Burl reviews John Wick: Chapter 4! (2023)

 

Ha ha and bang bang bang, it’s Burl, here to recount a tale of gunfire and mayhem! Yes, it’s the latest in the increasingly long line of action fables featuring the bearded Keanu Reeves, whom we recall so well from Bill & Ted Face the Music and other associated productions! It’s the John Wick pictures I’m talking about, of which I’ve seen all, but have only reviewed, I believe, John Wick: Chapter 2! This one is called John Wick: Chapter 4, which I figure they chose as a title because, ha ha, it’s the fourth chapter in the series!

Of course these crime pictures are set in a crazy copless world which seems essentially run by a big gangster conglomerate known as the High Table! Ha ha, the movies are so dedicated to this world that they often seem ridiculous, but at the same time the fealty to this criminal fantasyland is so complete as to be kind of admirable at the same time! And my belief – the belief that allows me to fully enjoy these movies, ha ha – is that the filmmakers know about and encourage that ridiculousness, while still endeavouring to make worthwhile action pictures!

I won’t bother relating the plot, as it’s both a continuation and repetition of what’s come before, to wit: John Wick, super-assassin widower and former dog owner, is trying to not be killed by the people who are after him, which is nearly everybody, and endeavouring to get out of this crime-world! (Is there an “out?” Ha ha, if so we never see it!) To accomplish this he must shoot and punchfight all sorts of people in order to satisfy the arcane rules of the people who run things! This time, for John, it ultimately means dueling a fop, but there are plenty of fights to have before that in this nearly three-hour tour!

Characters from previous Wick adventures are here, notably Wick’s pal Winston, played by Ian McShane from Too Scared To Scream, who here loses his beloved concierge and his hotel too! Laurence Fishburne from Fast Break and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 returns as the King of Lower Bumtown, but here his main activity seems to be providing Wick with bulletproof suits, guns, and the occasional boat ride! The new character everyone loves is a blind master called Caine, played by the Ip Man himself, Donnie Yen, known to Western audiences from movies like Rogue One! He’s an appealingly human and ambiguous presence, and his fighting is most impressive!

Other fresh faces include Clancy Brown from Buckaroo Banzai and Extreme Prejudice, who strides through the proceedings wearing a black hat and a big beard, his task evidently to see that the rules of the High Table are strictly followed! There’s a fellow with a dog and a gun but without a name, who will occasionally aim his rifle at John Wick but usually ends up shooting someone else! And then there’s Scott Adkins, who’s been actioning it up in all sorts of movies for some twenty years now, and who here wears balloon makeup and golden teeth in the role of a monstrous card sharp!

There are some fine action scenes, in particular the one up the stairs to Sacré Coeur! The roundelay at the Arc de Triomphe gets a lot of love, and I certainly enjoyed it, but there was a greenscreen weightlessness to it at times – it was all those bodies flying around after being hit by passing Citroëns, I suppose! And I quite enjoyed the long overhead scene in which John Wick blasts people with a shotgun that sets them on fire, ha ha! The last contest with the foppy clothes-horse Marquis, who stands as the picture’s principal villain, is okay, but maybe wasn’t quite the satisfaction I was looking for; but the last-act tribute to The Warriors was a mighty big help, boppers!

In sum, there’s plenty to enjoy here for the action enthusiast, and even the Ridiculous Action enthusiast! There’s a rake-gag aspect to some of this: you’ll lose count of how many times John Wick gets hit by a car, or falls down the stairs, or plummets a distance that would cripple a normal man! There’s a more general repetitiveness of tone as well as event through much of the picture: many times, for example, Wick will meet up with someone with whom he used to be friends, and they’ll refer to this bosom chumship in sober and reverent terms, but every time this happens it leaves you wondering just exactly what sort of friendships these were! Ha ha, did these guys go out for beers or socialize in any recognizable manner, or did they just run across each other in the course of their killing sprees and develop their friendships as a sort of parallel play between gunshots? It’s a conundrum, and it’s perplexities like this which keep you from fully engaging with the movies on a human level – ha ha, that’s is why Donnie Yen is such a breath of fresh air in this hermetic and cloistered environment! But you know, I took my son to see it and we had a fine old time at the picture house, and so I give John Wick: Chapter 4 three doorless cars!

