Burl reviews Talking Walls! (1987)

 

Ha ha, it’s Burl - sheep room activated! Unfortunately, to know what that means you have to have seen Talking Walls, and you probably haven’t! That may be for the best, but I’ll be happy to tell you all you need to know about this curious picture so that you can decide for yourself!

Why is it curious? Well, first of all, it comes from a director whose previous picture, released almost a decade earlier, was a sort of gritty, downmarket On Golden Pond/Death Wish mash-up featuring Lee Strasberg and Ruth Gordon as an elderly couple trying to survive in a rapidly de-gentrifying Bronx! It was called Boardwalk, and in no way by watching it could you have predicted the coming, only nine years later, of Talking Walls!

Our alleged hero in this newer picture, Paul, is played as a real weirdo by Stephen Shellen from Gimme an ‘F’; and no wonder, because the character is indeed a big old motel-living, emotionally adolescent weirdo! He’s a sociology student trying to complete a PhD on “personal relationships” or some such bumblefuzz, and proposes to his professor, played by Barry Primus from Boxcar Bertha, that he gather his data by peeping on the various guests populating (on an hourly basis) the motel he lives at!

To this end he cuts through the motel walls and floors with a demented pervert’s energy, waving a skilsaw around and laughing maniacally as he installs his two-way mirrors and cameras! He records a parade of yolk-faced fartmongers as they play bohankie with ladies (some professionals, others not) in the various theme rooms! Yes, there’s a sheep room, and the theme in there appears to be sheep, but not erotic garter-wearing sheep as we saw in Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (but were afraid to ask)! There’s also a car room, a shoe room, and some others I can’t rightly remember!

So he observes, but is such a poor scholar and abjectly stupid person that he learns absolutely nothing, for which his professor regularly upbraids him! “But I have all the latest equipment!” whines Paul! “It’s got to tell me somethin’ about how people are feelin’!” Meanwhile, the motel guests keep up their performative erotica for the benefit of Paul’s cameras and thermographs, and the picture turns into a series of sexual skits, like If You Don't Stop It... You'll Go Blind!!! or one of those kinds of movies!

There are some familiar faces in the theme bedrooms! Sybil Danning from Howling II, Karen Leigh Hopkins from The Running Man, June Wilkinson from The Bellboy and the Playgirls, and Sally Kirkland from Hometown U.S.A. are just some of the ladies; and the fellows include Don Calfa from Return of the Living Dead, Hunter Von Leer from Halloween II, Peter Liapis from Ghoulies, Mickey Jones from Starman, and Richard Partlow from Alligator! Ha ha, it’s quite a gang!

Finally Paul tries dating a real woman, who turns out to be a Pac-Man playing French lady he finds attractive! Her name is Jeanne, and she’s played by Marie Laurin from Creature, and there’s a long montage of them kissing in picturesque places to the sounds of the worst softrock song of all time! Ha ha, bleargh! Of course the relationship goes south when he won’t let her see his place, because then she’ll know what a desperate pervert he is! The old man who owns the motel – my favourite character by a long chalk, ha ha! – counsels flowers, so Paul steals the ones the old man had just bought his wife, and books the cloud room for his anticipated bohankie! But there’s a twist ending, and it drives Paul mad and has him huffing from a big glass pipe and hallucinating a sort of music video that declares him to be on “The Losing Side of Love!”

It’s a weird movie when you get down to it! The protagonist seems so daft and damaged, and his oddball nature infects the entire picture! He videotapes everything, so much of the movie is literally from his perspective, and it's not a perspective any sensible person wants! There are unexpected intrusions of actual craft now and then, but these only make the whole thing weirder, and in any case nothing could possibly overcome the intolerable character of Paul, a petulant, whiny sociopath who wears leather pants for a scene of dramatic climax, then ends up driving the streets yelling “FIND HER! FIND HER! WHERE IS SHE!” There's more after this - ha ha, it seems to go on and on - but it all eventually wraps up in what I suppose was meant to be a happy ending!

The picture feels about eight times longer than it really is! It’s an extremely curious and off-putting thing, with only the charming old man and the weirdness to make it even worth a mention! I can’t say for sure that it was worth watching, but, as with other bizzarities like Mid-Knight Rider or The Worm Eaters, once it's over you know you’ve seen something most other people never will! I give Talking Walls one recalcitrant Coke machine!

Burl reviews Suture! (1993)

 

All for the love of monochrome, it’s Burl, here to review one of the genre/arthouse gems of the 1990s! Ha ha, actually, this sort of thing was perhaps not as au courant in the 90s as we citizens of the future believe it to have been! I know that’s probably a confusing statement, so I’ll clarify by giving an example! Movies like, say, The Daytrippers, ha ha: that was the sort of thing people went to the arthouses to see back in those days! Movies like this one, Suture, counted more as oddball curiosities!

But it’s an attractive oddball, that’s for sure! It was shot in a widescreen black and white format, which is one of my favourites! The images are very composed and frequently striking, and the black-and-whiteness is in fact part and parcel of the movie’s larger themes! And of course some say that the style and pictorial elegance either overwhelms any meat the film might have, or intentionally serves to disguise that there isn’t much meat at all! Ha ha, well, let’s see for ourselves!

