Burl reviews Night of the Living Dead! (1990)

 

It’s Burl once again with the shambling and the moaning and the munching – yes, it’s zombies all right, and not only that but it’s the same zombies, almost! Yes, last time I reviewed Night of the Living Dead, and now here I am with a review of Night of the Living Dead! Ha ha!

This is the one directed by trick effects makeup man Tom Savini, who did his gory necromancy in pictures from The Burning to The Prowler! Here he’s behind the megaphone and leaving the rubber wrangling to others, and ha ha, did you know what – he did a decent job of it! Like Stan Winston with Pumpkinhead and Tom Burman when he made Meet the Hollowheads, Savini seems to have picked up mostly the right things from being on so many movie sets before taking up the megaphone himself!

Well, it’s the same old story: Barbara and her ever-complaining brother Johnny pull up to the graveyard, a zombie man jumps them, Johnny gets a klonking, and Barbara finds a farmhouse! But this time it’s in color, and Barbara is played by Patricia Tallman from Road House and Army of Darkness, and Johnny is good old Bill Moseley from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2! And when Ben pulls up to the farmhouse, knocking over a zombie along the way and clutching a mighty hayer’s hook like he’s auditioning for Candyman, he’s played by Tony Todd from Enemy Territory!

Again we find cowering in the basement an objectionable slaphead, this time played by Tom Towles from Mad Dog and Glory, and even meaner, barkier and more crazed than the 1968 version! Ha ha, I thought this was a setup for when Ben shoots Cooper, as he did in the original – you know, make Cooper dangerously insane so we don’t consider Ben's action egregious! But that’s not where the movie goes with this particular relationship! And along with Cooper we again have the wife, the ailing daughter, and the young hayseed couple! The lad in this latter duo is played by William Butler from Friday the 13^th part VII: The New Blood, and he has about the same luck in both movies!

Aside from being in colour (though Savini’s idea, nixed by unimaginative moneymen I assume, was to start it in monochrome and gradually bring in the colour), the most remarked-upon change from the original is to reconfigure Barbara from a shock-paralyzed nobody to an actual character with agency! This is of course an improvement – one imagines that for Romero, who wrote the screenplay, offering the more badass Barbara was a sort of mea culpa for the wimpy old Barbara in his movie, ha ha! There are other small misdirects for those familiar with the 1968 version, and other welcome changes here and there, especially in the third act! But one thing they’ve kept: the incessant hammering of boards across windows! Ha ha, this update has even more hammering, I think, and it makes the middle act awfully monotonous! I also have to say that the inky, eerie, spookshow atmosphere of the original is almost entirely missing!

Most of the changes are improvements, however, even if they feel fairly strategic! Equally strategic are the things kept pointedly the same, like an appearance by Chilly Billy Cardille as a TV interviewer once again, and the return of the sheriff who says “They’re dead, they’re… all messed up!” (Ha ha, and that new sheriff is played by Russell Streiner, who was Johnny in the original, and was one of the producers of the old one too!) And of course the new movie is gorier than the original, but not as much as you'd think a movie directed by beloved goremeister Savini might be!

Altogether it turned out better than anyone could have expected it would! There’s nothing very organic or sincere about it, and I think it was at least in part a reaction to Return of the Living Dead (or maybe to Return of the Living Dead part II, which had just come out a year or two before), and generally designed to reclaim ownership of the Living Dead brand; but at least it was made by people connected to the original, who were willing and able to put some effort into it! It’s no 1968 Night of the Living Dead, but I’m going to give 1990 Night of the Living Dead two pairs of old man pants!

Burl reviews Cold Pursuit! (2019)

 

By krim-kram and by the flurries of winters past, it’s Burl, here to review yet another picture featuring an aging Liam Neeson carrying vengeance in his heart! He’s done this oh so many times before – look at movies like Next of Kin and Darkman and Taken 2, and there you’ll see that old familiar figure of Liam Neeson with vengeance reliably lodged in his heart! And the picture under discussion today is more of the same, and it’s called Cold Pursuit!

This is not just a vengeance picture but also belongs to that subset of movies which are remakes of movies made a year or two earlier by the same European director who made the original, and usually the remake is the filmmaker’s entrée into Hollywood studio picturemaking! Think of The Vanishing, (and, ha ha, then forget it – the remake, anyway), or Funny Games! Cold Pursuit is a remake of the Danish-Norwegian comedeo-vengeance film In Order of Disappearance, which I’m pretty sure I’ve seen! And like all these remakes, bar, I think, none, the original is the better one!

Old Liam plays Nels, which seems like, but isn’t, an anagram for “Liam!” Nels is a solid citizen in a little Colorado mountain town: he’s the man who keeps the roads clear with his big shed full of plowing equipment, and for this he’s being recognized as Local Man of the Year, for which his wife, Laura Dern from Blue Velvet, is proud! But then we see how their son, played by Neeson’s real-life son I believe, has, through his airport baggage job and the shabby offices of a disreputable pal, become mixed up with a drugs gang, and thanks to a misunderstanding, is kidnapped and given a fatal overdose by the gang!

