Burl reviews Thank God It's Friday! (1978)

 

Boogie down, boll weevils, it’s Burl, here to review the latest disco dancetravaganza for all you funky herky-jerky fly-folk! Yes, in honour of its 45^th birthday on May 18th, I recently watched an all-singing, all-dancing, Donna Summer-starring artifact of the late 70s, which, for those of us who missed it, really gives a taste of what that time and place must have been like! (I was technically alive and breathing then, I suppose, but, ha ha, I was just a little kid!) The picture I'm talking about goes by the simple and declarative title of Thank God It’s Friday!

It’s a plotless ensemble affair along the line of American Graffiti (it was no doubt sold as an American Graffiti for the disco age), or Drive-In, or Nashville, or any number of other such pictures! Everything revolves around a giant discotheque called The Zoo, owned and operated by Tony, who's played by none other than Jeff Goldblum, and whom we’ve all become familiar with from movies like The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai and Into the Night!

Our characters include an excitable DJ called Bobby Speed, broadcasting from his aerie not just to the club, but apparently to millions of listeners out in radioland! This night represents his big break, so if he doesn’t come across with a live performance from The Commodores, a voice on a speakerbox, which constantly berates him all night long, is going to see to it that he never DJs again! (And guess what – that voice belongs to none other than Al Fann from Parasite and Return to Horror High!) We also have a pair of high school girls who want to win the big dance contest so they can get enough money for tickets to a Kiss concert; a dancing leather-maniac called Marv played by Chick Vennera from Last Rites and McBain; and a chick duo that includes a fresh-faced Debra Winger, who might have come straight from Slumber Party ’57 to do this role!

And then there’s a couple called Sue and Dave, out celebrating their fifth wedding anniversary; and that’s funny, because I know a couple named Sue and Dave, and actually was at their wedding, and they in fact met at my wedding! Unlike the people I know, however, the Sue and Dave in the movie are real squares, man, real flat tires! Especially Dave, essayed by Mark Lonow from The Last Married Couple in America, who’s an accountant and gets dragged to the disco by his timidly adventure-seeking wife, played by Andrea Howard from Summer School! There she and her blonde feather-do nearly fall under Goldblum’s lecherous disco spell, while elsewhere in the labyrinthine club Dave is fed mind drugs by a pink-haired anachronism who ties Dave's tie around his head and renames him Bozunkis!

And there’s a banty fireplug called Gus, who is at the club to meet a blind date and behaves like an absolute jerk; a bewildered van driver hauling all of The Commodores’ gear, played by DeWayne Jesse, aka Otis Day from Animal House; and of course young Donna Summer, looking to prove herself as a singer at the club! And all of these stories alternate and entangle, and it’s not done badly either! The pacing is fine, the music absolutely constant, and there are regular interludes of seizure-inducing strobe effects! People sneak in the windows and get locked in the stairwell, and there are gags involving gay men and a trans woman, and thankfully these gags are not quite as phobic or mean-spirited as I would have expected – they mostly jibe with the general air of amiable acceptance found at The Zoo itself! Ha ha!

None of it is brilliant, but there’s decent pep, a few funny gags (and a lot of clangers too), and performances with energy and verve! I’m not myself a big disco fan, but I can certainly appreciate The Commodores, and it would have been a blast to see them play live in an environment like this! By the time the janitor is sweeping up confettis around the last lingering couple on the dance floor, you’ll feel like you yourself spent a night beneath the disco ball! And, ha ha, that’s not such a bad thing! I’m going to give Thank God It’s Friday two leather jackets and a handful of ‘ludes!

Burl reviews Xanadu! (1980)

 

Wrapped in swirling ribbons of pastel neon, it’s Burl, here to review a curious quilici that was, and could only have been, released in the bizarre transitional year of 1980! I was among those few who saw this goofnugget on the big screen, for it played my local cinema in the days when I would walk down the block and see whatever happened to be playing on a given Saturday afternoon! Other such pictures included In Search of Noah’s Ark, The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown, On the Right Track, and Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot! However, the item I’m going to try describing for you now is called Xanadu!

 

Being from the temporal-cultural crossroads of summer 1980, this is naturally a disco picture, but equally naturally, not only a disco picture! Like Roller Boogie, it’s a roller skating movie too, but it looks forward into the coming decade by virtue of a certain sort of feather-haired weirdness! Ha ha, I think it was doing its best to predict what the fashions and fads of the 1980s would look like, and because it was trying so hard, its guesses were bizarre and strange and not very accurate! The timelessness it sought ended up dating it precisely, ha ha!

 

The late Olivia Newton-John, whom we recall from Grease and from Two of a Kind, is in the picture, but she’s not really the main character! In fact, she’s not much of a character at all, ha ha! It's really the story of a blockheaded painterman played by Michael Beck from The Warriors and Megaforce who works in a strange factory environment in which he and other artists, including Friendly Fred McCarren from The Boogens and Class Reunion, reproduce album covers onto large canvases for some reason! They’re overseen by a nasty boss called Simpson, who does his best to crush any lingering artistic ambition his stable of industrial daubers might still possess!

 

Strolling the beach one day, Beck meets up with Gene Kelly, the legendary footstomper from Summer Stock, Singin’ in the Rain, and of course Viva Knievel! Then he’s knocked down by a rollerskating Newton-John and becomes instantly smitten, and thereafter he keeps alternately running into either Kelly or Newton-John and develops friendships with them both! Kelly turns out to be a retired musician who is also, conveniently enough, fabulously rich, and harbours dreams of opening the nightclub to end all nightclubs; and Newton-John, it turns out, is actually Terpsichore, one of the nine muses of Greek legend!

