Burl reviews Cold Pursuit! (2019)

 

By krim-kram and by the flurries of winters past, it’s Burl, here to review yet another picture featuring an aging Liam Neeson carrying vengeance in his heart! He’s done this oh so many times before – look at movies like Next of Kin and Darkman and Taken 2, and there you’ll see that old familiar figure of Liam Neeson with vengeance reliably lodged in his heart! And the picture under discussion today is more of the same, and it’s called Cold Pursuit!

This is not just a vengeance picture but also belongs to that subset of movies which are remakes of movies made a year or two earlier by the same European director who made the original, and usually the remake is the filmmaker’s entrée into Hollywood studio picturemaking! Think of The Vanishing, (and, ha ha, then forget it – the remake, anyway), or Funny Games! Cold Pursuit is a remake of the Danish-Norwegian comedeo-vengeance film In Order of Disappearance, which I’m pretty sure I’ve seen! And like all these remakes, bar, I think, none, the original is the better one!

Old Liam plays Nels, which seems like, but isn’t, an anagram for “Liam!” Nels is a solid citizen in a little Colorado mountain town: he’s the man who keeps the roads clear with his big shed full of plowing equipment, and for this he’s being recognized as Local Man of the Year, for which his wife, Laura Dern from Blue Velvet, is proud! But then we see how their son, played by Neeson’s real-life son I believe, has, through his airport baggage job and the shabby offices of a disreputable pal, become mixed up with a drugs gang, and thanks to a misunderstanding, is kidnapped and given a fatal overdose by the gang!

Neeson and Dern each react to this in their own way: Dern takes off for parts unknown and is never seen again, while Neeson becomes vengeance-crazed, turning to his retired-gangster brother, played by William Forsythe from Smokey Bites the Dust and Extreme Prejudice, for information and advice! The tone turns blackly comic as Neeson kills his way up the Denver crime hierarchy, and with each new notch on the belt comes an intertitle memorializing the dead party and listing his gangster nickname! Ha ha, this is a bit on the cutesy side – I recall it working better in the original, where the humour was allowed to be as dry as it needed to be and the little titles didn’t stand out as much as they do in this more studio-tooled, focus-grouped remake!

The nicknames are another running gag, with a puzzled Neeson quizzing his brother about them! But, like the obituary intertitles, this aspect seems nothing more than ornamentation added later to purfle the border of an otherwise ordinary crime thriller! Ha ha, but there are a few details which seem a bit more organically integrated, like the rival gang of Indigenous mobsters! And there’s a subplot involving the son of the main bad guy, a boy-faced mob boss called The Viking, who lacks any evident Viking qualities beyond a general ruthlessness; this subplot has a mild wackiness to it, and lends the picture a bit of dualism which, for the movie’s running time at least, serves as an acceptable substitute for complexity!

The revenge part works well enough, familiar as it is, though I was disappointed that Nels didn’t use his snowplow more! It figures into the last act a little bit, but not enough to make this picture anything more than a mildly eccentric and otherwise unmemorable crime picture, more notable for casting a shadow over the original foreign iteration than for any qualities of its own! Neeson does this stuff with an appealing stolidity, but he could pull that off in his sleep, and in several scenes seems to be doing so here! I say stick with the original version, or maybe Fargo, which did snowbound crime eccentricity better than any other picture I can think of; but I’ll give Cold Pursuit two Fruity Pebbles anyway!

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 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 Hurray - The Swedes Are Here! (1978)

 

By all that’s Bavarian, it’s Burl, here to review one of the many, many, many sex comedies made in and around Bavaria in the 70s and 80s, usually involving hotels, burgomeisters, and Swedish girls! You might recall High Test Girls, which was about six Swedish girls arriving to take over a gas station; well, this one is pretty similar, and it goes by the English title of Hooray - The Swedes Are Here!

Of course there’s no plot, ha ha, no plot at all, but if you’ve read my reviews you know that’s not always a problem, especially with movies like this! The setting is a small Bavarian town, and it seems the burgomeister has given a strapping local lad named Niki Moser a big loan so that Niki can buy a hotel; but the agreement is that Niki will then marry the burgomeister’s perpetually nude daughter Marianne! But he doesn’t want to, and so the solution, suggested by Niki’s friend Tony, is to get a government subsidy to develop the hotel, so that Niki can repay the burgomeister and not be obliged to marry Marianne and this in turn requires that a government minister be fooled into believing the hotel is fully booked with guests so he will okay the subsidy!

