Burl reviews She Demons! (1958)

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burl reviews Foreign Correspondent! (1940)

 

By the turning of the windmill, it’s Burl, here with a bit of Hitchcockery for you! Ha ha, this is Hitch in actionman mode, making a big old wartime crowd-pleaser with plenty of derring-do and get-‘er-done sentiment! It’s not the most finely-crafted picture old Alfred ever made, nor his most suspenseful, nor his most rollicking, but there’s a case to be made that, alongside North By Northwest, it’s the one that most effectively combines all these qualities! Ha ha, and the name of the movie is Foreign Correspondent!

It’s set in a very specific period of time, which I always appreciate in a movie! The thunderclouds of war have spread across Europe, and just about everybody knows it’s coming – and there are some shadowy figures, it seems, who want to hurry it along! But before we meet them, we are introduced to Johnny Jones, the putative hero of the picture, a Big Apple newsman who is the right guy to go find out what’s up in Europe, figures his editor, because (and the cop-phobic Hitch loved this no doubt) he once beat up a policeman!

It seems Hitch wanted Gary Cooper for the role, but he got Joel McCrea from Sullivan’s Travels and Ride the High Country! This disappointed the director, who found McCrea too affable; and you can certainly see why he’d want Coop for a two-fisted role like this! Maybe the fact that they were each known by nicknames made up of the first half of their surnames was an extra attraction to Cooper for the portly filmmaker, but who knows! Anyway, I like McCrea – his affability gives a lightness to the picture that helps keep it aloft, and he’s able to get serious when he needs to, as in the Thing From Another World-style coda!

It’s late August of 1939, and you know what that means - Nazis are about to make their move! When Johnny Jones arrives in England, he finds a dyspeptic colleague played by the great Robert Benchley (who also wrote some of the dialogue, or at least his own); the leader of some kind of peace party, Stephen Fisher, played by Herbert Marshall from The Fly; and Fisher’s beautiful daughter Carol, essayed by Laraine Day from The Story of Dr. Wassell! Malarkey of some kind is going on, and things only get weirder after a diplomat called Van Meer, who is instrumental in whatever chance there may be to stave off the Germans and whom Johnny is supposed to interview, gets himself shot in the face in a surprisingly brutal moment!

Johnny also meets the real hero of the picture, or at least I thought so, a debonair newshound called Scott ffolliott (and yes, ha ha, they address the lower-case double Fs), played by the marvelous George Sanders, whom we recall from Doomwatch and Endless Night, and from his own pithy suicide note! ffolliett is a real cool customer, an adventuresman who, it seemed to me, had as much of Hitchcock’s attention as the hero! After the famous windmill scene – well, relatively famous, probably cracking the top ten or twelve of famous Hitch scenes – and Van Meer has mysteriously returned, still played by Albert Bassermann from Alraune, Johnny is hot on the trail of the story, and so naturally it’s time for the movie to hang with ffolliett for a while! Yes, ha ha, it seems for a while that ffolliett (a relation to ffolkes, no doubt!) is the new hero of the movie, and one is not unhappy to have him!

There’s some great stuff here! Edmund Gwenn from Them! and The Trouble With Harry pops up as a hitman who maybe was a bit past his prime! And there are some terrific mugs in the margins, like Mr. Krug, played by Eduardo Cianelli from Strange Cargo, who tortures poor Van Meer with hot jazz music! The special effects and sets are simply top notch, and the plane-crash climax is a corker!

You can tell Hitch wasn’t too interested in the specifics of the peace process or the ginned up McGuffin here – ha ha, as McGuffins go, this is one of the director’s most transparently immaterial! It’s a weird mix of ripped-from-the-headlines reality and the sort of picture they were making in the lead-up to the war, where the evil country would remain pointedly unnamed, perhaps in the hopes of avoiding any kind of intercontinental rile-up! I suppose that’s because history marched on as the picture was being written and prepared, and all of Fisher’s mournful references to “his country” were left over from prewar days!