Neeson and Dern each react to this in their own way: Dern takes off for parts unknown and is never seen again, while Neeson becomes vengeance-crazed, turning to his retired-gangster brother, played by William Forsythe from Smokey Bites the Dust and Extreme Prejudice, for information and advice! The tone turns blackly comic as Neeson kills his way up the Denver crime hierarchy, and with each new notch on the belt comes an intertitle memorializing the dead party and listing his gangster nickname! Ha ha, this is a bit on the cutesy side – I recall it working better in the original, where the humour was allowed to be as dry as it needed to be and the little titles didn’t stand out as much as they do in this more studio-tooled, focus-grouped remake!

The nicknames are another running gag, with a puzzled Neeson quizzing his brother about them! But, like the obituary intertitles, this aspect seems nothing more than ornamentation added later to purfle the border of an otherwise ordinary crime thriller! Ha ha, but there are a few details which seem a bit more organically integrated, like the rival gang of Indigenous mobsters! And there’s a subplot involving the son of the main bad guy, a boy-faced mob boss called The Viking, who lacks any evident Viking qualities beyond a general ruthlessness; this subplot has a mild wackiness to it, and lends the picture a bit of dualism which, for the movie’s running time at least, serves as an acceptable substitute for complexity!

The revenge part works well enough, familiar as it is, though I was disappointed that Nels didn’t use his snowplow more! It figures into the last act a little bit, but not enough to make this picture anything more than a mildly eccentric and otherwise unmemorable crime picture, more notable for casting a shadow over the original foreign iteration than for any qualities of its own! Neeson does this stuff with an appealing stolidity, but he could pull that off in his sleep, and in several scenes seems to be doing so here! I say stick with the original version, or maybe Fargo, which did snowbound crime eccentricity better than any other picture I can think of; but I’ll give Cold Pursuit two Fruity Pebbles anyway!

Burl reviews Dune Part One! (2021)

 

Wey wey hep-a-hole, it’s Burl, here with another big-screen review! Yes, today I’d like to talk about the new superproduction of Dune, rather than the old superproduction of Dune made by that man David Lynch so long ago! As compromised as that older picture was, it was still a fine entertainment I thought; but it was not really the book! And as much as we all wish we could see the Alejandro Jodorowsky version that never was, it probably wouldn’t have been the book either, or at least the book that’s in my mind! This new version, brought to us by the bontempi film artist Denis Villeneuve, is the book, or at least about five eighths of it, both for better and for worse, and accordingly, with the rest of it apparently on the way, the official title of this picture is Dune Part One!

We recall the story! It’s the far future and the desert planet of Arrakis, the only source of an incredibly valuable spice that makes cosmic travel possible, is the locus of all sorts of interplanetary intrigue! The Emperor of the Universe sends the nasty Harkonnens (a name pronounced differently here than it was in the Lynch version) back from Arrakis to their greasy home planet and installs the more beneficent Atreides royal family as caretakers of the spice-mining bonanza; but this is all a plot to launch a surprise attack on the Atreides, which in turn forces the young scion of the Atreides family, along with his mother Jessica, out into the desert to make common cause with the indigenous Arrakians, called Fremen!

Paul Atreides, the manchild of destiny, is played by a young flyaway called Timothée Chalamet, and I don’t think he quite caught the character the way Kyle MacLachlan did back in 1984! He’s not terrible or anything, just a little flat! His father, Duke Leto Atreides, is played by Oscar Isaac from Inside Llewyn Davis, and he’s good too, but he never has a moment as poignant as Jürgen Prochnow did in Lynch’s picture, staring out at the oceans of his home planet Caladan and wistfully saying “I’ll miss the sea!”

Rebecca Ferguson from Doctor Sleep and The Kid Who Would Be King is Paul’s mother Jessica, and she’s ideal for the part, if a bit young! We get a veiled crone performance from the terrific Charlotte Rampling of D.O.A. fame, here playing a witchy Reverend Mother; an earthy, or perhaps sandy, turn from Skyfall’s Javier Bardem in the role of Stilgar; and Stellan Skarsgård from The Hunt for Red October and Deep Blue Sea is the nasty Baron Harkonnen, not quite so covered in furuncles as his 1984 counterpart, nor as demonstrative in his appetite for boyjuice, but somehow even grosser nevertheless!

In grossitude he is nearly matched by the enormous worms that plow through the desert, but in this truncated version of the story these guys don’t yet play a big role! However, ha ha, there is a very satisfying scene in which one of them gobbles up a few Harkonnens like they were junior mints, just as its distant cousin on Tatooine, the All-Consuming Sarlacc, so enjoyed to snack on Jabba’s men! Again I say ha ha!

A recurring theme is of one out of four things not working properly: we see, for example, that a carryall meant to lift a spice harvester out of worm danger fails because one of its four hooks cannot deploy properly; later, that one of the flappy wings on the ornithopter in which Paul and Jessica flee the Harkonnens becomes choked with sand and goes limp; and that ultimately, of the four allegedly loyal House Atreides councilors and men-at-arms - Thufir Hawat, Gurney Halleck, Duncan Idaho and Dr. Wellington Yueh - one of them is not to be trusted!

In some ways the movie is almost doggedly faithful to its source - one occasionally longs for some flights of imaginative fancy that come from the filmmakers alone! The only changes, additions, elisions or other departures from the Frank Herbert text are borne of utility, however, and there’s something a bit too literal and acolytic about this approach! The same goes for the musical score, which does the job effectively, but something a little more adventuresome and experimental might have been nice!

