, though the picture starts out with some promise! It’s set in 1939, and our heroes are a pair of radio actors, Larry Abbot and his fiancée Vickie Pearle, who are played of course by real-life marrieds Gene Wilder from Silver Streak and Gilda Radner from Hanky Panky, and in the story here are very soon to be wed! But Larry has a fright problem and suddenly from out of nowhere Paul L. Smith, the large man from Dune and Pieces, pops up in the role of Larry’s uncle, planning a shady-sounding scare cure for him, to be enacted over the upcoming nuptial weekend!

Larry and Vickie return to the ancestral manse and are soon mixed up with a gang of weirdos all in on the plan to scare Larry – we think! Actually, we don’t know, because some peculiar opacity of the narrative prevented me from ever being exactly sure what was going on! Ha ha, that’s some real good storytelling for you! Of course it’s possible that the plot threads were just too nimbly woven for my poor oaf’s brain to discern all the subtleties at play, but somehow, in a movie that chooses to cast Dom DeLuise from The Last Married Couple in America as Great Aunt Kate, the Abbot family matriarch, I doubt it! Ha ha!

Easily my favourite thing in here are the radio show scenes we see at the beginning, which look to have been well researched, and are certainly well designed and played! But then we get to the big old mansion, and things more or less begin a-swirling the drain! There are a couple of amusements, but even these tend to be ruined by overstretching, and the rest of it is dead unfunny! They spent a few bucks on the sets, you can tell, but to no especial purpose! It often doesn’t make sense, and people act in ways that are not always identifiable as genuine human behaviour!

It’s cast well – Wilder, who directed it too, took every advantage of shooting this in England, I’d say! At least three guys from Brazil show up, including Jonathan Pryce (whom we also recall from Tomorrow Never Dies), Bryan Pringle, and Peter Vaughan! Jim Carter from Top Secret also appears, providing the basso profundo in the great chorus of voices Wilder has assembled! And Wilder himself is a fine performer, and does some okay stuff here, but again it all seems such a waste, being as it is in the service of a cold plum pie! The plot has more cracks than a gang of humpties, and despite Wilder’s warmth as an actor, and presumably as a director, in toto this picture has all the charm of a three-bean salad! I give Haunted Honeymoon one sturdy moosehead!

Burl reviews La piscine! (1969)

 

Hé-ho, c’est Burl, here to review a film about the very French! Yes, I’m languorously languishing on a chaise longue on the Côte d'Azur, most of the buttons on my white cotton shirt undone, Ray-Bans in place, Gauloise between my fingers, thinking inscrutably existential thoughts! Ha ha, the scenario I’ve just described applies with some frequency to the movie I’m discussing: La piscine! 

Our setting is an estate just up the hill from the seaside, equipped with a lovely swimming pool and some spectacular views! Living here, though not themselves the owners, are a couple, Jean-Paul, played with typical handsomeness by Alain Delon from Un Flic, and Marianne, essayed in a more relatable performance by Romy Schneider from Purple Noon! They’re on vacation and have borrowed the house from acquaintances, and seem to be having a pretty romantic time of it, ha ha!

But things change when their pal Harry roars up in his peppy sports car! Harry, played by Maurice Ronet from Elevator to the Gallows, is an old friend of Jean-Paul’s, but also an ex-lover of Marianne’s, a history to which he constantly, winkingly refers! And he’s brought along his shrinking violet daughter Pénélope, played with extreme gorgeosity by Jane Birkin from the similarly sunny Evil Under the Sun! For a while this arrangement trundles along, with the quartet eating dinners, sitting around the pool, and so forth, and there’s even a brief party!

With its Mediterranean locations, beautiful people, and virtually the same cast, it strongly recalls Purple Noon, the more so when, eventually, there’s a murder! I won’t give things away, because part of the fun is the slow burn, during which you’re watching tensions and awkwardnesses ramp up slowly at first, and then quickly, and you wonder how exactly the tension is going to release! It’s not a suspense picture, nor a mystery, but both of those qualities are present, even if not in a form familiar to the fan of the detective genre!  

There is a detective, though! Paul Crauchet from Un Cercle Rouge turns up late in the picture as L'inspecteur Lévêque of Marseille, and he conducts his investigation with apparently all the craftiness of, say, Alastair Sim in Green For Danger, but with none of the results! Ha ha! There was something very realistic but also strangely laissez-faire about his police work, and I liked what that brought to the picture!

