Burl reviews Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds! (1977)

 

Screech screech and aiyeeee it’s Burl, here with Japanese monster action! Ha ha, when I was a kid I had several issues of a magazine called Hammer’s House of Horror, and one of them contained a piece on a movie called Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds! The article was allegedly a review, but the author obviously hadn’t seen the movie and didn’t try to hide that fact; but the write-up, which described centipedes acting up and eels appearing in people’s beds, along with the accompanying photos of dinosaurs and monster birds, made it look like a must-see!

Now all these years later, thanks to the magic of the internet, I’ve managed to catch up with this (in my mind) legendary movie! Now, first off, the title: despite the plurals, the movie contains just one dinosaur and one monster bird! (I guess you could say it’s the titular legend speaking of multiple creatures rather than being a promise of the title itself, but I still say the plural is a bit of pocus!) Secondly, there were no centipedes or eels to be found, unless I nodded off for a minute and missed them! And, I’m sorry to say, nodding off during this picture is a definite risk!

The story is set at one of the lakes which surround Mount Fuji, and I really liked that specificity because I didn’t previously know much about this region! Dinosaurs and monster birds aside, it looks quite pleasant! Nearby is that forest you’ve heard about where people go to kill themselves, and that gets a mention in the movie too – a skeleton discovered there is dismissed as just another suicide, rather than being recognized as the dinosaur and/or monster bird victim that it is!

We open with a woman – a would-be suicide, I think – wandering in the woods! She falls into a cave (there’s a terrific shot of her plummeting toward the camera), where she finds some eggs, and then an egg cracks open and she sees a goochy eye staring back at her! Then we meet the picture’s alleged hero, a geologist called Takashi, who’s described in the film’s IMdB synopsis as an “action scientist,” and ha ha, I guess that’s what he is! On the other hand, for most of the picture he seems almost as sleepy as the Russ Tamblyn character in War of the Gargantuas, a film I was strongly reminded of as I watched this monster bird movie!

The scientist sees the story of the woman who discovered the giant eggs on TV and instantly becomes obsessed first with finding the eggs and then, once he realizes the possibility, with seeing an actual living dinosaur, which was also a pet project of his late father's! Once at the lake, Takashi hooks up with an old flame, Akiko, who is an underwater photographer! More stuff happens, not much of it having to do with either dinosaurs or monster birds though, and finally the picture borrows a scene whole from Jaws (a major inspiration on the first half of this movie) when two wiseacres panic people with a fake fin in the lake! The stunt cruelly interrupts a country music concert held on a floating barge, but thankfully the two pranksters are first swirled in the water like the turds they are, then chomped! A third fellow witnesses this, but, in a heartrending scene, no one will believe him when he reports it!

The monster rumours extend far enough to bring a Scotsman, who tells everybody that, as a Scotsman, he knows it’s no picnic dealing with giant lake monsters! Akiko can certainly confirm this once her diving buddy is chomped in half by the dinosaur, but the gruesome tragedy doesn’t prevent her from taking a shower (providing the picture with that rarity in the kaiju genre: a nude scene!) and doing a cheesecake underwear scene which concludes with a cutaway shot of a doll in diving gear with pink troll doll hair!

When the monster bird finally shows up, it’s almost worth the wait! He grabs people with his talons and then drops them like a jerk; he buffets them with his wings and slaps them with his tail, then causes them all to blow up! Inevitably the two props battle it out, bumping into each other and making screeching noises! A volcanic eruption puts a stop to this rumbustification and provides a seemingly endless final scene in which the two leads are caught in a deadly situation, dangling from a log over a river of bubbling lava!

This absurdly overstretched sequence and its uncertain terminus are frustrating but apt for a movie that’s a frequent bore and a narratively unstructured mess, ha ha! Plus, the monster bird looks like a really ugly version of one of those dino-head grabber toys, and the dinosaur has a freakishly pliable neck! Other trick effects are actually pretty good though, and the slight nudity and slightly more frequent gore give the whole thing a grindhouse feel; also we get the occasional striking shot or moment, like that plummet in the cave! Too often it’s tedious though, and sure could have used more monster attacks, more people being eaten up like junior mints, better characters, a proper story, and a heavy dose of pep! If it comes down to a choice, stick with War of the Gargantuas, but if you do watch Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds you will be able to wring at least some enjoyment from it! I give this picture one and a half depth charges!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burl reviews She Demons! (1958)

 

To the beat of the jungle drums it’s Burl, returning to the land of Cunha! Ha ha, we’re all very familiar with, and fond of, his work I’m sure, particularly the Great Quartet of Fifty-Et, which includes Giant from the Unknown, Frankenstein’s Daughter, Missile to the Moon, and the movie I’m gabbing about today, the exotic, buxotic, quixotic She Demons!