The handsy old government official brings his girlfriend to the hotel for a dirty weekend while he considers whether Niki deserves the government subsidy, although he stops along the way to first get pooped on by a cow and then to take his mistress dirndl shopping! It looks bad for Niki, as, aside from a newlywed couple, one of whom is the gayest man alive, the other an understandably frustrated woman, the hotel is almost completely free of guests! Luckily a quintet of pulchritudinous Swedes shows up, followed by, out of nowhere, a marching oompah band! Everyone is soon having sex, ha ha!

The picture is full to bursting with hoary old jokes - they even try on the one about the fly in the soup! Ha ha, that one had whiskers when the Muppets did it, which I guess was around the same time as this! And of course there are pies in the face too, ha ha, because you can’t have a picture like this without pies in the face! And as the five Swedes gambol topless around the pool, a small boy in a Tyrolean hat peeks in and demands they give him a Tampax, because he’s heard that with one you can go swimming, horseback riding, hang gliding, and so forth! Ha ha, another fosselized old chestnut! And then of course there's the one about the exploding outhouse!

Now I haven’t seen a lot of these German bedroom-polka pictures, but I still recognized some of the faces here! Marianne, the burgomeister’s daughter, is black for some reason, and she’s played by Scarlett Gunden from Melody in Love! Why Niki is so reluctant to marry her is anybody’s guess, because she’s good-natured and very gorgeous! Niki himself is played by Wolf Goldan, who was also in Melody in Love, and of course played one of The Three Superguys! Bea Fiedler from Summer Night Fever and Hot Chili is in here, as is Renate Langer also from Summer Night Fever! And of course there’s Rosi Meyer, the same gurning old lady who seems to be in all of these pictures, including of course Has Anybody Seen My Pants? Ha ha, in fact the movie opens with some outhouse jokes performed by her and the burgomeister!

Finally Niki realizes that Marianne is a) cute, b) nice, and c) naked all the time, so it all ends the only way it could: with the triumphant blare of an oompah band, some slow-motion running through an alpine meadow, the tearing off of a dirndl, and a tilt up to a mountain that looks like a breast! Ha ha! Because I enjoyed watching it, and because I like writing dirndl, I’m gong to give Hooray - The Swedes Are Here three dirndls!

Burl reviews Firestorm! (1998)

 

With a snap, a crackle, and a pop, Burl is here to review you a movie about fierce forest fires and the folk who fight them! It’s 90s Hollywood action yet again, and this picture, along with Eraser, got me thinking about that particular category of motion picture! You’ve got your minor classics, like Speed and Face-Off and The Fugitive, and then your successful-but-middling works, like Point Break, The Rock, Con Air, The Last Boy Scout, Cliffhanger, Air Force One, Under Siege, Passenger 57, so forth! And then again you have a whole different category: movies that some studio or other (usually Fox) made in imitation of either Speed or Die Hard or some combination of the two, but that ended up as anonymous video-store fodder, remembered by few and cherished by none! These titles include buntonics like Chain Reaction, Mercury Rising, Hard Rain, Chill Factor, Striking Distance, and today’s picture, Firestorm, which I’m forced by circumstance to report might be the worst of them!

Our hero in this endeavour is not a cop but a fighter of forest fires, and the fellow playing him is not an actor but instead famed pigskinsman Howie Long, wearing a perpetually blurred and startled look in the role of Jessie the smokejumper! Ha ha, the picture opens with its most professionally-directed scene, in which Jessie and his mentor Wynt, played by Scott Glenn from The Keep and The Right Stuff, must rescue a little girl from a house in the burning forest! Wynt is injured, which leads to his part in the drama becoming strangely similar to the one Glenn undertook in another flame-based actiondrama, Backdraft!