It’s a chaotic movie, but all of a setpiece by the end, ha ha! I’ve seen it a couple of times now, and it sure does hold up! The plotting is maybe not completely thought through everywhere, but it’s got it where it counts! I give Foreign Correspondent three and a half phonographs!

Burl reviews Tilbury! (1987)

 

Hèi hèi, it’s Bürl, here to review some Icelandic cinema! Actually this may have been more of a TV movie, ha ha, but I’m not completely certain! If it was, then Icelandic TV was more permissive than the North American variety, because this picture contains a little bit of nudity, some bloody violence, and some salty language! It also contains a strange mythology, but then what Icelandic tale does not! The picture tells the tale of a tilburi, and it’s called Tilbury!

Now, as I mentioned, there are plenty of odd tales in Icelandic mythology - ha ha, I myself have written a film treatment concerning the strange saga of the Necro-Pants, and I hope one day that one can be committed to film! This particular myth holds that a woman who wants more butter in her life can conjure up an imp called a tilburi, which requires that she hold a rib bone wrapped in wool between her breasts and douse it in communion wine, along with some other witchy acts! Then the goblin will appear and steal the milk from livestock at neighbouring farms, and when it returns will spit out a hideous green butter “of unusual consistency,” according to the movie’s opening narration! Then of course it desires to suck blood from a teat which grows out of the woman’s thigh!

That’s the myth in its broadest strokes, though what’s missing is an explanation of why anyone would want butter that badly! Perhaps I’m not properly appreciating the level of privation on Icelandic farms, but surely there must be more desirable commodities than butter! At any rate, the story is set at the opening of the war, in the spring and summer of 1940, when the little island nation is overrun by British soldiers on the lookout for Germans! A goonybird pastor’s son called Audun, who scarfs down dairy products as quickly as his slavering jaws can consume them, goes to Reykjavík in search of a bigger swimming pool in which to practice his distinctive leaping stroke, and also is asked to keep an eye on Gudrún, a young lady from the town whose father is worried about her in the free-living environs of the capitol!

And so he should be, because Gudrún has conjured a tilburi! He takes the form of Major Tilbury, a big-nosed British officer, who rides around in a sidecar and distributes Cadbury chocolate to the children! Ha ha! From there the tale darkens considerably, as everyone dances to the “Let’s All Go To The Lobby” intermission song and Major Tilbury begins to show off his butter-redistribution skills as well as his Freddy Krueger fingernails!

At times the picture seems like one of the early gentle comedies of Bill Forsyth, at others more like a piece of filmed experimental theatre a la Futz! At still other moments it’s downright horrific; in fact this hour-long TV drama manages more affrights in its scant running time than the entire Friday the 13^th film series! It makes plain the otherness of the creature, and its seperateness from the Icelandic population, by equating it with the British and American soldiers who have overwhelmed the country; and the more so by making the tilburi an officer rather than an enlisted man! By the end an American Tilbury has showed up, and he distributes Hershey chocolate instead of Cadbury!

I enjoyed this curious photoplay, and I recommend it to all! It’s not a lavish piece of cinema, but it’s a highly effective one, and has that great Icelandic sense of humour without diluting any of the scariness! I give Tilbury three basement Nazis!

Burl reviews The Guns of Navarone! (1961)

Like a false Englishman it’s Burl, here with a review for you! It’s a World War II picture today, a purely fictional one, but a reasonably thrilling and involving tale of derring-do nevertheless! Yes, I’m here to tell you now about the big-budget Columbia Pictures British-American superproduction The Guns of Navarone!

Ha ha, you’ve probably heard of this one! It was a big hit in its day, with a multinational cast of stars and a solid hook on which to hang its story! We start with Gregory Peck from Spellbound, arriving on a plane to meet up with the jolly-looking James Robertson Justice! Ha ha, now there’s an actor I’d like to see more of! Anyway, the mission is to destroy two giant guns the Nazis have set up in the Aegean Sea so that a British flotilla is able to sail past and rescue a couple of thousand stranded soldiers! Ha ha, David Niven from Murder By Death, Anthony Quinn from The Last Action Hero, Anthony Quayle, Stanley Baker, and Moondoggie himself, James Darren, make up the rest of the commando brigade!

