Burl reviews The French Dispatch! (2021)

 

Eh bonjour friends! Yes, Burl has returned to review another picture, and this is yet one more movie I saw on the big screen, to my great joy! I’ve been hitting matinees mostly, so there’s nobody around and things feel pretty safe, pestilence-wise! Ha ha, and for this particular matinee I went with an old pal, one of my very oldest in fact, and he’s probably a fellow I haven’t been to a movie with since the 80s or early 90s! That’s a long time! The picture was of course the newest Wes Anderson joint, the one generally known as The French Dispatch!

Like The Life Aquatic, it has an actual title that’s longer than I care to write out in full, ha ha, and like The Grand Budapest Hotel, it takes place mostly in the mid-Century Europe with which Anderson is evidently obsessed! Ha ha, I recognize a fellow enthusiast! And we know the picture tells the tale of the magazine after which the picture is named, which is of course based on the New Yorker and the staff and writers of that venerable publication!

Bill Murray, famous from Ghostbusters and of course many other Anderson pictures, from Rushmore on up, is every writer’s fantasy editor, indulging his scribes to a degree never seen in reality! (Though he’s not, it should be noted, the ideal employer if you’re a mere copy boy!) As a former newspaper editor myself, I appreciate the near-deification such a character is accorded simply by casting Murray to play him!

Life around the French Dispatch office, located in “Ennui-en-Blasé, France” (which name, thank goodness gets the bad French jokes out of the way quickly) provides the picture’s exoskeleton, and the meat of it is the three feature stories printed in the magazine’s final issue! First up is a jailhouse tale featuring Benicio Del Toro from Inherent Vice as Moses Rosenthaler, a near-feral prisoner accused of the gruesome attack-murders of three bartenders, who proves to be an accomplished painter once he finds a subject, muse, and lover in guard Simone, played by Léa Seydoux from No Time to Die! Adrien Brody from Midnight in Paris is the art dealer Cadazio, who champions the artist while ignoring his wolfman-like growls; this tale is related by correspondent J.K.L. Berenson, played by Tilda Swinton from The Dead Don’t Die!

Another writer, this one called Mrs. Krementz and played by Frances McDormand from Darkman, tells the next story! This one is set during a fictionalized take on the student uprisings of the late 60s, with Timothée Chalamet from Dune Part One leading the intellectual faction, meanwhile having his first affair with Mrs. Krementz and then his second with a pretty fellow radical!

The author of the third story is played by Jeffrey Wright from Only Lovers Left Alive, here affecting a Roscoe Lee Browne accent to play Roebuck Wright! His tale involves a kidnapping and the involvement of an accomplished police chef, and features Mathieu Amalric from The Forbidden Room as the police chief and Steve Park from Fargo as Nescaffier, the police chef! Ha ha!

Owen Wilson from Anaconda, Bob Balaban from Moonrise Kingdom, Henry Winkler from Night Shift, Christoph Waltz from Django Unchained, Fisher Stevens from The Burning, Liev Schreiber from The Daytrippers, Willem Dafoe from Streets of Fire, Edward Norton from Fight Club, and Griffin Dunne from An American Werewolf in London all appear in smaller roles, so it must be noted that the cast is a pretty thrilling one! More thrilling still is the wealth of detail woven into each of the stories as well as the wraparound business, and the pictorial amusements with which the picture is well stuffed! There’s some great model work, marvelous gags, and an animated sequence that perhaps goes on a little long! Ha ha, and if you’re at all a student of the New Yorker, its history, and its writers, you’ll get that much more out of the whole thing!

I must admit I thoroughly enjoyed myself at this movie, and do you know what? My childhood friend, Rob by name, did too, notwithstanding the lumpenproletarian that he is! Whether it all comes together in the end is more of a personal decision than a critical one, I think, but I myself had a terrific time, and so I give The French Dispatch three and a half pop stars named Tip-Top!

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 Con Air! (1997)

My goodness, it’s 90s action again! Ha ha, I’ve reviewed a lot of these lately, it seems, and this one, Con Air, is a picture I may well have tackled back in my old reviewing days, and if I looked I might be able to find the old notice itself! But I recently watched the picture again, so I can provide opinions that are popping fresh and hot out of the oven! Hee hee!