 

All of this comes together, sort of, when Kelly and Beck team up to create Xanadu, where disco and 50s-era rock are melded together into one goofball farrago that resembles not a whit what 80s culture would actually turn out to be! The last half hour is mostly dancing around, and there’s some impressive hoofstomping, but it’s mostly just a cavalcade of synthetic pageantry that adds up to nothing more than vaguely annoyed bafflement!

 

I know a lot of people like this movie, but I’m not entirely sure why! To me it fits right in with dire musical oddities like Can’t Stop the Music, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and The Apple, and, funny as they may be, we must admit that none of those are very good! Xanadu largely squanders the talents of its cast (though I believe it was Kelly’s own desire not to do much dancing) along with whatever fantasy-romantic promise its mythology-based concept had, and that’s tough to fully forgive whatever ancillary charms the movie may (or may not) possess! In the end I can only give Xanadu one single animated pastel-neon ribbon!

Burl reviews Rock 'n' Roll High School! (1979)

 

Hey ho, let’s go, it’s Burl Ramone here with another movie review for you! Yes, it’s that paean to rock n’ roll and to some of their high priests, those leather-jacket lotharios the Ramones! Of course the movie is Rock 'n’ Roll High School, and it’s always been funny to me that, after being conceived originally as something called “Disco High,” before it was pointed out that a school could not be blown up to disco music, and then cycling through rock bands as diverse as Devo and Van Halen, the picture ended up with the Ramones as their superstar all-time teen idol crush objects! Ha ha, I’m a tremendous Ramones fan, but the idea of them as objects of starry-eyed devotion is amusing indeed!

P.J. Soles from Halloween plays the marvelously-named Riff Randall, the top Ramones fan at Vince Lombardi High! Concurrent with the building excitement for the big Ramones show the entire school wants to attend is the appointment of a new principal at Vince Lombardi, a tight-bunned autocrat called Miss Togar, played by that singular talent Mary Woronov from Cannonball! With her two Katzenjammerish hall monitors, she institutes a reign of terror; meanwhile, Riff waits in line for three whole days and buys Ramones tickets for the entire student body! Meanwhile again, there’s a romance triangle: a gormless sweater-jock played by Vincent Van Patten from Hell Night sets his cap at Riff (who only has eyes for Joey Ramone of course), while Riff’s friend, a sweet nerd played by Dey Young from The Running Man and The Serpent and the Rainbow, sets hers, for some reason, at Van Patten! It falls to boy’s room entrepreneur Eaglebauer, played by Clint Howard from Ticks and Apollo 13 as a good-natured cross between Milo Minderbinder and Sgt. Bilko, to try and put things aright!

Paul Bartel from Piranha is Mr. McGree, a rather stuffy music teacher who is yet open-minded enough to give the New York good-time rock combo a chance, and once he attends their concert, he’s shouting Gabba Gabba Hey along with everyone else! Ha ha, he doesn’t even mind when Joey calls him “Mr. McGloob!” He’s a very likeable fellow, I must say! The Ramones concert sequence is highly reminiscent of the concert stuff in Get Crazy, which makes sense since they were both directed by goodtime music lover and ex-Fillmore East usher Allan Arkush! (Ha ha, a trivia for you: by the end of the shoot, Arkush became too sleepy to continue, so Joe Dante had to direct the last day or so!)

When Miss Togar pushes Riff Randall and the rest of the student body too far, they take control of Vince Lombardi High and rename it Rock 'n’ Roll High School! The fantastic and much-beloved Dick Miller, known from from Armed Response and Explorers and many dozens more, is called in to help keep the peace, and truth be told his character doesn’t do much except stand around and call the Ramones ugly! But it’s great to have Miller there, so ha ha, I’m not complaining! It all ends with a tremendous explosion which, like much of the rest of the picture, belies the measly $300,000 they spent on it!

The movie is chock full o’ delights: a great cast, the hilariously bad acting from the Ramones, a marvelously sincere embrace of the anti-authoritarian spirit of rock n’ roll, and a boogie van called the Warlock! Dey Young is pretty, but her crush on the dweeby square played by Van Patten is mystifying! Ha ha, oh well - different strokes, I guess, and anyway by the end, like many a teen Romeo before him, Van Patten is singing “Sweet Mr. Sansregret” at the top of his lungs! It’s altogether a fun time at the pictures, and I give Rock 'n’ Roll High School three placards reading “Gabby Hayes!” Ha ha!

Burl reviews Little Shop of Horrors! (1986)

 

With a song in my heart, it’s Burl, here to review a movie musical! Here’s another one I saw in the movie theater, and when I think of this movie I think of my friend Jamie, whom I saw it with, and who is now deceased! So there’s always an element of melancholy connected with this picture, Little Shop of Horrors, but there’s delight too as I recall the strange adventures Jamie and I had the night we saw it! Ha ha, we witnessed a pair of toddlers speeding down the street at the wheel of a car, with nary an adult in sight! We saw a piece of garbage paper blown by the wind: it circled twice in the air then dove out of sight below a curb, emerging a second later as a living, flying bird! A cigarette butt blown along by that same wind struck Jamie in the chest and exploded in a starburst like a Tie fighter hitting the Death Star! Ha ha!

So all of these strange events, which are preserved not just in my memory but in the lyrics of a song Jamie and I wrote for our high school rock band, come to mind when I consider Little Shop of Horrors! Of course I was already a fan of the old non-musical Roger Corman version, because of course that one featured Dick Miller in a supporting role as the flower-eater Burson Fouch! I was slightly chagrined to see that the Fouch character had not been carried over from the original movie to the musical stage adaptation or the big-budget movie currently under discussion here; but thinking about it, I realized that the adaptors must have known they simply couldn’t find anyone as good as Miller to fill the role if they had maintained it! Of course they could have hired Miller himself, who was around and active when this movie was made, but I guess they didn’t think of that!