The urgency of the mission, the near-impossibility of it (enhanced by the assumption by chief planner Justice that it is impossible), and the consequences should it fail, are set out with great clarity in the early part of the picture! From there it’s a series of suspenseful near-misses and daredevil cliffclimbing actions and bursts of gunfire and unfortunate setbacks! Ha ha, it truly seems like an ill-fated venture for the sextet, even after they meet up with two lady members of the Greek Resistance, doughty Irene Papas and beautiful, mute Gia Scala!

Perhaps to offset the presentation of wartime as a grand, if risky, boys’ adventure story, there is plenty of dialogue about the ethics of doing this or that ruthless action on behalf of the greater good! Ha ha, there’s perhaps a bit too much of it, in fact, though I appreciate the general anti-war sentiment that is the cumulative effect of these often heated discussions! And you didn’t often see Peck shout and bluster and wave his gun around, but by the last act, wracked with guilt and uncertainty, that’s what he’s doing all right!

A curious thing about Peck’s character: he’s supposed to be an Englishman, but Peck makes no attempt whatever to put on an accent or use English phraseology! Ha ha, this lack of limey jargon could be because the script was written by American screenwriter/producer Carl Foreman, then fresh off the blacklist! In any case, I spent most of the movie assuming Peck was supposed to be a visiting American, and I assume many other viewers assumed the same!

In the end, The Guns of Navarone is nothing more than a solid Hollywood product with pretty fair trick effects (though the cliffclimbing scene is pretty obviously just the actors flat on their bellies!) and some noble intentions! It’s thoroughly middlebrow, reasonably entertaining, and fun to pair up with something like 10 to Midnight or Happy Birthday To Me, which came from the same director, J. Lee Thompson! The big guns at the end are a little creepy, but impressive; and it’s satisfying to see the Nazis who’ve been running the things get blown to flinders! Ha ha! I give The Guns of Navarone two and a half surprise popout seagulls!

Burl reviews The Train! (1964)

Ha ha and rolling stock, it’s Burl, here to review a fantastic movie about a train - and guess what, it’s called The Train! That’s right, it’s the wartime action drama from John Frankenheimer, who also brought us such winners as Prophecy and The Manchurian Candidate! The picture is laid in France as the Liberation approaches, and the Nazis, at the behest of a German colonel called Von Waldheim, played by the terrific performer Paul Scofield, are collecting great artworks from the Paris museums and shipping them to Berlin by puff-puff!

Burt Lancaster, whom we know so well from The Osterman Weekend and Local Hero, plays Labiche, a railway yardmaster who’s also part of the Resistance! When he’s asked to use his rail-based sabotage network to stop the art train, he initially scoffs! Ha ha, he says, a bunch of paintings aren’t worth the lives of several fellows! But others in his group feel more strongly about it, and when they start acting to slow or stop the train, Labiche has no choice but to join in and do his best to foil the Nazis! Quickly he becomes the number-one enemy to the increasingly art-obsessed Von Waldheim!

Ha ha, I became a big fan of this picture the moment I first saw it, which was actually at an art gallery as part of some kind of film series they were doing! The movie clearly respects, even cherishes, the crucial role of art in human society, but as more and more partisans are killed in the effort to save the Picassos, Cézannes, Braques, Renoirs, Mìros etc. etc. from the Nazis, the tough questions are asked: how many lives are a trainload of paintings worth? Ha ha, or, is that even a fair equation?