I’ve said it so often that the words have lost all meaning: here, truly, is quintessential 90s action! But I’ve felt the same about pictures as minor as Passenger 57 or as forgotten as Executive Decision, though if I were applying myself seriously - ha ha! - I might have to give the title to something like Speed, or even to the execrable Bad Boys or The Rock! Con Air, for its part, is more the latter than the former: one of those Bruckheimer crundleburgers that practically bust a nut trying to earn the baffling critical acclamation “Testosterone Fueled Action!”

Well, here is where the movie scores highest: in the simplicity of its plot and in its singular cast! Nicolas Cage pulls out his Sailor Ripley accent, with just a touch of H.I. McDunnough, to play a man just paroled from years in the pokey, hitching a ride on a plane with a load of convicts who are all being taken to a big new jail! But soon the hard cases take over the plane; these include legendarily monstrous criminals played by the likes of John Malkovich, doing the same sort of thing he did in In the Line of Fire, Steve Buscemi from Escape from L.A. playing a calm maniac, Ving Rhames from Mission Impossible III as a Black revolutionary, plus M.C. Gainey from Starman and Django Unchained, Danny Trejo from Machete, and Mykelti Williamson from Streets of Fire as the diabetic buddy! We also get famed instability comedian Dave Chappelle playing a young wiseacre! Ha ha, so you see what I mean about the cast!

The tensions come from Cage trying to keep his identity as a parolee from the other cons, and particularly from Malkovich! Meanwhile, on the ground, John Cusack is trying to figure out how to get what he constantly refers to as his plane back down on the ground without blowing it up, which is what hothead Colm Meaney wishes to do! (To be fair, Meaney has seen this kind of thing before, from when he played a pilot in Die Hard 2!) Up in the plane, where convicts are constantly rooting through Cage’s stuff and discovering his secret, there are violence fights and near-misses, and it all ends with a crash in Las Vegas and then a fire truck fight, and then an over-the-top showcase death for main heavy Malkovich! Ha ha, he catches a real piledriving right upside the head!

Rachel Ticotin from Total Recall plays the only lady on the flight, and as such becomes the focus of Danny Trejo’s horrible rapist character! Of course he gets his just desserts without having a chance to practice his horrible avocation, but, after enjoying a tea party singalong with a little trailer park girl, Buscemi’s maniac is allowed to stroll off for a some action at the roulette table! Ha ha, all of this simply reveals a script that privileges mindless button-pushing over structure or characterization, or other things a motion picture scenario usually aspires to!

All it really has to offer are moments scattered here and there to juice up the audience and make them whoop and say ha ha! We get scenes like the dumping of Chappelle’s battered corpse from the plane down to a city street; the destruction of a classic Corvette by use of a plane, a length of cable, and a hook; and the time Cage rolls under a truck to avoid an explosion, only to find Dabbs Greer already there! Ha ha! And these are all fine, and the movie’s 115 minutes move quickly and entertainingly! It’s clearly aware of its own absurdity, and the cast is just having a ball, but there’s a forced cynicism and faux edginess to the whole thing that really wears thin, and some of the special trick effects are pretty bad too! It’s a movie of its time and doesn’t have the staying power of some of the better 90s actioners, and so I give Con Air one and a half bunnies in the box!

Burl reviews Escape From Alcatraz! (1979)

Ha ha and jailcells, it’s Burl! Yes, I have a tale of the big house today, of cons doing hard time, of yardbirds staring down the wrong end of a long stretch! It’s Escape From Alcatraz, one of the many, and maybe the last, of the pictures Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood made together!

What’s it about? Ha ha, the title tells you about everything you need to know! Clint plays Frank Morris, a robber who is sent to the Rock not so much for his robbing, but for escaping from other prisons! Nasty warden Patrick McGoohan dislikes him from the get-go, and Frank spends some time in the lightless bowels of D block! Ha ha, having spent so much time as a prisoner himself, you’d think McGoohan would take it a little easier on his charges!