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 The Abominable Dr. Phibes! (1971)

 

At the playing of the organ, it’s Burl, here to review a popular curiosity of the Seventies! It’s a little of Vincent Price’s wonderful egg magic, and he speaks here without moving his mouth just as when he narrated The Devil’s Triangle! Of course we also know Price from his later roles, such as we find in Dead Heat and Edward Scissorhands, and we know him from his work on the AIP Poe films, and from yet earlier works like Laura and The Baron of Arizona! But this is a taste of his early-70s stuff, and of course it could only be The Abominable Dr. Phibes!

 

I saw plenty of stills from this movie before ever seeing the movie itself, because it had come out not long before a rush of picture-book histories of horror movies were published, and they all used images from it and its sequel, Dr. Phibes Rises Again! And why not? They’re well-shot movies with elaborate and unusual sets and plenty of crazy and bloody goings-on to depict, and if the truth be told, the visual delights with which the picture is well salted, along with of course the outré murders and limited but still delightful Price performance, count as the movie’s main virtues!

 

It’s a revenge story, even if the motive doesn’t make much sense! As the narrative commences the murders have already begun, and in fact we join a crime in progress as a man in bed is shredded by bats loosed into his bedroom! Ha ha, it seems that we’re located in London in the year 1925, and general purpose genius Dr. Anton Phibes, with the help of his beautiful but mute and mysterious assistant Vulnavia, is taking out the entire surgical team he holds responsible for his wife’s death on the operating table, one by one, with killings inspired by curses in the Old Testament!

 

On his trail are the dogsbodies of Scotland Yard, represented by a blockheaded policeman named Trout, played by Peter Jeffrey from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen! Ha ha, Trout makes a few leaps of logic that initially give him the appearance of someone with a decent investigative mind, but he’s soon revealed as an incompetent who seems smart only in comparison with his even dimmer superiors! Joseph Cotton from Shadow of a Doubt plays Dr. Vesalius, the leader of the rapidly dwindling surgical team and the obvious final victim, and even he fails to see certain highly evident aspects of the revenge plot coming! And their dimwittedness even reduces the purported genius of Phibes, because we think that after all it wouldn’t take much cleverness to trick this gang of muleheads!

 

Of course it’s the goofy and horrible murders which stand as the film’s main attractions! We get the bat attack, a headsqueeze from a trick frog mask, an exsanguination (neatly bottled as in Exorcist III), rats on a plane, a freezing by snow machine, a highly unlikely brass unicorn impalement, a munching by locusts, and an attempted acid facewash! This is not strictly speaking Old Testament stuff, but we won’t mind that, ha ha! And of course Price is always a treat, but I find his charms muted here since he doesn’t speak in the accepted oral manner, and when we do hear his voice, the Priciness of it is altered by his stilted and mechanical syntax!

 

There are plenty of baffling questions, like why Vulnavia, played by Virginia North from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, is so devoted to Phibes and his plot! Is she even human, or is she one of the clockwork creations Phibes has playing music in his lair? (Vulnavia is always playing music too, so maybe that’s the giveaway!) And why does Phibes blame the surgeons so thoroughly for his wife’s death? Being so completely unaware of the risks of any surgery in the 1920s makes him come off as something of a reactive idiot! And why was a psychiatrist (the frog mask victim) part of the team at all? Just for the “headshrinker” joke I suppose, but that hardly seems worth it!

 

Anyway, the movie quite actively resists any attempt to take it seriously, and as mentioned, it has a number of pleasures you can concentrate on instead! It’s never scary, but it is comic-gruesome, and of course, ha ha, the Price is right! I’m going to give The Abominable Dr. Phibes two brussels sprouts!

Burl reviews The Northman! (2022)

 

By the beating of the black raven’s wing, it’s Burl, here with a tale of blood-soaked Viking vengeance! Ha ha, I saw a new movie in the theatre the other day, which always makes me happy; and what’s more it was a real movie too, not some digitally-rendered seventh superhero sequel! By garr, it was The Northman, and as usual I’m glad I made the effort and went out to the movie house! It was worth it!

This is your basic Old Norse version of Hamlet – the main character, played by Alexander Skarsgård from Godzilla vs. Kong, is even named Amleth, which sounds like ‘Hamlet’ if you say it fast! The story starts with him as a boy, delighted by the return of his father King Aurvandil, played by Ethan Hawke from Explorers, from a pillaging and looting expedition! (The raping is only implied, but heavily so!) After Amleth is inculcated into manhood by a crazy ritual enacted by him, his dad, and the loony court jester played by Willem Dafoe from Streets of Fire, there comes the inevitable heartbreak: his beloved dad is slain by Uncle Fjolnïr, played by Claes Bang from The Square, while his mother, Nicole Kidman from Stoker, is carried off screaming!

