Burl reviews Aftersun! (2022)

Merhaba my friends, it’s Burl here to review fun in the sun! Well, sort of fun, anyway, ha ha! It’s one of the newer movies out there, and while it takes place in a sunny Mediterranean resort locale, if a rather downmarket one, and while nothing overly traumatic happens, and while the word “sun” is even in the title, it would be a stretch to call this a fun-in-the-sun picture now that I think about it! But, ha ha, you can decide! The movie in question is a Scottish picture called Aftersun!

It’s all set in a period with which I’m quite familiar: the late 1990s! It’s a reminiscence story, mostly though not entirely from the perspective of 11 year-old Sophie, who has come to a Turkish resort on holiday with her father, Calum! (And yes, his name is Calum, but unlike the fine film A Lawless Street, with its protagonist Calem Ware, they don’t feel the need to repeat the name over and over again!) Calum is a loving father and a reasonably friendly guy; but still, there’s something a little off with him, and this impression is visually represented in the first half of the picture by the unexplained, and completely unsigned, plaster cast he wears on his right arm!

We get more and more clues that something is off with Calum, mostly from little scenes for which Sophie is not present, or events of which she is unaware! Calum expectorates unexpectedly on a mirror, or sobs naked in the room, or walks into the sea, or just sometimes has a funny look in his eye! Occasionally the musical score will play some worrying strings just to underline the problem, whatever it is! And when he peevishly refuses to karaoke an R.E.M. song with Sophie, you really start to wonder!

The problem, it seems, is that Calum is depressive, and that he’s not able or willing to medicate himself! Through clever filmmaking and right proper acting we get the notion that for Sophie this vacation is an opportunity to have fun with her dad and with some of the other guests, and even to kiss a boy; while for Calum it's a last hurrah, a solemn goodbye dressed in jolly holiday clothes! He worries for his daughter; exhorts her, as parents of pre-adolescents will, to talk to him about anything that may trouble her as she goes through puberty and teendom; but we don’t get the sense that he plans to be there for it himself!

All of this is interspersed with quick shots of strobing club action and little flashes of the adult Sophie! Ha ha, in the present day she has become a parent herself, and perhaps this is why she’s looking back over this Greek father-daughter holiday: scanning it for clues not just to her father’s inner life, but her own, and perhaps her child’s! She’s watching all the video she took during that time, possibly wincing at her childishness, maybe lamenting her lost innocence! It’s hard to tell, but, as with Calum, a lot of room is left for the viewer to fill in the blanks!

The movie features one of those moments I cherish in cinema: where you don’t know the end is coming, but then there’s a shot in which you realize this would be the perfect note on which to end the film, and then indeed the film does end in that instant! I remember having that feeling at the end of Irma Vep, and there are other examples too I’m sure! Ha ha, The Conversation comes to mind also, and there’s a movie I should watch again! But Aftersun, well, it was a fine film too, and its subtle emotional ratcheting worked on me in just the way I imagine it’s supposed to, and thus the ending did too! If you think you might relate to anything in here – father-child relationships; the mysteries of adults from a child’s perspective; loss of innocence; the lapping tide of depression; budget Mediterranean resort life – then by all means seek it out! I give Aftersun three motorcycle video games and a sound tubthumping!

Burl reviews Gordy: The Little Pig Who Would! (1994)

 

Bumpkins rejoice: it’s Burl, here to review the animal show! Ha ha, cast your mind back to the year 1994, when a garrulous young pig took the culture by storm, capturing hearts and spraying bacon world-wide! That young pig’s name was Babe, and he has nothing to do with the movie under review today, except that he utterly crushed it and left it flattened and forgotten on the pop culture highway like an old piece of jerky! The name of that misbegotten pig picture? Well it’s Gordy: The Little Pig Who Would!

Ha ha, and you won’t believe it, but I actually saw this porkshow in a movie theatre! I was a semi-professional reviewer back then, and I guess I attended the free preview screening – certainly, ha ha, I didn’t pay for the privilege! I didn’t care for the movie then, but when chance and galactic happenstance recently put a VHS copy in my hands, I thought I’d give it another oink!

To the picture’s credit, it gets off and trotting from the get-go, quite literally! Gordy is a pig who lives in the barnyard of a foreclosed farm with his mother, father, and five piggy siblings! Rough men arrive from the meat packers’ and haul away the dad, and as Gordy is galloping behind the truck carrying his porcine pater, back at the farm the rest of the family is scooped up too, and all of them are taken Up North, the terrifying direction from which no oinkers return! Gordy is left on his own, trotting up the highway in a desperate search for his family!