The plot is largely lifted from Eyes Without A Face, or would have been if Eyes Without A Face hadn’t come out a year later, ha ha! It seems that there’s been a Gilligan’s Island-style marine mishap, and the castaways include spoiled debutante Jerrie, played by beauteous Irish McCalla, most famous for playing the title role in Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and who, a trivia, was born exactly the same day as the great Dick Miller! The boat captain and generic hero type is Fred Macklin, played by Tod Griffin, who had, after all, already appeared in She Devil so should have known what to expect on this island! There are a couple of crew fellows too: Sammy Ching, played by Victor Sen Yung, famous for his role as number one son Jimmy Chan in the Charlie Chan film series and who also appeared in movies like Moontide, Soldier of Fortune and The Killer Elite; and Kris Kamana, played by Charles Opunui, who had appeared, very briefly, as an “Eskimo” in The Thing From Another World!

After exploring the beach, which looks a lot like Paradise Cove in Malibu, they venture into the island’s interior, which looks a lot like Griffith Park! Unfortunately their buddy Kris suffers a mishap that leaves him chock full of spears, ha ha, and it’s soon revealed that the perpetrators are a group of goochy-faced ladies who like to dance around and attack anyone who happens along! And these ladies, instantly dubbed “She Demons” by our intrepid castaways, turn out to have been created by Colonel Osler, of course!

But who is Colonel Osler? Well, he’s played by Rudolph Anders, who’d essayed plenty of Nazis and other assorted evil Germans before this, and was Dr. Louis Dupont in The Snow Creature, and here he delivers a particularly rootin’-tootin’ performance as a Mengele type guy acting out of the usual maniacal uxoriousness, which of course he’s happy to drop as soon as he claps eyes on Irish! It seems Osler’s wife Mona, played by Leni Tana from Torn Curtain, was involved in a lava accident and needs a replacement face, and local island ladies figure in this treatment somehow, and whenever the procedure fails, as it constantly does, the result, somehow, is a She Demon! The filmmakers don’t really explore the medical whys and wherefores of this, however!

Of course Osler has his Igor figure, here called, imaginatively enough, Igor, and played by familiar face Gene Roth of Strange Illusion, Jet Pilot and Zombies of Mora Tau; he also has a number of generic sub-henchmen who all try to keep their faces in those frowny expressions Nazi henchmen always seem to wear in B pictures! Ha ha! And as the island’s volcano gets rumblier, and Fred and Sammy are captured and tortured while Jerrie is captured and wooed, and then everybody escapes with help from the bandaged Mona, who has finally recognized what a monster her husband is (and whose face, partly revealed near the end, is genuinely gross), and Osler rants and raves and grins and grimaces, and the She Demons keep dancing around, we come to realize just how long 77 minutes can seem!

Nevertheless, I liked this little movie! After all, it starts from a pretty solid foundation, because I’m naturally fond of these little 50s programmers and always enjoy the world of Cunha! In the first half of the movie Jerrie is a supremely annoying spoiled rich girl, but it’s rewarding as she transforms into a regular person! Sammy, for his part, is just a regular sidekick sort of a guy instead of the Asian caricature I was fearing, and that was good too! He’s goofy, but also resourceful and brave! And then it’s always nice to see Nazis on the receiving end of a lava shower, ha ha! It won’t make you change your religion or anything, but you’ll probably enjoy the movie, so I give She Demons two powder-blue cashmere shorties!

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burl reviews 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 65! (2023)

 

Ha ha, Burl returning to you good people after an absence! Sorry about that – I’d have warned you there would be one, but I simply didn’t know! These things sometimes happen in Burl-land, and although I’ve watched plenty of movies I’d like to review, the old reviewing muscles simply weren’t twitching! But I’ve just returned from the cinema show, and I figured I’d review you the picture I saw while it’s fresh in my memory! It’s the sci-fi dino-fest 65!