The picture opens with the arrival of a man named Clay in Phoenix, Arizona, where he meets his estranged brother Vincent who looks just like him! Except Clay, a friendly and decent fellow, is black - he’s played by Dennis Haysbert from Heat and Absolute Power - while cold, distant Vincent, played by Michael Harris from Satan’s Princess, has a resemblance to Nick Cave if he were more prissy and ratlike! We soon realize that this disconnect between what we see and what the characters see is simply one of the movie’s affectations - there’s no narrative payoff to this!

Vincent is very rich, the more so thanks to the recent murder-death of his (and Clay’s) father! But Vincent is a suspect in this murder, so his plan is to blow Clay up by use of radio-phone, then use their startling resemblance to each other to assume Clay’s life while inheriting their father's money! But Clay survives the explosion, though both his mug and his brain panel are damaged, and he must undergo facial reconstruction surgery at the hands of the rather too-obviously named Dr. Renée Descartes, played by Mel Harris from Wanted: Dead of Alive and another twins thriller, Raising Cain!

Much of the middle act is Clay receiving this therapy and becoming comfortable with the identity of Vincent! Ha ha, of course he has amnesia, so he believes he’s Vincent because everybody tells him he is! His psychiatrist Dr. Shinoda, played by Sab Shimono from Gung Ho and Blind Date, takes a liking to him and helps him along, and soon Dr. Descartes takes a shine to him too! Meanwhile Vincent’s friend and lawyer, Alice, an older lady played by Dina Merrill from The Player, nurses a longstanding crush on him and tries to kindle his affections! Is it because he’s very rich? No, Alice seems sincere in her reserved ardour! And also meanwhile, a cop played by David Graf from Police Academy investigates Vincent’s part in the murder of the father, along with the connected but non-fatal shooting of an old housekeeper played by Fran Ryan from The Sure Thing and Quiet Cool! And of course the third act will see the return of the real Vincent, prissily teed off that his initial murder attempt didn’t work!

So it’s got some Hitchcockian thriller elements to it, and some psychological mystery bits, as when Clay relates his dreams of transforming into a car to Dr. Shinoda (shades of Spellbound, speaking of Hitch!); but mostly it seems to be a somewhat inchoate meditation on self identity and so forth! The situation is so contrived and the film's reality so artificial that it also serves as a commentary on the relationship between art and truth! But while it clearly has more in its sporran than simple suspense-thrills, there remains nevertheless a slight feeling of “Hmph, so that’s it?” when the thing is done! And yet I can’t call it unsatisfying!

No, for me the solid acting, confident direction, gleaming widescreen black-and-white photography rendered it a perfectly enjoyable viewing experience! I might have liked it better back in 1993 when I saw the movie at a late and much-mourned rep cinema in my town that used to bring in all manner of terrific movies, and spiced up the experience with a mobile of model jet planes that had been hung in front of the screen! Ha ha! They also for some reason had a model airplane mounted on the wall in a frame! Anyway, they screened Suture back in the day, I enjoyed it, and now that I’ve watched it again I’m going to give it three party hats!

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 Corpse Eaters! (1974)

Ha ha, I’m not crazy, I’m no-o-o-ot! No, ha ha, I’m Burl, here with a movie review that might make you think I am crazy! But, just as a character in the movie itself screechily claims at the end of the picture, I’m not! I'm no-o-o-ot! The movie is real, and it is called Corpse Eaters!

This is one of those little regional zombie pictures of the early 1970s, very much in the same category as something like Garden of the Dead or Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things! For that matter, I guess it’s a pretty direct, if badly mutated, offspring of Night of the Living Dead, itself a penny-poor regional zombie picture, but one pulled off with a lot more professionalism and flair than Corpse Eaters! Ha ha! But I certainly don’t mean to imply that Corpse Eaters is entirely lacking in charm and zombie interest - no sir, it most certainly has a measure of that!

The story takes place somewhere near the mining community of Sudbury, Ontario, and features characters with Canadian accents so thick they sound Irish! Initial scenes are set at the Happy Halo Funeral Home, where a scruffy old grump runs the show, but doesn’t think much of his customers! He seems to have a real grudge against dead people in fact, which is bad, because he works with them every day! In any case, a mustachioed corpse comes in who needs some special facial reconstruction work done, and as his mortician gets to work, the Happy Halo owner strolls around his boneyard, musing nasty thoughts in voice-over!

Ha ha, dissolve to the lake, and to a little hard-boating action! A little gang of pals, including Ritchie (whom I didn’t realize until later was the corpse delivered to the Happy Halo in the opening scenes), zoom about in their watercraft, then repair to the shore to guzzle a little Molson Ex and engage in bohankie! Well, one of the couples does at least, which is to say Ritchie and his good-time gal Julie; the other pair, a fiveheaded hoser called Alan and his perpetually grouchy girlfriend Lisa, can only watch this sloppy, beer-soaked bohankie from the sidelines! Before too long, and over the strenuous, and as it turns out, well-justified objections of Lisa, the quartet end up in a remote graveyard, hiding from the rain in a handy crypt!