Meanwhile a slightly clever but also completely goofy jailbreak is enacted by a fancy-talkin’ robber-killer played by William Forsythe from Cloak & Dagger and Extreme Prejudice! As a purposefully-started forest fire rages on the mountain, he and a band of confrères escape from the ridiculously low-security work detail they’re on, and in their new guise as a group of Alberta-based firefighters, adopt ridiculous Canookian accents straight out of Canadian Bacon! Ha ha!

Suzy Amis from Fandango turns up as an ornithologist who’s not just an ornithologist but has been relentlessly trained by her father in the art of being a Marine, and that ridiculous confluence of characteristics is typical of this picture! Once the perennially baffled Jessie figures out that the constant litany of “eh?” from the would-be Canadian firefighters is counterfeit, he and Amis are on the run! Fortunately for him, but unfortunately for the thrill ratio of the movie, Forsythe’s baddie is killing off all his buddies himself, leaving Jessie nothing to do except run away! Ha ha, he does fight one of the henchmen, but is left prone and defeated beneath a pile of camping equipment while the henchman is finished off by Forsythe!

Jessie himself has a gang of pals, including familiar faces like Christiane Hirt from Malone and Michael Greyeyes from Blood Quantum, but they all mostly stay put at headquarters and never become a part of the action! Meanwhile the movie degenerates into a display floor of blundered potential and missed opportunity! A situation involving a group of people trapped on a bus might have had plenty of suspense wrung from it, but instead it turns out to be merely the setup for a weakly-executed gag! Jessie talks about trees and rocks exploding, but we never see that happen; and the climactic firestorm is just a digital mess that looks like some kind of 90s-era screen saver! Ha ha, we do get a moment involving somebody’s head igniting like a match, but that’s small recompense!

The picture was directed by talented cinematographer Dean Semler, who shot City Slickers and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and this hire was clearly part of the studio’s attempt to recapture the magic of Speed or The Fugitive, also directed by cameramen! But like other photographer-directed 90s actioners, Chill Factor or Hard Rain for instance, it was in the end a failed gambit - it’s hard to know whether the actors or the action were more poorly served by Semler’s inexperience behind the megaphone! The storytelling is a mess, thanks to the lousy script as well as the confused direction; the dialogue is laughably lousy; and the hero is virtually indistinguishable from the trees he’s trying to save! It’s the lowest ebb of 90s studio action, so I give Firestorm one groundpounder!

Burl reviews Iced! (1989)

 

Schuss schuss, it’s Burl, here on the slopes to review a tale of downhill slashing! Of course there are earlier examples of ski lodge horror, most notably Snowbeast, but this picture, Iced, is probably the first time a slasher got to work on the hard pack!

Like many slashers, this one starts with the Traumatic Inciting Incident From Several Years Before! We find ourselves in the midst of a group of ski-happy puffhairs having lifestyle fun at the winter resort! But there’s a conflict, and the tightly-wound Jeff, who suffers first a romantic setback and then a humiliation on the slopes, complains to an unseen person that his so-called pals appear to be questioning his integrity as a skier! Jeff then goes for a nighttime rip and ends up plummeting chest-first onto a rock!

Five years later the surviving friends all get mysterious invitations to a free vacation at Snow Peak, a new and unimaginatively-named mountaintop resort! But the weekend goes decidedly off-piste when a mysterious figure in a powder-blue snowsuit and cracked goggles gets out the old carving ski and goes to work! Although "goes to work" is not quite accurate, ha ha! The killer flattens one of the pals with a snowplow before the unlucky victim has a chance to even arrive at the resort, much less unpack, but after that the maniac waits a very long time to resume his killing spree!

This time is filled with the kind of late-80s horror-soap drama familiar to anyone who’s seen Bloodmoon! The histrionics are enacted by actors of varying levels of talent, several of whom should have known what was coming, as they've had trouble with slashers before! Trina, played by Debra De Liso from The Slumber Party Massacre, is the main lady here, and her husband Cory is Doug Stevenson from The Prowler! Wednesday Addams herself, Lisa Loring from Blood Frenzy, is the resident hot tamale, and Joseph Alan Johnson from Berserker and Hollywood Hot Tubs, who also wrote the script for this confunction, is the guy trying-but-not-trying to sell time shares of the ski resort cabin! And there’s an ill-fated couple played by John C. Cooke from The Puppet Masters and Elizabeth Gorcey from Footloose, Grandview U.S.A. and Teen Wolf!