And I know you’re saying “But Burl, by garr! What does that title mean!” Well, it refers to the time frame in which the picture is set: 65 million years ago! It seems an alien man named Mills, played by Adam Driver, whom we recall from Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Inside Llewyn Davis and The Dead Don’t Die, is driving his spaceship past ancient Earth when he gets knocked askew by a meteorite! But there’s some backstory, economically told thank goodness: Mills, we learn, is only driving this spaceship to earn enough money for lifesaving medical treatment to cure his ailing daughter, which is a plot point only an American could come up with! Ha ha, on a sophisticated, futuristic, Trek-style planet, they’ll have universal health care, believe me!

Anyway, Mills crash lands on a planet, which, tah-dahh, is Earth in the dinosaur times, and all the colonists or whomever Mills is ferrying are killed, but there’s one survivor, a little foreign girl! Together she and Mills must trek across the jungle primeval to the other half of the crashed spaceship, where there might be a blast-off pod! Along the way they must deal with dinosaurs, gross bugs, geysers, quicksand, cave-ins, language difficulties, and more dinosaurs! And of course their visit to Earth is perfectly timed with the impending arrival of the planet-killing meteor that wiped out the thunder lizards! Ha ha!

And that’s about it for plot! The bulk of the picture is the overland trek, punctuated by dinosaur encounters and the other hazards mentioned, and it’s all done passably well, but there remains a feeling that more excitement, more suspense, even more art, could have been wrung out of this premise! Driver does a fine job, though his attempts to communicate with the girl don’t always make sense; and the mere presence of the girl, a stand-in for the daughter he misses so much, is about as un-nuanced and sophomorically convenient as storytelling gets!

Still, the whole thing moves well, looks good, and clocks in at a trim (for these days) 93 minutes, so even with its obviously huge budget, it counts as one of those appealing B-cinema theatrical experiences that I treasure so well! One does occasionally wish for the R-rated version that might have been, in which there are more survivors among the passengers and therefore more potential victims to be bloodily chewed on by lizards and bugs, but there’s an appeal to this trimmer PG-13 iteration too – ha ha, it was a family outing for us, and it never got too gruesome for my 11 year-old! (He’s got a pretty high threshold for that stuff though!)

Altogether it was more straightforward and enjoyable than, say, Jurassic World or any of those recent ones – it was more on the level of Jurassic Park III, another unpretentious 93-minute special! I can’t accuse 65 of excessive originality or style or a very good title, but the premise works and it’s a night out, barely! I give it two mouthfuls of bug goo!

Burl reviews Troll! (2022)

Höch now, it’s Burl, here to review sweet monster madness! Yes, we’re in giant creature territory here, but not in Japan this time, nor even in Korea or North Carolina! No, this monster hails from the northern reaches of our world, up in Norway! Of course we’ve had monster troubles up there before – ha ha, we all remember Trollhunter! Well, here’s a picture in the same vein, and this one is simply called Troll!

It’s not that Empire Picture from 1986 called Troll, the one where Sonny Bono turns into a jungle! No, in fact it's a pretty basic giant monster picture, garnished with a specific mythology and featuring a more human-like monster than usual! The movie reminded me of War of the Gargantuas if it had just the more sympathetic brown gargantua and not the evil green one! Still, the giant troll in this one does, like his grouch-coloured gargantua forbear, munch down on a poor unfortunate guy, eating him up just like a junior mint!

Anyway, the story is pretty simple! After a prelude showing a girl and her father climbing to the top of a Norwegian mountain and talking about the legend of the trolls, we skip to twenty years later, the present day, by which time the girl, Nora Tidemann, now played by Ine Marie Wilmann, has become a professor of paleontology working with The Rocketeer himself, Billy Campbell! When a mountain-drilling project being protested by environmentalists suffers a strange disaster which kills drillers and protesters alike, the Norwegian government puts together a task force which includes the initially baffled Nora!

Turns out the legends her father always talked about are true, and a hundred-meter troll has awakened in a grumpy mood and is wreaking destruction across the countryside! He’s not a destruction-for-the-sake-of-it sort of a monster, but he sure doesn’t shy away from causing carnage either! He’ll kick a house down without thinking twice if the house is in his way, and his melancholy, bulbous-nosed expression stays constant! But he does start to get irritated when they start shooting at him with rockets, ha ha! And who can blame him!