Still, the cast they ended up with is a pretty remarkable bunch of comedy superstars! Rick Moranis from Strange Brew and Streets of Fire plays Seymour Krelborn, the slightly-renamed nebbish working in the flower store and being constantly yelled at by his boss Mr. Mushnik, played by the aptly-named Vincent Gardenia from Death Wish II! Also working in the shop is the daffy spin case Audrey, played with great gusto by Ellen Greene from Wagons East!; and, as in the Corman original, one wonders how a Skid Row flower shop entirely bereft of custom can afford so many employees! Ha ha!

Further down the cast list comes a true galaxy of starpower! Steve Martin from L.A. Story and All of Me plays Audrey’s truly despicable boyfriend, a biker-dentist named Orin Scrivello! John Candy from The Great Outdoors does a marvelous job as a wacky radio host; Bill Murray from Meatballs shows up in the Jack Nicholson role of the masochistic patient; Christopher Guest from The Princess Bride does an excellent turn as a flower store customer – the closest analogue to the Dick Miller character, in fact; and Jim Belushi from The Fury appears without making much of an impact!

Of course the real star is Audrey II, the voracious monster plant Seymour discovers and begins feeding blood and bodies to! The trick effects used to bring the big flytrap to life are truly impressive, from the big reaching tentacles to the expressive lips; and the voicing, from Four Tops singer Levi Stubbs, is ideal! Almost as impressive are the three ladies who act as the story’s Greek chorus – ha ha, I thought they were terrific! And on balance I thought Frank Oz managed some fine staging on his Sesame Street sets, though a little more pep and dynamism wouldn’t have gone amiss!

But Frank shouldn’t have listened to those outraged preview audiences who detested the original apocalyptic ending of the story, in which the plant devours Seymour and Audrey, spawns equally hungry offspring, grows to immense size and goes on a Godzilla-like rampage! Ha ha, they must have been pretty angry audiences to convince a studio to dump a huge multi-million dollar sequence and replace it with a gormless happy ending involving a playhouse! It does a real injury to the movie, I think! I didn’t realize they’d monkeyed with it, not until I read an article in Cinefantastique magazine anyway, but I could still tell there was something missing! It’s never been restored, though you can watch it on the internet! And considering all this, I’m forced to give Little Shop of Horrors two and a half bandaged fingers!

Burl reviews Phantom of the Paradise! (1974)

 

With a Hollywood smile and a perfect profile, it’s Burl, here to review the great rock ‘n roll phantasy of the 1970s! No, it’s not the Rocky Horror Picture Show, it’s the other one: Phantom of the Paradise! Ha ha, this picture really was everywhere when I was growing up: everybody I knew had the soundtrack album and could sing the songs by heart! I still recall how grateful I was on being called in by my father from some onerous outdoor chore to watch the movie on TV!

So needless to say I feel quite fondly toward the picture! And of course it comes from Mr. Brian De Palma, who’s made many movies I’ve enjoyed - ha ha, yes, even Wise Guys, and certainly The Fury! In this tale he evokes Faust and updates the cautionary tale of devilish deal-making to the 1970s and plops it into a glam-rock setting! Ha ha, and in this world, the biggest thing in music is a diminutive impresario called Swan, who’s a combination of Phil Spector, David Geffen, Berry Gordy, Bill Graham, Malcolm McLaren, Brian Epstein, Albert Grossman, and Lou Pearlman, with just a dash of Colonel Tom Parker! And all this while standing no taller than three bricks and a short refrigerator, ha ha; but he’s made a deal with the devil as it turns out, and is a pretty ruthless customer in any case!

He’s looking for the perfect new music to open up his new concert hall, the Paradise, and finds it in the piano stylings of Winslow Leach, a songwriter who looks like a weedier Warren Zevon with just a touch of John Sebastian! Of course Swan doesn’t want Leach, just his songs, and soon the naïve but rage-prone songwriter is ignored, then framed, imprisoned, has all his teeth extracted, and is hideously deformed in a record press accident! He dons a leather outfit and a silver bird mask and becomes the vengeful Phantom haunting a cherubic rocksman’s Paradise!

It all ends in a glam-rock delirium that shoots for complete chaos, but, for budgetary reasons, doesn’t quite get there! This is both what’s wrong and what’s admirable about the movie: they all-too-obviously didn’t have the money to create the Olympus of popular music the story really calls for; but what they did accomplish through inventive filmmaking and the Herculean efforts of such people as set dresser Sissy Spacek, ha ha, is extremely impressive!

The songs are good, thank god! Paul Williams, who plays Swan, wrote them and did a good job sending up the 70s singer-songwriter genre, hard rock, nostalgia rock, softrock balladeering, and glam! (It would be considered a truly prophetic work had it predicted punk, New Wave, and disco, but it doesn’t quite make that step!) William Finley, who was in other De Palma pictures like Sisters, and interesting genre pictures like Silent Rage and The Funhouse, is poor schlubby Winslow, driven mad by the storm of malevolence and misfortune he suffers! Jessica Harper from Inserts is the ingénue, Phoenix, the only one Winslow will allow to sing his songs!

The supporting cast has a quintessential quality! We get Gerrit Graham from C pictures like Cannonball, Class Reunion, and Chopping Mall as the fey and monstrous Beef, a sort of Alice Cooper/Gary Glitter hybrid; big George Memmoli from Mean Streets as Swan’s right-hand man; Archie Hahn from Matinee and many other Joe Dante pictures as one of the rotating band members; and groupies played by such lovely and familiar faces as Janit Baldwin from Humongous, Janus Blythe from Eaten Alive, Robin Mattson from Candy Stripe Nurses, and Rainbeaux Smith from The Pom Pom Girls, Logan’s Run, Massacre at Central High, and more!