On paper, the picture delivers the goods one expects from a slasher, with several scenes of both real and imagined bohankie, and a few Special Makeup Effects sprinkled here and there! Ha ha, the ski pole through the neck and the icicle in the eye are highlights (and in this latter effect, the movie beats Renny Harlin to the punch, as his use of icicles as murder weapons in Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger came only later!), and the luring of the rattail-sporting drugs fiend into a garden of bear traps has a certain grisly impact! But for all this it’s not terribly memorable - there’s precious little pep in the filmmaking, and the characters are by and large intolerable!

For a ski resort picture there’s not much skiing, which is fine, and the lodge itself is strangely anodyne! This atmosphere extends to nearly the whole picture, with a few small exceptions! The climax has the main lady running around in a ski jacket, however no pants; and the post-climax codicil is a delightful burst of absurdity involving a snowman! Ha ha! Most of the picture is pretty tiresome though, with a full load of melodrama to endure and not much vim to leaven it! The mystery aspect is underdone as well! It’s all very late-80s, and that will be a draw for some I suppose; and with that in mind I give Iced one Rockadiles shirt!

Burl reviews First Blood! (1982)

 

Ha ha and hambones, it’s Burl, here with a review of the good Rambo picture! Yes, that would be the first one, and its general solidity as a motion picture, especially as compared to the other entries in this series - ha ha, and in particular the last one, Rambo: Last Blood - is evinced by its title, which does not contain the name Rambo at all, but is the simple and succinct First Blood!

Sylvester Stallone, who later returned to the mountains in Cliffhanger, is as ever the star, the profoundly damaged Green Beret John Rambo! He’s out for a stroll, looking for an old army buddy, and is dismayed to find that his friend has died from the cancer, thanks of course to the Agent Orange he inhaled back in ‘Nam! Rambo then makes his way to a nearby mountain town and runs into a big bear of a sheriff played by Brian Dennehy from Ants! and F/X and Best Seller! Well, the next thing you know, the sheriff is power trippin’, Rambo is flashbackin’ to his wartime torture days, and deputies are a-flyin’ left and right and Rambo’s out the door and away into the mountains!

The scene with him beating up all the deputies is pretty satisfying, I must say, and later, when the meanest deputy of them all, played by Jack Starrett, who directed The Losers and Race with the Devil, plummets from a helicopter from which he’s shooting at Rambo, we get even more satisfaction! Then the whole gang of deputies is wounded by Rambo and his forest traps, and that’s pretty all right too! This gang of bozos is played by a gallery of familiar faces, like Bill McKinney from Cannonball, Chris Mulkey from Quiet Cool, Michael Talbott from Vacation, John McLiam from Sleeper, with good old Alf Humphries from My Bloody Valentine as the goofball cop and David Caruso from Without Warning as the nice-guy rookie!

But Dennehy’s Sheriff Teasle - ha ha! - is the biggest bozo of all, increasingly bent on getting the mumbly, misunderstood ex-soldier despite the fact that he, Teasle, was the one who started it by not letting Rambo eat lunch in his town! Richard Crenna from Summer Rental and Un Flic appears as Rambo’s old commander, and regales Dennehy with tales of the things Rambo could eat that would make a billy goat puke! Soon the National Guard is called in, and Rambo makes his way back to town and begins a campaign of gunfire and blowups! And despite the explosions and the flying bullets and the crashing cars, the only one who ever gets killed is that nasty deputy who fell from the helicopter!

It’s a fair action meller and a pleasantly cathartic exercise for viewers who are not much enamoured of the police forces in America! In that sense it’s a lot more relevant than the later Rambic exercises in commie-blasting, ha ha! It’s solidly directed by an old pro, and Rambo’s teary breakdown scene near the end is affecting! Plus, like Stallone’s later Cobra it’s a stealth Christmas picture, as evidenced by the sad desktop trees on view in the police station! I give First Blood two and a half grimy canvas ponchos!