Most of the time is spent with the humans, though, following Nora as she's recruited by the prime minister to help out after an anthropoid form has been spotted in the billowing dust of a panic video! She’s paired up with a nerdy assistant who’s always telling people about his crazy book ideas, then is seconded to a military unit, and it looks like a pace-crippling romantic triangle might develop between Nora, the nerd, and a handsome military man, Kaptein Kristoffer; but thankfully that never happens! The gang visits Nora’s old dad, who’s now a crazed hermit because no one would listen to his troll theories, and there’s some tension between daughter and dad that needs to be worked out!

Meanwhile the troll attacks, or rather strides through, Lillehammer, where pesky helicopters are ringing church bells at him! Though annoyed he takes a moment to save a father and son from certain doom, and this is where everyone, characters and audience alike, realizes the troll’s primary goal actually isn’t to flatten (or occasionally eat) humans! But he doesn’t mind doing it either, and it soon appears that what he really wants is to stomp Oslo! It turns out he’s got his own agenda beyond that, but I’m not saying Oslo also doesn’t get a little stomped on in the process!

In many ways this is a Scandinavianized update of King Kong Lives, ha ha, but luckily they left out most of the stupid stuff! It’s not much more than a standard kaiju, complete with a “let nature be” message, and it has a few monster-less longeurs, but it’s never boring and pretty consistently entertaining! Plus the trick effects are solid, the troll is a sympathetic figure, and the whole thing is played at just the right pitch – not too self-serious, not too self-aware! Sure the characters aren’t much to write home about, some stuff doesn’t make sense, and a few threads are left dangling, but if you like a giant monster movie this ought to scratch the itch! I give Troll two and a half vintage Chevy pick-ups!  

Burl reviews Phantoms! (1998)

 

Ha ha and sweet goofballs, it’s Burl, here to review a tale of underground gumphries! You might say to yourself “Ha ha, Burl, what the heck are underground gumphries?” No, I don’t know, because whatever the monster is in this picture, it may as well be called an underground gumphry as anything else, because it’s one of the vaguest creatures ever to come down the pike! And the movie in which it is featured is called Phantoms!

The picture is much like Deep Rising, with which it shares an amorphous creature, some dodgy digital effects, some refreshing gloop and gore, an approximate release date (January 1998), and at least one actor, Clifton Collins, who here plays an ill-fated general! The story is laid in a small Colorado mountain town as two bickering sisters, played by Joanna Going from The Tree of Life and Rose McGowan from Scream, drive into town for a visit and wonder at the total lack of human activity on the streets! Ha ha, but when they start discovering things like disembodied hands clutching at a rolling pin, they twig that something terrible has happened to the townsfolk! They run into some equally bewildered cops led by Sheriff Ben Affleck of Dazed and Confused and Gone Girl fame; in his company are a pair of deputies, one played by Nicky Katt from Gremlins, and the other, a giggling snickering jerky-jerk and an obvious madman from the moment he steps on screen called Wargle, is essayed by Liev Schreiber from The Daytrippers!

They find the desiccated corpse of Linnea Quigley in a hotel room, and Wargle, whose complex of pathologies includes being a pervhound, seems to want to have relations with it! Ha ha, and shortly thereafter he goes completely boo at the zoo and has his face eaten off by a giant moth! At this point in the review, if you haven’t seen the movie or even if you have, you’re probably wondering just exactly what it is menacing the town! Is it a giant moth? Is it the revived corpses of some of the victims, including Wargle, who pop up now and again? (These, I take it, are the phantoms of the title!) Or is it something else, aliens perhaps? Well, ha ha, it’s hard to say!

Clarification, or as much as we’ll ever be granted, comes from a character preposterously called Dr. Timothy Flyte, who is played by none other than Peter O’Toole, most famed from his role in Club Paradise! Flyte is napped by a pair of agents played by Bo Hopkins from Tentacles and Rob Knepper from Wild Thing, who deliver him to the beleaguered town, tip their caps, and are never seen again! By this time the army has become involved and there’s a mobile laboratory that I was heartened to see! Flyte, once he’s hooked up with our gang of protagonists, compares the malevolent entity to a petroleum jelly, so I guess that’s how I’ll refer to it to, because, much like most of the film’s characters, I never really had any idea what they were up against!