Its pleasures are so plentiful that it would be churlish to list its flaws, and so I won’t, ha ha! There’s some of that De Palma trickery of course, and I always love that stuff, even when it’s not top shelf material! The split-screen sequence, for example, isn’t as effective as the one in Sisters, but I still like it a lot! But the bottom line is that I am and always will be very fond of this movie! I’ve seen it on TV, on VHS, on DVD and on the big screen in revival showings, and it’s fun every time! And now I’ve shown it to my son, and so the circle continues to turn, ha ha! I give Phantom of the Paradise three and a half neon lightning bolts!

Burl reviews Gimme an 'F'! (1984)

Ha ha, it’s that dancin’ fool Burl, here to review yet another movie about a cheerleader camp! It’s not Cheerleader Camp, of course, because I already reviewed that one; today’s picture, however, features all the necessary components for a cheerleader camp picture - pom poms, gymnastics, squads competing for the big prize - except the one it could have used most: a murderous killer! Ha ha! And the movie we’re talking about today sports the vaguely unsavory title Gimme an 'F'!

I’ll say right up front that this is a slightly odd one! In some ways it presents as a raunchy sex comedy: the camp is called “Camp Beaverview” (the campers eat at the “Beaverteria”), and by the third act the antagonists are being pelted with enormous urine balloons; but on the other hand, though opportunities are rampant, there are virtually no nude ladies in the film, and the plot spends an awful lot of time on the dramatic life choice problems of Tommy Hamilton, the head counselor played by Stephen Shellen from American Gothic! (In this, I think the movie believes itself to be imitating Meatballs, but it’s not a very good imitation, ha ha!)

Tommy’s problem is that he loves antics and to teach the art of cheerleading, but feels that, at twenty-five, he’s too old for both these pursuits! He’s apparently not too old to romance sixteen year-old campers though, which he just barely manages to do without committing any arrestable offences! Tommy has a girlfriend who’s displeased with him not because of the antics, but because he wants to stop doing them! (She’s also not too chuffed about the sixteen year-old!) Tommy’s flashdancing pal is Roscoe, played by Mark Keyloun from Sudden Impact, and Roscoe, whose urine fills those balloons late in the picture, is the very definition of an anticsman, so this makes it even harder for Tommy!

Aside from the counselors, we meet plenty of the cheerleading campers too! There’s an evil team, the Falcons (pronounced “faaalcon,” as Americans will do); a sweet and inexperienced team called the Molene Ducks; and, just for good measure, a team of sympathetic tough girls! Familiar faces dot all of these squads, faces belonging to the likes of Jennifer Cooke from Friday the 13th part 6, Daphne Ashbrook from Quiet Cool, Tyra Ferrell from Tapeheads and Exorcist III, and Darcy DeMoss from Return to Horror High and For Keeps! John Karlen from Impulse plays Bucky, the owner of the camp, whose constant outrage at Tommy and his antics is perfectly within reason! It’s that Ghostbusters thing: the villain may be a jerk, but he has a solid point nevertheless!

Bucky is trying desperately to impress a group of Japanese investors led by the always-enjoyable Clyde Kusatsu from In the Line of Fire and Godzilla! And yes, this group is always introduced with the bonging of a gong on the soundtrack! Classy move, Gimme an 'F'! Meanwhile Roscoe falls in love with a member of the Faaaaalcons, and to impress the surly object of his affections, he delivers chocolates and swings down from trees, but is only made the guest of honor at a slap party for his troubles! In an extreme of desperation he dresses like Wez from The Road Warrior, and surprisingly that is what works!

After performing a long underwear dance in the shower, Tommy makes an ill-advised bet with Bucky that the Ducks, a meek bunch of klutzes, can beat the fearsome Faaaaaalcons in the big final competition all these camps seem to have! (The performance scenes seemed to me ridiculously elaborate productions for a modest sleepaway camp!) No prizes for guessing that the Ducks transform from goodie-two-shoed stumblebums to sexy professional dancers in a matter of days, and the pee-soaked Bucky loses both his bet and his sanity!

Gimme an F seems like a movie made by strippers and pornographers who, jaded by years of exposure to skin and sex, get their biggest thrill from clothing being left on! Ha ha! It was written by Jim V. Hart, whose next credit would be Steven Spielberg’s Hook, another movie with weird tonal shifts! The filmmaking is nothing to write home about, and while there are some impressively athletic performances, the lack of charm in the leads is everywhere evident! They come off as a bunch of jerks: Bill Murray could prank Morty in Meatballs and not seem too mean about it, but these guys can’t even fire a pissbomb at a nasty crank without coming off as despicable! Ha ha, Gimme an 'F' is a pretty poor and forgettable movie and I award it one locker room flashdance!

Burl reviews April in Paris! (1952)

With a handful of posies, it’s Burl, here to review a spring musical for you! Yes, you’ve guessed right: it’s April in Paris, as, currently, it’s April everywhere, for a few more days at least! Ha ha! This picture features the unlikely romantic pairing of Doris Day, whom we know so well from suspense thrillers like Midnight Lace, and Ray Bolger, whose shirt here is stuffed even more than it was in The Wizard of Oz! Ha ha!

The plot is rather contrived, even for a musical! Bolger’s character, S. Winthrop Putnam, is an uptight nebbish who works in the State Department, in the position of Assistant to the assistant to the Deputy Undersecretary to the Assistant to the Secretary of State, or something like that! His grumpy boss is played by Paul Harvey, who sounds just like a more polished Lon Chaney Jr. if you close your eyes! Anyway, they’re planning some kind of arts festival in Paris, for which they propose to gather the crème de la crème of American culture and ship them all to France! But the invitation to Ethel Barrymore goes by mistake to a brassy chorine named Ethel “Dynamite” Jackson, played of course by Day!

After a touching goodbye party from her theatre pals, Bolger arrives to inform her of the mistake, which of course devastates her! Up to this point, I had assumed Bolger’s character was a secondary fussbudget character of the type that used to be played by Franklin Pangborn or Mischa Auer or Edward Everett Horton, and that the romantic lead had simply not showed up yet! Of course I knew Bolger was a great entertainer, and in particular a fantastic dancer, but I was still expecting the real hero to show up any minute, ha ha!