Burl reviews On Her Majesty's Secret Service! (1969)

Ha ha, this never happened to the other fellow indeed! Yes, it’s Burl again and Bond again, only this time the superspy in question played not by Connery, not by Moore, not by Dalton, Brosnan, or Craig, but by the doughty one-offsman George Lazenby! So yes, of course the picture is On Her Majesty’s Secret Service!

Now, I’m not so sure I’d have watched this movie in July had I remembered it was a Christmas picture, but there you are! It’s not one of your more action-packed outings, to be sure, but, ha ha, Lazenby’s not the only novelty here, because the picture tries a bunch of new things! Because it’s the late 1960s, we get some elliptical editing and other New Hollywood movie tricks, particularly in the fight scenes! I enjoyed this, though to contemporary audiences it may well have seemed like the kind of blender-editing which makes Quantum of Solace such a chore to sit through!

He does some garden-variety spy stuff, like when he sneaks into an office to steal some documents! But he doesn’t just snatch the papers, nor photograph them with a little spy camera, no: he has a buddy dress up like a construction worker, then place a large case into a crane bucket so it can be hefted up the side of a building to the fifth floor where Bond is! The case contains a device which proves to be an enormous photocopier, ha ha - state-of-the-art equipment for any spy in 1969, I’m sure!

Of course it all ends up in Blofeld’s mountaintop allergy clinic on Christmas, ha ha! Blofeld even has a tree and gives out neatly-wrapped gifts! And here, the perennial villain is played by Kojack himself, Telly Savalas, whom we know so well from his equally sinister appearance in Mario Bava’s Lisa and the Devil! Ha ha, Blojack! And what’s great about this iteration of the super-villain is that he gets a lot more personally involved in the battle against Bond than we see in other pictures! He’s not just sitting in a chair and stroking his pussy this time, no sir!

The big question is: how’s Lazenby? Well, he’s demonstrably no Connery! He’s matey and cavalier, and seems equally uncomfortable doing the action as he does in the long section at the allergy clinic during which he must wear a kilt and pretend to have no interest in the beautiful ladies who abound there! And in the end he’s not really an actor, nor does he claim to be! But for all that I didn’t mind him - certainly I prefer him to Moore in his smarmier moments! And the movie Lazenby has going on around him is, while not exactly action-packed, interesting and solid enough to raise him up to a quite acceptable level!

And the movie sticks the landing, emotionally speaking! This is perhaps the only Bond picture which ends with the superspy sobbing instead of snogging, and it makes for a genuinely affecting conclusion! Diana Rigg, who plays Mrs. Bond, and whom we know so well from Theatre of Blood, is quite believable as the woman Bond would want to settle down with, and Gabriele Ferzetti, who was Sandro in L’ Avventura, is terrific as her friendly gangster dad! I give On Her Majesty’s Secret Service two and a half purple parcels!

Burl reviews Careful! (1992)

Ha ha, and don’t put too much pepper on it! Yes, it’s Burl, here to review a movie I’ve liked for many years: Guy Maddin’s mountain picture Careful! This was Maddin’s third picture, I believe, and they say it was filmed on the great, flat plains of Manitoba, Canada! But I can’t believe that, because the movie patently takes place in the mountains! Ha ha!

It’s an odd movie, and delightfully so! We’re in the town of Tolzbad, a mountain town whose inhabitants are constantly, morbidly, appropriately, afraid of being swept away by an avalanche! Of course they also fear falling off of cliffs, and so everybody at all times behaves with the greatest restraint and propriety! In a word, they are careful!

Two brothers, Johann and Grigorss, are our heroes, sort of! Johann has a bit of a crush on his mother, sorry to say, and in such a repressed society as this, such feelings can only lead to a mouth-searing and some chocolate-sauce gore! A pair of sisters are also having trouble with incest, and this family too must lose a few members before things can be set aright on the mountain once again! In fact I’m not really sure things ever are set aright, but that’s the upper regions for you, ha ha! The thin air and tendency toward inbreeding makes the people a little bit stupid! Just have a look at Cliffhanger and you’ll see what I mean!

I don’t want to tell you how it ends, but practically everybody dies, ha ha! So it’s a tragedy, but it’s a very funny one, with deliberately crude special effects and wildly coloured cinematography! A few scenes are so overexposed that they hurt the eye, and I’m not one hundred percent sure that was the effect Maddin was going for, but who knows! And a few performances are a little flatter than I’m sure was intended; but on the other hand most of the actors are right on the mark! Vic Cowie, in the role of Herr Trotta, the libidinous papa, was especially strong!