I did appreciate such background as is provided: Flyte calls the creature the “Ancient Enemy,” and spins vaguely Lovecraftian tales of how this ageless jelly occasionally rises up from the earthen underworld in which it dwells to wipe out entire towns or civilizations! I like that kind of thing in a movie, but they don’t do a lot with it here! When it’s not a moth or a zombie, or shaking down The Thing by incarnating as a dog and then bursting forth from within it, the jelly resembles a sort of fudge, or a putty of sorts, or maybe just a big shmoo! Its powers are ill-defined, its goals unclear (it seems to crave publicity, of all things), its weakness implausible and its inspirations obvious! But, ha ha, on the other hand it will occasionally telephone the characters and scream at them through the receiver!

O’Toole and the rest of the cast take all this as seriously as they’re able, and I have to admit they didn’t do a bad job of it! This being a Miramax production and featuring Rose McGowan in a leading role, one gets the creeping willies thinking about that horrible Weinstein brother and his monstrous treatment of McGowan and who knows how many other women – in fact, there’s a moment when Wargle tries out some of his perv-dude talk on Sheriff Affleck and is promptly shut down; one wonders if this was meant as a sort of proxy dramatization of real-life Weinstein-Affleck conversations, with Affleck in the role of the righteous hero and the slobbering madman rapist standing in for Weinstein! Well, who knows!

But it’s a real lombego, this movie! I saw it in the theatre, so I’m feeling that extra bit of affection I carry for such pictures, and the simple fact is I do like a monster movie, and I really like The Thing, which this is trying to be! But ha ha, that it sure ain’t! The dialogue clangs about like a collapsing church organ and the goofnugget level is off the charts, but there are a few effective scenes if you let yourself get into it! It’s dumb and it’s derivative, but the things it’s imitating are mostly fun and interesting, so it benefits from the echoes! It reminds me of a bigger-budget version of something like The Kindred, or a lower-budget simulacrum of the 1988 The Blob, and it receives additional credit for possessing, more or less, that spirit! It’s bad and nothing can change that, but you might find it entertaining! I give Phantoms one and a half phone calls!

Burl reviews Leviathan! (1989)

 

Speaking bubbly, it’s Burl, ducking my head beneath the waves to bring you a review of yet another of the underwater monster movies of 1989! You’ll remember it well, I’m sure: in January we got Deep Star Six, in August we plunged down The Abyss, and somewhere in between, in around March of that year I believe, came this picture, Leviathan!

As has likely been noted by every single other reviewer, if you took Alien and The Thing, mashed them together, plunged them to the bottom of the sea, and made them not very good, you’d get Leviathan! Ha ha, it’s amazing how precisely the picture tries to ape those two predecessors! It’s shameless, really; and then you add on the fact that it was only one of several underwater creature pictures that year, and it starts to seem pretty darn derivative!

Our characters are undersea miners nearly at the end of their ninety-day tour of duty! The boss man is Beck, played by Peter Weller from Buckaroo Banzai and Robocop, and his character note – his single character note – is that he’s not an administrator by trade or avocation, but a geologist, and struggles with the people-managing parts of his job! Richard Crenna from First Blood plays the Wilford Brimley part of the doctor who, on realizing that the problem won’t be cured simply by the application of a little Bon-Zoe, comes to believe the goings-on at the undersea mine must be kept at all costs from infecting the rest of the world!

But wait, just what are the goings-on? Well, the resident jackanapes, an unpleasant, bathrobe-wearing workplace harasser and all-around reprobate called Sixpack, mysteriously tolerated by the rest of the crew and played by Daniel Stern from C.H.U.D., discovers a sunken Russian vessel called Leviathan, and filches some vodka from it! He and a lady called Bo, essayed by Lisa Eilbacher from 10 to Midnight and Beverly Hills Cop, sip from the vodka flask and soon start growing scales and other assorted bodily unpleasantnesses! The rest of the crew, which includes Amanda Pays from The Kindred (in which, you’ll recall, she turns into a fish mutant, ha ha!), Ernie Hudson from Ghostbusters, Hector Elizondo from Pocket Money and The Fat Black Pussycat, and Michael Carmine from Invasion U.S.A., realize, to their horror, that their former colleagues are blobbing together and becoming weird bloodthirsty monsters!