Still, it’s all very gorgeously made and properly immersive, moves at a stately pace but never bores, and seems to end prematurely, and so I find I’m looking forward to Dune Part Two! There will be lots of fighting and battle scenes and, one hopes, worms! Ha ha! I give Dune Part One three gom jabbars!

Burl reviews Black Cobra! (1987)

 

Greetings to all, it’s Burl here with another review! Ha ha, and this is a strange one: a movie that isn’t any kind of official remake, but an unofficial adaptation that makes no bones about its status as a cinematic remora! Of course there are a lot of these movies in international cinema, from the Turkish Star Wars on down, and endless Italian examples but usually they purloin from big hit movies instead of, say, the Sly Stallone vehicle Cobra! Ha ha! Yes, the picture I’m talking about today is the Italian-made, Fred Williamson-starring, hyper-literally titled Black Cobra!

The Hammer, whom we remember from The New Gladiators, itself the Italian clone of The Running Man, plays Robert, aka Black Cobra, a homicide cop whose unconventional methods drive his captain crazy! We see his moves early in the picture when, instead of a supermarket as in Cobra, some nogoodniks have taken over a swimming pool, of all places! Meanwhile there’s a crazed murder gang with a profound love of studded leather, led by big-faced Bruno Bilotta from Warrior of the Lost World! In the course of their everyday murder activities, Bilotta has his picture taken by fashion photographer Miss Trumbo, played by Eva Grimaldi, who was in something called The Fine Art of Love: Mine Ha Ha! Based on that title, I supposed I ought to see that one some day!

The murder gang decides that the hospitalized Miss Trumbo must be killed, and as step one of their plan to infiltrate the medical institution, they wrap a chain around some poor motorist’s neck and drag him to his bloody demise! Step two involves actually visiting the hospital, but Black Cobra arrives there too, and rides gurneys around the place while blasting away at the murder gang! Black Cobra manages to save Miss Trumbo from the murder gang, but only just, and so he decides that the best way he can protect her is if she comes and lives with him!

At home, Black Cobra is utterly dominated by his cat Purvis, which terrorizes him with its constant demands for colour-coded cat food! (Could this be a little tribute to The Long Goodbye? Ha ha!) But even Purvis must adapt to a new routine when Miss Trumbo arrives, and one somewhat nervously expects the movie to become an Odd Couple riff, with Miss Trumbo complaining about Black Cobra’s homemaking habits! But this doesn’t come to pass! Instead, happily, the murder gang attacks again and people are blasted by Black Cobra’s big gun or the grenades he will occasionally toss!

Meanwhile Black Cobra has a partner whose teenage daughter is kidnapped by the violence gang, and their wish is to trade her for Miss Trumbo! But Black Cobra is having none of it, informing his partner that “I’d go and get her even if it was Santa Claus’s daughter!” Ha ha, I’m sure Santa is happy to hear that! The climax is decently well done for a cheap little rip-off picture, I suppose, and includes a fake-out or two; but the gang leader’s demise is nothing close to the spectacle offered in the Stallone picture!

Those are the things you miss in these rip-offs! Cobra drove a big black tank-like vintage car; Black Cobra drives a shitbox Ford! The violence gang in Cobra chanted and banged axes together; the clowns in Black Cobra just sit around moping in their abandoned factory hideout! Ha ha, they don’t even keep the furnaces blazing like the guys in Cobra did! On the other hand, neither Cobra nor any other movie I know of can boast a collision between a Chevy Blazer and a windsurfer, ha ha, but Black Cobra sure can! For that, and for all its other little peculiarities, I give it one tin of blue cat food and a half a tin of red!

Burl reviews The Town that Dreaded Sundown! (2014)

 

A shivery sunset to you, it’s Burl here with remake terror to review! Ha ha, and among the least likely horror works to be remade might be the films of Don Dohler or Bill Rebane or Larry Buchanan, but close behind that in the unlikelihood stakes are the films of Charles B. Pierce! Wait a minute, you say - did somebody remake Boggy Creek II… and the Legend Continues? Ha ha, nope! In fact it’s an all-new take on The Town that Dreaded Sundown!

The original picture, released in 1976, is probably remembered more for its poster, or at least the image on the Warner clamshell video release, than for anything else! But it was also an effective exploitation of a local spook-story, in a low-budget, regional sort of a way! The creepy headbag went a long mile to securing its place in the grindhouse pantheon, though, and in my childhood, thanks to that movie, I found even the name “Texarkana” to be inherently eerie! Ha ha, I still sort of do!

The original picture told the story of maniac who terrorized Texarkana in 1946, using a gun or a knife to kill habitués of the local Lovers’ Lane! This new version begins at the annual screening of the Charles B. Pierce picture in Texarkana, during which it is revealed that the killer, now presumably elderly, has returned to his old habits! And judging from his filthy jacket and workpant combo, and of course his headbag, he shops at the same outlet store Jason does! Ha ha! But is it really the same killer, who would now be so impossibly old he could barely wield a buck knife, let alone chase screaming teenagers through the woods with it; or is it someone related to the killer; or someone simply inspired by the movie itself; or, in a possibility brought up several times, some kind of blood-crazed supernatural boogeyman!

