Burl reviews X! (2022)

 

Hi alla y’all, it’s Burl, here with a tale of Texas terror! Ha ha, the letter X has been used in horror movie titles before, but as with X the Unknown and The Amazing Mr. X and Jason X and The Man From Planet X and The Strange World of Planet X, there’s usually a little something accompanying that single character! Not so here! The picture I’ve just come home from seeing is called X, very simply and tout court!

Yes, it comes from that horror upstart Ti West, whose casually-metered pictures I quite like! He’ll tell the story the way he wants to, by gum, and no newfangled pacing trends are going to force him to do any different! But this picture is maybe one of his bigger crowd-pleasers in that respect, and certainly it’s not lacking for provocative content! It’s terrific to see, in fact: a modern picture that’s in large part about sex! I keep hearing how chaste the younger generations are these days, so maybe X will seem pretty alien to them!

It starts with a little gang of Texan youths driving in a van along the hot highway on their way to an old house in the middle of nowhere in the 1970s! Ha ha, clearly we’re in Tobe Hooper territory here - the opening gets most, but certainly not all, of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre referencing out of the way, and the pond gator we meet later gives us that touch of Eaten Alive!

It’s 1979, and the gang is out to produce a cheap little 16mm pornoo picture! Of course we know they’re really making a horror film, even if they’re not aware of it, but for quite a while we follow them as they beaver away at this enterprise! The picture is being produced by Wayne, played by Martin Henderson from The Ring; his girlfriend Maxine, essayed in feathered locks by Mia Goth, has a taste for the devil’s dandruff, and is one of the pornoo stars! The male star is none other than a be-Afroed Kid Cudi, whom we recall from Bill and Ted Face the Music, and there’s another star, a blonde lady (the pornoo is called “Farmer’s Daughters”), and then the film-geek director/cameraman and his withdrawn sound recordist girlfriend, played by Jenna Ortega from that new Scream picture!

The farm they’ve chosen for their location is owned by an elderly couple not evidently overfond of company! The old folks have a slightly rubberized look, like Robert Englund in The Mangler, or Winona Ryder in Edward Scissorhands, and ha ha, when they made the old gent’s prosthetics there must have been some leftover orc makeup at the WETA workshop because he’s a pretty gruesome customer! And these are full-body makeups, it should be noted, ha ha!

It all goes wrong for these would-be filmmakers, but I won’t detail just exactly how! There are plenty of referential bits: Psycho is embraced as energetically as TCM, right down to the dialogue! (Come to think of it, strange these characters didn’t mention TCM, as it would have loomed pretty large on their cultural firmament just then!) Things simultaneously go in surprising directions and exactly how you think they will, and there’s a deeper theme that underlines the importance of the genre these characters have chosen to work in! The bookending sequences have James Gaylin from The Meg playing the local sheriff, who just can’t believe what he’s finding on this crazy farm, and who gets the last word!

It’s a well-mounted, well acted movie, even if really just a slasher picture with unusual (or maybe not so unusual) motivations! The Texan accents are creditable, the location a reasonable simulacrum of Texas (the picture was shot in New Zealand), and the whole thing put together with a casual, anachronistic fearlessness! It never gets all that scary, but there are some seat-clutchers along the way! I enjoyed myself, but, ha ha, I was the only one in the theatre, except when a couple of kids came in and stayed for fifteen minutes of so through some of the gnarlier scenes! Ha ha! Anyway, I brought a beer along and had a fine old time at the movies, so I give X three roll-outs!

 

Burl reviews Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched! (2021)

 

From deep within the creaky fen I cry “Ha ha!” Yes, it’s Burl, here to review a new documentary picture, which provides many things, not excluding a kaleidoscope of movie clips, a long list of films to watch, a great huge gallery of gabby movie nerds, and a sore bum, because the thing is well over three hours long! Ha ha! It’s a study of folk horror on film and television, and it’s called Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched!

The picture is divided into chapters: six of them, to be precise! We open with a look at British folk horror, which is a smart decision because while it’s not the fount from which all other folk horror has sprung, it’s likely the most common entry point into the genre for most viewers! Ha ha, we’ve all seen Witchfinder General, The Wicker Man, and Blood on Satan’s Claw, and so those three pictures, which interviewees refer to as the Unholy Trilogy, are tackled first, and this leads into a section on British TV horror of the 1970s, very little of which I’ve seen!

From here we spread out into other regions: North America, Asia, the Down Under areas, so forth! There’s a bit on the Icelandic picture Tilbury, ha ha, and Rawhead Rex, and mentions of the Indian Burial Ground nonsense featured in movies like The Shining and Pet Sematary, and the goofiness of this in underlined by one of the interviewees, Jesse Wente, who points out that when you’re disinterring legend on Turtle Island, remember that it’s all an Indigenous burial ground! Other interviewees include the director of The Lighthouse and, more relevantly, The Witch, Robert Eggers, and Alice Lowe, co-writer and co-star of Sightseers!

The doc goes on (and on, and on!), exploring the early works of folk horror, which are of necessity not that ancient themselves, as it takes time for story to become myth! The fifth chapter is titled something like “Folk Horror Around the World,” and it’s here that the movie becomes less of a documentary and more of an essay film, which is not in itself a bad thing, but doesn’t feel completely purposeful! Indeed, the fifth chapter is by far the longest, and one really starts to feel the running time here! But the earlier chapters, more concise and skillfully organized, at least give this one a solid foundation upon which to overextend itself!