He soon meets a family country music band who travel the highways and byways in an attractive RV, and briefly, and hearteningly, the movie turns into an RV picture, which you know is something ol’ Burl likes! Ha ha, from Race with the Devil to Paul, the genre is filled with gems, though the movie RV is an exception to the rule! The dad in the band is played by Doug Stone, evidently an established country music star, but I didn’t know him from Joe Bopkins; the tween daughter, meanwhile, a junior-league Lee Ann Rimes, sings about pulling hangnails and checking out your own butt while people line dance before her! Ha ha, line dancing! There seems no terpsichorean form more determined to bleed the fun and spontaneity out of dancing!

But soon Gordy is on his own again, and he hooks up with Hanky, the young scion of a junk food company whom Gordy saves from drowning! This somehow makes him famous, and the next thing you know there’s tedious corporate intrigues, and the daughter of the old man who runs the company – mother to Gordy’s new young friend Hanky – has a boring stuffed shirt for a boyfriend, who works at the junk food company and is trying to win the old man’s heart! But of course when the old man dances off his mortal coil, it’s Hanky who owns the company, along with Gordy! They turn it from a junk food company into a health food company, and inexplicably this causes the company to skyrocket in value! From there– well, let’s just say that none of the subsequent plotting will surprise you very much, but I was glad when the RV and the family band reappeared!

It’s not a movie overburdened by movie star power, ha ha, but there are a few familiar faces and/or voices! The family band’s manager, Cousin Jake, is played by Tom Lester from many a hayseed comedy, and one of the antagonist boyfriend's hired thugs is essayed by Afemo Omilami from Trading Places and The Money Pit! The picture also employs the voice talents of Hamilton Camp from No Small Affair and Earl Boen from The Man With Two Brains, and of course those of the everywhereman Frank Welker, whose golden throat adorns Gremlins and Explorers and so many, many more! And of course there’s a cameo appearance by the young people’s favourite, Louis Rukeyser!

The climax takes place in Branson Missoura, and involves the country-fried talents of Roy Clark from Matilda (the kangaroo one, naturally, not the Roald Dahl one); Jim Stafford of Bloodsuckers From Outer Space fame, and also for singing “Spiders and Snakes;” Mickey Gilley from Smokey and the Good Time Outlaws; and of course Boxcar Willie, decked out in full railriding hobo-face, but with a gee-tar in hand instead of a bindle! Then there’s some fisticuffs between the family band dad and the weasel-faced boyfriend, lots of face-pulling from Cousin Jake, and then the final race to save Gordy’s family, intercut with nightmarish shots of butchers sharpening their knives!

Don’t worry, it all ends up fine, with the last moments of the movie making it seem like the origin story of one of those rural sitcoms of the 60s, most particularly Green Acres! As for the movie itself, everybody in it seems just a little bit off-brand! The grandpa seems like he should be played by Will Geer from Moving Violation or Richard Farnsworth from Into the Night, although the old boy they got is perfectly adequate in the part! Cousin Jake is the sort you can see Jim Varney from Ernest Goes to Camp or Lou Perryman from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 playing, though again, the varmint they cast instead is quite serviceable! And then there’s Gordy himself! He’s cute enough and all, but, as in Francis, a voice is overdubbed as the animal opens and closes its mouth rapidly, as though someone has shoved peanut butter in there, or maybe iron filings!

I haven’t said much about the quality of the movie, but I guess I have to admit that the script and dialogue are a little hamfisted, and the filmmaking itself is of pork wality! Scenes sometimes go on a little bit when there should be cold cuts instead, though I will say that the pacing in general is not bad, and I never sausage a thing as that climactic country music concert! Ha ha, I guess they couldn’t afford Johnny or Waylon or Willie or Kris! And then there’s the star of the show: well, Gordy is not as annoying a character as he might be, but I’m here to tell you he’s not charming either! I give Gordy: The Little Pig Who Would one congratulatory phone call from President Bill Clinton!

Burl reviews Who Has Seen the Wind! (1977)

 

From out on the windy prairie, it’s Burl, here to review some coming-of-age Canadian cinema! Ha ha, this is the sort of movie Canada did really well in the 1970s, and the wintery, Francophone version of it would be the excellent Mon Oncle Antoine! But films like this were not considered very cool while I was growing up – they were the sorts of things occasionally shown in classroom situations, movies to be endured rather than enjoyed! Ha ha, I remember a class outing to the cinema to see one called Mario! But it turns out that some of them, perhaps even most of them, possibly even all of them, are really good! Case in point: Who Has Seen the Wind!

 

This is exactly the kind of movie that, done wrong, would instantly become what my pal Evan calls “Canadian with a K!” Fortunately it was done right, ha ha! It’s all set on the plains of Saskatchewan in dust bowl times, and of the massive cast of characters, the one hewn closest to is a ten year-old boy called Brian O’Connel, played by Brian Painchaud in one of the best kid performances I’ve ever seen! Sadly, young Painchaud died aged only twenty, so whether he would have been a good adult actor too will always be unknown!