Well, the movie has an answer, though not one that will satisfy all viewers! It has other things to offer, of course: a highly stylized shooting approach that will impress some and put off others; some wince-inducing gore; and a game cast! The younger contingent of the cast all acquit themselves well as they try to evade the shootings and pokings, but there’s also a gallery of oldenbones, or relative oldenbones, that includes some surprisingly familiar faces! Veronica Cartwright from The Birds and Invasion of the Body Snatchers plays the lead girl’s granny, who decides that now is finally the time to up stakes and leave Texas, which she claims never to have done before despite living less than a kilometer from its border, ha ha; Edward Herrmann from The Lost Boys is a priest who’s strangely supportive of the murders; Anthony Anderson from The Departed, playing the Texas Ranger in charge of investigating the murders, gets a great blustery entrance but is given disappointingly little to do after that; Gary Cole from In the Line of Fire is a deputy, and Ed Lauter from Lassiter is the sheriff!

The picture works hard to be stylish, clever, and scary, and is successful only some of the time! I did like that they included Charles B. Pierece Jr., noted for his constant shirtlessness in Boggy Creek II, as a character who provides the leads with his own theories on the case! The long take that opens the movie is impressive in a mechanical sort of a way, and some of the lighting has a pleasingly Bava-esque quality, but too often the pointlessly canted angles distract from the atmosphere, ha ha! And the concluding reel of the picture is very familiar, and therefore lacks the impact found in earlier spook-scenes! Still, a noble effort made with enough verve and intelligence to make it worthwhile and not just another sequel/remake/reboot that wastes everybody’s time! I give The Town that Dreaded Sundown two death-recliners!

Burl reviews King Kong! (1976)

 

To the beating of a chest it’s Burl, here to tell you a tale of ape! Yes, a big ape - in fact, Kong himself! It’s not the old Kong, not the new Kong, but the middle Kong, the one brought to us by none other than old Dino De Laurentiis! It’s that big hairy Christmas release of 1976, King Kong!

You won’t believe it, but my dad took me to see this one on the big screen, and let me tell you, for me it was an event! I was maybe six years old, and the movie was to my little eyes thrilling and terrifying and altogether grand, and Kong himself a figure of mythical awe with his black chest smooth as Corinthian leather and his gimlet eyes gleaming in the dark like two side-orders of jelly! It, and this iteration of Kong, no longer have that terrible power over me of course, such power having been diluted in inverse proportion to the gradual development of my critical faculties; but that original viewing, wide-eyed before a massive screen in a grand old theatre, has stuck with me!

The script, by Lorenzo Semple Jr., is not perfect of course - ha ha, who can forget, and who would not love to forget, kidnap victim Dwan’s cry of “Put me down, you chauvinist pig ape!” For that matter, who would not love to forget that silly character name, “Dwan!” On the other hand, it’s not as bad as it’s reputed to be, either - it’s a perfectly acceptable 70s update to the story, with an oil company taking the place of the movie company seen in the original! So the topical environmental themes are present and accounted for, and the outlandish outrageousness of this band of first-world pirates showing up and stealing Kong away from the island he calls home and from the people who love and fear him, is duly noted!

Jeff Bridges, well known from Starman, plays the lead, an all-purpose character whose expertise, ostensibly in primatology, extends to anything the story requires: medicine, photography, general adventuring! This was the big debut of Jessica Lange from Tootsie, and she’s required to babble about meaningful miracles involving Deep Throat, but does the best she can with it! Charles Grodin from It’s My Turn and Clifford plays the rapacious corporation man, and while he seems a little miscast, he does a fine job too! Rene Auberjonois from Walker and 3:15 the Moment of Truth, and many Robert Altman pictures besides, plays the scientist who reveals the truth about the oil on Skull Island; and meanwhile the ship’s crew features all sorts of familiar faces! The captain is John Randolph from Earthquake and Christmas Vacation, and there are sailors played by Julius Harris from Live and Let Die, Jack O’Hallorann from Dragnet, Ed Lauter from Lassiter, and John Lone from The Hunted, and then of course there’s Pahoo himself, Dennis Fimple from Creature from Black Lake, in the role of Sunfish, who so far as I can tell survives the ape’s stomping feet and his remorseless rolling of the log!

Now here’s a problem with the picture, and it’s a big one: no dinosaurs! There’s a big snake, which looks fakey in the same charming way as the one in Conan the Barbarian (another Dino production - ha ha, maybe they used the same snake!), but Kong defeats it easily and gorily, and it never eats any sailors like they were junior mints, as the dinos do in the ’33 and ’05 versions! Skull Island, or Ape Island, or whatever it’s called - actually, I don’t think they give it a name in this picture - really lacks atmosphere, ranging between location shooting in what is obviously Hawaii, and studio shots in what is obviously a studio! We do get some nice matte paintings, though, and some acceptable backlot work!

Of course, when he gets to New York and is humiliated before a crowd, the angry simian escapes and makes his way not to the Empire State Building, but further south to the World Trade Centre, the presence of which qualifies this movie as an historical document! So that adds a little retroactive interest for the nostalgic viewer, though he doesn't straddle the buildings, as on the poster, or crush a rocket or duck a fighter jet! Ha ha, I remember thinking that poster overpromised a bit!