Many clever people are interviewed, and they make many clever and worthwhile and illuminating points! Ha ha, I learned a lot! But the interviewees are frequently allowed to digress, and often these digressions are of interest, but at other times they just seem to extend things more than is necessary! And, as seems unavoidable with the weight of all this material and diverse historical knowledge, the picture eventually goes beyond its remit and includes movies that I myself would call folk horror only by the broadest and most generous of definitions!

Still, it’s not my movie, is it! And the impression one walks away with (after one has regained feeling in the buttocks and properly emptied the bladder) is that the sheer amount of effort put into this picture is stunning and very much to be admired! Like most great catalogue works, there’s a feeling of inevitability about it, and necessity, and it’s-about-time, but also the strange impression that this study has already been done, that the scholarship has previously been lassoed into just this form - that, ha ha, we’ve seen this movie before! And of course it hasn’t and we haven't, but that sense too is a testament to the project: an indicator that it badly needed doing and has indeed been done right! There’s a lot to discover here, and so I recommend catching the movie whenever you have the opportunity! For both ambition and achievement, I give Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched three wizard sticks!

Burl reviews Mulholland Drive! (2001)

 

Attention malingerers, it’s Burl, here with a review of a fine example of Lynchiana! In fact it might be one of the Lynchiest films he ever made, and that’s saying a lot! Of course the picture I’m speaking of is not Dune, but Mulholland Drive, which I remember seeing in a cavernous old Vancouver movie palace nearly on my own in the cinema, which itself was a somewhat Lynchian experience, ha ha! Plus I went to school with a guy named David Lynch, and while that has nothing to do with anything, I thought I’d mention it!

So I hear you asking “Ha ha, Burl, what’s this movie about?” Whoa, bear, not so fast! Well, after all, it’s a dream, and me explaining the story to you will sound a bit like I’m telling you one of my own dreams! It can be boring and even annoying to hear about someone else’s dream, and I think there are some who take this movie, or any mildly challenging oneiric work, in that negative spirit! Ha ha, not me though! I love a good dream movie, and this is one!

There’s a car crash on Mulholland Drive in the hills above Hollywood, and a lady, pretty but mindstunned, and played by Laura Harring from Silent Night, Deadly Night III and The Forbidden Dance, stumbles out of the wreck! She sneaks into a house and falls asleep, and the next day Betty, played by Naomi Watts from Matinee and The Ring, arrives in Los Angeles straight from Deep River, Ontario, all bright smiles and big eyes, and in the company of an elderly couple she met on the plane! She’s staying at the home of her absent aunt, which of course is the house the car crash woman is squatting in, and is part of a Hollywood complex managed by Ann Miller from On the Town! Spying a poster for Gilda, the amnesiac woman calls herself Rita, and together Rita and Betty set out to discover Rita’s true identity!

Meanwhile, as a squad of cops that includes Robert Forster from Alligator investigate the Mulholland car crash, Justin Theroux from Miami Vice is trying to direct a movie! He's receiving cryptic casting offers he can't refuse from a pair of gangsters, the Castigliane Brothers, who are played by the film’s composer, Angelo Badalamenti, and that fine old fishface Dan Hedaya, well known from Endangered Species, Buckaroo Banzai, Tightrope, Commando, and so many others! Also meanwhile, Mark Pellegrino from Bad Meat plays an imbecilic hit man who must shoot everyone who sees him, and of course there’s the vignette with the two guys and the horror-hobo behind Winkie’s!

Meanwhile meanwhile, Betty gets a chance to do her big audition! In the office of movie executive James Karen, whom we know from Time Walker, Betty plays a scene with a leathery Troy McClure-type star played by leathery Troy McClure-type Chad Everett from The Intruder Within! Ha ha, she really gives ‘er and wows everyone in the room, including an agency rep played by Lee Grant from Damien: Omen II! And indeed it is an electrifying scene, something you might expect to happen in a naïf’s aspirational dream of Hollywood!   

And of course there’s the Cowboy, and what else can be said of this sprightly lad? His warning to the film director, that if he does good, he will see the Cowboy one more time, and if he does bad he will see the Cowboy two more times, is potent enough on its own that no follow-through is required, and take that Chekhov and anyone else who needs a continuity of incident in their dramas! Ha ha!

And then at a certain point everything changes, and characters you thought were one thing turn out to be another, and a movie you figured for a neo-noir is so far around the genre wheel that it’s almost a neo-nor again; and then Rebekah Del Rio busts out an amazing performance of Roy Orbison’s Crying, but in Spanish, and the old laughing people come crawling out like bugs, and you say to yourself ha ha, this is weird! But it’s a dream! all a dream of Hollywood, and thus a dream about a dream factory that was inspired by the dream factory itself, and so where does cinema end and dream begin, and is there a line of demarcation, however fuzzy, and why need there be anyway? And let us embrace mystery for once, and all together we'll cry "Ha ha!"