Meg Foster from They Live plays the evil company woman with whom Beck occasionally teleconferences; she’s always hanging up on him and is of no help anyway, so the miners arm themselves with an assortment of makeshift weapons, including a flamethrower, I suppose because Alien and The Thing had them too, a highly impractical-looking saw, a fire axe, and also a hedge trimmer for some reason! The biology of the monsters is pretty confusing: there’s the blobbing together, but also presumably some kind of cell-like division, which, if that happens, is kept off screen! Tentacles that are chopped off swim around and grow into new monsters, or expel toothy eel things that look like the monster from Parasite! In short, you never know how many monsters there are, what they might look like, or what needs to be done for the monster peril to be defeated!

All the monster scenes are terribly staged and incomprehensibly edited, and one gets the sense that thanks to this incompetence, a lot of the creature effects crew’s hard work was elided, obscured, and otherwise ignored! Behind the megaphone is George P. Cosmatos, who brought us Rambo and Cobra (or at least so the credits claim) and directed Weller in a rat picture called Of Unknown Origin, and he brings one or two moments of style to the movie but otherwise works in a very static, pep-free mode! The underwater stuff is done in the same dry-studio way they did that old Irwin Allen show about the bottom of the sea, but, with some fine camerawork and by sending the occasional big-jawed fish across the screen on a string, the effect is not too bad!

The cast, as you can see, is pretty great, and they certainly spent some money on the sets and trick effects! They might have spent more time on the body horror aspect before getting to the monsters, and would that they’d given the characters more than one single characteristic each (Sixpack is an unpleasant horndog; Pays loves money; Hudson hates waves; Eilbacher has nice breasts; Carmine, in the role of DeJesus, is obsessed with Alpine skiing; Elizondo, the shop steward, is a by-the-book union man; and Crenna’s doctor is never around when you need him), but I remember having fun with this in the theatre, as I had fun with all the underwater movies that year, so I’m going to give Leviathan one and a half tube worms!

Burl reviews King Kong Lives! (1986)

With a mighty roar and a monkey two-step, it’s Burl comin’ at you with sweet monster madness! Ha ha, today I’m reviewing a movie I dutifully went to see back around Christmas of 1986, because in theory there’s nothing wrong with going to see monsters and destruction on the big screen! In theory! And that theory gets a bit of a stress test when the movie in question is King Kong Lives! Ha ha!

Yes, this is the work of Dino De Laurentiis, who wanted to make a direct follow-up to his big hit from a decade before, the 1976 King Kong! In fact he starts this with footage from the ’76 picture, showing the mighty ape tumbling from the World Trade Centre – but, ha ha, turns out that didn’t kill him! No, he’s been on life support in a big warehouse, and now Dr. Amy Franklin, the world’s leading expert in giant ape transplants, played by Linda Hamilton from Dante’s Peak, is ready to fit Kong with the biggest Jarvik-7 ever seen! Ha ha, let's call it the Jarvik-7000! The problem is, to survive the procedure Kong needs a blood transfusion, but who could possibly be the donor?

Luckily at that moment a generic adventurer played by Brian Kerwin from Hometown U.S.A., sporting the generic adventurer name of Hank Mitchell and wearing the requisite generic adventurer hat, is in the wilds of Borneo running from a giant hand! The hand is attached (allegedly) to a Lady Kong, and in short order she’s been captured and shipped to a warehouse nearby to Kong's, and then Kong gets his blood transfusion and his artificial heart, which is inserted somehow without leaving a visible scar on Kong's mighty chest! Of course the apes can sniff each other out over vast distances, and once they're aware of each other, nothing, not chains, not guns, not front-end loaders, can keep these aspiring lovebirds from each other’s company!

They escape into the hills, and hard-case Colonel Nevitt, played by John Ashton from Some Kind of Wonderful, is sent after them! Of course Dr. Amy and Hank Mitchell team up in an effort to find them first and prevent the trigger-happy armyman from harming the super-simians! The apes, meanwhile, can’t keep their paws off one another, and soon it's a case of sweet monkey love, ha ha! There’s concurrent human bohankie occurring nearby in the sleeping bag occupied by Dr. Amy and Hank Mitchell! But soon the army comes with their tanks and helicopters and knockout gasses, and Lady Kong is captured!