But before the movie came out, old Dino promised, in reference to Jaws, “Ha ha, no one cry when shark die, but everybody cry when monkey die!” And do you know what? He wasn’t entirely wrong there! It’s genuinely sad when the big gorilla, shot into meatsauce by helicopters, rolls off the building and plummets to his doom! I think that’s a bit of an achievement, so whatever this picture’s faults, it’s got that! Ha ha, I give King Kong two camera hunts in the interior!

Burl reviews Kongo! (1932)

Ha ha and houndstooth, it’s Burl, here to review a bit of pre-code nastiness that plays like Freaks meets Island of Lost Souls meets The Most Dangerous Game! It’s not quite the firecracker that combo makes it sound like - ha ha, it’s too stagey for that - but it frequently comes close! Anyway, it’s lurid, and the name of the picture is Kongo!

It’s a remake of West of Zanzibar, the Lon Chaney silent jungle extravaganza in which he plays a stratospherically nasty jungle kingpin known alternately as Flint and Dead Legs! Like The Penalty, which it strongly resembles, it was an opportunity for Chaney to play a paraplegic who never lets his disability get in the way of his psychotically sadistic behavior! But for the talkie version the filmmakers went for Walter Huston, both because he had already played the part of Dead Legs on stage, and because Chaney was, after all, dead! Huston is not quite as spectacularly demonstrative in the physical aspects of the part, but he does a fine job of crawling around on the floor, lifting himself into his wheelchair, or pulling himself up a knotted rope to his grimy roost in the ceiling!

I’ll back up a bit and give you the plot! Somewhere in deepest Africa, the crippled Flint has set up his palace of torment, where he keeps various sad-sacks in his thrall and from which he manipulates the local people by baffling their minds with parlour tricks! (Needless to say the movie is packed with colonialist racism, with the idea that the indigenous population would be so easily fooled and controlled being only the beginning of it!) His ragtag bunch includes a Portuguese firecracker played by Lupe Velez, a pair of dumbbells who wait on him, and eventually, as part of a long-game revenge plan later echoed in Oldboy, the convent-raised daughter of the man who originally caused his disability with a flurry of kicks to the back! This daughter, Ann, has been brought up in circumstances of absolute purity, and then at Flint’s behest is lured first into servitude in a Zanzibar brothel, and then to Flint’s compound where she is debased and diseased and kept prisoner!

Into this hellish situation stumbles a junkie doctor, Kingsland, whose addiction to some kind of jungle root is cured with swamp leeches! He becomes determined to rescue Ann (who is very well played by Virginia Bruce, it ought to be said), but matters are complicated by the arrival of her ostensible dad, who is also Flint’s greatest enemy and the real object of his vengeance plan! Certain native burial customs further heat up the situation, and a man called Fuzzy plays his part as well! Redemption and escape are in the cards, but hardly guaranteed!

Ha ha, this is a compelling picture if not the feel-good frivolity of the year! I suppose during the depression, before the Production Code came in anyway, movies could opt either to lift the spirits of audiences by presenting happy fantasies, or else make the real-life situation seem easier by presenting a twisted, corrupt, horrific vision of hell on earth! That’s the route taken by Kongo, ha ha! And while it certainly betrays its roots as a stage production, and doesn’t manage to convincingly present its jungle setting, the movie whips up a bleak atmosphere rarely matched in Hollywood and gets plenty of additional power from Huston’s relentlessly mean performance!

Kongo is imperfect, but still a little jungle horror gem, and I recommend giving it a look if you think you can take it! I give the picture three raggedy chimpanzee sidekicks!

Burl reviews Invasion of the Body Snatchers! (1978)

 

Hello, it’s Burl, and believe me, it really is Burl, not an outer space replacement! Ha ha, you know it’s me, because I don’t think my pod replacement would laugh quite so much, or if he did, it would be in a sinisterly robotic fashion! No, it’s good ol’ Burl, here to review possibly my favourite iteration of that old tale of poddery, Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers!

Now, I’m sure I don’t need to defend my preference for this over, say, the Abel Ferrara version, Body Snatchers (which I still enjoyed quite a bit!), or close cousins like The Puppet Masters, which has its own modest charms perhaps! There will be some, though, who are aghast that I would like this better than the original Don Siegel picture! I suppose it’s because I’m a city kid, so can better relate to the unease of urban dehumanization than I can to the small-town version we see in Siegel’s film! Anyway, the old one is excellent, don’t get me wrong - ha ha, and so large did it loom in the cine-political firmament as I was growing up that I used to believe “McCarthyism” referred to the star of the picture, Kevin McCarthy, and not the diseased Senator Joseph McCarthy! Ha ha, shows to go you where my interests lay!

Anyway, we’re here to talk about Kaufman’s picture, which, by the way, employs both Siegel and McCarthy in important cameo roles! We also get Robert Duvall from The Killer Elite in a strangely sinister appearance as a swinging street priest! But our stars are San Francisco public health official Matthew, played by Donald Sutherland from Klute and Heaven Help Us (and The Puppet Masters, ha ha!) and his co-worker, on whom he clearly and understandably nurses a big crush, Elizabeth, played by Brooke Adams from The Baby-Sitters Club!