 

All the kids in the movie are really good! A very Sammy Snyders-esque youth, Douglas Junor, plays The Young Ben, a mostly silent lad with a blonde bowl cut; a figure of pathos and mystery for much of the picture! His father, The Ben, is played by the movie’s requisite superstar American import: none other than José Ferrer from The Sentinel and Dune! Ha ha, it’s amusing and unusual to see the cultured, Puerto Rico-born Ferrer playing a rough-hewn slab of prairie hardtack: the local brewer of illegal moonshine whose still blows up in the church basement and who keeps a caged owl both as a hard-won pet and as the movie’s principal figure of obvious symbolism! Who knows why the caged owl hoots, ha ha!

 

As you’ve probably figured out, the picture is a tapestry of life in this small Saskatchewan town, as seen largely but not exclusively from the perspective of Brian! The large number of characters, played by a large number of familiar Canadian actors, include a kindly school principal played by Thomas Hauff from Millennium and Bells; a nasty schoolteacher played by Patricia Hamilton, who later was the ill-fated Mabel in My Bloody Valentine; pious jerk Reverend Powelly, a vaguely Norman Fell-ish presence played by David Gardner, the detective from Prom Night; old bitch Mrs. Abercrombie, essayed by Charmion King from Shadow Dancing and Last Night; Dr. Svarich, the town sawbones, played by Cedric Smith, whom we recall as Gary “The Blacksmith” Black in Fast Company; and others, like a philosophy-disdaining shoe salesman, an unctuous barber/mayor, a Chinese family, and a bible-crazed prairie hobo who dwells in a sturdy piano box! And Les Carlson from Black Christmas and A Christmas Story appears just long enough to drive a cart and sing a scatological horse song!

 

Brian’s dad, town pharmacist Gerald O’Connel, is a nice guy played by The Rowdyman himself, Canadian icon Gordon Pinsent, known internationally from pictures like Blacula and The Thomas Crown Affair; and from the first moment we see him, buttoning up his shirt after a doctor’s examination, we know he’s doomed! “Is it true your dad turned yellow?” Brian’s friends are soon asking him! Brian’s mom is Chappelle Jaffe from Terminal Choice and The Dead Zone, and her big moment comes in facing down the nasty schoolteacher who punished Brian by making him hold his arms up for hours, until he faints!

 

The replacement schoolteacher, Ruth Thompson, is played by Helen Shaver from Starship Invasions, and she’s much more pleasant than the sadistic one lately booted from the position! But in a pattern established early in the film, nothing good can happen for Brian without something bad following it up! After his dad – kind, beloved, but not much use in discussions about feelings – dies, Brian goes to live with his salty-tongued Uncle Sean, a role for Gerard Parkes, who also played an uncle in Isabel and was a cop in Spasms! Sean’s hired limpy-man, Ab, is essayed by Hugh Webster from Rip-Off and Between Friends!

 

The movie seems to be about life and death; imprisonment of various kinds and the necessity and the means of escape; culpability, blame, and forgiveness! It’s a lot to fit into 103 minutes, especially when you consider the very many characters, the general eventfulness of the film, and the need for a climactic, near-disastrous windstorm! The picture is impressively put together, nice-looking, well-acted, understated, and real! The musical score is not bad, but it’s too bombastic, and too often tries to comment on the action in a film that everywhere else resists melodrama! A warning, however: this movie is not for gopher lovers! I give Who Has Seen the Wind three one-way train rides to the Mayo Clinic!

Burl reviews Dazed and Confused! (1993)

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 Cameron's Closet! (1988)

 

Hello closeteers, it’s Burl, here to catch up on some 1980s horror I missed the first time around! Or else I may have seen it and then completely forgotten it, ha ha! At any rate, I got my hands on a VHS copy of Cameron’s Closet and recently watched it, and I’m here to tell you all about it!

It comes from the director of He Knows You’re Alone and The Supernaturals, and I suppose it represents a slight step up from those works! It’s a bit more elaborate at any rate, but not to any great effect I’m afraid! The picture opens by introducing us to Cameron, a ten year-old boy with astonishing psychic powers who’s being studied by his father and a scientist pal! Cameron can put marbles in a jar or rearrange plastic letters merely by will alone, ha ha, but evidently his talents also extend to raising evil closet demons!

This is where his dad, played by Tab Hunter from pictures like Ride the Wild Surf and The Kid From Left Field, and the researcher pal, essayed by Chuck McCann from Herbie Rides Again and Lunch Wagon – in truth a good actor, but also the poor man’s Robert Prosky – start to get worried! Soon Tab is dead, his head cut off by an errant machete, and Cameron is off to live with his mom, played by Kim Lankford from Malibu Beach! The mom has a meathead boyfriend who venerates his car above all else, and one night he gets his eyes burned out and is fired out Cameron’s bedroom window as though from a cannon, landing of course, ha ha, on his beloved car!