 

Amleth escapes by means of a fearsome nose-biting, and rows off vowing to avenge his father and save his mother! Next thing you know it’s years later (per the runic intertitle) and Amleth, now big and tough and with a hulking stride that seems a bit affected, is working as a berserker, shouting and carrying on and ravaging villages and so forth! A mystical seeress in a really rather far-out hat, who is of course played by Björk of Drawing Restraint 9 fame, convinces Amreth it’s time to follow his fate along its path of revenge, and by pretending to be a slave he hitches a ride to Iceland, where Fjolnïr has become a gentleman farmer! Along the way he meets Olga, another slave played by Anya Taylor-Joy from Last Night in Soho!

 

Ah, Iceland! Ha ha, it’s a place I’ve been many times, and by garr I hope to go back there sometime soon! When Amleth gets there, he settles into the role of farm slave, biding his time for maximum vengeance! Of course he falls in love with Olga, and then begins a program of bedevilment against Fjolnïr and his farm! Ha ha, he really pulls some crazy pranks on that farm, like chopping up a couple of henchmen and pinning their remains up on the side of a building in the form of a galloping horse! Of course there soon comes a time when Amleth realizes that all is not as he had long assumed it was! Still, he’s sworn his blood oath of vengeance, and done so before Björk of all people, so what’s a feller to do? Well, it all leads to a final battle that will look familiar to anyone who’s seen Revenge of the Sith!

It’s a good gritty Viking picture, and apparently pretty authentic, as all Robert Eggers pictures seem to be! It’s not as crazy as The Lighthouse or as scary and earth-level as The Witch, but he had a lot of coin to spend on this picture, and it shows! And like his earlier movies, there’s a good balance of historical verisimilitude and supernatural happenstance! Still, I don’t think this will stand up as his best film – it’s a solid, rugged, bloody and often bold Viking picture, but nevertheless not so far from The Vikings or The 13^th Warrior or even Erik the Viking as it pretends to be! It’s got a definite touch of Conan the Barbarian to it too, and that’s fine by ol’ Burl! But Amreth is a bit of a blockhead, and all the talk about fate and following it or whatever is pretty gassy stuff! Still, it looks terrific, and it's epic enough, and after all, it's a real movie, and we get precious few of those in these days of decline! I’m going to give The Northman three decapitations, which is I believe the same number the film itself contains! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Nobody! (2021)

 

Ha ha and headbutts, it’s Burl! Yes, it’s time for another review, and this time I’m reviewing more old man action for you! As if Taken 2 and Rambo: Last Blood were not enough, here we have the story of a family man who used to be a man of violence in his role as an… what was it, adjuster? accountant? actuary? Anyway, some kind of killer for the C.I.A. with a boring-job nickname for whatever reason! The picture is quite simply called Nobody!

Now what this picture is, is the “fun” version of A History of Violence! And I say “fun” despite the scenes of a downtrodden ironworks executive cowering, while at work, from his in-laws and his bosses, who are one and the same, and later lying prone on his bed at night, separated from his disinterested wife by a wall of pillows! Don’t worry, his passion for mayhem will be reawakened soon enough! (Oh, and I should say right here that his father-in-law is played by Michael Ironside from Scanners!)

The fellow’s name is Hutch, and he’s played by comedysman Bob Odenkirk, who spent 2021 playing against type in pictures like this and Halloween Kills, in which he played a miniature role! Connie Nielsen from Rushmore plays his distant, disaffected wife, who spends a good chunk of the movie cowering in the basement with the couple’s teenage son and young daughter! It all kicks off when a couple of housebreakers invade Hutch’s house and steal his watch and a handful of cash, and put a bopping on the teenage son! Hutch has a chance to bean them with a golf club, but instead sends them on their way!

Of course as a result of this soft-out, his family believe him to be nothing better than a paisley mandanfield; but little do they know the incident has given him the thirst for violence! He seeks out and retrieves his watch from the robbers, then happens into a clash with a gang of drunken Russian louts posessing little sense of either civility or bus ridership! Ha ha, Hutch pounds them all (getting well tenderized himself in the process), and thus earns the enmity of crime baron Yulian, played by Aleksey Serebryakov from Fartsa, whose brother or cousin or something was one of the beatees! In fact Hutch has not merely roughed this relation up, he’s roughed him up to death!