Of course spores come from space right at the outset, and right away Elizabeth’s husband, played by Art Hindle from Black Christmas and Porky’s, is replaced by his pod double, and becomes emotionless and uncaring about sports, a subject on which he previously was compulsive! The feeling of a grip being slowly tightened settles over the movie, and ordinary street scenes acquire a disquieting menace! Kaufman, who later brought us The Right Stuff, also brings it here with his masterful control over the material!

He also put together a stellar cast: in addition to those mentioned, we get a new agey couple who run a mud baths, played by Jeff Goldblum from Buckaroo Banzai and Veronica Cartwright from The Birds! Ha ha, a terrific couple, and then too we have Mister Spock himself, Leonard Nimoy from Star Trek Into Darkness and The Brain Eaters (which, being an off-brand adaptation of Robert Heinlein's original The Puppet Masters, is another cousin to the Body Snatchers series)! Ha ha, what a bonanza! All the performers acquit themselves admirably, with Sutherland especially good!

Terrific photography by Michael Chapman, marvelous trick makeup by Tom Burman and family, and great San Francisco location work all make for a movie that’s a jewel of a pip of a beauty, and a real work of craftsmanship! Ha ha, and watch out for that ending! The post-Nixon paranoia, the satire of 70s self-help, the character work, the eerie use of ‘Amazing Grace,’ it’s all part of this wonderful and of-its-time picture, and I give Invasion of the Body Snatchers three and a half man-headed dogs!

Burl reviews Never Say Never Again! (1983)

Doo-doot-de-doo, ha ha ha! It’s Burl here with a little off-piste Bond for you! Yes, it’s Never Say Never Again, Sean Connery’s big return to the role after a decade of watching Roger Moore make movies like Live and Let Die and Moonraker! It was made by another company than usual, so they couldn’t use the theme or the same actors to play M, Q and Moneypenny! Ha ha, the worst thing is not using John Barry’s great action music and choosing to replace Barry not with James Horner or Jerry Goldsmith or someone who made sense, but with Michel Legrand, a composer forever tilting at the windmills of your heart! He’s not the first one to try ruining a Bond movie with an elevator jazz score, but it hurts a little more because the movie is otherwise decent!

Or anyway it’s decent compared to the contemporaneous Moore ones! Now Connery is a little older here, sure, but he’s in fine shape! He does tread the line between confident relaxing and lazy coasting at times; on the other hand one can’t deny that he delivers the quips better than ever! And for gosh sakes, he’s Sean Connery, who can kick around leprechauns while growling “Get away from me, you bashtards,” and still seem like a heck of a guy!

The plot of Never Say Never Again is really just Thunderball with more video games and (marginally) fewer high colonics! Bond’s fitness is in question by a particularly priggish M, so he’s bundled off to a special clinic! Trouble comes right after Bond does, and soon a hulking beardo is chucking him around the room! This all leads to missiles under the sea and an entertaining, smile-based performance from Klaus Maria Brandauer as the bad guy, Largo! Along with Skyfall and maybe one or two others, this is one of the few Bond pictures with a straight-up insane man as a heavy! It’s too bad we don’t get more of Max Von Sydow as Blofeld, but you can’t have everything! At least we get Barbara Carrera as the kill-crazy Fatima Blush!

There’s some okay action, but not that much of it! Kim Basigner’s buttocks make a featured appearance; Bond sleeps with so many ladies that it’s as if he’s trying to make up for a decade of inaction; and there’s a super motorcycle that doesn’t do much besides make a few rocket-powered leaps! Ha ha, it doesn’t even seem all that fast, and Bond falls into traps so easily while riding it! And I have to say the final confrontation below the sea is a little underwhelming too! But at least there’s much less boring scuba fights than there are in Thunderball! Ha ha, I like Thunderball, but that stuff really drags it down!

On balance it’s an okay slice of Elderly Action, but it looks better than it is if you put it beside movies like Octopussy, which everyone did because they were the two rival Bond pictures that came out in the same year! I’m overrating it, I know, but, if only for the moment in which one of Q’s devices doesn’t work all that well, which in real life would happen all the time, I’m going to give Never Say Never Again two exploding femme fatales!

Burl reviews Friday the 13th! (2009)

Chuff-chuff-chuff, por-por-por, ha-ha-ha, it’s Burl, here to review a Friday the 13^th picture! But not any old Friday the 13^th picture; no, this is the attempt they made about a decade ago to bring Jason and his antics into the new century, to make his slicings, his dicings and his pokings relevant to a new generation of thrill seekers!

It’s called simply Friday the 13^th, but it’s not exactly a remake of the 1980 Friday the 13^th, just another variation on the theme! It plays, I guess, like Friday the 13^th part 2 would have if they’d tried (pointlessly) to inject more logic into the saga instead of bringing in a long-dead character and putting a bag over his head! But of course they sacrifice different logic in doing so!

It opens with a restaging of the original picture’s climax, with Mrs. Voorhees catching a head-chop from a surviving girl! But her severed head instructs Jason to Kill For Mommy; and so if Mrs. Voorhees is issuing orders to her son, that means he didn’t drown, and she knows it; and if that’s the case, why was she taking out her revenge on these camp counselors? What’s everybody so mad about? Ha ha, who knows, and who cares!