Well this brings Detective Talliaferro, played by Cotter Smith from The Post, in on the Cameron closet case! He’s been having waking closet nightmares, which annoys his partner Leigh McCloskey (from Inferno and Fraternity Vacation), and is being forced to attend sessions with police psychiatrist Dr. Nora Haley, played by Mel Harris from Wanted: Dead or Alive! After Talliaferro’s partner runs afoul of the demon in Cameron’s closet, the investigation is on, and after further deaths, including one by interior superboil, and a near-chopping by ceiling fan of Cameron himself, the final confrontation is on!

Ha ha, this is an American picture, but there are a lot of Italian names in the credits, and the pastaland influence is everywhere evident! Cameron himself isn’t an evil child, but there are enough glowing eyes and psychic shenanigans to recall The Visitor (though it never gets as loopy, of course, because what could), and Cameron himself is terrorized nearly as much as little Bob in The House by the Cemetery! Thanks to the competent work of later-to-be-superstar cinematographer Russell Carpenter and a generally solid set of actors (even Cameron is pretty good!), the movie rises above its budget; but it’s when the demon itself comes onto the scene that things falter! He’s a creation of Carlo Rambaldi, who brought us such lovable animatronics as E.T., but on this job I think he may have been a bit drunk! The thing looks like a big raisin with teeth, as though he brought his creature from Possession out of a long, imperfect storage and gave it a quick coat of red-brown housepaint before shoving it in front of the camera! Ha ha!

It’s narratively incoherent, frequently derivative, and often stupid, but it’s got some zest and pizazz here and there, with the eyeless meathead shooting out the window a particular highlight! The trick makeup effects range from mannequin-style (the machete decapitation) to sort of scary (a smiley zombie creature), but are pretty delightful at either extreme! It’s dumbbell horror and there’s no denying it, but I give Cameron’s Closet two refitted He-Man dolls anyway!

Burl reviews Big! (1988)

 

Up, up, and away, it’s Burl, here to review the beloved classic from years gone by! Ha ha, it’s a beloved classic to a lot of people I guess, but not to me, because this is one of the popular pictures I ignored back when it was new, and continued to ignore as the years went by! (I ignored all the late-80s body-switch pictures in fact - Like Father, Like Son, Vice Versa, 18 Again!) In fact I only just saw this particular picture for the first time a few years ago, and now I’ve watched it again, and am prepared to review for you a little movie called Big!

Of course it comes from director Laverne DeFazio, who also brought us pictures like Jumpin’ Jack Flash, A League of Their Own, and other popular entertainments I haven’t seen! Big begins by introducing us to 12-going-on-13 year-old New Jersey kid Josh Baskin, who hangs out with his little pal Billy, played by Jared Rushton from Lady in White, and suffers an embarrassment in front of the school cute girl when he’s too tiny to get on a roller coaster! He consults a fortune telling machine called Zoltar, makes his wish to get bigger, and wakes up the next morning in the form of Tom Hanks, whom we know so well from Volunteers and The Money Pit!

Mercedes Ruehl from The Secret of My Success plays his mom, who’s horrified when the gangly Hanks appears in her kitchen insisting that he’s her son! Ha ha, the poor woman! (The movie is too determinedly cheery to dwell on the horror these poor parents must be feeling for the many weeks their son is gone, apparently kidnapped by a fresh-faced comedy actor!) She chases him away, and Josh runs to the school and manages to persuade a terrified Billy that he is who he claims to be, and so the two head to the big city, New York!

Pretty quickly the movie edges into 80s boardroom comedy territory when Josh bluffs his way into a job at a toy company, then charms the avuncular owner – played by Robert Loggia from Psycho II, of course – with his childlike outlook and a spirited round of piano dancing! So he instantly becomes a vice president in charge of playing with toys, a perfect job for a kid, and snags a huge loft apartment (which in New York, even in the 80s, would be outside the price range of a minor executive) while being regarded as a weird eccentric by his co-workers! These colleagues include Jon Lovitz from ¡Three Amigos! as a fellow who tries to give Josh tips on becoming a love-yuppie; John Heard from C.H.U.D. as Paul, who develops a rivalry with the free-spirited boy-about-town; and Elizabeth Perkins from Love at Large, whose affections transfer from Paul to Josh with all due haste!