Sometimes in a movie I might be totally out to lunch as to what’s going on, but within my haze of confusion I suddenly recognize that the story has come to its proper end and I think boy oh boy, if the movie ends right now that would be just perfect… and then, what do you know, it ends! That has happened now and again - Irma Vep is one example - and that’s what happened with Mulholland Drive! Let’s call it Unexpected Perfect Ending Syndrome! It’s one of my favourite things a movie can do, and accordingly I give Mulholland Drive four dumpsters!

Burl reviews The Lost Squadron! (1932)

 

Hello chums, it’s Burl, here with a nifty picture about flying fliers and the flights they flew! It’s a story about some airborne veterans of WWI - the Great War, ha ha - and what happens to these fellows once the hostilities have ceased; and it’s called The Lost Squadron!

It opens in the final five minutes of the war as our heroes try to down as many German planes as they can, and then, as the 11 AM bell strikes on November 11, we see them exchange a last friendly wave with their former enemies and fly back to their airfield! Ha ha, it really pushes the alleged gentlemanly aspects of the war, in much the manner as it was parodied many years later by Monty Python in The Meaning of Life, except here it’s in earnest!

Our boys are upright Gibby, played by Richard Dix from It Happened in Hollywood and The Ghost Ship; Woody, the most carefree of a pretty relaxed bunch, essayed by a cheerful Robert Armstrong from King Kong and The Mad Ghoul; Red, handsome and charming, in the person of Joel McCrea from Foreign Correspondent, Sullivan’s Travels, and of course the great Ride the High Country; and their potatofaced mechanic Fritz, played by Hugh Herbert from The Black Cat and Hellzapoppin’! At their demobbing they are told nothing has changed since they left for Europe, but on their return Stateside they find everything has! Personal disasters - bankruptcy, cuckoldry, so forth - befall each man, which they accept with astonishing stoicism; and one drinking scene and a quick montage later, all but one of them have become rail-riding hobos!

On the distaff side we have Mary Astor from The Palm Beach Story and of course The Maltese Falcon playing Gibby’s ex, the ambitious, inconstant Follette - a character not dissimilar to how Astor herself was perceived by the public a few years later when she was beset by the sort of scandal that small, Puritanical minds think is important! As well there’s a crucial character called The Pest, who is Woody’s little sister and is played by Dorothy Jordan from The Searchers!

Gibby, Red, and Fritz, the three members of the squadron who have become stewbums, make their way to Hollywood, where they discover Woody living the good life as a stunt flier for the then-booming genre of aerial war pictures, and The Pest worrying about him and trying to stop him from his habit of drunk flying! Woody’s glad to see his old pals and convinces them to join him in the lucrative if still dangerous endeavor, and so it is that the squadron once again find themselves facing off against a fiery German enemy: this time the shouty director Von Furst, played by The Man You Love To Hate, Erich von Stroheim! Not only is he a sociopathic martinet in jodhpurs, but he’s now married to Gibby’s old flame Follette, who’s the female star of the movie! Ha ha!

Well that is a coincidence! And it’s not one the perpetually angry Von Furst is willing to countenance: he decides to get rid of Gibby by dousing his plane’s guywires in acid! But the irrepressible Woody takes the sabotaged plane up instead, and when Gibby, having realized what’s happening, goes up and flies alongside Woody trying to warn him about the acid attack on his wires, Woody just laughs and gives him the finger! Ha ha!

Well, after the wires break and Woody crashes in a spectacular conflagration, it’s clear to the remaining three that revenge is required, though there is disagreement on the type! However, before this can be resolved an accidental gunshot claims the autocratic filmmaker, and down the stairs he tumbles! Ha ha, the boys have to pull a Weekend At Bernie’s with Von Furst’s corpse to fool a slow-witted watchman who heard the shot! From there events proceed as they must, with noble subterfuge and sacrifice abounding, and in a final touching coda, the squadron members who’ve succumbed in the course of the story reappear as ghost fliers piloting ghost planes!

It was a real pleasure to watch this peppy little picture, I must say! The stunt flying is impressive, and the cast a real delight, and the pre-Code shenanigans are terrific! The gentlemanly comradeliness of the squadroneers is almost alien in its profundity and relentlessness! Von Stroheim is good in his role as the heavy, even if he’s more or less playing a more homicidal version of himself, and the layers of postmodern irony with which the narrative is infused seems almost unintentional, which fact merely adds another layer, ha ha! It’s a crackerjack and no mistake, so I give The Lost Squadron three toasts to fallen comrades!

Burl reviews Scala! (1990)

 

Taking your ticket, it’s Burl, here with a review of a movie not about movies, but about a movie theatre! I suppose that means it is about movies, ha ha, because a big old movie palace is still and always will be the best place to see one, and this movie is about just such a place! The movie palace in question is London’s late and much-lamented Scala Cinema, and the movie about it is simply called Scala!

Now, I’m no Londoner (ha ha, no, I’m not even British!), but I’ve spent plenty of time in that fine city, and when I was there for a spell in the late 1980s I discovered the Scala! And what a discovery it was! I recall seeing triple bills like Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, Daughters of Darkness and Edge of Sanity, the one with Anthony Perkins! Or, on a different occasion, a De Palma triple-header of Blow Out, Body Double and Dressed to Kill! I saw Videodrome, Un Zoo la Nuit, Danger Diabolik, Barbarella, a trucker’s double-header of Wages of Fear and They Drive By Night, David Mamet’s House of Games and Things Change, and more! Every day the program changed and so every day there were more glorious movies to see, all of them projected on 35mm film, or at least high-quality 16mm, on a big ratty old screen! Oh, ha ha, it was the purest heaven to a fellow like ol’ Burl!