And I liked the relaxed continental pace of the movie, the wonderful décors, the contrast between its sunny look and its dim outlook, and, if I didn’t care much for the characters themselves, I appreciated what the actors brought to them! Everyone was good in their roles! When we learn that Jean-Paul has had some emotional problems in the past, and even tried his hand at suicide, Delon’s performance makes a little more sense; and the character of Harry is someone that we’ve all met in the past! And, ha ha, Birkin’s character is the most hilariously disaffected of all, despite not herself being French! Yes, as a slice of late-60s French Riviera life, the picture is nonpareil, though for some I suppose it will be too slow and uneventful! Me, I give La piscine three bottles of Johnny Walker Red!

Burl reviews Pulse! (1988)

 

Bzzt bzzt, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m going back to the 80s horror well today, reviewing a picture that’s well-regarded by aficionados of the form! It’s one of those so-called “safe horrors” with which the decade was so generously supplied, and it’s a PG-13 joint in the bargain, with an eleven year-old hero! It all takes place on a Spielbergian suburban street, and features a premise Stephen King might have rejected as too obvious! Ha ha, the picture is called Pulse!

It begins with suburbanite Bill, played by Cliff De Young from F/X and Secret Admirer, woken in the night by a kerfuffle across the way! It seems the mean old man across the street has gone nuts and is breaking up his house! The next day Bill’s son David, essayed by wee Joey Lawrence from Summer Rental, arrives for an extended summer visit and is welcomed with open arms and a racing-themed bedroom by Bill and his new wife Ellen, a non-wicked stepmom played by Roxanne Hart from Highlander!

It takes a little while, but weird happenings start to become evident! With the parents away, David tries to watch the ballgame, but all the blobs of solder in his TV go crazy and he’s reduced to listening to the game on the radio instead! Later a gas main breaks while David is trapped in the garage, and he’s nearly suffocated! Ellen begins to believe David’s assertion that something uncanny is happening with the utilities, but Bill, a staunch realist, refuses to accept it, and his position is backed up by the tradespeople who periodically come by to check things out! These are played by the likes of Damone from Fast Times and Joe from The Annihilators, and they offer boring explanations which only further convince Ellen and David that something supernatural must be afoot!

Meanwhile the kid next door, a walking bowl cut called Stevie played by Joey’s brother Matthew Lawrence from Planes, Trains & Automobiles and Tales From the Darkside: The Movie, gives David the lowdown on the mean old man across the way! And a weird old duck played by Charles Tyner from Best Seller pops up with dire warnings about an evil electrical pulse that makes its way from house to house! There’s also a subplot involving a VHS tape of Starman, which I’ll confess I didn’t really understand, but all this sets the scene for a shower scalding, and then David and Bill, now at last a team, wage a final battle with the hydro, the plumbing, and the natural gas!

As I say, this is a fondly-regarded movie, but I’m not entirely sure why! It’s well produced, with nice photography, including lots of macro images of crazed solder blobs, and good physical trick effects; but things never get as creepy as they should! The provenance and motivations of the dreadful pulse are never revealed, and that’s fine; but the ambiguity is not in the service of unease the way it ought to be! It also takes a while for things to get going, and the movie feels weirdly trapped on its one street location, and not in a way that increases the feeling of peril and imprisonment!

Still, the cast is good and it’s slickly made, and there are a few moments that might have you eyeing your own utilities askance! It’s similar in many ways to Bells, though with a supernatural rather than a revenge-based explanation, and like that picture it could have used a bit more pep! I certainly didn’t hate it, though, so I give Pulse two racecar beds!

Burl reviews Krampus! (2015)

 

Ha ha ha, merry Christmas! Yes, it’s Burl, and of course we’re well into the Christmas movie season, and I’ve already watched a number of the usual suspects this month: Gremlins, Christmas Vacation, A Christmas Story, Die Hard, so forth! But I also watched one that was new to me: a little PG-13 horror dingle-dangle called Krampus! Now, I know there’s a little cottage industry of direct-to-video Krampus pictures out there, but the one I’m talking about is the relatively big-budget one that came from the director of Trick ‘r Treat! As mentioned, it’s a PG-13, so rather than having the Krampus rip people’s heads off or stick them with icicles, the picture features a family besieged by an army of demonic toys like some kind of unimaginably slick Full Moon movie! Ha ha!

Charles Band could only dream of a cast of mildly recognizable faces such as Krampus has on offer! Adam Scott from Our Idiot Brother and Who Loves the Sun is Tom, the dad, and Toni Collette from Fright Night and The Way Way Back is Sarah, the mom; they have two kids, a younger boy called Max and a teenage girl named Beth, and Tom’s German-speaking mother is there to make traditional Bavarian treats! As in Christmas Vacation, the homestyle holiday is interrupted by the arrival of a gang of downmarket relations, including David Koechner from Dirty Work as Howard, the gun-crazed über-American slaphead, plus his wife and three kids (a pair of tomboy bullies, a baby, and a pre-teen dunderklumpen who never says a word), and the grouchy lush Aunt Dorothy, played by Conchata Ferrell from For Keeps?