Ha ha, yes, the twelve year-old in the big man’s body has sex in the course of the picture, and, to the irritation of his little pal Billy, is pulled, with a gruesome inexorability, into the adult world of work and responsibility! In fact he seems to thrive in the corporate atmosphere in which he’s been plunged, and that might be the most Reagan-era aspect of this picture – anyway, that and the giant Pepsi machine Josh installs in his loft! Yes, this is a capitalist entertainment through and through: too timid to explore the real ramifications of what’s happened to Josh and his family, but, like its hero, happy to sit on the floor and play with toys!

It’s all done with studio professionalism, plenty of polish, and not a little charm; though not quite so much as it believes itself to have! Hanks is the picture’s ringer, of course, and the movie paid him back by becoming a big hit and sending him to the stratospheric heights of stardom in which he’s marinated ever since! But watching it today I think to myself “Ha ha, no wonder I didn’t bother with this back then!” It was the biggest (ha ha!) of the body-switch movies, despite the fact that Josh doesn’t actually switch his body with anyone, but to me it’s not any great shakes! I give Big two canapés!

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 Ernest Goes to Camp! (1987)

Ha ha, hello and howdy everybody, do you know what I mean? Yes, it’s Burl, here to review a strange star vehicle from days gone by: a feature film presenting a character who wormed his way into the public consciousness by appearing in a string of commercials in which he speaks to his invisible pal Vern! Ha ha, yes, I’m talking about Ernest, and more specifically about his feature film debut, Ernest Goes to Camp!

Strangely enough I saw this movie in the theatre, and I’ll take a brief digression to tell you why! Ha ha, it was June of 1987, and I was excited to see a new movie that was coming out that summer! I heard about a sneak preview one night, and so my pal Doug and I hurried down to the mall multiplex! In their wisdom, the theatre chain decided to pair this new movie with something they figured would go well with it, Ernest Goes to Camp! When the Ernest picture ended and the sneak preview began, you could hardly hear the sound of the movie over the din of parents rushing their children out of the theatre: for the movie was Full Metal Jacket! (Ha ha, one intrepid dad stuck it out to the end with his two young kids, though!)

So ever since then, those two movies have been inextricably connected in my mind! Watching it again, I realized there were other connections too! Both pictures have predominantly male casts, feature an incompetent who’s bad at everything but shapes up in the end, are set largely in barracks-like environments, employ actors who later participated in the Toy Story series, and climax in scenes of frenzied battle! After a preview setting up the Indigenous legend that’s the backdrop for the titular camp (and which the picture treats with surprising restraint and, by its lights, respect), we meet the halfwit camp handyman, Ernest, played as ever by Jim Varney! Varney of course is also known as the voice of the slinky dog in Toy Story!

Victoria Racimo from Prophecy is the camp’s serious-minded nurse, whom the picture never successfully turns into an object of the neutered Ernest’s romantic interest! Her grandfather is played by famous Italian actor Iron Eyes Cody, well known for his redface roles in Son of Paleface and hundreds of other movies and TV shows; his character, it seems, owns the land the camp is on! Ernest, whose dream it is to one day become a real camp councilor, is put in charge of minding a group of alleged delinquents after these scrubbed-clean teens manage to shatter the leg of their original councilor! Scenes of Ernest trying to make friends with the delinquents are intercut with vignettes involving camp chef Gailard Sartain (whom we know from All of Me and many an Alan Rudolph picture) and his gross food-flinging machine, and scenes of bad guy John Vernon, well known from Sweet Movie, Curtains, Crunch, and Herbie Goes Bananas, doing his bad guy thing without putting too much effort into it!

Vernon’s character owns a strip-mining company that wants to take over and destroy the land, and of course Ernest moronically manages to help Vernon bamboozle the camp away from its rightful caretaker, Iron Eyes Cody! In a showdown punchup with a beefy mining foreman played by Lyle Alzado from Tapeheads, Ernest is brutally beaten and ends up face down in the dirt, bleeding, and is scorned and abandoned by his charges, except of course the little boy who always liked him! This savage pounding, along with a dim awareness of the profound ramifications of his idiocy cause Ernest’s canoe smile to finally fade, and that night he sings a heart-rending ballad of infinite sadness to his turtle in which he expresses gratitude for the falling rain, as it will hide the tears streaming down his bruised and battered face! Ha ha, pretty grim!

The picture has a few bright moments, and Ernest is not wholly without good-natured charm; and the climax involves a sudden turn into the supernatural, which is a trope I usually like! The picture was a little better than I remembered it (actually, I didn’t remember it at all, other than as a way of marking time before the start of the Kubrick movie), but not much, and I was expecting it to be absolutely bottom-of-the-barrel! It wasn’t that, but it hovered not too far above, and so I give Ernest Goes to Camp one and a half turtle parachutes!