This picture has a very long pre-title sequence involving the demise of a whole group of college-age kids, of the type you’d never want to hang out with in real life! They are quickly gotten rid of by a ragheaded Jason, whose methods have become more sadistic than they used to be! No longer for him the simple poking, but now a slow campfire roast in a sleeping bag, or a bear trap to the leg! But of course one of the girls resembles Mother, and so as the picture wears on we can be assured of the same gambit used in part 2, and also of course in Humongous!

Finally we meet a whole new gang of teens, a completely unlikely group of pals, and most of them boneheaded jerks! They’re spending the weekend at the remote country house of the biggest jerk of them all, a shrill, possessive colungus who’s constantly remonstrating with his guests about scuffed tables and spilled beer! There’s also a character imported whole from Friday the 13th part 4, the handsome backpacker searching for his missing sister! But where the heck is Crazy Ralph?

While there are a couple of nicely set-up moments, like one involving a shower curtain, the movie is on the whole remarkably free of tension or frights! It’s clearly trying for an intensity never reached by the older episodes, but doesn’t manage any better! There’s a flatness to the whole enterprise; while the poking scenes come with a bran-fuelled regularity, the rollercoaster momentum the movie wishes to have never gets going! If the movie hits a sweet spot, it’s in the meatiness of its killings, which are gory but not excessively or cartoonishly so!

Jason’s lair, which is somewhere beneath Camp Crystal Lake, or maybe underneath his old house, features trophies from his past adventures in killing! This would be a nice touch if it weren’t so obviously, well, obvious! Better the energy should be spent on creating real characters to murder, or actual suspense, dread or terror in the execution of said murders! It’s altogether a pretty tired enterprise, filled with terrible songs, and I can’t muster the energy to give this Friday the 13^th more than one field of leafy greens!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burl reviews The Blob! (1988)

Blup blup, it’s Burl, here to review a very blobby picture: the 1988 remake of The Blob! Ha ha, I saw this one in the theatre when it was released in August of 1988, and to me it remains the quintessential Late Summer Horror Picture – the kind of movie you could count on seeing as the toasty months wane and school approaches! The tradition has slacked off in recent years, and I count that as a real shame!

Well, ha ha, it’s not the end of the world! But I sure enjoyed The Blob when I first saw it, to the point of including it in alongside The Thing ‘82, The Fly ‘86 and Invasion of the Body Snatchers ‘78 on the list of Remakes Which Justify The Practice; and a recent viewing confirms that it is indeed a pretty enjoyable film, if not on the level of those already-named remakes!

Like all good remakes, it makes One Big Change from its forbear! The Thing reclaimed the shapeshifting premise; The Fly made the metamorphosis gradual; Invasion changed the setting from a small town to a big city; and The Blob makes the titular creature not a random passer-by from space, but a man-made organism gone screwy from space bacteria or something! Ha ha, it’s a pretty good dramatization of the post-Iran Contra cultural cynicism, which itself was an echo of the post-Watergate cultural cynicism from a dozen years earlier!

Filmmaker Chuck “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3” Russell kept all the right things from the 1958 version of the story! We have a small town, a fiery meteor and a fatally curious stewbum (played by the grandpa from Moving Violations, Billy Beck) who figures “Somethin’ fell from space, better poke it with a stick!” The town of course includes a motorcycle hoodlum (Kevin Dillon, fresh from his travails in Remote Control), a cheerleader (Shawnee “Summer School” Smith) and a football hero (Donovan Jr., well known for Cutting Class), all of whom will encounter the pulsating pink menace!

The hoodlum and the hero are kind of like the two sides of Steve McQueen’s persona in the earlier movie, and the picture manages a nice surprise when it dispenses with one half of this dyad early in the action! Another new character is Dr. Meddows, the initially avuncular but ultimately evil government scientist! Ha ha, they really made a great decision in casting Joe “The Evil That Men Do” Seneca in this part, because it’s so unexpected! Also, he’s very good in the role!

The casting in general is strong: the great Del “Next of Kin” Close plays a reverend driven into an apocalyptic mania by his experience with the blob; Mittens himself, Art La Fleur from Cobra and Zone Troopers, plays a grumpy dad; Candy Clark from Q and Amityville 3-D is a sweet diner lady, and Jeffrey “The First Deadly Sin” DeMunn is the sheriff whose efforts to romance her would have been successful if not for that darn blob! Plus we get people like Jack “Dune” Nance and Beau “Star Trek Into Darkness” Billingslea in small roles, and Paul McCrane is once again reduced to a jelly, just like he was in Robocop!

The picture looks great, with soft pink photography from the portly cinematographer, Mark “Fast Company” Irwin; and the makeup trick effects are superb and frequently gory! The visual effects, however, are not so hot, and are at times on the level of the jam-on-a-picture-postcard effects of the original! Ha ha! Then you've got the physical blob itself, which does resemble a puppet, or at other times, a pile of giblets! Russell’s direction sets up some good stuff, but as often as not misses the opportunity for tasty suspense or scares! And the white shirt worn by Kevin Dillon? Ha ha, it’s horrendous!

Despite its flaws I remain fond of this picture, and although the older one is still scarier, I’ll go to bat for the remake any day! Ha ha, I give The Blob two and a half annoying movie theater talkers who get their comeuppance!