But no, the steely-eyed turnkey ratchets up his nastiness, causing a terrible incident when he revokes the painting privileges of a kindly dabbler played by the great Roberts Blossom from Christine! Poor Roberts is so despondent that he goes to the wood shop and chops all his fingers off with a hatchet! It’s gory and sad, and for Eastwood it’s the last straw! He begins planning his escape, his first digging tool being the nail clippers he purloined from the darn warden himself!

Eastwood’s pokey pals include Fred Ward from Secret Admirer and UFOria; another guy playing his brother, and yet a fourth fellow, a sad sack called Charlie Butts, well known from Armed and Dangerous, whom you know things are going to go badly for the moment you see him! There’s a tender scene between Charlie and his wife, who’s the only visitor you see anyone get, and in fact the only lady in the whole movie! So you’re rooting for Charlie, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up for him if I were you!

There are some pretty suspenseful scenes and a great cast! Paul Anthony, a very unusual actor of whose work I’m fond, is the one who gives Eastwood the low-down on the place, and it would have been nice to see him get a crack at escaping too! The style of the thing is minimalist, and it’s some of Siegel’s best work of that decade! And that was a good decade for him - he made Charley Varrick after all! And Telefon too, but we won’t talk about that, ha ha!

There’s moody photography from Bruce Surtees, who also shot Out of Bounds of course, and a pretty penitentiary atmosphere! No, it doesn’t make the pokey look like much fun! Except the toques - the toques are nice! And one of the guards seems like an okay guy! But I say no thank you, it’s not the life for me! Ol’ Burl’s going to stick to the straight and narrow! In the meantime, I give the effective Escape From Alcatraz three fake heads!

Burl reviews Escape from L.A.! (1996)

Ha ha, it’s me - call me Burl! Yes, I’m here to review not the first, but the second adventure of Snake Plisskin, which is to say the time he had to Escape from L.A.! Now, like just about everybody, I’m very fond of his first go-round, Escape from New York! That’s just a terrific picture! But I remember going to the theater to see the new one when it came out back in 1996, and I came reeling out with my brain full of skunkfire! It was a terrific disappointment!

Watching it again more recently, I found more to like in the movie, but not much! It’s certainly on the bottom level of John Carpenter pictures, along with Ghosts of Mars and The Ward, and so very remote from the heights of The Thing and Halloween!

Snake Plisskin is still the monocular man of action we know and love from 1982! It seems there’s another godly hypocrite in the White House, played by Cliff Robertson in Malone mode, and he’s made L.A., that heathen city, into a dumping ground for everyone he doesn’t like: atheists and so forth! Ha ha, Los Angeles is a big city, but I don’t think it could fit everybody this joker doesn’t like! Ol’ Burl, for example, would be sent there immediately, and I would probably set up shop in the Academy screening room and just watch movies all day!

Of course Snake has no time for that: he has to get back some important trinket from Robertson’s rebellious daughter, who has set up shop with notorious gangster-terrorist Cuervo Jones; and for Snake there’s a countdown clock (referred to even more insistently than it was in New York) and gangs to fight, and, as in the previous picture, a terrific supporting cast! As before, everyone he meets either knows him or has heard of him, but now, instead of everyone thinking he was dead, they all thought he’d be taller!

There are also lots of really ropey CGI trick effects (that shark!) and a lugubrious mise-en-scene that drains the action scenes of any pizzazz! Oh John, how did it come to this! You’re a terrific action director! It doesn’t help that so much of the movie plays as a pale imitation of the earlier movie’s highlights! Instead of gliding onto the World Trade Center, Snake submarines onto a freeway ramp! When he’s captured by the bad guys, he doesn’t fight their biggest man in a ring, as he did in New York; no, he must play basketball! At least the doo-dad he’s after is a mini disc instead of a tape cassette, ha ha!

The general reduction in amazingness extends to the supporting cast, which, as I said, is terrific! Just not as terrific! Stacey Keach is fine, but he’s no Lee Van Cleef! Steve Buscemi is a wonderful actor, but he’s not Harry Dean Stanton! Peter Fonda is great, but Ernest Borgnine is greater! And George Corraface is most assuredly no Isaac Hayes! We also get Pam Grier and Bruce Campbell, wonderful performers both, but somewhat underused here!