Of course the picture has a fantastic French cast: Jeanne Moreau is in there as a wan war widow; Suzanne Flon and Albert Rémy both make appearances, and the great Michel Simon plays the dyspeptic Papa Boule! And there are Germans too of course, most notably Wolfgang Preiss, who was always playing German officers in pictures like Von Ryan’s Express (another wartime train picture, ha ha!), and who plays another one here! He does a particularly good job of it, and is a good foil for Scofield, particularly near the end!

But the puff-puff itself might be the real star! Well, ha ha, I’d give it and Lancaster equal billing I suppose, because both turn in the most extraordinarily physical performances! Lancaster is forever sliding down ladders, leaping on and falling off moving trains, rolling down hills and leaping over gullies, often while in real life suffering from a leg injured when he stepped into a gopher hole while golfing on his day off! Meanwhile the train steams grimly ahead, slipping off sabotaged rails or charging ahead like black lighting, a scream of warning issuing from its whistle!

There’s a great train collision that has to be seen to be believed, and this was accomplished not with models or other trickery, but by simply smashing one real train into another, at speed! Ha ha, my hat is tipped to Frankenheimer, his great camera crew, and all the stunt and trick effects folk who worked so hard to make this spectacle! And we should pour one out to all the cameras that obviously got mangled while capturing, in their last moments, these titanic clashes of steam, wood and metal! Ha ha, this is a fine war picture, and I give The Train three and a half one-franc pieces!

Burl reviews It Happened Here! (1965)

Sieg ha ha, it’s Burl once again, and I’m here to review a movie on a pretty somber subject! That’s right, it’s a What If picture, and, as usual, the question is What If Those Horrible Nazis Won? The movie is called It Happened Here, and it’s a British semi-amateur production that took almost ten years to make!

Ha ha, the story behind the making of it is one worth telling! The picture was made by the famed historian and reconstructurist Kevin Brownlow, who became something of a legend to me around the time he was working so hard on Abel Gance’s Napoleon! He co-directed it with Andrew Mollo, whose devotion to accuracy in war costuming is known across the world! And these two worthies were but teenagers when they began this project! (Ha ha, Mollo was the brother of John Mollo, the famous costume designer, who also was obsessed with period military garb! Ha ha, two of them in one family!)

Brownlow and Mollo weren’t old and grey when they finished it, but they must have felt it at times! With a star whose age visibly fluctuates over the decade-long shoot; stylish work from the very talented cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, who later shot The Empire Strikes Back and many David Cronenberg pictures, like A Dangerous Method; and a little post-production financial and logistical help from friends, they finally completed and released the movie in 1965, and it got plenty of attention!

The shooting conditions certainly informed the storytelling, which is episodic and sometimes appealingly choppy! Our main character is Pauline, a nurse, whom we meet in an England that has been beaten and occupied by Hitler’s armies! After a partisan attack on German soldiers claims a number of Pauline’s friends, she ends up in London and decides to tread as central and apolitical a path as she can! She joins the Immediate Action group (“a name that sounds like a laxative,” one of the more sympathetic characters opines) and engages in nursing work - a job that eventually turns nightmarish!

Pauline, played by a non-actor also called Pauline, has a compelling face and an accent that, when the poor sound recording allows, gives charming hints of her Irish background! The style of the film, and the way the action scenes, and Pauline’s reactions to the horrors of fascist occupation, are presented, are impressionistic and decidedly modern; one can’t be sure at which points the talents of Brownlow and Mollo end and the exigencies of a paltry budget begin! The movie has a few professional performers in it, notably Sebastian Shaw playing an antifascist doctor! Ha ha, if he looks familiar it’s because he would go on to play the unmasked Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi! And yes, John Mollo designed that mask, and yes, he based it on German army helmets! Ha ha, and so the wheel turns!

It Happened Here has a newsreel authenticity to it (little wonder Suschitzky went on to shoot Peter Watkins’ The War Game, ha ha!), but this verisimilitude tips into creepiness when we realize that Brownlow and Mollow found some genuine Oswald Mosely-style British fascists to play some of the collaborators, and spew some of their actual loathsome views! Others are merely actors who are frighteningly good at pretending to be people who’ve embraced the twisted cross and all that comes along with it!