Young Max is so upset by these goofs that he rips up his letter to Santa and sends it flying to the four winds! This act alone is sufficient to conjure up the Krampus, a horned and hoofed demon who leaps from rooftop to rooftop and employs random tactics to harass the un-festive! Homicidal gingerbread men, humongous toothy jack-in-the-boxes, dirty elves borrowed from Icelandic mythology: all this and more eventually shows up to bedevil this extended family! Ha ha! Omi knows what’s going on, because as a girl, back in the old country, she had a run-in with the Krampus! Kids start disappearing, either into the uncanny blizzard that has the family trapped, or up the chimney, or in the cavernous attic!

Max, who started it all with his Santa-ripping shenanigans, is more or less our hero, but the ending leaves the efficacy of his heroics in question! Ha ha, the whole last act seems kind of piecemeal, and this stands in contrast to the first part of the movie, which concentrates on being a sort of family Christmas comedy, almost entirely sans horreur! I thought this was a good decision, ha ha, and it would have been an even better decision had the affrights, when they do come, been more effective! But they’re not, particularly, and nor are the comedic parts particularly uproarious!

There are some rewarding moments, though, and the performances are good, and I liked the opening scene with the slow-motion shopping frenzy, even if that has very little to do with anything! It’s no seasonal classic, but it was enjoyable enough counter-Christmas programming to watch with the family by the fire! An R rated version might have been more fun, but this was perfectly fine as it was! I give Krampus two and a half vinartertas!

Burl reviews Halloween! (2018)

 

Ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-HA-ha, it’s Burl, laughing the famous Halloween theme tune for you! And I know what you’re saying: “Ha ha, Burl, haven’t you already reviewed Halloween?” Yes I have, but now I’m reviewing the recent remake of that picture, or actually more of a belated sequel: the 2018 picture known, like its inspiration, simply as Halloween!

This new picture was directed by David Gordon Green, who brought us Prince Avalanche, and the idea here is that every other sequel, including Halloween II, Halloween 4, Halloween 5, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, and any other sequels there might be, are completely ignored! Halloween III: Season of the Witch, being as it’s a story that has nothing to do with Michael Myers or Haddonfield, is not necessarily being ignored - ha ha, we just don’t know one way or the other! And as for those Zombie ones, well, I haven’t seen them, but I detected no references to them in this picture!

Jamie Lee Curtis, whom we know so well from Prom Night and Grandview U.S.A. and so many others, is of course once again Laurie Strode, and, as in Halloween H20 (the existence of which is, naturally, also ignored), she’s a jumpy, paranoid mess as a result of her terrible experience from her days as a babysitting teen! Now though, instead of channeling her fear and rage into running a private academy for jerks, she has become a doomsday prepper with a house full of guns and alarms and locks and bolts and bars! She has installed such survivalist accouterments as a gun cubby and a swivel counter, and has made sure her house is fitted with louvered closets so she can re-experience the trauma of her babysitting days any time she chooses! Ha ha, she reminded me a bit of Rambo in his final adventure, Last Blood!

Between installing floodlights and target shooting at mannequins, she has found the time to have a daughter, played by Judy Greer from The Descendants and Jurassic World! But her paranoid ways have driven her daughter away, and Laurie’s penchant for wine-guzzling and angry non-sequiturs even have her granddaughter, a teen who calls Laurie “grandmother” as though she were addressing Mrs. Manson Mingott from The Age of Innocence instead of Laurie Strode from Halloween, looking at her a bit askance!

But what about Michael, you ask? Well, he’s been in an institution, standing on a checkerboard floor and attended to by another crazy doctor now that Loomis is long gone! The new headshrinker is Haluk Bilginer from Ishtar, and his idea of therapy is to let a pair of dimbulb podcasters approach Michael on his checkerboard floor and dangle the old Shatner mask in front of him! Ha ha, of course these podcasters are made short work of once Michael escapes his checkerboard and heads back to Haddonfield!