I remember it was a bit scary to go there, which was part of the appeal! You’d take the tube to King’s Cross, emerge into the rat’s nest of streets surrounding that station, and see, as in a vision, a white edifice rising like a massif down the way! Mods, rockers, punks, cinéastes, skids, students, seedcakes, sketchy people of all description with heads full of high fructose skunkfire, would gather to see the show, and none of them wanted any trouble so far as I could see! You could get some food, a beer or glass of wine if you liked, and the seat you settled into would be your own little campsite for the evening! Of course, as is noted by several interviewees in this thirty-minute documentary portrait of the place, the whole cinema rumbled with each passing tube train and the sound system was not exactly double-Dolby; but again, ha ha, all of this only added to the charm!

The movie about the Scala is not nearly so exciting as the actual place was, however! It’s mostly a parade of talking heads, with very little footage of the cinema itself, though I suppose there’s only so much mileage to be had from such B-roll imagery! More pep and wit in the editing would have gone a long mile, though, and if they could have managed some footage of a screening in progress, that might have been nice! There are some clips from at least three movies though: Evil Dead, Glen or Glenda and Mona Lisa, which are cut in for little or no reason!

I suppose these were available because their UK distributor, or producer in the case of Mona Lisa, was Palace Pictures, owned in part by Stephen Wooley, who was also a major player in the Scala and provides many interesting remarks in the doc! Also interviewed are a number of other Scala employees, including Jane Giles, who later made a book about the fabled movie palace! There’s also a great gallery of London eccentrics, including an old chap who offers tribute to his favourite cinema in the form of doggerel; an old lady who likes car chases and other action antics, but not so much “bedroom scenes;” the actor Ralph Brown from Alien 3 and Stoker, who does a bit in the voice of his character Danny from the marvelous Withnail and I; and a soft-spoken, utterly sincere gent whose film obsession is total!

The movie is a bit reminiscent of Out of Print, the tribute to the New Beverly Cinema in L.A., but is only about a third the length! This subject could have supported a feature too, but not necessarily in the style we get here - it would have to be much sharper and more energetic, I think! Still, a nice little portrait of a place close to my heart, and I was glad to discover it on the YouTube! I give Scala two soiled seats! 

Burl reviews The Mirror Crack'd! (1980)

Pondering the mysteries of life, it’s Burl, here with a touch of Christie for you! Yes, today I’m reviewing one of the star-studded Agatha Christie whodunits, but not Murder on the Orient Express or Death on the Nile, no! This is a distinctly lesser effort that came trailing along later: The Mirror Crack’d!

It’s set in a little English village, so it lacks the exoticism of the earlier grander efforts; but there are still any number of Hollywood glamour-pusses reeling about, even if well beyond their sell-by date! The story, set in 1953, begins promisingly with a movie-within-a-movie: a mystery picture screening at the vicarage, which resident biddysleuth Miss Marple, played by a well-cast Angela Lansbury, solves when the film breaks just as the killer is about to be revealed!

The tale proper involves an invasion of the village by Hollywood moviemakers, who are for some reason shooting an Elizabethan drama in this tweedy Tudor town, which, we are led to believe, is home to a large studio facility! The film’s star is fragile, violet-eyed Elizabeth Taylor, famed from her role in Night Watch; its director is the Taylor character’s husband, played by Rock Hudson from Written on the Wind and Seconds! Hudson seems to be having an affair with his assistant, the hay fever-ridden Geraldine Chaplin from The Moderns and The Forbidden Room; and soon enough a boorish producer, played by Tony Curtis from The Manitou, arrives on the scene with his wife, another actress, and a nasty, bitter rival to Taylor, played by Kim Novak from Vertigo! And guess who else shows up, playing the Mayor: none other than Thick Wilson, whom we certainly recall from Sex With the Stars, Strange Brew and Bullies!

At a party for the village noteables, held in the estate where the movie’s above-the-liners are staying, there is an unexpected death! But who was the glass of poison really meant for, and will the killer strike again? On the case of course is Miss Marple, though she must engage with it remotely for the most part, due to a sprained ankle! Most of the legwork is undertaken by Marple’s nephew, a Scotland Yard detective played by Edward Fox from Never Say Never Again!

The catty byplay between the starlets is fun at first, but wears thin quickly! Ditto the provincial eccentricities of the townsfolk! Curtis’s crass producer is a caricature to be sure, but we can tell the actor is injecting some of the realities he’d encountered in his career into the performance! Rock Hudson, also clearly channeling some Hollywood reality, bestrides about the place, towering over everybody else in the picture! Ha ha, maybe this was a more subtle jab at Hollywood and stardom: to make no effort, with camera angles and apple boxes, to prevent Curtis, Fox, and certainly Lansbury, from looking like midgets in comparison!

Like The Man With the Golden Gun, which I watched on the same evening, this picture was directed by Guy Hamilton! This unintentional Hamilton double header did not elevate my estimation of his filmmaking talents, I’m afraid, though it was not necessarily a representative sampler! There’s not a great deal of style or atmosphere on display in The Mirror Crack’d; little more than you might find in a BBC television production of a Miss Marple story, anyway! It all relies too much on the aging stars, who march about like automatons mechanically uttering lines that might have played better on a West End stage forty years earlier!