I’ve not seen many of the mountain pictures that inspired this movie - things like Leni Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light, for instance, or the work of Dr. Arnold Fanck - but I can imagine them, and Careful appears to be a sincere and loving tribute to those great eruptions of Teutonic repress-o-passion! It’s packed with imaginative details and vivid sequences of high melodrama! Literally high, ha ha, because it’s mountains, and perhaps the makers of the picture were a little bit high too! It’s a florid work, and one I can cheerfully recommend! I give Careful three and a half condor eggs!

Burl reviews Cliffhanger! (1993)

Stay back from the edge everybody, it’s Burl here with a review of 90s action! I’ve provided such reviews before - ha ha, remember logampompadors like Drop Zone and The Hunted? - but today’s picture, Cliffhanger, is one of the taller rock formations on the 90s action landscape! Not because it’s all that great, mind you, though it’s pretty entertaining; but in action-historical terms, we must note that by placing Sylvester Stallone on the edge of the abyss, it yet drew him back from the abyss! Ha ha, he was loading himself up with lead weights like Oscar and Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot and preparing to dive right in there, never to be seen again!

Having directed Die Hard 2 in 1990, Renny Harlin was well positioned to become a 90s actionmaster (though he overplayed his hand, ha ha!), and Cliffhanger shows him right in that sweet spot! The picture opens with its most memorable scene: a rescue climber played by Stallone (that grim-faced actor we may recall from Cobra) fails to stop his pal Michael Rooker’s girlfriend from plummeting into a chasm! Well, some months later, just as a sad Sly returns to his mountain town, an airborne heist orchestrated by none other than John Lithgow goes terribly wrong, and when the Rocky Mountain Rescue folks are called in on false pretenses to help out, it’s shoot, stab and plummet time in the mountains!

Ha ha, Lithgow affects a plummy accent that is somehow faker than his Emilio Lizardo voice in Buckaroo Banzai, but he makes a real meal of the role! His gang includes shouty Rex Linn from Night Game, who lays a salty tongue on all in his vicinity; Gregory Scott Cummins, the star of Action U.S.A. himself; the singularly named Leon from Bats; and a lady who is either the poor woman’s Kristin Scott Thomas or the very poor woman’s Emma Thompson! All of these characters meet a sticky end at the bottom of a chasm, or the tip of a bullet, or the pointy end of a stalactite!

I have to admit that 90s action movies intrigue me, and that’s perhaps because they’re such an ordered progression from their 80s forbears! It’s interesting to watch this kind of evolution! Now, I’m not saying they’re better, and in fact I assert that they’re not, but they’re different in incremental ways! They appear to have taken certain things that 80s films showcased, like the privileging of action setpieces, or the all-important gimmick death of the heavy, as an instruction manual, and created entire movies according to these directives! Ha ha! And I’ll get to a lot more of these movies, I’m sure: Speed, Hard Target, Eraser, maybe Under Siege and The Rock, and Demolition Man and other such things! But not Bad Boys! I hate Bad Boys!

Anyway, back to Cliffhanger: it’s often very silly, and really just a dramatization of how badly wrong a supposedly clever heist can go; but on the other hand the stunts and mountain photography and the Italian Alps locations are all very impressive! Of course, by the spring, when the snows recede up the mountain and the yetis wander down to take their pleasure in the local fatboys, you’ll have completely forgotten it, except maybe that opening scene! I give Cliffhanger two stylish old mountaineering sweaters!

Burl reviews For Your Eyes Only! (1981)

Ha ha, Burl here! It’s not a very controversial position, but Roger Moore has always been my least favourite Bond! (I’ve liked him elsewhere though, like in ffolkes! Ha ha, ffolkes!) However, his were the ones I sort of came of age with, as it were, so there’s still plenty of extratextual enjoyment for a guy like me! I’ve always thought of For Your Eyes Only as the “good” late-Moore, even though Octopussy is the one of which I am truly fondest, the Walken/Jones evil team and their blimp in A View To A Kill notwithstanding!