Yulia commands a gang of course - that brand of gangster who in movies are often seen in track suits with gold chains hanging about their necks, ha ha, and so the movie is almost as Eastern Promises as it is A History of Violence - and they find Hutch's name by inspecting his dropped bus pass! There’s a home invasion scene which ends in more victims; a car crash; a kidnapping; a car chase; and finally the big showdown at the tool and die factory! Here Hutch receives some last-act help from his old hangdog dad played by Christopher Lloyd from Buckaroo Banzai and Track 29, and his stepbrother, a sniper played by the RZA from Ghost Dog and The Dead Don’t Die; and thanks to them and the Home Alone traps Hutch has earlier set, a lot of Russian gangsters are shot, exploded, or run through with rebar!

Ha ha, that’s a throwback move, isn’t it, the rebar impalement! It seems very 80s or early 90s to me, and indeed, the whole movie has that same spirit! As a mechanism for providing a cathartic jolt to middle-aged schlubs who fantasize about violent vengeance against imaginary wrongdoers, it’s finely-honed, ha ha! As a story with any real depth or subtextual provender, I found it wanting! Of course once he becomes a hyper-violent killer his wife rediscovers her ardor for hubbo, who for his part admits that in his transformation from soulless killer to middle-class doormat, he might have overcorrected! But there’s no investigation of these human aspects, no challenging of them, no real way of excavating a theme from the thing!

It’s an enjoyable bit of melba toast and cheese for a’ that! The actors all do good work, and I was pleased to see J-Rod in the role of the bus driver! I would also add that it’s clear from watching the picture that whoever purchased the set dressing did an exemplary job! It’s a bonbon and no mistake, but I give Nobody two and a half stock shots of some other city!

Burl reviews Tales From the Darkside: The Movie! (1990)

 

Once upon a time, it’s Burl, here to review a multi-story, omnibus, portmanteau anthology horror picture! Ha ha, of course Dead of Night is the standard bearer for such works, and I’m here to tell you that this movie is no Dead of Night; nor, indeed, is it a Creepshow! No, in actual fact, the picture is Tales From the Darkside: The Movie!

Ha ha, I remember when this one came out in the theatres, but for whatever reason, even though I always like to see horror pictures on the big screen, I ignored it! And I continued to ignore it until recently, when a DVD of the movie came my way and I could ignore it no longer! It begins with a framing story concerning a suburban witch played by Blondie herself, Debbie Harry, well known from Videodrome, is preparing to fricassee a paperboy she has captured, played by Matthew Lawrence from Planes, Trains and Automobiles!

To distract her from her meal prep, the paperboy recounts three tales from a big volume he has found in his cell! The first is the most star-studded of them: laid on a college campus (a setting ol’ Burl always appreciates in horror movies), we meet a gang of students, including Steve Buscemi of Escape From L.A. fame as a nerdbody who has received a mummy by mail order, toffee-nosed rich boy Lee, played by Robert Sedgwick from Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home, who has cheated Buscemi out of a grant or a scholarship or something; the toffeenose’s even more toffee-nosed girlfriend, played by Julianne Moore from The Fugitive; and the girlfriend’s brother, who seems out of place in this tennis whites-wearing crew, essayed by Christian Slater of Hot Tub Time Machine 2! Soon the mean-faced mail order mummy, previously a reposing mummy, becomes a full-on walking mummy, and like his compadres in Dawn of the Mummy, exacts a little gory vengeance to the beat of the cloth-wrapped feet!

Next we meet a rich man, played by the always-welcome William Hickey from Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, who fears a local housecat and hires a gentleman assassin played by New York Doll David Johansen to take care of the fearsome feline! This one is based on a Stephen King story, but it’s one of his sillier ones, featuring as it does a scene in which the kitty forces its way into someone’s mouth and down his gullet! Ha ha!

The final story is the one that tries to pack in some emotional resonance, and it involves a downtown artist played by James Remar from Quiet Cool, who, despite being poor and unsuccessful, maintains a vast Soho warehouse studio that would tax the income of a Jeff Koons! He has a scary encounter with a gargoyle which wounds him and makes him promise never to tell anyone about it, and then leaves him be! Remar meets a pretty lady played by Rae Dawn Chong from Commando! They fall in love, get married, have kids, and if you can’t guess the twist then you’ve never read an EC Comic or a story by O. Henry!