Burl reviews Lady in White! (1988)

 

Hello and a happy post-Halloween to you all! Just a few days ago, and for the very first time, I watched a movie I’ve been aware of for years and years, something I saw on the shelves of the video store I worked at and the ones I patronized! I never did pick it up, because although it was a spooky picture and I like those, it seemed a bit too much like a kiddieshow! Ha ha, it was the same with The Monster Squad! But having a kid myself now, who's the same age as this film's protagonist as it happens, it seemed the perfect time to finally sit back and take in The Lady in White!

The opportunity to see the picture came from the director himself, Frank LaLoggia, who posted a link to his director’s cut on a social media! I downloaded it toot sweet and watched it with my family, it being a family-type movie more or less! It’s a flashback sort of a story, a childhood memory caper like Stand By Me, and so it’s appropriate that it begins in the present day with the main character as an adult, a Stephen King-type horror writer played by LaLoggia himself, being ferried to his old stomping grounds by a cab driver played by Bruce Kirby from, yes, Stand By Me! Ha ha!

The young version of this character, Frankie Scarlatti, is played by Lukas Haas from Witness, Mars Attacks! and Who Loves the Sun! He dwells in a small upstate-New York town with his dad, Alex Rocco from Gotcha, Stick, and Herbie Goes Bananas, his brother Geno, played by the talented Jason Presson from Explorers, and his old country bickerson grandparents! Life is good for jug-eared Frankie except for the fact that his mom has recently died, and he must occasionally suffer some older-brother ribbing from Geno!

Also there’s a pair of mean kids in his classroom, and one evening close to Halloween they lock him in the cloakroom at his school! There he sees the ghost of a little girl who was murdered a decade earlier, and then a rather more substantial presence: a man with a hooded face who comes into the cloakroom to find something, and, realizing he's not alone, starts to strangle poor Frankie! Yes, it seems the town has been suffering a series of child murders, and Frankie, having survived his encounter, realizes he’s got access to clues that might help him find the killer, and that another ghost, the legendary Lady in White, might be a further key to the mystery!

But he only comes upon these realizations gradually, for Frankie is no precocious boy detective but a refreshingly real kid who gets scared and doesn’t always do the right thing! And the movie itself is not a fast-paced, Goonies-style kids’ adventure, but a more meditative memory piece that moves at its own tempo, bringing on characters like a family friend played by Len Cariou from One Man, The Four Seasons, and Executive Decision; the local crazylady, Katherine Helmond from Time Bandits and Brazil; a storytelling postie well played by Sydney Lassick from Alligator and Silent Madness; and Lucy Lee Flippen from Summer School as Frankie’s teacher! And then of course there’s the poor school janitor, blamed for the killings mostly because he’s black; and his poor wife, left alone with her children to suffer the wrath and scorn of the town; and the grief-stricken racist lady, mother to one of the dead children, who gets a mad look in her eye and plots revenge against the wrongly-accused janitor!

Between the child murders and the racism it gets kind of murky for a family film, but some tonal equilibrium is maintained thanks to the heavy filter of nostalgia, the antics of the grandparents, and, since the story unfolds over a period of months, the inclusion of both Halloween and Christmas scenes! The narration, delivered by LaLoggia, is pretty ropey and is probably best ignored, which the poor sound mix on the director’s cut I watched made easy to do; and some of the optical trick effects are silly in both conception and execution! Also, at 122 minutes, the movie, or at least the director’s cut, might be a tad overlong, ha ha! The cliffside climax does tend to linger like the last guest at a Halloween party!

But it all comes straight from the heart, and that’s a virtue not to be airily discounted! LaLoggia took his own history - that of a horror-loving kid named Frank growing up in an Italian family in upstate New York - and married it to an established local lady-in-white legend and an invented serial killer story, and the result is a heartfelt if minor spookshow! I should also mention Rocco, who so often played a hard case but here is warm and kind as the anti-racist father! It was nice to finally catch up with this little movie, and I give Lady in White two and a half squirrel hunting jackets!

Burl reviews The Secret of Roan Inish! (1994)

 

Ay-ti-tai-ti-tai-ti-tai, it’s Burl, here with an Irish tale of seaside blarney! Ha ha, this is a picture I remember writing aboout back in the old movie reviewer days, but fear not, what you're reading right now is all new, all Burl! The enjoyment I derive from this defiantly uncommercial entertainment has remained constant, however, and the movie in question is John Sayles’s The Secret of Roan Inish!

My DVD copy of this picture claims it to be “Sayles’s most popular movie ever!,” which is a bit like saying sour cream & onion is the most popular Old Dutch Flavour Favourite! Ha ha, those in the know are the lucky but the (relative) few! Anyway, I’d have thought Lone Star was his most popular movie ever, but that shows what I know! This one, The Secret of Roan Inish, is very charming and has broad appeal to all ages, so I guess its putative popularity makes sense!