It all wraps up with a pretty unconvincing twist ending, and the solution to the mystery, after ninety minutes of determinately keeping Miss Marple away from all the action for some unknown reason, comes to her in the middle of the night apropos of nothing, with the blue-haired sleuth sitting up in bed to exclaim “The vicar!” When you compare it to a really good English village mystery like Green For Danger, or even A Canterbury Tale, which isn’t even principally a mystery, it comes up pretty short! I give The Mirror Crack’d one and a half jars of Kensington gore!

Burl reviews Two Weeks in Another Town! (1962)

Hello friends, it’s Burl here, saying goodbye to one of the old guard! Yes, Kirk Douglas has left us at the age of 103, so it seemed the time was ripe for me to watch a Kirk picture I’d never seen before! The one I settled on, because it was sitting on a shelf in my basement, was Two Weeks in Another Town!

Of course we know Kirk well from Eddie Macon’s Run, and here he plays Jack Andrus, a once-famous actor recuperating quietly in a Home For The Extremely Nervous! One day a cable arrives from Rome: ha ha, it’s his old director, Maurice Kruger, played by Edward G. Robinson from such great pictures as Double Indemnity and Key Largo! He’s offering Jack a job in his latest picture, and not just a job, but a last chance for some kind of career redemption!

But when Jack arrives in Rome, he finds it’s Last Chance City and the very air is permeated with desperation! Kruger himself is an old philanderer whose wife hates him, and this picture, his first in several years, represents a comeback opportunity and a last chance, as European movies so often did for Hollywood types in those days! The picture’s star, George Hamilton from The Long Ride Home, is young and handsome but insanely mercurial, and if he mucks this one up he’s likely to be a has-been! Ha ha!

Jack finds the job is not to act in the picture but to supervise the dubbing, and he’s not pleased! Nor is he happy to find his old flame Carlotta still on the prowl for him; and meanwhile his relationship with Kruger waxes and wanes, while Kruger himself, under tremendous pressure to finish the movie on time and under budget, seems to be losing it, dissolving into tears late at night in his hotel room! Jack is buoyed by a burgeoning romance with a lovely Roman girl and the discovery that he’s a natural film director! But this discovery leads to a bitter break with Kruger, a drunken spree, and one of the most out-of-control scenes of crazy-driving ever committed to film!

That there is an object of obsession called Carlotta and a lot of driving around (with process shots that make you feel you’re playing the old proto video game F-1), the picture feels at times a cousin to Vertigo! But, ha ha, never for long: it mostly seems as if director Vincente Minnelli was asked to show us what it would be like if Douglas Sirk had popped some amphetamines and directed Day For Night! And of course it has a relationship to The Bad and the Beautiful, the Hollywood melodrama Minnelli made a decade earlier with Kirk playing a hard-hearted producer, and which the characters here screen at one point, reliving their past triumphs!

It’s a pretty over-the-top movie, with Kirk’s performance oscillating between brooding slow-burn and that particular hammy overplaying he excelled at in pictures like Ace in the Hole! On balance I thought he did a terrific job conveying the live-wire desperation of his character, ha ha! It’s a melodrama’s melodrama, about melodramatic characters making a melodrama, and it’s melodramatic even for that! Plus it’s a nice look at the state of the industry circa 1962! I give Two Weeks in Another Town three kicks in the bum!

Burl reviews Return to Horror High! (1987)

Hello friends and good neighbours! It’s Burl, here to review a tricky little picture, Return to Horror High! Ha ha, it’s another movie about the business of illusion and the fuzzy line between appearance and reality, just like its model, The Stunt Man! Somehow they forgot to cast Steve Railsback as the maniacal director, ha ha, but they did get Alex Rocco, who of course was in The Stunt Man, as well as Herbie Goes Bananas, Stick and Gotcha, to play the role of the crude and mercenary producer!

Rocco and his crew are making a movie about the true events surrounding a high school massacre from five years earlier, and doing so on the actual location in which the killings happened! (This, of course, is the same premise of The House of Seven Corpses!) Naturally the killer returns, or seems to have returned: in fact, anything that happens in the movie must be said only to seem to have happened, because frequently, what we assume to either flashbacks to the original carnage or else a new on-set murder, turns out instead to be a scene being filmed for Rocco’s movie!

Ha ha, so there are plenty of fake-outs, enough so that, even having just watched the picture, I can’t remember what the upshot was! I do know there’s a scene that recalls the end of Sweet Movie, in which sheet-covered bodies sit up en masse, and also a rubber mask is involved at some point, just like in Hell Squad! And there are plenty of scenes involving confusions between real body parts and the work of the movie-within-the-movie trick makeup effects man! Ha ha, he’s played by Marvin J. McIntyre, who was the parachute instructor in Fandango, and who should have had a much bigger character comedy actor career than he did!