But it was For Your Eyes Only I recently rewatched, and though it wasn’t quite as serious-minded as I remembered, it was hardly the gagfest that was its immediate antecedent, Moonraker! I remembered it better through its Mad Magazine parody than through the movie itself! But it wasn’t a standout in any way, just one of the acceptably decent ones in the middle of the pack!

It opens with a pretty good remote-control helicopter scene, then shows us the fate of a British spy ship which pulls a mine up in its fishing nets! Ha ha, boom, and the McGarnigle of this film, The ATAC System! Everyone wants The ATAC System, and it seems that a beautiful lady’s parents are killed about it, and then she, being half Greek, is seeking vengeance as Bond is trying to beat a legion of swarthy Greek toughs and an East German supermen to the prize, The ATAC System!

Lynn Holly-Johnson from Alien Predators is a childlike figure skater who develops an old-man crush on Bond! Julian Glover from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is the initially friendly fellow who may be more nefarious than he appears! And Michael Gothard from Lifeforce (a picture I can’t believe I haven’t reviewed for you yet) is skulking around everywhere, wearing little glasses and causing mischief, and eventually meeting a curiously satisfying fate! And Bond’s ally in the last third of the picture is Topol, whom we know from Flash Gordon, deedle-deedle-dum, and who munches incessantly on some kind of nuts through every one of his scenes!

It’s on the whole pretty simple for a Bond movie, and unusually unambitious! But that works in its favor too – the stakes are mentioned at one point, and while they weren’t low (bad guys could use The ATAC System to shoot off the UK sub fleet’s own missiles at her own cities!) they are not worried over, or even mentioned, thereafter! It’s kind of nice, especially for this period, that the very planet itself isn’t in danger, and that whatever the case nobody was much worried about it! Ha ha!

It was John Glen’s first movie as a director, ha ha, and that must have been a bit of a trial by fire! It’s a pretty big picture to start off with, and maybe that’s why the results are a bit workaday! It’s certainly better than many of the movies, but it doesn’t take many risks either, and so its failures are not spectacular! The scene on the mountainside is pretty good, though spatially it didn’t make much sense! Well, ha ha, it’s Bond, what can you do! I guess after some thought, and taking into consideration that it never subjects us to that Southern sheriff guy, I’m going to award For Your Eyes Only one and a half yellow Citröens!

Burl reviews Dante's Peak! (1997)

Ha ha and mountain peaks, it’s Burl, back again! I thought I’d take you all the way back to 1997, the Year of the Volcano! Ha ha, that was one of those times when two very similar movies opened within a month or two of one another, and in this case it was volcano movies! This one, Dante’s Peak, opened first, in February, and then Volcano, a movie about a volcano bursting up from beneath the streets of Los Angeles, came along in April! Ha ha, of course I went to see both of them!

Dante’s Peak is the more conventional disastershow of the two, perhaps, but also the simpler and more solid picture! It’s pretty straightforward: essentially a heavily embellished version of that Art Carney picture St. Helens: Killer Volcano! Here we are in the pretty little town of Dante’s Peak, where the camera tilts so often up to the menacing matte painted mountain behind them that you get a sore neck in sympathy! Ha ha! Anyway, it’s of course time for their yearly Mountain Daze or whatever, and an expert shows up to proclaim danger and doom, but fails to convince the ambitious mayor, who is played by an actor called Hamilton! Ha ha, sound familiar? It’s Jaws, but with Linda Hamilton instead of Murray, and a volcano instead of a shark!

Like the shark, the volcano even manages to claim a few early victims, notably the couple skinny-dipping in the hot spring who get boiled like sausages when magma burbles into their pool! Yikes, I’ve thought of that every time I’ve dipped a toe into any geothermal pool ever since! Anyway, there’s volcanologist Pierce “The World’s End” Brosnan, his goofy gang of geological scientists and his rather stuffy boss Charles Hallahan, well known from The Thing! There’s also a crabby grandma! There’s a lot of bickering over whether the mountain will blow or not, and the consensus of everyone but the experts is, don’t worry about it! Enjoy Mountain Daze, ha ha!