Of course there is much sad relevance to our situation today! A number of European countries, and our fair neighbours to the south with their loopy, pan-fried president, seem engaged in flirtatious dances with, or indeed outright embraces of, this troublingly inhumane ideology! More and more we hear something close to the rants of O’Brien from 1984 coming from the lips of authoritarian goofballs! And while this picture has an ostensibly happy ending, it’s a barbed one, both for our character and for the future of humanity! “The appalling thing about fascism is that you’ve got to use fascist methods to get rid of it,” says Shaw’s doctor. “We’ve all got a bit of it in us. It doesn’t take very much to bring it to the surface.” And therein lies the message of the film, and its warning! It’s an extraordinary work in many ways, and I give It Happened Here three and a half boots stamping on a human face - forever!

Burl reviews Lassiter! (1984)

Hut hut, it’s Burl! That’s right – Burl talking! I’m here to review a picture that’s long been forgotten and swept into the dustbin, and that picture is called Lassiter! Ring any bells? Ha ha, I thought not!

You might be more familiar with the picture’s star, Tom Selleck, who of course is well known for his roles in Terminal Island and Midway, and, of course, High Road to China! He stars as Lassiter, of course, who is a jewel thief living in pre-war London for reasons of his own! Lassiter seems to have a pretty good life: he creeps around in the houses of the rich, plunders their valuables and then goes home to his taxi dancer girlfriend, Jane Seymour – Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman herself!

But then suddenly an extremely angry Bob Hoskins shows up in the company of a meek FBI man (played by Joe Regalbuto from The Sword and the Sorcerer) and demands that Lassiter must steal diamonds from the Nazis! Ha ha, Lassiter doesn’t want to, but they pressure him pretty hard! The rest of the picture involves Lassiter refusing this offer he can’t refuse, and planning the job, and then figuring out how he can get away from the nasty Hoskins, who actually presents more of a threat than the Germans!

It’s June of 1939 in this scenario, so the war is a couple of months away from being on in earnest! I guess then it makes sense that the Nazis would never seem particularly threatening, but on the other hand they make such attempts to create nasty antagonists – the sadistic dragon-lady played by Lauren “Malone” Hutton, and a brutal henchman essayed by none other than Dim from A Clockwork Orange – that the failure is particularly notable, and egregious!

For most of its running time, the picture seems to be completely twist-free, with everyone expressing their motivations and intentions with complete honesty! Ha ha, thankfully the last act features a bit of double-dealing, but it’s too little and too late I’m afraid!

Selleck and his period-inappropriate moustache engage in a few lite-action scenes, but they’re never very exciting, and are scored with completely the wrong sort of music! Sure, the tootling jazz music may be of the time, but it drains the picture of any suspense or excitement in might otherwise have managed! Ha ha, why not use, say, the sort of music that you’d have found in the crime movies of 1939? A much better choice!

The picture had a medium-decent budget, and some talented people behind the camera! But it’s not the lavish style-fest the poster implies, and is often a little bland in its execution! The director (a nice guy – ha ha, I worked with him once!) mostly does TV, and that shows here, I think, even if he does try to spice things up with a little nudity and kinkiness! Ha ha, and the Nazi dragon lady bit is so ludicrously overdone as to be ha-ha-halarious!

The thing that might have saved the picture, even in the absence of style, suspense and complex plotting, would have been a performance of Cary Grant-level charisma from Selleck! But, sadly, he’s pretty boring here! He manages to deliver a few lines pretty well (“Why, has my hair turned white?”), but there’s no pep to his performance, and very little to the film itself either! I give Lassiter one and a half end credits theme songs by Taco!

Burl reviews Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade! (1989)

Ha ha, yi-yi-yi-yi, it’s Burl! I’m here to review the third and should’ve-been-final Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade! This is the one that features a delightful performance from Sean Connery as Indiana Jones’s father, one of the most perfect pieces of casting (Scots accent notwithstanding) since Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl in Popeye!