In fact, across the board there’s a decent cast of familiar and half-familiar faces! Lori Lethin from The Prey plays the main actress recreating the murders, and Scott Jacoby from The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane and The Supernaturals is in there too, and there are old ringers like Andy Romano from Beach Blanket Bingo and Drop Zone as the principal; Vince Edwards from Murder By Contract, now on the other side of the law as the investigating detective; Richard Brestoff from Fastbreak playing somebody or other; Al Fann from Parasite playing a janitor with a secret or two, ha ha, and Marcia from The Brady Bunch as a chowhound cop who seems to enjoy the carnage at the curiously underpopulated crime scene! And, ha ha, we get George Clooney, well known from The Descendants, as a big-headed actor who is the first victim!

Even if it steals most of its tricks from another movie, it’s nice to see a horror picture that attempts something a little headier, a little different! (That’s my feeling about Wes Craven’s New Nightmare as well, ha ha!) It’s competently made, with decent 80s horror cinematography from Roy H. Wagner, who brought the same to A Nightmare on Elm Street 3! It could be a bit peppier, a bit scarier, a bit more sharply directed, but it’s got some clever lines and funny performances, and at least it tries! I give Return to Horror High two unsafe industrial fans!

Burl reviews Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group! (2017)

Ha ha, and ticket stub please! Yes, it’s Burl, here to review a documentary about a regional film club called the Winnipeg Film Group, which I recently happened to catch on the Kroger Channel! I like these local movie and moviemaking tales - the last such picture I reviewed was probably 2014’s Out of Print, the documentary about the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles!

This one is called Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group, which is a riff on the title of the first feature by one of the Group’s most famous acolytes, Guy Maddin! That picture was called Tales from the Gimli Hospital, and if you haven’t seen it, ha ha, I recommend it! In fact I recommend all of Maddin’s work, particularly a picture called Careful!

Maddin is one of many interviewees in this talking-heads doc: he speaks of playing many hours of ping pong at the film club’s offices, and of his creative debt to fellow film club member John Paizs, the camera-cranker who made a very amusing picture called Crime Wave! Paizs himself is not interviewed for some reason, but much footage from his films, Maddin’s films, and the cinematic efforts of many, many others are excerpted! Ha ha!

There is also some footage of many of the moviemakers at work, using all manner of fascinating techniques to produce their films! There are vintage photos from the club’s early days in the mid-70s, so, ha ha, we get some good outfits and facial hair! The fact that it was largely a bastion of white male enterprise is addressed, and we see that the club has lately expanded its membership to include ladies, people of colour, the queer, and even some Indigenous folk! Better late than never, I suppose!

Of course it all takes place in Winnipeg, that famously remote and chilly city on the plains! It seems an interesting place, and in fact I know it is, having spent some time there myself! Their film club is among the most famous and accomplished in the land, ha ha, so on that basis alone, this documentary production is of interest! Those who are fans of the great Canadian films of the 1970s, from Goin’ Down the Road and Black Christmas, to Between Friends and Rip-Off, to Homer and Paperback Hero, will find themselves hooked!

There are plenty of tangents taken and amusing stories told in the course of the movie, but the unfortunate thing is that this film about filmmaking rarely sings as a filmmaking exercise itself! The editing seems too frequently arbitrary - you can see where the filmmakers have inserted shots simply because they need something there! Ha ha, the wallpapering is at times pretty egregious! And there are far too many literal gags: if someone mentions fire, we see a shot of fire! If the floor is mentioned, there’s a shot of the floor! Ha ha, having so many miles of other people’s films to choose from was perhaps not the advantage the makers of this doc supposed it was!

So at times one wishes this was better made, but mostly the subject matter is compelling enough to make you forget that! I’m glad the picture was made, and would hope to see other such histories from other cities! I give Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group two and a half jumping cats!

Burl reviews The Movie Orgy! (1968)

Hello and ha ha, it’s Burl here to review movie madness! Yes, I’ve recently watched Joe Dante’s first film, The Movie Orgy, which he made a full ten years before Piranha, back when he was a student and still wanted to be a comic artist! I guess The Movie Orgy represents Dante’s swing from comics into pictures, and as such I suppose it has historical value to those of us who appreciate the man’s work, even though one waits in vain for a clip with Dick Miller in it! But Dante's a fine director and, ha ha, you all know how I feel about Matinee!

But what is The Movie Orgy? Well, it’s a long pastiche of movies - mostly B pictures -  and television snippets, all cobbled together into a four-and-a-half hour beast that you can easily imagine the aliens from Explorers watching on their space TVs! A few pictures seem to occupy more real estate than others: Dante has distilled the likes of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, College Confidential (an Albert Zugsmith joint, natch, featuring Elisha Cook Jr. as The Angry Dad), The Giant Claw (the turkey gobbler from outer space, as big as a battleship) and something called Speed Crazy into just the good parts, and woven them all together like stripes on a mackintosh!

Laced into these are bits from other movies, like Teenagers from Outer Space, the 1933 King Kong, Beginning of the End, Moby Dick, and The Giant Gila Monster! We get many olde-tyme television moments too, like an episode of You Bet Your Life in which Groucho enacts something I’ll call The Humiliation of John Farbotnik! Other TV gold includes Andy Devine’s demented kids’ show Andy’s Gang, featuring good old Froggy; a clip of Elvis singing Hound Dog to a big basset in a top hat; US Treasury Bond appeals asking you to Underwrite Your Country’s Might; Nixon’s Checkers speech; and a series of insane Bufferin ads best described as inconclusive mini-dramas about “sensitive people” who care so much about others they need an extra edge to their headache medicine! Ha ha!