Ritchie is keen on enacting a satanic ritual he learned from his uncle, and this is where it all goes pear-shaped! Zombies unearth themselves and come to put a biting on the foursome! Julie is quickly overwhelmed and the flaky-skinned cadavers have a good old belly-munch; Ritchie, the fool who caused it all with his hocus-pocus and mumbo-jumbo, catches a heavy biting, and the other two drag him to the car (a Challenger or a Cougar from about 1970 - I couldn’t tell which in the grainy 16mm murk, but it was sure sweet!) and drive him to the hospital! Ha ha! But nothing the medicos do can help Richie, and he ends up at the Happy Halo, as Lisa meanwhile endures terrible zombie nightmares and is consoled in the most jerkish, responsibility-dodging manner possible by the gormless Alan!

The Happy Halo man, deep in his cups, is startled by noises, and when he sees a zombie pulling out a guy’s eyeballs, his mind simply snaps! There’s no real conclusion to the story save the funeral home director being roughed up by orderlies (and, charmingly, you can actually hear one of the actors apologize during this scene - ha ha someone must have accidentally stepped on someone else's foot) and left in a room all strait-jacketed up and howling that he’s not crazy! He’s no-o-o-ot!

Well, after 57 minutes of crude but heartfelt Sudbury moviemaking, the picture ends with the viewer’s goodwill intact! Ha ha, that’s an achievement in itself, and one worth celebrating! Corpse Eaters is not a film for everyone, and the little gimmick of the warning siren and the barfing man, meant to signal an upcoming sequence of grotesque and sickening gore, is not required for those who might be enthusiastic to make its acquaintance! If it’s a diamond in the rough, there’s an awful lot of rough, but those who might appreciate it most definitely will! Ha ha! I give Corpse Eaters two Evinrude outboards!

Burl reviews Strange Cargo! (1940)

 

That’s right, it’s Burl, baby! Ha ha, yes, I’d like to review a very odd drama, and for those who watch this picture and say to themselves, “Ha ha, that was certainly strange,” well, just remember that you were warned! The picture is after all entitled Strange Cargo!

It’s a Devil’s Island story, naturally, like Papillon! Clark Gable and Joan Crawford, who’d appeared together a whole bunch of pictures before this, including Love on the Run, are the stars, with Gable as an escape-obsessed prisoner and Crawford as a local prostitute! They both have pretty hard lives and are ready to leave the area, but there are all sorts of obstacles! Gable not only has to break out of the jail, negotiate the jungle and cross the water, but he has trouble with the other prisoners too, one of whom, a fellow called Moll who’s played by Albert Dekker from Kiss Me Deadly and The Wild Bunch, goes so far as to bonk Gable on the head with a shoe! One doesn't weep too hard for him though, because Gable's playing a real jerk here!

Crawford, for her part, has repeated run-ins with the slimy Mr. Pig, played by Peter Lorre from My Favorite Brunette! Ha ha, I always like seeing Lorre in a movie, and this is the sort of part he could do with his eyes shut tight! He’s good, though! And so is Dekker, and also Paul Lukas, from Grumpy and 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea, playing another prisoner, a Mr. Suavetoast who likes to first marry and then kill rich old ladies!

It all revolves around a group escape attempt, but the bone-deep oddness of this movie comes to the fore with the introduction of a character called Cambreau, played by Ian Hunter, who of course played The Man From Toronto! Cambreau is, right from the start, a Christ figure, preternaturally calm and always right about everything, who encourages his fellow escapees to seek redemption as they die during the jungle trek and long, windless sea voyage! Ha ha! Gable, however, steadfastly resists the Jesusness, figuring that he’s well beyond absolution, until the end when he can resist it no longer! By the last few scenes in the picture, director Handsome Frank Borzage is laying it on pretty thick, putting Hunter’s character in the sea with his arms spread out Christ-like across a piece of flotsam, while a lame fisherman informs Gable, who’s now going full Barabbas, that he is the only one who can save the floundering deity!

All of this goes well beyond allegory and into the sort of Bible stories that would become popular in later decades, like The Greatest Story Ever Told and The Ten Commandments and The Robe and of course John Huston’s picture The Bible! But the weirdness is that this movie still believes itself to be an allegory and not a literal Bible story transposed to the modern day! However, ha ha, I don’t hold that against the picture! In fact, all the oddness attendant with this concept, and the self-delusion required to carry it off is, as ever, a mark in the movie’s favour! And it’s well-acted and well-directed, and features an exotic location, and is altogether unusual! I enjoyed this crazy thing and feel that it lived up to its title! I give Strange Cargo three torn strips of dress-cloth!

Burl reviews The Naked Flame! (1964)

 

Good day, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m in the mountains today to review a picture about Doukhobor unrest in the airy peaks of Alberta Province! Ha ha, this is an odd one all right - a combination of wilderness adventure, romance drama, cultural study and nudie picture, all wrapped into a thing known variously as Deadline For Murder and The Naked Flame!