With the stories told and the basting pan ready, the paperboy of the framing story must figure out a way to escape from the witch, and ha ha, I won’t give that part away! I will give away this fact, however: it’s not a great movie! But it’s not awful either: the cast alone (many of whom had appeared on the Tales From the Darkside TV show) ensures that! It’s slickly made, with some fine makeups and a moment here and a moment there, but it’s decidedly deficient in affrights, and in the end sits about on the level of, say, Creepshow 2! But for my money it doesn’t touch the Amicus pictures from yesteryear (though it does manhandle the later Milton Subotsky productions like The Uncanny and The Monster Club), and while it provides some fun, and the final story tries hard, I can only muster a rating of one and a half wire hangers for Tales From the Darkside: The Movie!

Burl reviews Marked for Death! (1990)

 

With a hapkido hello, it’s Burl, here to review midbudget action! I’m sure you’re all familiar with the Steven Seagal Three Word Title series, inaugurated by Above the Law in 1989 and maintained through to the year 1991 by equally dopey movies like Hard to Kill, Out for Justice, and today’s picture, Marked for Death!

Now, as you might guess, I don’t hold Seagal in terribly high regard, either as an action hero or as a person, based on what I’ve heard! But of course it’s not always the best idea to form an opinion based on rumour and innuendo! Such rumour and innuendo as there is insists that he’s a big blowhard who treats people terribly and plays up some kind of mob connections! Ha ha, I don’t know how much of that is true, but the personal qualities it implies are clearly detectable in his screen presence!

Marked for Death opens with Seagal’s character, John Hatcher, in Mexico, running down good old Danny Trejo of Con Air fame, shooting up a drugs den, and acting like even more of a jerk than he usually does, even to his putative partners! It turns out that at least some of this jerkiness is part of the performance, as we next see Hatcher in a confessional, telling the priest he doesn’t want to be such a knob any more! Ha ha, then he quits his job with the DEA, though his boss, played by good old Peter Jason from Prince of Darkness, doesn’t want to hear about it!

Next the ponytailed ex-cop heads for his home territory of Chicago, where he visits his sister and her family and hooks up with his longtime buddy Max, played by good old Keith David from They Live! He finds, to his dismay, that the old neighbourhood has been taken over by Jamaican drugs gangs, or “posses,” and Max is already prepared to take them on! A dread mon called Screwface, played by Basil Wallace from Return of the Living Dead III, is behind it all, and is much feared in the drugs gang community for his brutality and his voo-doo!

Seagal struts around looking ridiculous in dumb clothes he designed, or anyway chose, and speaking dumb words that he wrote, or claimed to, and wearing just the dumb expression you’d expect from, say, a caveman being shown a flashy card trick! In most of his movies, thanks to the crushing insecurity he feels every day, Seagal’s slapfight style involves mainly him delivering beatings on people and twisting limbs here and there, while never so much as feeling the brush of his opponent’s fingertips ‘pon his cheek! Here he at least gets a few bonks, and finds himself in a couple of sticky situations, as when the drugs gang crushes his beautiful Mustang with him inside, then tosses a Molotov cocktail in with him, or when they tie him down and prepare to sacrifice him to Damballa or someone similar!

Other characters include Joanna Pacula from Gorky Park and Black Ice, playing some kind of ill-defined expert who gets a crush on the kung-fu blockhead and is completely forgotten about by the end of the movie; and Tom Wright, the hitchhiker from Creepshow 2, playing a Jamaican cop on the hunt for Screwface so the movie can claim not to simply be a 90 minute anti-Jamaica slur! Other attempts to ward off criticisms the filmmakers clearly expected include a small speech about the tough lives led by the underclasses of Kingston, a little note at the tail end of the credits reading “The posse phenomenon is estimated to be a fraction of one percent of the Jamaican population and should not detract from their country or the contributions Jamaicans have made to this country,” and a cameo appearance by Jimmy Cliff of Club Paradise fame! But it all still seems a little bit mean!