When the mountain does blow, there’s a pretty impressive run of both destruction and improbable events! Some of the supporting cast meet their demises: Hallahan is swept into a river with a last little Wilhelm Scream, and granny is dissolved in a lake! At another point, Brosnan's truck drives under water! Ha ha, just because he was at that time playing James Bond shouldn’t mean everything he touches became a spy gadget! There really is a tremendous amount of stale Hollywood cheese in this movie – Like Pompeii, it’s a scrupulous throwback to 1970s disaster movies, missing only the large celebrity cast and soap-opery subplots found in movies like When Time Ran Out (which I admit is a key aspect of them)! But, although Dante’s Peak occasionally matches the sadistic showmanship of those earlier movies, generally speaking when the movie isn’t dumb, it’s derivative, and it frequently manages both simultaneously!

There are some compensations! Peter Jason, whom we know from Streets of Fire and Dreamscape and Brewster’s Millions and Prince of Darkness, appears as a crabby townsman, and he’s an actor I always like to see! The craftsmanship behind the camera is generally fine! And I guess there is a certain pleasure in having these old disaster movie beats trotted out with such punchclock precision!

I remember it fondly for some reason, probably because I vaguely recall the experience of seeing it in the theatre! But I can’t recommend it on general terms, I guess! I’m going to give Dante’s Peak one and a half pyroclastic clouds!

Burl reviews Giant from the Unknown! (1958)

Grrr, ha ha, it’s Burl, towering over you to review another picture! This movie is one of the Four Cunhas, all of which I enjoy to some degree – they have a goofiness and charm all their own, while still fitting perfectly into the low-budget 50s genre niche in which they sit!

But ha ha, I hear you asking: what are the Four Cunhas? Well, they’re the four movies made by a man called Richard E. Cunha way back in 1958! The pictures are, in order of their production, Giant from the Unknown, She Demons, Frankenstein’s Daughter and Missile to the Moon! Ha ha, and they’re all short little movies, probably not much more than seventy-five minutes apiece, so you could have a good little one-night movie marathon with these things! This is an enterprise ol’ Burl heartily recommends!

Giant from the Unknown is perhaps not the most thrilling picture ever made, and not even the most thrilling of the Cunhas! No, it may be the least so, in fact! Not a whole lot actually happens for the first forty-five minutes or so, and if there was ever a movie that needed more giant attacks in it, this is the one! (Of course, more giant attacks would also have helped A Dangerous Method, ha ha and plenty of other movies too, I’ll bet!)

It’s set in a small mountain town in Northern California, where science wizard Morris “Zombies of Mora-Tau” Ankrum is puttering around with his somewhat reluctant daughter Janet, following up on a theory of his that a giant Spaniard might be buried somewhere in the area! A young archeologist, Wayne, runs into the pair, and together they all go upcountry to make a search!

Meanwhile, a local old man has been roughed up to death, and the hardnosed but teeny-tiny local sheriff believes Wayne might be the culprit! Ha ha, he’s not, of course: turns out the rocks in the area have a mystical preservational property that keeps entombed lifeforms in limbo, and the very same Spanish giant whom the professor is seeking – the Diablo Giant, they called him – has recently awoken, and not in the best of moods! Ha ha, it’s another Iberian reanimate, just like in The Vulture! Eventually there are some eerie scenes and a ghostly snowfall straight out of Eternal Love, and then the killer giant is knocked off a dam to his doom! Ha ha!

It’s a good premise with plenty of potential, but sadly the movie ends up something of a black clancy! The makeup for the giant was by the legendary Jack Pierce (he would do I Bury the Living that very same year, ha ha!), but it’s nothing to write home about, unfortunately! There are plenty of charms, however, like the scene in which Janet, on hearing the giant lurking outside her tent, grabs her gun and shoots her bed! And then you have that crazy kid Charlie Brown, Wayne’s pal, played by the guy who would later write the snake-revenge picture Stanley! And on top of that there are some nice mountain locations, some fake but lovely special effects, and the marvelously earnest acting one usually finds in these things!

I like all those Cunhas, as I’ve said, and while Giant from the Unknown may be the least-loved, I’m still going to award it two buddy baers and a hearty clap on the shoulder! Ha ha!