On the plus side - and Burl always looks for that, ha ha! - Kurt Russell doesn’t miss a trick in his Snake Plisskin shtick! A couple of the fights are pretty good, and there are pleasing ideas or bits of design lurking in the margins! There’s a little cavalcade of Rick Baker makeups in the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills scene, which is always nice! And, as with every movie about the destruction of L.A. made by people who live there, there’s a certain glee taken in the city’s demise, with potshots aplenty taken at its ways and its people!

And of course, in its depiction of the demagogic Robertson, the picture has a certain prescience; enough, maybe, to serve as a cautionary tale along the line of Sinclair Lewis’s book It Can’t Happen Here! And even at his worst, John Carpenter is still John Carpenter, and there’s some pleasing carpentry throughout the movie! I give Escape from L.A. one and a half full-court free throws!

Burl reviews Eddie Macon's Run! (1983)

Watch out, here he comes… and there he goes! Ha ha, it’s Eddie Macon’s Run, and it is I, Burl, here to talk about it! This is a chase picture, mainly, and for me was one of those movies that I was aware of thanks to the ubiquity of the VHS box, but never had any interest in seeing… until now!

In fact I can’t claim any real interest in seeing it, but, having spotted the tape lurking in my basement, I watched it anyway! The picture was an early effort from Jeff Kanew, who later gifted us with Gotcha!, and Kanew wrote and edited it as well! Ha ha, kanew believe it! I guess the mastermind behind Revenge of the Nerds was once a sort of auteur!

He began a relationship with Kirk Douglas (well known from The Fury and Out of the Past) on this picture too, which he would continue later with Tough Guys and I think some kind of Kirk tribute documentary! Ha ha, it must have been pretty great to be a filmmaker who became friends with Kirk! And Kanew uses him pretty well in Eddie Macon’s Run!

John Schneider, well known from The Curse and of course for essaying the role of that shine-runnin’ Bo Duke, plays the title character, a fellow who’s been thrown in the pokey for doing virtually nothing beyond having put a punching on John Goodman, from C.H.U.D. and Matinee, who plays a nasty man entirely deserving of it! He’s chased by cops and pulled over and railroaded right into slam, and away from the family he loves so well! Immediately he escapes and is re-caught by a professional chaseman played by Douglas, but not before he smites Douglas a sound clobbering upon the pate! Now Eddie Macon is facing a nickel’s worth in the pen, and boy howdy he doesn’t like it!

Now, all of this background business is delivered throughout the picture in the form of flashbacks, which is too bad! Eddie Macon’s major escape occurs right at the top of the picture, which initially cheers the viewer - ha ha, she thinks, here is a picture that begins right away! Then the flashbacks start popping up and the heart sinks, for we know this flashbackery will continue until the proto-story is told! But front-loading all this background would have been bad too, of course; much better would have been to find the most economical way possible to deliver the necessary information and get on with the chase itself, which after all is the topic of the picture, and even of the picture’s very title! We don’t need to be persuaded of Eddie Macon’s relative innocence, or have it laboriously spelled out for us, because Schneider’s performance is sufficiently solid and goodhearted to meet that need!

Aside from Kirk and John, the picture features performances from a pair of slasher movie ladies: Leah Ayres from The Burning and Lisa Dunsheath from The Prowler! The former is Eddie Macon’s beloved wife, who sets out a backpack full of escape supplies for him! The latter plays a member of a demented ranching family, which also includes menacing tallmen Tom Noonan from Wolfen and F/X and Jay O. Sanders from Hanky Panky and JFK, who-all capture Eddie and attempt to lynch him right in the middle of their living room! Ha ha, this is quite a sequence all right, and serves as a nightmarish centerpiece to the picture; quite at odds with the rest of it, frankly! Ha ha, but I was glad it was in there!

Finally Lee Purcell, whom we know from Necromancy and Mr. Majestyk, shows up to play Jilly Buck, who becomes Eddie’s last-act guardian angel and helps see him to a happy ending! Kirk does his bit too, of course, but only after a car flip scrambles his molecules! Ha ha, the chase at the end is okay, and the rancher scene is pretty unsettling, but otherwise the picture is not as thrilling or exciting as it would like to be! The performances are fine and we all want Eddie’s run to be successful - and it is literally a run, as Eddie's preferred method of escape principally consists of jogging - but in the end there isn’t a whole lot of hossmeat to the picture! It comes in, does the job, and takes its leave with a courtly bow and a curt “good day!” I give Eddie Macon’s Run two games of Gorf!