Will Patton from The Puppet Masters plays the local lawman, and there are other assorted victims or potential victims wandering around the town! Michael enjoys a little welcome-home killing spree once he arrives in Haddonfield, which we the audience mainly observe from outside the windows! It’s a pretty effective sequence! Meanwhile, Laurie, her daughter, her granddaughter, and the good-time comedy slaphead dad who seems like a holdover from more lighthearted David Gordon Green projects, are all arguing about whether Laurie is too paranoid or not paranoid enough; and Michael, who is emphatically not related to Laurie this time around (phew!) nevertheless seems to have some kind of Laurie Strode homing beacon implant which has him on a steady course toward the strapped granny’s security castle!

Head-bashing is Michael’s favored killing method this time around, frequently with messy results! Even Laurie catches a bonk, though a non-fatal one! Yes, there’s significantly more grue than in the original picture, which features approximately zero Special Makeup Effects but is a far superior movie nevertheless! I think that should go without saying, but after all, this is a movie review, ha ha, so critical comparisons like that are part of the game! This new one isn’t the worst potato on the block though - it’s entertaining enough, and does a fine job of making Michael a primal force of evil and all that, but it never does manage to bring us that skittering-leaves October atmosphere the original provided so satisfyingly, even though it was shot in the summer and on a much lower budget!

It’s always a pleasure to see Jamie Lee Curtis on screen though, and I appreciated that they kept it reasonably simple and didn’t try to add family connections, cult antics, or supernatural mumbo-de-jumbo! I give this newest Halloween two dollops of peanut butter!

Burl reviews A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy! (1982)

 

With a blast of Mendelssohn, it’s Burl, here to review a minor picture by the bespectacled comedian, upon whose private life I render no judgment nor pronouncement at this time! And I guess most of his pictures qualify as minor ones, though there are more than enough relatively major works salted into his vast filmography, the most recent and likely last of them being perhaps Midnight in Paris! (Or maybe that just seems major because of the time travel, ha ha!) But this picture, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, is decidedly minor!

It was intended as such from the get-go, apparently, and, in a largely salutary way, that intention shows! The picture is an amuse-bouche set in and around a country house in the early part of the century, with a group of mostly uptown folk gathering to celebrate, or to privately mourn, some upcoming nuptials! The house of course belongs to Allen’s character, Andrew, a stockbroker who spends most of his time inventing crazy things, like the machine that takes bones out of fish, or if you prefer, although there’s no point to it, it puts bones in fish! And he’s married to Adrian, played by Mary Steenburgen from Time After Time, who has lately been ignoring Andrew in the bedroom, causing him to spend ever more time in the barn crafting his inventions!

The picture begins with its only scenes away from the Andrew/Adrian property, in which we are introduced to the high-pated professor Leopold, played by José Ferrer from Dune and The Sentinel! Leopold is an intellectual and a blowhard, and he arrives at Andrew’s house in the company of his fiancée Ariel, played by Mia Farrow from Rosemary’s Baby! We also meet Andrew’s best friend Maxwell, a horndog medico played by Tony Roberts from Amityville 3-D! He invites candy stripe nurse Dulcy, essayed by Julie Hagerty from Airplane, along for the weekend, and thusly do we get our six main characters!

The relaxed and bucolic vibe of the movie kicks in once they’re all gathered at Andrew and Adrian’s house! Of course everyone is in love with Ariel: her Shakespearian name alone assures it! Andrew had once had his shot with Ariel, but blew it, and Maxwell falls deeply in love with her the moment he sniffs her! Ha ha! Now, I think this is one of the best performances Tony Roberts ever gave, but I must say that I found his instant obsession with Ariel one of the more irritating aspects of this picture, and it came as a distinct relief to me when he received an arrow in the heart!

Of course the picture is inspired by Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night, but with 70% more neuroses added in! There's an undercurrent of melancholy, of mourning for the ephemeral, with a key line being Ariel's observation that "This beautiful summer light doesn't last forever!" All the actors are good, and I particularly enjoyed Ferrer’s pompous academic, even if he was made a pretty easy target by Allen’s hastily-written script! There are some solid laffs, and the bohankie-farce aspect, which might have been tiresome had it been allowed to fully conquer the narrative, remains under control! It’s the easy country vibe, unusual for Allen, that makes the picture such a delight, and in perfect support of that we get marvelous cinematography from the great Gordon Willis, and lovely, pastoral second-unit shooting from that bearded Finn, Jeri Sopanen, who also shot My Dinner With Andre!

The last-minute detour into the lightly supernatural fits the movie well, and the use of Mendelssohn’s music is ideal! It’s a highly pasteurized work to be sure, but as light, enjoyable, and white as a glass of chardonnay on the lawn! Ha ha, I always enjoy a country house picture, especially ones as free from Chekhovian decay as this! I give A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy two and a half musical house slippers!

(And for anybody who's interested, this is my 900th movie review! How they do add up!)