It’s a pretty poor show, but it has a few pleasures! Seagal and his awful outfits have camp value of course, and the action is sometimes okay, sometimes ho-hum, but there are Special Makeup Effects, which I always like to see in an action movie! Ha ha, some of them, like a fake head for an eye-gouging scene, are a bit ropey, but that somehow makes them even better! Lots of early-90s action pictures seem coughed in from the 80s, and this, with its Reefer Madness-like sophistication about drugs and its hero who forswears violence only to renege immediately his loved ones are threatened, is certainly one of them!

It’s full of Jamaican accents and patois that are as phony as the bad guy’s blue eyes, and while it might be one of Seagal’s goriest movies (there’s a hand chopped off, a head chopped off, the requisite broken limbs and of course the eye gouge), it’s also one of his stupidest, and that’s really saying something! I give Marked for Death one inscrutable hand signal!

Burl reviews The Return of Frank James! (1940)

 

Yodel-ay-hee-hoo, it’s Burl, presenting a new movie review for you! Ha ha, today it’s a review for a sequel to a movie I’ve never actually seen, 1939’s Jesse James! But of course I know the story in its broad strokes - don’t forget, it was covered in the more recent picture The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and you only need to read the title to get the gist of it, ha ha - and so I was never at a loss during my recent screening of The Return of Frank James!

Henry Fonda, well known from Tentacles and City on Fire, plays Frank, just as he did in Jesse James! The picture opens with Jesse’s killing at the hands of the coward Robert Ford, who here is played by the terrific John Carradine, whom we recall from pictures as diverse as Sunset Cove, Man of Grey Testes, The Boogey Man, and many, many others! His brother Charlie is played by Charles Tannen from Gorilla At Large! Frank, living the quiet life on his farm along with his pals Pinky and Clem, hears about the killing of his brother, straps on his six-guns, and heads out to get ram tough like a rock on those Ford boys!

Nothing, but nothing, will dissuade his little buddy Clem from tagging along, and Pinky later becomes a very important factor in the story too, though what the poor man must have gone through is not dwelt upon and his heroism is mainly implied! Lovely Gene Tierney from Heaven Can Wait plays a newspaper baron’s reporter-daughter Miss Stone, and Frank and Clem’s attempt to use her to spread a counterfeit story of Frank’s demise only brings a shady but persistent detective onto their trail! Ha ha, and the detective is memorably played by J. Edward Bromberg from Strange Cargo!

Henry Hull from Werewolf of London plays old Major Cobb, Frank’s excitable old pal! (I have to admit that for a while I thought the actor was Frank Morgan! I was certainly wrong about that!) Ha ha, Frank engages the old Major as his lawyer in the courtroom finale, and for a time one is not convinced that choosing to be defended by an apparent crazed hayseed was Frank’s best call; but it turns out that James truly is being judged by a jury of his peers: they all belong to the bumpkin class just like him!

But is Frank James really a bumpkin? Fonda, in some ineffable but fundamental way that is in no sense his fault, is ill-suited to play an old west character, whether an outlaw and gunfighter or the humble man of the soil he is at the beginning of this story! He does it well however, and somehow becomes the character in a different and more oblique way than that which we commonly associate with good acting! It’s like seeing The Elephant Man on stage with the actor wearing no makeup: you know he’s not physically an elephant man, but you watch the performance instead and the makeup becomes wholly unnecessary!

With a supporting cast that includes Donald Meek from Love on the Run (not playing aptly to his surname, for once), Russell Hicks from Hold That Ghost!, and of course Jackie Cooper in the role of the puppy-like Clem; along with several exciting gunfights; nice colour photography; and solid direction from none other than Fritz Lang, who later brought us Human Desire, it’s an entertaining and well-paced oater! It doesn’t stand out in the way of other Lang Westerns, most notably the terrific Rancho Notorious, but it’s a darn good show anyway! Ha ha, I’ll have to look out for the original Jesse James, but in the meantime I give The Return of Frank James two and a half plummeting dummies!

Burl reviews Get Carter! (1971)

 

‘Avin’ a butcher’s, it’s Burl, here with a tale of Blighty gangsterism and blood vengeance! Yes, it’s that classic tale of the wide boys and hoodlum kerfufflement, British cinema’s own Get Carter! It’s a hard-edged limey classic, and I suppose many a junior racketeer latched on to this picture as the epitome of jolly old toughness and crikey cool!