But no! Anyway, after the old “The boss thinks the underling’s decision to represent America with an everywoman instead of a star is inspired” plot twist, Dynamite is back in (Ethel Barrymore’s reaction to the mix-up is never recorded), and the long middle section of the picture takes place (rather unconvincingly) aboard ship! Ha ha, here the Frenchman character played ingratiatingly by Claude Dauphin, whom we know from Phantom of the Rue Morgue, and who later became President of Earth in Barbarella, comes to the fore! Having earlier sung a song apparently called “Give Me Your Lips,” he plays matchmaker, sort of, and this leads to a long scene in the passage outside the adjacent cabins of Day and Bolger, in which their mutual lust is turned up to eleven!

Then we get a fake wedding, which means, by the puritanical rules of the period, that Dauphin and his pal have to act in a very un-French  manner and prevent Day and Bolger from consummating their non-marriage! Their cabins are rigged by the crafty Frenchmen, and this leads to several laffs and some outrage from Bolger’s boss! Finally everybody gets to Paris, which is represented by stock footage and stage sets, and there are further complications and an excellent nightclub number from Dauphin and Day! Ha ha, it’s one of the highlights! There’s also a surprising revelation about our Frenchman, Dauphin, and the last shot is of course set before a dropsheet depiction of the Eiffel Tower!

All of this is fine, even if the whole thing seems to lack the authorial voice a director other than David Butler might have given it! For most of the picture Day and Bolger seem an ill-fitting couple, it being particularly hard to see what the likeably bland Dynamite would see in a nervous prig like S. Winthrop Putnam! Ha ha! But the scene in the passage is a most definite exception: the air is thick with erotic feeling, and one can see reflected in their eyes the sideways bedroom waltz each craves to perform with the other!

It’s a pretty standard 1950s Hollywood musical: bright and colourful; tedious at times, but also occasionally funny; bizarrely moralistic; rah-rah American, though not too obnoxious with it; a few good numbers and some impressive dancing! One wishes the loose-limbed Bolger was given more to do, but after all, he was straitjacketed by his character! He does get a decent tap number in! Ha ha, I give April in Paris two collapsing beds!

Burl reviews The Nightmare Before Christmas! (1993)

Ha ha, ho ho ho and booga booga too, it’s Burl! Yes, I’ve just come from a special screening of the animated picture The Nightmare Before Christmas, with a full orchestra playing the Danny Elfman score, so perhaps this review will be slightly skewed by this charming and unusual movie-going experience! Or perhaps not; it’s hard to say! All I know is that it was y first time seeing this picture in any scenario, so my impression will always be that its standout quality was the music!

And this of course is hardly fair to the animation, which is stellar! The story I found less compelling, but that’s okay! It all takes place in the magical world of holidays: each special calendar day, it turns out, has its own little world, which is responsible for that particular holiday! Ha ha, I guess it’s a stretch to call Halloween a “holiday,” because, after all, it’s not exactly holy, and more crucially, your boss doesn’t give you the day off of work!

But anyway, in Halloweentown, a lanky fellow called Jack Skellington is the Pumpkin King, the fellow evidently most responsible for coming up with their annual scary Halloween gambits! Everyone loves Jack, ha ha, but he himself falls prey to a vague but powerful misgiving, a feeling that there must be more to life than Halloween! And so there is: he comes across a forest glen where trees are marked, restroom-style, with the symbols of different holidays, and the trees prove to be doors! After a brief sojourn in Christmastown, Jack is charmed by the concept and resolves to bring Yuletide joy to Halloweentown!

Jack’s specific plan is a little half-baked, but he ends up masterminding the kidnapping of Santa Claus, whom he imagines to be a towering half-man, half-lobster with snapping claws and crushing mandibles! This turns out to be a misapprehension, ha ha!

Anyway, by the time Christmas comes and Jack is riding a coffin-sled pulled by skeleton reindeer, he’s given cause to regret his rash embrace of someone else’s holiday, and Santa certainly upbraids him for the attempt! Ha ha, perhaps Jack would have been better off appropriating Casimir Pulaski Day! Christmas is saved in the end, and the main bad guy, some sort of boogen living in the basement, is revealed as being made of bugs!

There are Tim Burton design touches everywhere to be found, which would surely have felt fresher back in 1993! Ha ha, Christmastown is sort of boring and boilerplate; you can tell his heart is in Halloween! The movie itself was directed by Henry Selick, who later did a fine job with Coraline and other creepy animations! Jack is given voice in song by Elfman himself, which occasionally gives the thing the flavor of a feature-length Oingo Boingo video; his speaking voice, less frequently heard, comes from Chris Sarandon, well-known from Fright Night! Catherine O’Hara from The Paper provides the female voices, and William Hickey from The Sentinel is a nasty duck-lipped scientist!

I enjoyed watching the picture, but having missed out on it all these years, I can’t see it becoming a holiday perennial for me! Maybe there were just too many songs! But there’s lots to admire, and the live orchestral accompaniment was a lot of fun, so I’m giving The Nightmare Before Christmas two and a half shrunken heads!

Burl reviews Beach Blanket Bingo (1965)

Hey hodads, it’s Burl, here to review one of the A.I.P. beach party pictures from well back when! This one is Beach Blanket Bingo, which I think may have been the third in the series! Ha ha, it’s hard to tell, because they really cranked ‘em out around that time! And it wasn’t just A.I.P., but you had things like The Girls on the Beach, Ride the Wild Surf, Beach Ball, and so many others!