Burl reviews The Slams! (1973)

Ha ha, and clang goes the cell door, it’s Burl! Yes, I have a review of a pokey picture for you today, directed by our old pal Jonathan “White Line Fever” Kaplan! Yes, the movie is called The Slams, and, ha ha, it’s a tough little quillici of a Gene Corman production, with none other than football great Jim “Small Soldiers” Brown in top form as the lead jailbird, Curtis Hook!

The opening of the movie is a bit queasy! Hook and his associates, arrive at a gathering of mind-drug mobsters! They will have precious few seconds to regret their choice of a shipping container as a meeting place when they are locked in and fed cyanide-laced exhaust in place of air! Ha ha! The successful heist is quickly followed by a fatal falling-out between Hook and the others, and a wounded Hook ends up tossing away the smack and hiding the million-and-a-half in ill-gotten gains!

Well, he’s soon checked into the crossbar hotel, an object of interest to all! Brutal goon Ted Cassidy, who of course fought Steve Austin in the terrifying Bigfoot episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, wants to do horrible things involving caustic liquids to him! The high-living capo, played by Frank De Kova of course, wants the money on behalf of the mob! And the round-faced Captain of the Guards, who I thought the whole time was being played by David from Sesame, silly Burl ha ha, also would like the money, and is willing to employ some pretty underhanded methods too!

On the outside, Hook’s ladyfriend, at her man’s direction, gets in touch with a shady character who owes Hook a favor, or is his bosom chum, or some admixture of the two! (Hook’s lovely lady is played by Judy Pace from Frogs, and the buddy is Paul Harris from Kaplan’s later Truck Turner!) An escape plan is cooked up, and many punchings are laid upon one and all!

Critical to the plan is a cab ride with driver Dick Miller, that great actor whom we know from Lies, Gremlins 2, Get Crazy, Moving Violation and all sorts of other movies! Ha ha, as good as most of the other actors are, the movie really felt as though it upped its game during those Miller moments! You forget what a good actor he is unless you really pay attention, ha ha!

I’ll tell you that a cement truck provides a grisly surprise in the penultimate moments of the picture! The very last scene shows Hook and his lady enjoying the spoils of their booty, ha ha, although one thinks with regret of his old mum, whom he appears to have left behind with her believing him dead! Poor goodhearted old lady!

The pokey picture isn’t my favourite genre, I must admit, but this is a pretty entertaining one! It’s fairly nasty and brutal too, but not very realistic! The escape scene is easy enough to buy into, though some of the specifics of the outhouse hiding spot were a little mystifying to me! Ha ha! I’m going to give The Slams two and a half ladles of bleach, with almost a full one of those for the Dick Miller scene alone!

Burl reviews Death Warrant! (1990)

Ding-bong-wao, it’s Burl, here to review you an action picture! This is one of those Jean Claude Van Damme movies, but an earlier one! Ha ha, he’s fairly young here, not an old and depressed robot like he was in Universal Soldier: Regeneration! He’s as vigorous a punchfighter as ever in this particular picture, which is known by the title Death Warrant!

This is one of The Muscles From Brussles’s leaner and meaner productions, clocking in at an even 90 minutes just like Commando! It also features a credit for Special Makeup Effects, which I always like to see in an action picture! And indeed there are a few Special Makeup Effects on view here, though in fact the movie wasn’t quite as violent as I expected it to be! That’s all right with ol’ Burl, since violence in pictures isn’t exactly my first priority!

In these earlier Van Damme movies it was always fun to see how they’d explain away his accent! Sometimes he was a French Foreign Legionnaire and sometimes a Cajun, and the logical allez-vite-la-twists reached a sort of apotheosis in Sudden Death, in which he sported an accent merely because, as a lad, his character had spent his summers in Quebec! Ha ha!

Here he plays a Mountie, which is pretty great, because near the beginning, when he’s going rogue in L.A. to catch the nefarious Sandman, a local policechief shouts “This is Los Angeles, ha ha, not Canada! We have procedures!” Ha ha, Rodney King will be glad to hear that, Mister Policechief!