I’ve chosen to review it under the latter title, because there are flames and nudity in the same frame, but, although there is murder, it’s not committed on any kind of deadline! The tale takes place in a small mountain town populated by both Doukhobors and regular folk! The Doukhobors, a religious group also known as Freedomites or Sons of Freedom, were fond of protesting things by stripping off their clothes and occasionally burning things down, and therein lies the exploitation hook!

Our characters include lovey-dovey young couple, Bob (Barton Heyman from The Secret of My Success) and Cathy; and whereas she is a Freedomite, he is not, and this kind of intermingling is evidently frowned on by the sect! Meanwhile the local bully-man, Sorkin, a slobby, bearded Son of Freedom with a thick but unplaceable accent, wants Cathy for his bride, and so is happy to gin up the Doukhobor outrage against her union with Bob! Bob’s father, who manages the local mine and is played by Mort Van Ostrand, is against the union, and Cathy’s father, a Sven Svensson type, had at one point apparently betrothed his daughter to the unspeakable Sorkin without her knowledge! Into all this wades a mining company lawyer called Paul, played by Dennis O’Keefe from Top Hat and The Leopard Man, who is there to investigate the culture clash, but has his own history with the Doukhobors! Indeed, he too had fallen for a Freedomite girl, Elena, played by Kasey Rogers from When Worlds Collide, but she now hates him for helping imprison her brother on charges of arson!

While the Freedomite ladies of the town get their kit off and fire up the torches to protest Paul’s return, the nasty Sorkin, played by Al Ruscio from Deadly Force and Jagged Edge, feels some incendiary urges of his own! He lights Cathy’s house on fire, then, when she runs out, pursues her in a weird little foot chase, then - thankfully off screen - rapes and strangles her! When Cathy’s body is found, Bob swears blood vengeance on the perpetrator; and then when Sorkin is blasted with a shotgun by persons unknown, Bob is the natural suspect! He flees and is caught by a Mountie with a radio announcer voice, and Paul, believing him innocent, becomes his lawyer for the courtroom-based final act! And yes, there’s a little murder-mystery twist ending!

It’s an odd sort of a movie, with the brief scenes of bare skin seeming both an afterthought and the central reason for the making of the film! Also, it treats the Doukhobor culture at once with a strange anthropological seriousness and an exploitative disinterest in fact! The courtroom scenes threaten to get boring, and the story perpetually promises to get a little deeper but never does! And the conclusion relies on not one deus ex machina, but two! On the other hand, the unusualness is itself an asset, and there are a few perfomances, like that of Ruscio as the dreaded Sorkin, that are perfectly entertaining! It’s not exactly a gem, but if you think you might be interested in a picture like this, it’s decidedly worth watching! I give The Naked Flame one and a half sunflower seeds!

Burl reviews Phantasm! (1978)

 

BURRRRRRL! Ha ha, no, it’s not the Tall Man, it’s me, Burl, reviewing the very first of the Phantasm pictures, which is to say Phantasm! Now, I’ve seen the picture a time or two, and I’m pretty sure I saw it back in the old days of VHS, but somehow it never really spoke to me! I liked it passably well, sure, but never concentrated on the movie hard enough to buy into the dream logic frequency it operates on! It wasn’t until Phantasm II came out in 1988, and I went to see it in the theatre, that I really began to appreciate the demento imagination behind these pictures!

Of course we know the story of Phantasm, or what passes for a story! In a small town (which is, like Haddonfield, really just cobbled together from a bunch of L.A.-adjacent locations), a teenage orphan called Mike notices strange goings-on around the local funeral home! His older brother’s buddy has just been killed, and a weird, towering, almost psychotically stern-looking undertaker is hefting coffins around like they were empty cardboard boxes, and robed dwarves are running around and then there’s that severed finger bleeding mustard, the enormous housefly, and the silver flying ball that spikes itself into people’s foreheads and drains their blood as though through a firehose! And don’t forget the tuning forks that lead to another dimension!

Ha ha, it sounds like I’m describing a weird nightmare, doesn’t it! That’s exactly the appeal of Phantasm; well, that and the hardcore 1970s After School Special atmosphere it possesses! Actually, maybe the combination of crazy metaphysical supernatural sci-fi horror and Brady Bunch melodrama is what makes the thing work the way it does! Add to that the frowny Tall Man, played by good old Angus Scrimm from Chopping Mall, and the mellow balding ponytailed hipster-jester sidekick ice cream man buddy Reggie, and an unforgettably boss HemiCuda, and you’ve got a mighty groovy concoction!  

The acting is all over the place, but every performance, however raggedy, is exactly what the picture requires! Michael Baldwin from Kenny & Company is fine as Mike, and Bill Thornbury from Summer School Teachers does what he needs to do as Jody, the older brother! Scrimm and Reggie Bannister, playing Reggie of course, are even better! The picture could use a strong female character or two, but I guess you can’t have everything!

It’s a special little movie, very 1970s, very nonsensical, and quite unique! As much as I like Phantasm II, I almost wish this original movie was a standalone phenomenon! (Ha ha, the subsequent sequels have some pleasures to offer I suppose, but in the end are pretty forgettable! At least, I’ve pretty much forgotten them!) I guess it’s not for everyone, but those who like weirdness and 1970s So-Cal blow-dry madness will find a lot to appreciate! I give this crazy movie Phantasm three giant flies in the garbarator!