There are plenty of clever little editing room goof-offs, like a bit that starts with the opening title to The Naked City, followed by a short silent vignette from the 1920s involving a young inventor who has created a strange viewerscope upon which he can call up images of a topless ladies! Of course he is interrupted by his mother, which must be a familiar scenario to many of to-day’s computer-screen teenagers! Then we pop back to The Naked City, and the closing spiel: “There are eight million stories in the naked city; this has been one of them!”

We come away from The Movie Orgy with some fine quotes, like “That Skippy is too much for television!” from College Confidential, and the endlessly repeated “Everybody’s always crowdin’ me!” from Speed Crazy! There are lots of funny juxtapositions and a few editing tricks, and assorted monster movie, Western, and jungle picture clips, and lots of credits too, which I appreciated; and on top of all that the funniest Abbott and Costello skit ever: the Susquehanna Hat Company! Ha ha, great stuff!

The last reel jumps equally between 50 Foot Woman, Giant Claw, Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers and Giant Gila Monster, with other clips salted in to make an ironic point, or a joke, or an ironic joke, or no point at all! Finally there’s a bloom of The End cards, and people signing off or walking out or saying goodbye, and even Nixon claiming this would be his last press conference and you wouldn’t have Nixon to kick around any more! Cut to an audience clapping with enthusiastic approval, ha ha! And there are a few other good jokes at Nixon’s expense, and, looking forward, a couple of jabs at Ronald Reagan too! None of it's very slick - ha ha, you can practically hear the rattle of the Moviola and see the tape splices - but you can tell it was made with heart!

Dante, who created this college collage with his pal Jon Davison, remembers “great drifts of funny-smelling smoke” coming from the crowd wherever this was screened (mostly university halls), and it seems to me funny-smelling smoke is the right mindset to adopt for this experience! It’s got lots of easy jokes, sure, but it’s equally easy to forget that this would have been a lot of work to put together back in the actual-film days! Oh those glory days! The Movie Orgy is a pretty special creation, and I give it three Skippies who are too much for television!

Burl reviews Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood! (2019)

Ha ha and Dykstraflex, it’s Burl, here to review a new picture from Quentin Tarantino, who brought us Django Unchained and a number of other pictures! Now he’s got a movie about Hollywood at the hard fall the 1960s! It’s a fable, and by this time in our culture it’s a fairy tale, and so it’s called Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood!

It’s a simple and quite sweet movie! It’s about Hollywood and the 1960s, yes, and it’s a little bit about Charles Manson and his family of kookoo nuggets, and it’s almost about their crime, but really it’s a portrait of male friendship and the loss of puissance! (Ha ha, as if to discourage Freudian takes on that, or hook it up to simple aging, the only man explicitly stated to be having sex in the movie is Bruce Dern, who must be a hundred and five by now!) As a sort of sideline, the movie shows us the process behind the transformation of a star into a character actor, and for those with any interest in this kind of career trajectory, it’s a fine old pumpernickel of a bonus!

In the story we mostly stick with either Rick Dalton, a TV star who has aged out of the roles that made him popular; or else Cliff Booth, Rick’s stunt double, dogsbody, and pal; or else, most often actually, both of them! Around them revolves a large cast, from celebrity lookalikes (the Steve McQueen suggests an uncanny melding of McQueen and Gene Wilder) to old ringers like Bruce Dern and Al Pacino and even Clu "Tapeheads" Gulager, to the younger actors who have real parts, like Margot Robie as Sharon Tate (who gets some nice moments watching herself in a Matt Helm picture) and Emile Hirch, who plays Sharon’s hairdresser pal Jay Sebring!

The picture winds pleasantly through the Hollywood Hills, spending time also in Musso & Frank’s (where I too have sat and listened to tales of Tinseltown’s underbelly while drinking whiskey sours, and had to leave through the back door because in front the cops had shot some poor addled street person waving a Swiss army knife around!) and along the Sunset Strip (though I was surprised none of the characters went to any clubs!), and Cliff, played by Brad Pitt, even drives along Yucca once, with the 7-11 visible in the background, past the building where Ed Wood lived out his declining years!

Of the climax of the picture, which involves a home invasion by the Manson gang, I will say nothing, except that it doesn’t go down exactly like you read in the papers, ha ha! There’s something about the wish-fulfillment aspect of it that doesn’t quite sit right; also the merciless violence of it; but on the other hand it’s a fine wish, and it’s a lot of fun to watch in an animal brain sort of way!

The picture has many entertaining digressions, a ton of beguiling period details, and is pure joy for the movie lover! The visual effects by none other than John Dykstra are seamless and superb! Brad Pitt’s character is a bit of a black hole, but he’s an amiable one, and Leonardo Di Caprio, in the role of Rick, cries a lot! I thoroughly recommend Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, and give it the three Georges, Peppard, Maharis and Chikaris! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Tapeheads! (1989)

Ha ha and beta tapes, it’s Burl, here to review one of the lesser-known comedies of the 1980s! Yes, it’s Tapeheads, which, while probably no one’s favourite movie, has enough charm and weirdness to make it well worth a look! And I’ll admit right here at the outset that I may be slightly biased in its favour, since it’s about two guys who decide to start up a rock video business together, and I along with a friend of mine once started up the very same sort of business! Who knows, ha ha, maybe you’ve seen some of our work!