Burl reviews Godzilla! (2014)

Ha ha, with a honk and a roar, it’s Burl, here to review what is becoming an annual tradition for me: the big summer monster movie! After all, last year I reviewed Pacific Rim, and some time before that, Super 8! This year, to get my fix of big, lumbering, city-stomping beasts, the natural choice was Godzilla!

I’m not a devoted fan of the Godzilla pictures, though I did see both Godzilla 1985 and that stinky 1998 version in the theatre! And of course you all know of my admiration for War of the Gargantuas! But I’ve only seen a few of the Toho pictures, and have yet to sit down and properly watch the charcoal-black Japanese version of the original film! (I plan to rectify that soon, ha ha!) They always seemed mainly like kiddie films to me, I guess!

But when this one came along, I couldn’t help but beetle off to the cinema to check it out! Now, my favourite part of all these pictures (that is to say, disaster movies and monster-attack films) is the build-up, when strange things are happening, and mysterious but still relatively small-scale disasters are plaguing the area! I also like when you can see that, somewhere off in the distance, just over those hills or on the other side of those big buildings, something incredibly destructive is occurring! And let me tell you, ha ha, Godzilla offers a great deal of this stuff!

Now remember, I saw Godzilla 1985 in the theatre, so this picture had a pretty high bar to clear! The beginning of the movie, where a man played by Bryan Cranston, well-known from Dead Space and, I must say, one of the bigger hambones working today, suffers a workplace disaster that claims the life of his beloved wife, Juliette Binoche, the Gallic performer familiar from Clouds of Sils Maria and many other pictures! After that Cranston gets a good deal of screen time to devote to his famous overacting, and his young son grows into a bomb dismantler named Ford, who is played by one of the least expressive actors since Lundgren!

Well, eventually there’s monster action again, and Ford becomes a sort of monster Forrest Gump, always around when the critical events are taking place! Ha ha! The plot mainly has a couple of monsters which, according to the complicated backstory, are the spawn of Mothra and Rodan, making their way to San Francisco in order to be married! (Ha ha, the Mothra/Rodan connection was a pretty canny way of inserting maximum Toho mythos in there, so congrats filmmakers!) And Godzilla shows up to ruin the wedding night, because as a stone-faced Ken Watanabe observes, his function is to redress nature’s balance! (I therefore assume his next stop will be the head offices of Monsanto, ha ha!)

Anyway, there’s plenty of spectacle here, and even better, there’s not as much spectacle as there might have been, since we often don’t get to see the full battles and the toppling of buildings! It’s more realistic that way, and demonstrates that there was some actual thought put into the staging of all this mayhem! Viewers such as myself truly appreciate that, ha ha!

It’s hardly a brilliant picture, but for a summer action monster spectacular, it’s pretty darn good! I congratulate the filmmakers and hope they’re able to keep a good thing going in the inevitable sequels! I give Godzilla two and a half pointless red smoke trails!

Burl reviews The Thing! (1982)

It’s Burl here with a review of a movie I saw five times in the theater alone, and countless times on home video since! Ha ha, it’s John Carpenter’s The Thing, one of the all-time great examples of how a remake can better its predecessor, even if the predecessor is already pretty good!

There are a few other examples of this – Cronenberg’s The Fly, even Chuck Russell’s remake of The Blob – but  The Thing is the king of them all! You already know the story of course: alien life-form invades Antarctic research camp, paranoia and gruesome special effects ensue! The great idea behind this production was to go back to the original John W. Campbell story in which the alien was a mutative beast who could hide within its victims, rather than a tall humanoid with rosethorn knuckles and vegetable flesh! Ha ha, if they’d tried that, they might have ended up with something like that legendary turkeybird The Dark!

This movie’s got it all, except ladies! You have a wonderful, chilly score from Ennio Morricone – I guess the suits wouldn’t let Carpenter do his own, ha ha, but I think I’m glad for that in this case! – and uniformly solid performances from all the gentlemen involved! Kurt Russell is marvelous as MacReady, A. Wilford Brimley (who is also the Wilford Brimley) makes an excellent Dr. Copper, and David “Matinee” Clennon is perfect as the stonerman Palmer! Of course Keith David gives his usual mackerel of a performance, and Charles Hallahan is good too! They’re all good, dagnabbit! And many of them wear beards!

The dog who brings the infection into camp is really fine too – one of the best dog actors I’ve ever seen, right up there with the one from The Boogens! I hope he got some extra kibble the day they shot his “wandering through the base” scene, ha ha! Other virtues to be found in this picture include the icy cinematography from the portly cinematographer, Dean Cundey, and the tightening sense of dread as we realize first how unlikely is a happy ending for these men, and what the stakes are if – or when, ha ha! – the alien reaches a populated area!

There isn’t a whole else left to say about the picture, except that it’s one of Burl’s all-time favourites and has been since June of 1982! Sure, it’s hardly a perfect movie, but it’s pretty close! It’s the best movie Carpenter has ever made, and he’s made some doozies! Halloween is great, and so is Dark Star, and so are The Fog and Big Trouble in Little China and They Live and Prince of Darkness (though Christine, the movie he made right after this one, is only sort of solid), but none of them touch this cool cucumber of a picture! He out-Hawksed Hawks with this one, ha ha! I give The Thing a solid four crabheads, my highest rating! If you haven’t seen it, ha ha, give it a chance!