Burl reviews Doin' Time on Planet Earth! (1988)

Well hello there, it’s Burl, here to review an 80s oddity for you, as I’ve done many times before! This one comes from those Golan-Globus boys, but it’s one of their more obscure efforts and an altogether kooky concoction! Believe it or not, it was directed by Walter Matthau’s son Charles, and the picture’s called Doin’ Time on Planet Earth!

I recall many years ago reading an article about this movie in a magazine called Cinemafantastique (a combination Fangoria and Starlog for the wispy-moustache set), but I nevertheless knew little about it, other than a spinning restaurant is somehow involved! Ha ha, and indeed that proved to be true! But for much of its scant running time it seems like a belated, point-missing entry in the teen science whiz subgenre, with a clever black sheep family-oddball type called Ryan who is roundly loathed or at best barely tolerated by his family!

Ryan’s dad, played by Hugh Gillin from Psycho II, runs the Holiday Inn with the spinning restaurant on top; his mom is a ghostly nonentity; his brother hates him and is about to get married (the brother’s wedding plays a bigger part here than the comparable event does in My Brother’s Wedding); and his sister, played by Paula Irvine from Phantasm II, hates him even more, in fact detests him beyond even the pathological rage of the sister in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or the justifiable contempt of the one in Teen Lust!

Meanwhile, as in an ordinary 80s high school picture, the gormless Ryan’s main concern is Losin’ It! Ha ha, and the object of his virginal desire, a lounge singer at the revolving hotel played by Andrea Thompson from Hot Splash, returns his puppy love with the same opprobrium he receives from his family! Only a weird bus-driving couple played by Adam West from The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood (and who I met at a car show once!) and Candice Azzara from Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? show Ryan any respect, and that’s because they believe him to be born of alien DNA just as they and their Heaven’s Gate-type followers are; and furthermore that he is the star navigator who will lead them back to their home planet in the spaceship that is currently disguised as a revolving Holiday Inn restaurant! Ha ha!

It’s a movie that tries to be many things at once: a high school coming-of-age comedy, an oddball comedy about feeling out of step with the world, a speculative sci-fi eccentricity! If it aspires to anything, it’s to join the ranks of Repo Man, Rubin & Ed and UFOria! But it doesn’t accomplish this to any satisfying degree, despite a few lightly amusing lines and cameos from old warhorses like Roddy McDowell from Fright Night and Heads, here playing a preacher, and Maureen Stapleton from Interiors and The Money Pit as a wacky balloon lady! Ha ha, even the big chocolate bar-munching oaf from Friday the 13^th part V shows up!

None of it works terribly well thanks to inconstant direction, some dicey performances, and a script carved from real butter! The revolving restaurant is theoretically a nice touch, and to be sure it’s featured heavily, but in the end, like the narrative itself, all it does is go round and round! (I did like the band that plays the climactic wedding party though, led by a non-singer singer called Cecil Hill!) Ha ha, I watched this with my fairly uncritical eight year-old, and even he complained about the unsatisfying resolution! Doin’ Time on Planet Earth is obscure, but, while I appreciate that it’s trying something different, and its heart is in the right place, so far as I’m concerned it’s not something that requires rediscovery; so after all is said and done I give it one and a half helium inhalations!

Burl reviews Nothing But Trouble! (1991)

Ha ha and ham candies, it’s Burl, here to review one of the stranger Celebrity Dream Projects ever to have been made: Dan Aykroyd’s Nothing But Trouble! Ha ha, I’ve been consuming information about this thing for years, but until yesterday I’d never seen it! Everything, but everything I’d heard was bad, though; and Aykroyd is by all accounts an unusual fellow, so the prospect of a weird-looking movie written and directed by him, and of course featuring him as some sort of bloated, scab-covered old man, was a daunting one! I was prepared for a truly terrible movie-viewing experience, ha ha!

The picture’s original title was Valkenvania, and I maintain that whatever timid, unimaginative studio exec decided it should instead be called Nothing But Trouble did both the picture and its legacy a grave disservice! Ha ha, what’s in a name you might say, especially if the film itself is as inept and pointlessly grotesque as people say it is! But movies, even bad ones, are fragile and finely-wrought creations, like pixies or unicorns, and so with them everything matters, and the slightest misstep can be like coughing on a house of cards!

There’s a strong comedy cast: not just Aykroyd from Ghostbusters, but also Chevy Chase from Vacation, who must have got along with Aykroyd when they worked together on Spies Like Us, and John Candy, with whom Aykroyd co-starred in The Great Outdoors! Demi Moore, well known from her role in Parasite (the original; accept no substitute, ha ha!), is in here too, along with familiar faces like Taylor Negron (with whom I had lunch once, and who was a garrulous and maximally entertaining dining companion) and Brian Doyle-Murray!