The Indiana Jones movies are one of those series in which each entry is just a little bit (or, by the time you get to the Crystal Skull, a lot) worse than their predecessor! But all of them, or the first three anyway, qualify as robustly entertaining, if hocus-pocus filled, slabs of primo Hollywood entertainment! Ha ha, ever since I sat in the theatre and stared wide-eyed at the spiders and snakes and melting faces of the original chapter (while idly wondering how Indy could ride a submarine out into the middle of the ocean), I’ve been an unabashed fan of the series!

This installment is as propulsive and spectacular as any of them, while leaning even more on the hocus and the pocus and the soggy scenes of myth-swallowing! It’s all about the search for the Holy Grail, which you’d think would be slightly dangerous territory given the spectacular Monty Python treatment of the same subject just fifteen years earlier! But the Indy picture negotiates that obstacle simply by being very exciting and frequently funny! For a movie which features Nazis, book-burning and a cameo by Hitl*r, it really is quite amusing!

There are lots of glances back toward the other Indy pictures, like a reference to the Ark of the Covenant and a scene involving not snakes or bugs but rats! There are even references to future Spielberg pictures – for example, he does an early version of that gag from Schindler’s List in which a single bullet is used to kill several people standing in a row!

There’s a whole opening sequence in which River Phoenix, star of Stand By Me and Explorers, plays a young Indy, and demonstrates how he collected his chin scar, his fear of snakes, his taste for the whip and his signature headgear all in the same eventful day! Then the movie gives us a few relatively quiet scenes showing Indy in teaching mode and hanging out with Denholm Elliot – I was fond of these scenes in Lost Ark and felt their absence in Temple of Doom – and after that it’s off to the races!

There’s something very 1989 about this picture, as opposed to the staunch 1982ness of the first one, and for that reason alone Last Crusade stands as a lesser entry! The villains, too, are a little weak, even though one’s a N*zi! But I still can’t help but enjoy it, particularly when we get a wonderful zeppelin scene, or Connery says, apropos of his diary, “I should have shent it to the Marxsh Brothersh!"

For these delights and others, I award Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade two and a half Xshs marking the shpot!

Burl reviews Zone Troopers! (1985)

Hi, ha ha, it’s Burl to review one of those Charles Band productions from the 1980s! I actually saw a few of these things in the theater if you can believe it, pictures like Ghoulies, The Dungeonmaster and of course Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn! Looking back it seems incredible that such cheeseball little movies ever saw the light of a cinema projector, but these were different times!

I don’t know what sort of theatrical release Zone Troopers got, but I don’t think it ever made it to my neck of the woods! I didn’t even bother catching it on video ever, so when I recently spied a VHS copy for sale in a Times Square video shoppe – ha ha, I was just there for the regular movies, I swear! – I snapped it up! (Turns out the movie just got some kind of on-demand DVD release or something, so maybe that’s why someone dumped their VHS!)

It’s a WWII story, set in Italy in 1944 during the hard-fought Allied campaign up that benighted peninsula! There’s a big Wehrmacht assault at the beginning which thins the squadron of Yanks down to four: The Sarge, Mittens, Joey and a newly-arrived war correspondent named Dolan! This is pretty much our cast for the rest of the movie, though there are some Nazis (with a special appearance by Hitler, ha ha!) and some aliens. And of course there’s the main alien, who’s been trapped by the Germans and who looks like a mime with the head of a spider! And he eats cigarettes for dinner!

The doughboys save him and manage to reunite him with his alien friends (who don’t have bug heads, but certainly possess frosted tips), and they get some help in vanquishing the Wehrmacht! Not all of these old boys make it through the adventure, though, so the ending is bittersweet!