John Cusack from Grandview U.S.A. and Tim Robbins, well known from Fraternity Vacation, star as Ivan and Josh, two lifelong chums who are dissatisfied with their lot and decide to follow their dreams! Josh is a slightly nerdy tech wizard and Ivan is the would-be sharpie with the slicked back hair and tiny moustache; and when they lose their jobs as security guards they are free to start a business called Video Aces and set up shop in a huge downtown warehouse, which they share with a cute-as-a-button multimedia artist whose father turns out to be a secretly kinky Republican senator played by the great Clu Gulager from A Nightmare on Elm Street 2!

After misadventures with a Swedish boy band and the creative triumph of an impossibly fancy chicken-and-waffle commercial, Josh and Ivan stumble into success by mixing up funeral footage for a suddenly deceased heavy metal band they’ve attempted to make a video for, which makes them look like prescient artistic geniuses! There are some plot mechanics going on in the background involving Susan Tyrrell from Night Warning and a stolen video tape with incriminating evidence of Gulager playing his bo-peep games, which is passed off to the unsuspecting Video Aces! Naturally hit men go after them, and Josh and Ivan, believing them to be a musical act called the Hit Men, make a video for the killers too! All this time our characters move toward their real dream, which is to make a video for a superannuated soul act they revere called the Swanky Modes!

Mixing the Swanky Modes into the whole thing is what really makes this movie sing, ha ha, in both a figurative and a very real sense! They’re a Sam and Dave-type duet, charmingly played by Sam Moore and Junior Walker, and Ivan and Josh’s veneration for them hits just the right note of naïve hipness! As fictional movie bands go, they’re among the best, despite the 80s production quality of their numbers! Plus there’s all sorts of other terrific music in the picture, and appearances from all sorts of L.A. music scenesters! Ha ha, you don’t get to see Stiv Bators act very often, but he’s in here!

So is Doug McClure from Humanoids from the Deep, by the way! He joins Gulager and Tyrrell in the gallery of great faces on view throughout this enjoyable trifle! Never mind that it’s not very realistic about how music videos are made! It would be pretty boring if it was, ha ha! And sure, the storytelling is sometimes lazy, and there’s an underlying clubbishness about it all! But it has some appealing dashes of weirdness, an 80s template plot, some sharp lines, and a bright 80s look from cinematographer Bojan "Pumpkinhead" Bazelli! Most importantly the love for music in this picture is real, and because I share it, I’m happy to give Tapeheads three pancakes with little squares on ‘em!

Burl reviews Clouds of Sils Maria! (2014)

Eh bien, ha ha, c’est Burl! I’m here with a recent French picture, Clouds of Sils Maria, which comes from Olivier Assayas, the fellow who brought us Irma Vep! I really should watch Irma Vep again one of these days – I had a fine time seeing this one by myself in the movie house when it was released those many years ago, then walking home in the rain humming “Bonnie & Clyde” to myself the whole way! Ha ha, memories!

But it’s Clouds of Sils Maria I’m here to talk about today, and this picture is something of an echo of that earlier Assayas joint! Juliette “Godzilla” Binoche, who apparently provided the original idea for the picture, stars as an aging superstar actress taking part in a tribute to the writer of Maloja Snake, a play about the romantic power dynamics between an older and a younger woman! This is the play that made Binoche’s character a star many years earlier when she played the ingénue role! Ha ha!

But things have changed and continue to quickly change! The venerated playwright kicks the bucket, the tribute becomes a memorial, and Maria, our older actress, is offered the older-lady role in a new production of Maloja Snake! She holes up in the stunning mountaintop aerie owned by the late playwright and begins running lines with her personal assistant Val, played by Kristin Stewart of American Ultra! Of course the relationship between Maria and Val mixes and blurs with that of the characters they’re reading, and this is further complicated by the troubled young starlet, played by Chloe Grace-Moritz, who is cast in the younger role!

So you can see there are a lot of games going on in the situations and even in the casting, ha ha! Some of them work and others fall flat, or are a bit too obvious, but one gets caught up in the scenario nonetheless! Of course aging and the perceptions that come with it are major themes, and one offshoot of this is the curiously hefty amount of screen time given to scenes of Val trying to convince Maria that blockbuster Hollywood pictures can contain the same thematic and emotional weight as any rarified art film or theatre play! Ha ha, and I guess this is what leads to a mysterious disappearance late in the picture!

The phenomenon alluded to in the titles of both the film and the play-within-the-film provides one of the picture’s strongest moments! The Maloja Snake is a ribbon of low-drifting cloud that winds its way through the mountains near the playwright’s lovely home, and though the characters don’t see it, we do, and it’s a pretty good trick effect too, I must say!

The movie has a few longeurs, and I can’t say I wanted these characters as my new best friends, but the picture is engaging and the acting strong! It also appears to have been shot on film (by Yorick Le Saux, who also shot Only Lovers Left Alive), and it looks great! It’s of course a picture in the tradition of Persona and Cries and Whispers, but I don’t think it quite rises to the level of those marvelous classics, its high-altitude location notwithstanding! Ha ha, I’m going to give Clouds of Sils Maria two and a half pairs of granny panties!