Chase plays some sort of Manhattan financial player who meets his new neighbor Moore, a lawyer, and almost immediately offers her a ride to some kind of event in Atlantic City! With two annoying faux-Brazillians tagging along, they detour through the town of Valkenvania, where they run afoul of local constable Candy! He escorts the BMW full of yuppies to Valkenvania’s reeve, an ancient crank played by Aykroyd in leperous maquillage, who entraps them in his mansion/junkyard/funhouse and torments them with conveyer belts, pop-ups, and piles of bones!

Malefactors whom the reeve likes even less are sent immediately to Mister Bonestripper, a big machine that grinds people into skeletons! Ha ha! Meanwhile, Moore is stuck with two enormous, filthy diaper babies, one of whom is also played by Aykroyd! Ha ha, with all that time in the makeup trailer it’s amazing he had time to direct the movie! But direct it he did, and while I won’t say he did a great job, I can say I’ve seen worse! The busy production design and experienced cinematographer (the portly Dean Cundey, who shot The Thing and many other fine films was behind the camera here) certainly help the picture seem professionally made!

It’s really just an elaborate comedy version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (which already had its elaborate comedy version, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2), but merely the fact that it was this story and no other that Aykroyd wanted to tell in his directorial debut is simply delightful! Ha ha, it’s true that Chase puts in a particularly low-key, possibly even lazy performance, and it’s true the narrative is shapeless and deflated, like something I might have written in high school, but I nevertheless found plenty of laffs in the picture! It’s weird and gross and goofy-bad, but it's undeniably ebullient, and I felt very much that I was on its wavelength, that I was picking up whatever it was Aykroyd was laying down! (I sort of wish I’d been wearing gloves though, ha ha!)

The big diaper babies alone make it an irresistible treat! There are some extremely annoying characters you wish could take a trip through Mister Bonestripper post-haste, but there’s also an obliging hip hop crew who perform a number and who are freed by the reeve possibly because one of them, like the reeve himself, wears a false nose; and there’s a second, mute performance by Candy as a lady with unearthly strength! I wasn’t expecting to like this picture, but I did! I give Nothing But Trouble, alias Valkenvania, three cans of Hawaiian Tropic!

Burl reviews Camera 32 27th! (199?)

Hello and welcome, it’s Burl here to review… well, not a movie exactly, but an unusual and unique VHS tape that I found lurking in my collection! The video in question has no title card, but there is a label on the tape reading Camera 32 27^th, so that’s what I’m taking as the presentation’s proper name!

Ha ha, here’s the backstory to this… unusual tape! Some years ago I was invited by an acquaintance to help out his friend, whose parents owned a skid row pawn shop, by taking all their VHS tapes off the shop’s hands! They were free, but the catch was I had to take them all, not just the ones I wanted! Well, that was no real problem, and I ended up with a hockey bag and many, many cardboard boxes filled with VHS tapes of all kinds! This haul netted me gems like Action U.S.A. along with many others!

And buried in there was Camera 32 27^th! Yes, ha ha, I wondered about it, forgot about it, unearthed it, and then, finally, down in my basement VHS room, I watched it! Well, it turns out to be a tape made by, I presume, the employees of the pawn shop, and judging by the technology and fashions on display, I’d date it to sometime in the mid-1990s!

And what did they film, these amateur outsider cinema artists? Ha ha, backsides! Yes, they seem to have trained their camera on the behinds of every female customer who dared enter their den of iniquity! It’s quite creepy, and the occasional voice you can hear, for example a low murmur asking the cameraman “You got dat ass?,” or else a short Beavis and Butthead laugh, only sharpens the feeling of being party to something unsavory and wrong!

After a few seconds of flickering images showing different angles of the front and side doors of the place (evidently this was a repurposed security camera tape), the video proper begins as it means to go on: with a close-up shot of some unsuspecting young woman’s caboose! There are a few inelegant zooms in and out, and random reframings, and then we go on to the next victim!

The buttocks-obsessed cameraman will frequently drop to the floor to find the camera angle he desires, or when needs be he’ll go hand held! It’s a camera of the id, true first-person cinema, and we can almost read the shooter’s mind as he focuses on what is clearly the object of his every waking thought! And at another point we sense the peep artist’s frustration at one young lady whose bum is unsportingly hidden by her purse!

The perpetrators of this voyeuristic outrage worked as a pair, with one of them running the camera and the other occasionally coming out in front, casually pretending to browse, then at the right moment turning to make humping motions at the ass of whatever poor woman these cretins are filming! Mercifully, both filmmakers mostly remain behind the camera, ha ha! But all of this goes on for about fifteen or twenty minutes, and a dozen or so bums, then it's back to the cycling doorway security cam footage for several more hours until the tape is done!

It’s a shameful, leering catalogue of Peeping Tom-ism, more morally reprehensible than even Getting it On!, but as a record of this particular time and place, and of these particular jerks, it’s unbeatable! If one is able to temporarily forget the invasion of privacy aspect and take it as a Yoko Ono-esque experimental work, all the better for your peace of mind! This sort of found objet d'art is really something that goes beyond any one reviewer’s rating system, but I’ll just go ahead and give Camera 32 27^th one and a half pairs of lifeguard shorts!