Kong himself takes to the hills, where he broods and plans and eats gators and is briefly trapped by rednecks out for a wild time! He escapes their trap and takes a bloody vengeance upon the hillbillies, breaking one of them clean in half and popping another in his mouth like a junior mint! He then busts his ladyfriend out of the missile silo they’ve put her in, and of course it turns out she’s pregnant! Ha ha, Kongratulations! After a final climactic ruction, during which the big guy stomps Col. Nevitt into the loam, Lady Kong gives birth to a gorilla, and the giant ape life cycle continues!

Kong himself is played by Peter Elliott, who essayed many an ape in pictures like Greystoke and Congo, and here he sports a perpetually bewildered expression thanks to the stiff mechanics of Carlo Rambaldi’s apesuit! But I think he might give the best performance in the picture anyway, ha ha! The rest of the actors seem trapped in some weird limbo where they want to look at once like they’re taking this material seriously, and are also completely aware that it’s ridiculous! In trying to have it both ways they end up delivering bland and lifeless performances, devoid of the ham and the pep this kooky movie requires!

It’s a bad movie, of that there can be no doubt, and a misguided one too, but I’d be lying if I told you it had no entertainment value! There’s some good model work in it, though not all the trick effects are fully up to snuff, ha ha! The emotional stakes are genuine, though – you really do root for the Kongs! By all other cinematic or dramaturgical measures, this is a terrible movie, and even I, who saw it on the big screen at a relatively impressionable age, can’t find much to admire! I give King Kong Lives one and a half hillbilly hunters!

Burl reviews Night of the Howling Beast! (1975)

 

With a Spanish aroooo, it’s Burl, here to review some Iberian lycanthropy! Yes, ha ha, it’s our good and great friend Paul Naschy again, and here’s he’s playing his most beloved character, Waldemar Daninsky, just as he did in The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman, but didn’t in House of Psychotic Women! Poor Waldemar just can’t catch a break, and such is the case again in this picture, Night of the Howling Beast!

After an opening in which a gang of explorers in the Himalayas is attacked by a yeti who looks, sounds, and acts just like a werewolf, Waldemar is called in by The Professor to lead a follow-up expedition! He’s happy to do it, and happier still that The Professor’s comely daughter, and another beautiful science lady as well, will be participating! There are a few others in the party, including one fellow whose name is Lawrence Talbot, but who never comes close to becoming a werewolf himself, ha ha! No, he has to settle for merely being vertically impaled by Tatars midway through the picture!

On arriving in Nepal (played here by the Pyrénées), the party is split up, with Waldemar and the sketchy, perennially frightened local guide Joel heading off to find a pass through the snowy mountains! Joel runs off and Waldemar ends up in a cave inhabited by ladies who might be vampires or might be werewolves, but in any case they can’t keep their hands off the refrigerator physique of our hero, and this occasions much bum-wiggling sex! Once Waldemar realizes they’re flesh-eating creatures from beyond reality, he goes on an impaling jag; but before he can dispatch both ladies, one of them puts a chomping on his left tit! Ha ha, uh oh!

Now of course he’s a werewolf, and meanwhile the rest of the expedition is beset by the above-mentioned Tatars, who kill or kidnap everybody! Their leader, the Khan, has a skin condition on his back, and the witch in his employ is trying to remedy the ailment by peeling off other people’s backs and sticking it on the Khan’s! Yowch! Meanwhile there’s still a yeti, or yetis, running around, and Waldemar is periodically wolfing out, and what to do about these darn Tatars and their evil witch?

There’s a bit of a lull in the action around the middle of the picture while Waldemar and The Professor’s daughter hang out with a monk and his pal, but it’s nothing serious! There’s plenty going on at the Khan’s castle once Waldemar and the daughter arrive there, though! And the long-heralded battle between the yeti and the werewolf finally happens at the end, and it’s sometimes hard to tell one from the other!

As well, there’s time taken to give a happy ending in which the mystical flower is discovered by The Professor’s daughter right after the monster fight! Once she pushes a magic flower-blood combo into the werewolf’s toothy mouth, carefully, as you would, he reverse-pixilates into his Waldemar form and what’s more his wound seems to have healed! The last we see is the pair of them tromping off through the Himalayas in their leisurewear! Ha ha!

It’s pretty gnashy Naschy when all is said and done, and I enjoyed the picture, even if it gets a little sadistic here and there! Naschy didn’t himself direct this one, the better perhaps to direct his thespian attentions to the various ladies that want to “go ‘pon his bones for a touch of bohankie,” as they say! Yes, it’s solid Naschy, as solid as his own chest appears to be, and there's no doubt he knew just what his audience wanted to see, and gave it to them! Night of the Howling Beast is also known as The Werewolf and the Yeti, and by the end it earns that title, so I’ll give the picture two chomp marks!