In Donegal, up in the north-west of Ireland, just after the Second World War, a wee lassie of ten, Fiona, played by charming young Jeni Courtney, has just lost her mother, and her father must work in the factories! So she goes to the coast to live with her grandparents, two kindly souls who live on the seaside and stare out at Roan Inish, the island their family used to occupy but had to move away from because the government told them to or something! Mick Lally from The Fantasist plays Hugh, the bearded grandpa, and Eileen Colgan from Quackser Fortune Has A Cousin in the Bronx is moody Grandma Tess!

The family are the Coneelys, and over the course of the film we hear plenty about their family history and the mythical stories around it! Most recent of these is the tale of young Jamie, Fiona’s younger brother, who was in his boat-shaped cradle one day as they were packing up to leave the island, when he shot out to sea and was apparently lost to the waves! And yet in the three years since, he’s been sighted many a time captaining his little ship around the coast, often in the company of the seals who dwell there also! And from Tadgh, a tetched and dark-haired Coneely who cleans fish and is played by John Lynch from Hardware, she hears the back story of how a Coneely man became romantically involved with a selkie woman, which is to say a sort of a were-seal!

Well, this gives little Fiona a lot to think about, and she discuses it and makes plans with a fellow who became one of my favourite characters in the picture, her cousin Eamon, played by Richard Sheridan! He’s a young teen with charming manners who decides to believe Fiona when she reports finding evidence of habitation on Roan Inish and seeing her little brother running around in the altogether! It becomes evident to the two kids that the seals, or the selkie people, simply want the Coneelys to once again take up residence on the island!

Well, ha ha, I’m not usually a fan of magic realism, because it’s mighty hard to pull off! Sayles nails it, however, perhaps because he never tries too hard: the fantastic elements are underplayed as much as possible! It helps, too, that the picture is so earthy, so tethered to the world it creates, so matter-of-fact instead of pushily magical! The musical score is emblematic of this, sticking with Chieftains-like airs rather than, say, doodly-doo synthesizers!  

It may seem far removed from Sayles’s genre screenwriting work, but this picture after all has a strong water-creature angle like Piranha and Alligator, and a transformation scene like in The Howling, if a little less elaborate, ha ha! The cinematography from Mr. Haskell Wexler is unflashy, but works perfectly for the piece, and occasionally a beautiful shot is tossed at you! There’s an especially nice sequence on a cliff-side meadow dotted with yellow and purple flowers!

Whether or not it adds up to much is up to each individual viewer, I think, but by organically creating such a complete world and welcoming audiences into it with seemingly no effort at all, Sayles has really pulled off something special! I give The Secret of Roan Inish three enormous beach bonfires!

Burl reviews Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown! (1977)

 

Good grief, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m here to review an animated picture: one of the few I actually saw in the theatre! Growing up I had a neighbourhood theatre, what Variety used to call a “nabe” before all the nabes closed down! That's a very sad loss to me, and I expect it is to you too! Anyway, I used to go down to my nabe every wek and see whatever was playing, and if it wasn’t some weird Sunn Classics pseudodocumentary, or a genuine motion picture like The Bad News Bears or The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, it was a children’s animation just like today’s picture, Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown!

I remember enjoying it at the time, ha ha, but then I was just a wee tyke and my critical faculties had not yet been fully honed! I’ve watched it again several times over the past five years or so because my son had fallen under the Peanuts spell and so I went and hunted down a VHS copy of it! The Peanuts spell is a perfectly healthy spell so far as I’m concerned, and it was a pleasure to watch the movie again when I initially found the VHS, and an undiminished pleasure to watch it once more the other day!

We were at a wilderness cabin for the screening, and it was a very hot and summery evening, and these are the second most ideal circumstances under which to see this picture, the first most, naturally, being to see it at the nabe when you’re six years old! Ha ha! But however you watch it, the movie remains the story of the Peanuts gang, or selected members thereof, attending a summer camp and engaging in a raft race through an endless variety of landscapes such as you find described in books like Blood Meridian!

Charlie Brown proves himself a blockhead right from the opening moments, after the credits and their bad-but-catchy theme song that is, when he fails to step back on the bus after a rest stop and must travel the rest of the way riding pillion on Snoopy’s chopper, in constant screaming terror for his life! Once there, a group of camp bullies take Charlie Brown to task straight away for his round head, his bizarre name (?), and his pathetically evident need to prove himself! Only Linus cracking his blanket like a whip rescues the hydrocephalic hero from his trouble!

After some camp gags and a few competitive activities which the bullies win by rank underhandedness, the race is under way! Our hero gang divide themselves by gender: Charlie Brown, Linus, Franklin, and Schroeder in one boat; Lucy, Sally, Peppermint Patty and Marcie in another; and of course Snoopy and Woodstock participate in the race too, using their own jury-rigged watercraft! The bullies have a powerboat equipped with radar and sonar and all manner of technology, and they, along with their spike-collared cat, engage in never-ending shenanigans in their monomaniacal effort to win!