Burl reviews Futz! (1969)

With a guttural cry we have Burl, living it up among the avant-garde! Yes, I have a very unusual picture to review for you today: it’s Futz! Some of you might wonder what Futz is, or how do I obtain some of this wonderful substance, and what is its consistency! Well, Futz is not a substance, but the name of a character in this deeply eccentric picture!

Of course it started off ‘pon the stage as an off-Broadway bit of hippie-era weirdness! Tom O’Horgan, who choreographed and directed things like this - ha ha, he later made that film of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, the one with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder - put together a cast plucked largely from the La MaMa experimental theatrical troupe, went out to Stockton, California with a film crew, and simply Futzed around!

Though adapted from the text by playwright Rochelle Owens, the screenplay, strangely enough, is by Joseph Stefano, who also wrote Psycho! Ha ha, odd! It’s set in the backwoods of hillbilly America and tells the story, or sort of tells the story, of a farmer called Futz and his great love for his pig Amanda! Oh, Futz does truly adore his oinker, and one night when old Oscar Loop, a neighbor, played by an actor who looks like René Auberjonois with his René Auberjonois-ness turned up another twenty or thirty percent, happens to peer into Futz’s barn and sees him making sweet bacon with Amanda, he like to goes crazy and descends immediately into a frenzy of rape and murder!

Loop is jailed for his crime and set to hang, but the community blames Futz for the crime just as much, repelled as they are by his simple act of swine-love! Futz gets pushed around an awful lot, but defends himself with every hick fiber of his being! Unfortunately, however, all these events lead to a tragic finale, demonstrating what happens to nonconformists in this hayseed burg! Ha ha! I guess the moral of the thing is similar to that of Easy Rider, if there were no motorcycles and Dennis Hopper was a pig!

“Now, I don’t want to start a ruckus…” one character says, but really the whole movie is a ruckus! It seems at times like a Bethel Buckalew picture, or a Buckalew-esque work, like Country Cuzzins or Sassy Sue or Tobacco Roody or The Pigkeeper's Daughter, or some other such erotic hickventure! Most other times it’s a big old experimental theatre bumkunis, which you will enjoy or despise according to your feelings about experimental theatre! Actors are forever pushing each other down, or else being pushed down and rolling on the ground, and there’s no shortage of facial gurning and cornpone shouting! There’s also a hefty lady who peels off her dress to go a-swimmin’ in the ol' mud hole! Ha ha!

There are a few familiar faces here, like Sally Kirkland from Hometown U.S.A. and Fatal Games, and Frederic Forrest from It Lives Again and Apocalypse Now! The Auberjonois-Plus who plays Loop is called Seth Allen, and he played Hungry Joe in Catch 22, which seems appropriate! Some of the acting is astonishingly good, it must be said, and other performances try hard but don’t quite make it!

Funny thing, it was shot by Vilmos Zsigmond, who was behind the camera on many fine-looking films, from McCabe & Mrs. Miller to The Witches of Eastwick, but at the time of this picture was making his transition from low budget weirdos to the big pictures that would make his name! There are some good visual moments in here, most notably a genuinely striking overhead spinning optical effect shot - ha ha, you’ll know it when you see it!

But if you don’t like stuff of this sort, this will be the longest ninety-two minutes you ever spend! If you get into it, you’ll find some compelling dramaturgy and a few emotionally penetrating moments! It’s not necessarily the kind of thing I gravitate to, but I appreciated what the picture had to offer! Ha ha, I give Futz two flaming mops!

Burl reviews East of Euclid! (2003)

Ha ha and holubtsi, it’s Burl! I’m here to review another low-budget, high-style swirling-snow picture from days gone by! It’s called East of Euclid, and I’ll wager you’ve not seen it, ha ha, because it’s a fairly obscure movie! But it’s worth a look for those who can find it!

East of Euclid is set in what appears to be a medium-sized North American city (cleverly built cardboard-box miniatures represent the city’s warehouse district), but almost all of its characters are Russian or Ukrainian, or in one case, Finnish, in origin! Their fake accents are not the only thing that mark them as Eastern Europeans: their monstrous appetite for pyrohy tells the tale as well!

Ha ha, our story concerns the murderous killer and gambler Vilosh, played by Michael O’Sullivan from Careful, and his eventual clash with Valeri, a dashing, lank-haired news photographer played by Brent Neale from The Editor! The whole thing is framed as a piece of journalism typed out by intrepid lady newshound Natalia, who loves Valeri: this is a role essayed by Daina Leitold with an accent borrowed from Natasha Fatale! Now, Vilosh, an alternately melancholy and malevolent figure, is in hiding from a his vengeful former employers, the KGB, and longs to start a new life in Atlantic City! But he’s also compelled to kidnap a Finnish hockey player, and also to jealously react when Valeri falls in love with Viloch’s mistress Alexandria!