This one has the same plot as all the others: a beach full of kids on vacation, with Frankie and Annette holding hands and singing to each other on the beach, but they have the same old problems as ever! Annette thinks Frankie should grow up, and Frankie thinks Annette is a bit of a fuddy-duddy! Plus they both become interested in other people, namely skydiving instructors played by Deborah Walley and John Ashley!

Meanwhile there are other things occupying the beach gang! Bonehead (who until this picture had been called Deadhead), the size-tall lummox, falls in love with a girl from the sea who turns out to be a mermaid! This affair du coeur is followed in great detail, installing itself as the emotional backbone of the whole picture! Meanwhile there’s a pop singer called Miss Sugar Kane whose publicist, Paul Lynde, is thinking up big publicity stunts for her to do; and these stunts involve a skydiving school run by Don Rickles (well known from Innocent Blood, but approximately the last person I’d want to learn skydiving from) and the gang itself, when they too become interested in both skydiving and Miss Sugar Kane! In the background of all this lurks Buster Keaton, stonefacing with a lady in a fur bikini, dancing, and even getting into a fight!

But then, unfortunately, come regular doses of Erik Von Zipper! This is the idiot biker character played by Harvey Lembeck in a manner suggesting Morty Tashman from The Errand Boy became a biker! Ha ha, thankfully he spends at least some of his screen time playing pool with Timothy Carey (from Echo Park), in a performance that’s weird even for Timothy Carey, as a pool shark called South Dakota Slim! Slim stands there glaring over his surroundings with an imperious, squinty gaze, waiting his turn to make a shot, calling everybody “bubby!”

Boy, sorry Harvey, ha ha, but I sure hate Von Zipper! If I ever decided to make a list of my most to least favourite Beach Party movies (I never will), the top entry would be whichever one had the least Von Zipper! I find the Von Zipper character and all his scenes desperately unfunny, and ha ha, regrettably this one is very heavy on the Von Zipper! He falls in love with Miss Sugar Kane, and, to show his devotion, kidnaps her and takes her to the gang’s clubhouse, where she too will know the pleasure of playing pool with Timothy Carey!

Carey, the great fartiste, kidnaps the singer in his turn, announcing his intention to take her to his bubby house! Ha ha, Carey turns out to be a crazed psychotic who lives in a sawmill - his bubby house - and proposes to tie Miss Sugar Kane to a log and cut her in half! Apparently still intending to cut her in half at some later date, Carey instead spirits her to an upstairs room, where he cries “I’m gonna give ya some en-ta-tain-ment!” and starts shivering so violently that the still bound actress hops away from him in what appears to be genuine alarm! This part alone makes all the Von Zipper stuff worth wading through, because South Dakota Slim is a monstrous and memorable creation, sort of a Hannibal Lecter of the mid-60s!

There are a few lively beach tunes, some okay gags, and some nice work from Buster Keaton, who is a performer I think everyone adores! The mermaid stuff is stupid but tolerable, the Frankie and Annette scenes half-baked, and the picture as a whole seems to go on for a very long time! But how deeply can you dislike a movie that ends with Buster Keaton being covered in kisses? Ha ha, I give Beach Blanket Bingo two bisected bikers!

Burl reviews I Wanna Hold Your Hand! (1978)

Ha ha ha ha, it’s Burl here to talk Beatles! Well, actually, to talk about a Beatles picture that’s not so much about the Beatles as it is about some fanatical young adults trying their best to see those mopheads as they make their big American TV debut on the Ed Sullivan show! Yes, it’s Robert Zemeckis’s first picture, I Wanna Hold Your Hand!

Zemeckis and his writing partner, Bob Gale, were Steven Spielberg acolytes back in the mid-Seventies, and I guess pals! So Spielberg became an executive producer for the first time and helped the young fellows make this picture! Then of course he selected a number of the cast members buffet-style, for his next picture, 1941! Ha ha, 1941!

Nancy Allen, from Strange Invaders and RoboCop, effectively takes point in this ensemble, and delivers one of her better performances along the way! Her character finds her way into the Beatles’ hotel room, where she has an erotic encounter with one of their guitars, ha ha! In fact, her arc takes her from an upcoming marriage to the world’s most boring fellow to a realization that the Lads from Liverpool are what she needs to achieve the full bloom of her womanhood! Ha ha! Meanwhile, Bobby DiCicco from The Supernaturals and Number One With A Bullet plays a greasemaster who resents the moptopped eclipse of the music he prefers to see on the popular charts! Marc McClure, well-known from The Vagrant, plays a timid nerd who finds his courage in a bottle and commits egregious acts of drunken driving!

Wendie Jo Sperber, whom we know from Moving Violations, and who always brought her A game, plays a fan so delirious in her Beatle love that she passes out and misses the whole show, but, ha ha, doesn’t mind because she’s satisfied simply having been in the same building as her idols! Susan Kendall Newman from Slap Shot plays a young lady who thinks the Fab Four might be a dangerous influence on the larger population of young ladies, but becomes a convert by the end! Theresa Saldana from Defiance plays a goodhearted shutterbug whose gesture of kindness toward the nerd keeps her from seeing the show, but leads to a far greater reward! And of course Eddie Deezen from Desperate Moves appears as the world’s biggest platonic male Beatles fan! Best of all, however, is an appearance from the great and wonderful Dick “The Long Ride Home” Miller, who plays a hotel security guard with a peculiar fixation on lamps!

Well, as might be expected from a Zemeckis picture, there’s a lot of craziness, but since it was a pretty low-budget picture, it’s kept relatively small-scale! Still, there are many impressive crowd scenes, and the period detail is persuasive! But there may be too much detail – the movie’s middle section, intercutting the kids’ adventures in and around the hotel, gets kind of repetitive and seems to go on a long time! Ha ha! It’s an entertaining picture, but never gets really great, or really exciting, or really funny! But it’s frequently a little bit of one or more of those things, and with the generous dash of Miller it offers, I declare the picture to have been well worth watching! I give I Wanna Hold Your Hand two and a half lamps that are on!