Ha ha, I always thought the Peanuts gang were supposed to be six or seven years old, but this race, which takes multiple days and shunts them through an array of biospheres and climates, landscapes of desolation and abundance, through blasting sites, fishing villages, and over waterfalls, would test the mettle of the most cunning raftsman! On top of these hardships, the gang must not only contend with the bullies and their fiendish plots, but Peppermint Patty’s deluded, fascistic idea of how democracy works, and how it must be constantly applied by secret ballot to every decision made by the group!

The movie’s own politics are equally confused, as, after a series of highly annoying episodes in which Patty’s balloting madness results in, for example, the boys being forced to sleep outside in a (highly incongruous) snowstorm, some cohesion is only reached when she appoints Charlie Brown as Supreme Leader, singularly responsible for all decision-making! And while this doesn’t lead to triumph in the race, it at least helps prevent the bullies from winning, so there’s some semblance of a happy ending; at least, as much of one as a depressive like Charles M. Schultz could manage!

It’s a nice-looking picture, adhering to the patented simplicity of the Peanuts world, but mustering a bountiful supply of landscape and flora to spruce it up; and of course it wins points for using real children as the kids’ voices! One big debit, though, is the treatment of poor Franklin, who is given virtually nothing to say or do! I’ve always liked Franklin, so would that it were otherwise - and, I mean, just look at that poster! He doesn't even get his own little name-box! Shameful, says I! I give Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown two and a half corned willies!

Burl reviews The Kid with the 200 I.Q.! (1983)

 

With a demand to know whatchoo talkin’ ‘bout, it’s Burl, here to review a movie featuring that undersized imp of cinema and television Gary Coleman, whom we may recall from Dirty Work! Ha ha, he had a real corner on the precocious kid market back in the 70s and early 80s, and in the movie under discussion today, The Kid with the 200 IQ, he may have hit the absolute peak of precociousness!

His characters were always supposed to be smarter than other kids that were putatively his age, but here he plays a super-genius riding an academic scholarship into big people’s college, and how could the precociousness formula be more finely honed than that? It couldn’t! Coleman plays Nick Newell, who arrives at the college with his pleasant family and then must endure scene after scene of people doing double takes at him when he explains that yes, he is enrolled in the college! He lucks into an amiable roommate in his dorm, an athlete called Steve played by Dean Butler from Desert Hearts; and because the dorm is co-ed (Wink wink! Nudge nudge!), he gets to know a young journalism student named Julie, essayed by Kari Michaelsen from Saturday the 14^th!

It seems that Nick’s area of interest is astronomy, and he’s most excited about taking a class with the imposing Professor Mills, played by Robert Guillaume from Seems Like Old Times and Death Warrant! But Mills is one of the few not charmed by Nick’s exuberance, and in fact seems to resent the little fellow’s presence! And as the semester continues so do Nick’s troubles grow, presenting some real challenges to his 200 I.Q.! Ha ha, he bombs with an astronomy project for Mills’ class, he falls in love with Julie only to be heartbroken when he sees her getting friendly with Steve (whose advances she had initially resisted due to her hatred of jocks), and he endures very mild bullying and humiliation from a toffee-nosed frat bro after beating the older fellow in a game of Defender!

He has lots of friends, though: Mills’ daughter is a friendly cutie nearly as precocious as Nick himself; there’s a kindly caretaker called Debs played by Mel Stewart from Dead Heat; and Steve and Julie stick by him resolutely, sympathizing with his romantic travails! The climax is a Road Warrior-style chase scene in which all of Nick’s friends, including an abashed Mills and the reformed frat bro, chase after the Greyhound bus Nick has hopped to take him home and away from the university he no longer feels a part of! But of course it all ends happily enough, with Nick now Dr. Mills’ number one helper, welcoming to the pre-semester party freshman Crispin Glover, well known from Rubin & Ed and Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter, in the role of a newly-arrived astronomy student!

While we must admit that Coleman is not as adept at playing a super-genius as, say, Jason Segel in The End of the Tour, he’s nevertheless not bad, and packs a lot of charm into his diminutive frame! Guillaume is required to walk a tightrope between cold and stern on the one hand, and affable and avuncular on the other, and he does it well! The TV movie-ness of the whole thing is undeniable; though Coleman did some theatrical features (I remember seeing Jimmy the Kid at my local cinema), this was assuredly not one of them! It exudes a strange charm, though, as many artifacts do by virtue of their ability to evoke the past! Ha ha, I give The Kid with the 200 I.Q. two rounds of Defender!