After a long beginning, matters amp up when Valeri takes a photo of Vilosh, and, ha ha, the fugitive gambler doesn’t want that! So he and his thugs - including Mark Yuill from Crime Wave - invade the darkroom and beat poor Valeri to within an inch of Bokesville! Next thing you know, Valeri gets a false eye that’s also a camera, and he runs around the district maniacally taking eyeball pictures of everyone he sees! Then it’s vengeance time, and numerous attempts to rescue the kidnaped hockey player, who is kept roped up in the closet, having gained several suit sizes by being force-fed pyrohy; and a gang of East Side-style kids figures in somehow; and when the police finally start finding the corpses of Vilosh’s victims, which have been buried in snow, the chase is on! And Viloch is doing the chasing, ha ha, thundering after Valeri across rooftops until he reaches a ledge he dare not jump! 

Vilosh is caught and sent to prison, and his remaining henchmen are either locked in the briner or commit suicide by lying down on the pyrohy machine conveyer belt and being violently reformed into enormous pyrohy! Ha ha! But the 88 minute picture is not finished yet! Years later, Valeri and Natalia are a happy couple, the hockey player has become an ice-cracking butterball from his all-pyrohy diet, and Vilosh, released from prison, resolves to try jumping from the ledge he had chickened out on before, and crashes to earth four stories below!

All of this story unfolds at its own weird pace, and is photographed in a chonky black and white, surely 16mm! Ha ha, I quite liked the look, and was impressed, too, with many of the sets and props! As Action U.S.A. is clearly a movie made by stuntmen, East of Euclid is equally clearly a picture made by an art director!

The storytelling is not smooth, and the acting quality is variable, but these are not serious problems! It’s an eccentric picture and a singular one; it contains many of the tropes seen in earlier Guy Maddin or John Paizs films, and later in movies like The Goose or The Twentieth Century, but there is no sense of copycatting in any of these movies, just a shared inventiveness and mutual inspiration! Whatever city these movies all come from, it must be a weird and intriguing place! Ha ha, I give East of Euclid two and a half human pyrohy!

Burl reviews Finis Hominis! (1971)

HA HA HA, it’s Burl! Sorry for the booming laugh: it’s intended as a tribute to the king of booming laughter, the recently-deceased José Mojica Marins! Marins of course was the Brazilian wünderkind behind the stovetop-behatted proto-Freddy character Coffin Joe, whose long nails, big beard, and yes, booming laughter, graced a series of patched-together horror movies in the 1960s and 70s! I hope you’ve seen at least a few of them - they’re really something! Ha ha, especially Awakening of the Beast! That one’s a doozy!

But we’re not talking Coffin Joe today! In fact we’re discussing his complete opposite, a figure Marins created when he got tired of trying to affright people with his roaring, murdering, remorselessly anticlerical Joe! Yes, we’re talking about Finis Hominis, who was the main character of only one Marins film, an utterly unique oddity appropriately entitled Finis Hominis!

The picture begins with beefy Finis rising from the sea as though he were some primal creature of prehistory! He’s completely buck naked, and after frightening an old lady right out of the wheelchair she’d expected to stay in for life, he makes his way to São Paulo and wanders up and down the streets, flapping in the breeze! He scares away kidnappers, startles lovers kissing, and thrills crowds of children! Finally he enters a house where a lady, who seems to have been expecting him, presents him with a glorious outfit, including mood beads, a ceinture flechée and a bright red turban! Ha ha!

From here we are treated to a series of dramatic vignettes, into which Finis inserts himself to solve problems, protect innocents, and expose hypocrisy! Meanwhile he becomes increasingly famous, spoken of on radio and television! Of course he becomes beloved of the hippies, and when he visits their pad they speak of peace and love; but the second he begins to fling coins into the air they grovel for the money like hens in the dirt! Then it’s time to put the gears to the bourgeoisie across town: a millionaire cataleptic’s wife and family, a greedy bunch, plots to kill him! Ha ha, they think they’ve succeeded when, after a sad trip to Rio, he returns home to find her apparently dead! She’s not, but she seems to be, and at her funeral, for reasons far to complicated to go into, her illicit lover must perform an act of bummery on her, right in front of the mourners! Finally Finis arrives and the cataleptic awakens, and there is a panic!

I’m not telling half of what happens in this incredible movie, but it’s all pretty great! Ha ha, there’s a surprise ending, too, involving a Sanitarium for Nervous Disorders, a freeze frame and the superimposed epigram “If it exists, it must have a reason to exist!” Ha ha! And the astonishingly eclectic soundtrack bears mentioning too! We hear moans and groans; a tinkly piano rendition of the theme from Goldfinger; a sad clarinet version of ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head;’ wild funk-trap beats; more moans and groans; and a tune that sounds like The Four Seasons mixed with the ignition sounds of a car that won’t start! And visually the movie is all over the place, with colour and black and white randomly shifting from scene to scene! Ha ha, it’s a real ride!

I’m sad that this singular filmmaker has passed on, and I hope that someone reading this who hasn’t seen the film is encouraged to look it up, or any of Marins’ work! Ha ha, it’s a whole world of new entertainment you’ll never see anywhere else! Finis Hominis in particular stands alone, with the only point of comparison I can think of being something like The Human Mule, or maybe Luis Luis, Folger of Men! Anyway, I give Finis Hominis three actors named BIG - BOY!