Burl reviews Frankenstein Unbound! (1990)

 

Attention pilgrims, it’s Burl, here to review the work of a legendary filmmaker! The legendary filmmaker’s name of course is Roger Corman: the fellow who brought us such distinguished works as A Bucket of Blood, Rock All Night, Sorority Girl, and Attack of the Crab Monsters! He took a little break from directing movies which ended up lasting twenty years (though he produced them, and still produces them, with wild abandon), and his return to the director’s chair was this curious item, Frankenstein Unbound!

We begin in the future year of 2031, where a scientist called Buchanan, played by the terrific John Hurt of Only Lovers Left Alive, is putting the finishing touches on his superweapon! The superweapon dissolves matter, but it also opens up some kind of temporal time rift, such as we saw in The Philadelphia Experiment, but here shaped like a purple vagina; and after Buchanan drives home in his talking car to find a bunch of kids in his yard holding a funeral for a bike for some reason, he and his sapient auto get sucked up by the time rift and deposited in 1817, near Lake Geneva!

Naturally, as we know from history, Dr. Frankenstein was conducting his notorious experiments in this area, and of course, once Buchanan and his talking car have figured out where and when they are, and Buchanan has hidden his talking car in a bramble, he walks into a bar and the first person he meets is none other than the modern Prometheus! The good doctor is played by Raul Julia from The Eyes of Laura Mars as an imperious dandy, and after he gets a look at Buchanan’s digital watch, he’s pleased in return to show off the hulking creature he’s built! Nick Brimble from Lust for a Vampire plays the monster, a brutal oaf who speaks in a tragic, baronial timbre, is covered in face putty, and is happy to knock people’s heads off when he takes a mind to!

Meanwhile, of course, Mary Wollstoncraft (that is, the future Mary Shelley) is hanging around, played by Bridget Fonda from Singles, and there are brief, fey, pointless appearances from Byron and Shelley, essayed respectively by Jason Patric from The Lost Boys and rocksman Michael Hutchence from Dogs in Space! And then there’s Catherine Rabett from The Living Daylights as Frankenstein’ sweetheart Elizabeth, who gets cracked open like a walnut by the creature!

Yes, he’ll do violence all right, that creature, and he’s mad mainly because of the meat! Ha ha, no, he’s mad because Frankenstein has thus far refused to make him a mate, but then the doctor obliges him after all, and the mate seems to have CDs growing out the sides of her head; and then the time rift reappears, sending Buchanan, Dr. Frankenstein, the creature and his new jerrybuilt ladyfriend to some kind of frozen future wasteland! Ha ha, the talking car gets left behind in nineteenth century Switzerland, where it presumably will roll around the countryside startling locals with loud honks or unexpected badinage!

The climax involves more killing and the predictable revelation that the wasteland is actually the world of the future, which has come to this sad state thanks to Buchanan’s superweapon, and which he’s fated to wander alone for the rest of his days! Ha ha! I guess this is meant to function as a sort of corollary or echo of the monster’s self-imposed Arctic exile as depicted in the book!

Well, it’s a strange picture, and an odd choice for Corman! Of course, he made all sorts of pictures in his career, so maybe there is no odd choice for him! It’s a bit akin to the Poe films he made, Premature Burial and suchlike, but it has more heads and arms being ripped off than those ones did, ha ha! And it’s less elegantly made, frequently goofy, and in places demonstrates genuine ineptitude! But it also has really effective bits, as when the creature is chasing down Elizabeth’s carriage, or when he goes ape on the torch-bearing townsfolk!

I’m glad it exists though, as a curio if not a compelling piece of cinema; and it’s really not that much goofier than its contemporaries, films like Gothic and Haunted Summer! I thought the stitched-together multicoloured eye on the poster was a pretty cool image, meant no doubt as a metaphoric synecdoche for the creature itself - but it turns out that’s what the monster’s eyes really look like! Ha ha, talk about impractical! But there’s the movie in a nutshell for you - and look, a synecdoche after all! I give Frankenstein Unbound, or F.U. as some may prefer to call it, two vaporized Statues of Liberty models!

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!