Well, Van Damme ignores this and shoots the Sandman about a half a dozen times, then says “Ha ha, you’re under arrest!” A little while later, those very same Angelinos ask our intrepid Mountie to go undercover at the local prison, where inmates are being spiked through the back of the head! His job is to pretend to be a prisoner and find out who’s behind these brutal pokings!

He does this by immediately asking everyone in the prison who could be behind the brutal pokings, which doesn’t make him look like an undercover policeman at all, ha ha! And then, when the Sandman turns out somehow not to have died when Van Damme blasted him, and is transferred to the prison, the poor Mountie has a lot more trouble all of a sudden! Punchfights aplenty ensue!

There’s a not-bad supporting cast here! George Dickerson, the always-smiling actor from Blue Velvet, plays a character who turns out to be just the sort of fellow anyone who’s seen that film would expect him to be! Benson himself, Robert Guillaume, plays the Wise Old Black Lifer! The nasty head guard is played by Art La Fleur from Cobra and Zone Troopers! Naturally Al “Die Hard” Leong shows up! So it’s a pretty fun gallery of familiar faces!

It’s not a memorable picture, and the director, Deran Serafian, who made Alien Predators, and whose dad made Eye of the Tiger and also the great Vanishing Point, isn’t all that marvelous an action director! The punchfights are a little drab, despite the flashy lighting from DP Russell “Pet Sematary 2” Carpenter! Altogether, I’m going to give Death Warrant one and a half hilarious furnace jumpouts!

Burl reviews Bad Meat! (2011)

Hi, Burl here to review a crazy new horror picture! This one is called Bad Meat, and it was apparently shot in bits and pieces over the last few years, and stitched together much in the manner of your classic Frankenstein Monster! You can really tell that it was a tinkered-with production, but I have a soft spot for those special sorts of movies which, because of whatever problems that happened to have come up, are put together by different groups of people into a unique new movie that no one could have planned or predicted, and to which no particular authorial voice can be ascribed! It’s as though the Fates themselves made the movie, ha ha!

The picture begins with a spooky sequence in a hospital room, where a totally unidentifiable bandaged mummy of a patient tells, or rather types out, his or her story of how he or she got that way! It seems there was a terrible discipline camp out in the woods somewhere that was staffed by Nazis, wrestlers and she-devils, and these meanies terrorized a group of teenagers who had been sent there by their presumably nasty parents!

Well, they’re an unpleasant enough group of councilors, and are led by a neo-Nazi played by Mark Pellegrino from Mulholland Drive, but they get even worse when the cook feeds them some spoiled meat! For whatever reason this turns them into crazed flesheaters who vomit all over, fart a lot, and chase the kids hither and yon, hoping to pop them into a stewpot next! Meanwhile the kids, who are an argumentative bunch indeed, have to learn to somehow work together to escape or vanquish the hideous flesheaters!

It all ends rather suddenly in the middle of an attack! I guess we’re to assume the nasty bunch won out in the end, leaving only a single victim alive, but so hideously injured as to be absolutely unidentifiable; and that the final horror we take home with us is the thought of that poor person trying to recuperate, just as all those poor people deformed by chimp attacks have to! At least that’s what I took away from it, and I have to admit it gave me the willies!

This movie’s sure gross! There are some gory bits of course, but worse still is all the chunder and poo that splashes around everywhere! Yuck! And the beef stew that causes all the trouble is also very disgusting, and of course so are the characters and situations! You can almost smell the terror! So on that level, which is a pretty base level indeed, the movie succeeds!

Dramatically, perhaps not so much! I guess it never really was finished, but as I said, I don’t really mind that, and am personally pretty fascinated by these pariah dog pictures! The inconclusive ending gives the whole thing a strange avant-garde aura that I suspect is better than what we’d have gotten if the movie had been completed as planned!

Still, I’m not going to give the thing a totally ringing endorsement! It’s for certain very specific tastes only, and you probably know who you are! I’ll just say that this is a bizarre, perverse and ultimately compelling exercise in filmmaking at random! I give it two exploding pillows!