This movie is pretty beloved in some circles, and I guess it has a nice pulpy feel, a modicum of ambition and a little more wit and intelligence than your average cheap programmer! Certainly it outdoes most of the other Empire pictures of the day! I was prepared to really like Tim Thomerson’s performance as the Iron Sarge, since he’s perfect for the role and also is someone I’ve met and hung out with, and who was a nice guy, very funny! But he overdoes the squarejaw routine here, and his performance is pretty lifeless, never conveying the legendary aura the Sarge is clearly supposed to have!

I actually preferred the performances of the guy who played Dolan, the correspondent – he was a doughy middle-aged guy, but he had an appealing surfer’s drawl that I thought fit the part well! You believed he might be a writer! The fellow who played Mittens was good too, and the scene where he slugs Hitler in the jaw is pretty delightful! The alien, meanwhile, is kind of forgettable, and not a terribly good trick effect! It was created by John Buechler, but it’s no Cellar Dweller, ha ha!

The movie’s certainly not unenjoyable, but there’s not that much to it! It’s hard to rate a movie that rises above expectations but falls short of possibilities, so I’ll just give it two Kilroy drawings and leave it at that!

Burl reviews The Keep! (1983)

Hello! Yes, you guessed it, it’s Burl! I’m here to review an old Michael Mann movie called The Keep! This one’s pretty hard to find unless you’re a VHS collector like me, but if you enjoy the films of Mann, particularly Manhunter, you might find the effort worthwhile!

Apparently the original cut of this movie was three hours long, which is not as unusual as you might think, but in this case, being cut down to 93 minutes resulted in a very oddball and choppy movie indeed! It’s not so much that the story is hard to follow, though there are certain aspects which could really use some clarification, but the movie feels rather like it was made from a treatment rather than a fleshed-out screenplay!

So as I’ve read the book it was based on and have seen the movie several times over the years (I even saw it in the theatre!), I was tempted to review not the movie, but the movie I imagine Michael Mann would have released if he could! (He was pretty clout-free in those days, I guess!) However, that seems a little pointless, since none of us can watch that picture, and I’m fairly sure that, even if the elements were still locked away in the Paramount vaults somewhere, and were made available to him, Mann will never bother trying to piece together a director’s cut! Still, ha ha, you never know!

The story is set in Romania in the earlier days of the Second World War! German soldiers truck into a little town and set up camp in an old castle-like structure, which soon proves to harbor something even nastier than Nazis! At least, that’s what the movie wants you to think, but as the creature only kills Nazis and, at least in the final cut, gives no hints as to his larger goals, he comes off as rather a decent chap!

Soon SS-Einsatzkommondo Sturmbannfuhrer Gabriel Byrne arrives, believing the killings are the work of partisan villagers! He starts shooting people at random, hoping to smoke the partisans out, but no such luck! The highly mysterious and purple-eyed Scott Glenn, whom we recall from The Right Stuff, shows up almost but not quite wearing his net shirt from Urban Cowboy, and is soon making sweet love to the pretty daughter of a Jewish academic played by Ian McKellen in old age makeup! As in Heaven Can Wait, we get to see an actor we now know as an old man in speculative old man drag years before actually becoming an old man! But the supernatural creature makes a deal with the old professor, and zaps him young again! 

However, even the indescribably ancient power of this ferocious being is no match for Ian McKellen’s eyebags! It all leads to a finale involving many, many optical effects and colorful animations, courtesy of special effects man Wally Veevers, whose final film this was! Speaking of the special effects, I want to mention the great smoke effects used to cloak the monster during one excellent scene where he saves the professor’s daughter from a rape attempt, and then carries her back to her room! Really cool trick effects, I have to say!

In the end, though, despite several nice visual moments and some committed thesping, the movie is just too nonsensical to rate very highly! Also, I have to say, the Tangerine Dream score is a little bit bonkers, and frankly kind of chortle-worthy! I certainly appreciate the attempt to do something different, but in this case it didn’t really work! Sorry Mann! I give this movie, or at least the truncated cut of it, one and a half glowing nickel crosses!