Burl reviews Ridin' on a Rainbow! (1941)

Yee-ha-ha, it’s Burl! Yes, I’ve got another oater for you, and, like Susanna Pass, it features a singin’ cowboy! Not Roy Rogers this time though, but Gene Autry, starring as himself, or rather as a guy named “Gene Autry,” in a picture called Ridin’ on a Rainbow!

Yes, Gene’s here, a-warblin’ his tunes, and his good pal Frog, played as ever by Smiley Burnette, is right thar by his side! Ha ha! Gene plays a rancher who persuades his ranching buddies to put all their money into the bank, which is then promptly robbed by two badmen and a clown! The clown escapes the bank by mixing in with the crowd, who somehow fail to notice an enormous harlequin in their midst! And of course Gene is left feeling badly for having helped lose all his friends their money!

The clown, played by prolific performer Byron Foulger from The Man They Could Not Hang, is part of a showboat ensemble which happens to be docked in town and conducting a parade! He’s not really a bad guy, just a little misguided, and his doting daughter, also a showboat performer, promises not to tell where he is! The badmen who cold-bloodedly shot down the old bank manager are the real bad guys!

Nevertheless, we have a clown on the run, which is a great scene because so rarely in these dime-book Westerns do we get to see a stagecoach pounding through the sagebrush with a Pierrot at the reins! He’s got the fuzzbuttons, the Elizabethan collar and everything! Ha ha! And this remarkable scene closely follows a mindbending showboat number with a holiday theme, such that, before the act is over, the stage is crowded with a clutch of Pilgrims, a cherub, a goblin, a demented Easter Bunny, and Santa! Ha ha!

Of course Gene and Smiley go undercover as entertainers as part of their campaign to catch the bandits! They seem a lot more interested in performing than in solving the crime, it must be said, but some time is also given to scenes of contrived drama wherein friction is created by having the other characters simply refuse to listen to what Gene is saying! He’s always right of course, and they should have listened to him and believed him!

Ridin’ on a Rainbow has a supporting cast of journeymen, of that there’s no doubt, with recognizable faces like Ferris Taylor from You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man, Anthony Warde from Rear Window, and many others! I even liked the songs, except that holiday one and the title track, which really is a miserable ditty! Ha ha! But I enjoyed watching it, and found the relationship between Gene and Smiley to be the most compelling! Evidently it was spread across dozens of movies, and it would be interesting to watch them all and try putting their interactions into chart form, proving exactly what, I cannot say, but something noteworthy no doubt!

Anyway, Ridin’ on a Rainbow has some tapdancing, which I always love to see, and lots of great entertainment, and the showboat setting is novel for a Western, and the clown stuff is good for a chuckle! Give it a watch, why not! I give Ridin’ on a Rainbow two missing puffbuttons!

Burl reviews Rain the Color of Red With A Little Blue In It! (2015)

Ha ha, it’s Burl, here to review an African version of Prince’s 1984 picture Purple Rain! That’s another movie I know strictly by its Mad Magazine parody, so I was worried that I wouldn’t be getting all the enjoyment I could from Rain the Color of Red With A Little Blue In It, which is a remake of the Prince film, or a tribute anyway, shot recently in Niger!

It’s the story of Mali-born guitarist Mdou Moctar, playing himself! Mdou is almost thirty, but here I guess he’s meant to be playing a version of himself as a teenager! Ha ha, I didn’t realize it until a scene where he argues with his dad, who hates the idea of his son being a musician! And this is but one of the obstacles Mdou faces!

He’s also the new guy in town, the town in this case being Agadez, in central Niger! The local hotshot guitar player is a guy called Kader, and eventually a rivalry springs up between these two! Kader manages to steal Mdou’s new song, which Mdou had been saving specially for an upcoming Battle of the Bands being held to determine who is really the best guitarist in Agadez! In the meantime, Mdou has met a pretty girl, and is wooing her with trips into the desert riding pillion on his purple motorcycle! He almost loses this girl by acting like a jerk later on, but his music redeems him, and also solves the problems with his father! Good times, ha ha!

The story offered by Rain the Color of Red With A Little Blue In It is pretty basic, but the culture depicted within is fascinating! Ha ha, I hate to sound all anthropological, but the most valuable thing this movie offers, besides Mdou Moctar himself, is a crazy peek into the musical scene found in and around the Sahara! It’s all about trading and even listening to music by cell phone, the informal network by which Moctar became famous in the first place! “You’ve heard him on your cellphones, and now here he is in front of us!” cries the MC at whatever show or event he’s playing!

Despite the melodrama (in the truest sense) and the sometimes stilted acting or more likely because of these things, the seventy-five minute movie is consistently and thoroughly entertaining! The music is terrific, and the songs are all about peace and love! I’m not sure how closely it hews to the story of Purple Rain, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t matter whether you’ve seen that one or not: Rain the Color of Red With A Little Blue In It is a fun and culturally fascinating picture any way you slice it! I give this musical motion picture three headscarves!

Burl reviews Beach Ball! (1965)

Ha ha, hepcats, it’s Burl, here to boogie with you on the beach again! Yes, I can’t seem to help visiting the beach on a pretty regular basis, at least cinematically, ha ha! Because here I am to chat about Beach Ball, another of the non-A.I.P. sun ‘n’ surf-stravaganzas! In fact it shares much with The Girls on the Beach, and would make such an ideal companion piece with the picture that if you double-billed them, you’d have trouble remembering which was which only a few hours later!

Just like GotB, we have a group of fellows and a group of ladies (faux-nerds this time, ha ha), and with the beach (and sundry other locations) as a backdrop, the picture chronicles their inevitable coming together! It seems we have a battle of the bands, and our boys are a group called, ha ha, The Wigglers! There are three Wigglers and their manager, the kooky and superannuated Edd Byrnes! Two of the Wigglers are handsome guys: Bango the drummer is played by Robert Logan, well known from Born to Race, Scorpion and Snowbeast, and Jack the guitar player is played by Aron “Cannonball” Kincade! There’s a sax player in this trio too, the goofy one of the group, and he’s played by none other than Don Edmonds, who also appeared in Home Sweet Home and Wild, Wild Winter, but happens to be the director of Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS too! Ha ha, what a strange career he had!

The girls, meanwhile, are so close to the ones from GotB that I suspect it might actually be the same quartet, ha ha! The plot is all the kids getting together to help the Wigglers keep their instruments from being repossessed by the persistent Mr. Wolf, so that they can play in the big Best Band Contest! Lots of terrific performances pop up at the flimsiest excuse, from people like The Righteous Brothers (whose hits I’ve never liked, but I liked the band here!), The Four Seasons, The Hondells and the terrific Walker Brothers! And of course the grand climax to the music is The Supremes, featuring a truly amazing hairdo on Diana Ross! Of course, ha ha, somehow The Wigglers come out on top of them all in the contest!

The running gag involving Mr. Wolf is that he keeps getting caught up in all the fun fun fun, or else is dosed with nitrous oxide, and always ends up in some mildly compromising position in the morning, being frowned at by cops! The cops in this case are one guy I didn’t recognize, and the great Dick “Smokey Bites the Dust” Miller! Ha ha, he’s as terrific as ever here, taking it smooth and easy and grinning as if stoned!

After a great scene where a beatnik mechanic turns the boys’ car into a spacemobile, there’s a speed chase! Then come endless scenes of farce, filmed on the sly at a car show, and then, as in GotB, the lads end up dressed as ladies! It’s a silly picture, but it has many, many scenes of pretty ladies shaking their bottoms to the beat, and lots of fine music, and many activities (car racing, skydiving, skindiving, and even a little surfing, ha ha!); and of course it has Dick Miller, which automatically makes it a must see! I’m going to go ahead and give Beach Ball two and a half wigglers!

Burl reviews The Girls on the Beach! (1965)

Ha ha, it’s all so wiggy! Yes, it’s Burl here with another beach party movie to review – no, not The Beach Girls again, but one called The Girls on the Beach! Ha ha, this is one from back in the genre’s heyday, or at least shortly after, and it’s not an AIP one with Frankie and Annette and all that, but a copycat released by another studio!

And I’ll freely admit that, although the AIP beach pictures have their charms, they usually get too silly for ol’ Burl, and I tend to prefer the outsider ones more: pictures like Ride the Wild Surf, Palm Springs Weekend, and even drab little numbers like Wild on the Beach! The Girls on the Beach is another that, I must say, I would choose over, say, Beach Blanket Bingo, if I were for some reason given a choice!

The Girls on the Beach begins as it means to go on, with some fine music from the Beach Boys laid over shots of bikini-girls running hither and yon up and down the sand! Then we repair to a club, where the Boys are actually singing, and there we not only meet the quartet of sorority sisters who will be our protagonists and the trio of lads who will pursue them by unethical means, but the duo of waiters played by none other than little Dick “Get Crazy” Miller and big Leo “Bog” Gordon!

Dick Miller, who sure does appear in a lot of the movies I review, ha ha, plays a character with an inexplicable hate for the Beatles! “I wish they’d go back to where they came from,” he grouses! “England?” asks Leo, but Dick shouts “No, under a rock!” But too bad Dick, because everyone else in the movie loves those boys from Liverpool, and that love figures prominently in the plot, or at least in what this picture offers up in place of a plot, ha ha!

And what is this “plot?” Well, the sorority sisters, who are the executive of their chapter, are called back to their beautiful beach sorority house – yes, ha ha, you heard that right! – by the house mother, who reveals that, first, a rich and vengeful sorority sister, along the line of Sabra from Sorority Girl, who was kicked out at some point in the past and whom we never meet in this picture, has bought the house’s mortgage and plans to foreclose on it unless the sisters can come up with ten thousand dollars in two weeks! Secondly, the house mother admits, she spent the ten thousand dollar nest egg the house had banked for just such an eventuality! But because she spent it on humanitarian causes, the girls forgive her and set to raising the money by entering contests and such! After all, enthuses one of the girls, “a daily newspaper can be the greatest treasure map of all!”

The lads, meanwhile, want to make time with the ladies, and concoct a fabrication! They’re personal friends of the Beatles, they claim, and can get the four superstars to come and play a benefit concert for the sorority house! A fake phone call from Ringo – that is, from one of the boys doing the worst Ringo impression ever – seals the deal! The boys realize things have gone too far, but, after the girls have sold a bunch of tickets to this chimeric gala, they fail to figure out how to fix it, and simply confess their wrongdoing! It’s up to the girls to dress in Beatles drag and warble some Fab Four-style tunes of their own, including one called “I Want To Marry A Beatle!”

Ha ha, all of this must have seemed absurdly square in 1965! But it has lots of funny moments today! There’s a great scene where one of the shirtless lads, as part of their gambit to impress the gals with their superstar connections, bellows out “Fellas, I’m telling you, next time we come down here, we gotta bring Rock!” Only a few scenes later, the fellows get trapped in the sorority house and must dress as ladies, then endure the groping hands of the frat brothers before they're able to escape!

It’s a lovely little picture with plenty of attractive ladies and fine music from the Beach Boys, the Crickets and cute little Lesley Gore! We also get Bruno Ve Sota from Attack of the Giant Leeches as a telegram man named Pops! Sure, the movie is dumb and silly, and the way the ladies seem to instantly forgive the boys after their subterfuge is a little south of realistic, but it still works as a fine little document of the times! I enjoyed it, so I’m going to give The Girls on the Beach two and a half phone calls from “somebody named Ringo?” Ha ha!