Michael Caine from The Island and Jaws: The Revenge essays the role of Jack Carter, a London-based hard case who hears tell that his brother has been killed up in Newcastle! It was apparently an accident, but Jack doesn’t believe that for a second, ha ha, even though his brother wasn’t himself a gangster and would logically have no reason to get himself killed in a mob hit situation! In any case, Jack wants revenge and he’ll get it by crimble or by crouton!

Just about as soon as Carter gets off the train he tracks down a whole marvelous gallery of British hatchetfaces like Ian Hendry from Theatre of Blood, Tony Beckley from The Lost Continent, and the silky-toned playwright John Osborne as the pornographer Cyril! All of these fellas are gangsters, of course, and are all involved to one degree or another in the killing of Carter’s sibling! And Carter offers no quarter to these nogoodniks, pushing them into ponds or tossing them from parking structures as he sees fit! Ha ha, the climax involves a massive beachside dumping machine of the type one associates with 1970s England whether one knew they existed or not!

Britt Ekland from The Man with the Golden Gun is Carter’s ladyfriend back in the big city, with whom he makes sweet telephone love, which gets awkwardly halted - ha ha, loquerus interruptus! And then later, Carter plays a game of bohankie with his lumpy landlady, and that too gets interrupted when hoodlums bust in! Carter must grab his trusty shotgun and see them off in his birthday suit, ha ha! Carter finds the gun in the first act and carries it around all through the final act, but he never fires it, which may seem in contradiction to Chekhovian convention! Except that he does eventually use it as a bludgeon, ha ha, and I think that must count!

There’s lots to admire in this brutal and bleak picture, not least the symphony of great voices on display! Aside from Caine, there’s Hendry and Osborne in particular, and just about everyone is fun to listen to on some level! The atmosphere is exactly that I recall from my early trips to England, which weren’t until the mid-80s, but things don’t seem to have changed much! The photography from Wolfgang Suschitzky is top notch, and Mike Hodges directs it very assuredly for a chap making his first feature! There’s a lot of appealing craft on display, but it’s not always a pleasant watch, nor does it amount to all that much in the end! Still, plenty to admire here, and so I give Get Carter three appalled neighbours!

Burl reviews Darkman! (1990)

 

Biff, bash, bang and boom, it’s Burl, here to review a comics-based superhero picture! But it’s not your everyday superhero picture, thank the business! No, this is a Sam Raimi picture, and not the Raimi who made all those Spider-Man pictures either! Though, to be fair, it’s not the Raimi who made The Evil Dead, either! No, this picture is more from the Raimi who made Army of Darkness, and yes, ha ha, I’m talking about Darkman!

I had a good time at the movie theatre with this one, as I recall! Like Army of Darkness it’s a studio picture, but it has lots of the stylistic quirks we remember and love from pictures like Evil Dead 2 - the zooms and tilts and the weird montages and all of what have you! But you also get a cast of familiars, like Liam Neeson from Next of Kin and Taken 2 as the driven scientist looking for a way to make artificial skin, but frustrated because it always goes bloop at the end of ninety-nine minutes when exposed to the light!

Meanwhile, his lawyer girlfriend, played by Frances McDormand from Moonrise Kingdom, gets mixed up with gangsters through no fault of her own! These baddies, on the quest for an incriminating document, invade Neeson’s lab, kill his assistant, and blow him and his research sky-high! He ends up floating in the river with the complexion of a well-done coppa steak, an uncontrollable grumpy streak, and an inability to feel pain! The front-line bad guy responsible for this is Durant, played by Larry Drake of Dr. Giggles and Dark Night of the Scarecrow! He’s the sort of heavy who for some reason likes to collect the fingers of his victims, which he chops off with a cigar guillotine and keeps in a cigarette box - ha ha, presumably he takes these severed digits home and smokes them in the privacy of his den after his family has gone to bed!

Colin Friels, who returned to the dark later in Dark City, plays the bad guy behind the bad guy, dancing among the girders of a skyscraper under construction! But leading up to this is Darkman’s journey from crispy, wounded scientist to a rage-filled superhero wearing false faces as he disrupts the business affairs of the Detroit mob!  There are some fine action scenes in here, climaxing in a grand helicopter war, and several henchman expirations along the way!

All sorts of familiar faces show up in the movie’s margins, from Jenny Agutter, of An American Werewolf in London, as a heartless, pin-poking doctor, to Julius Harris from King Kong as a gravedigger, to Professor Toru Tanaka of Dead Heat as a Chinese warrior! And we get more director cameos than in a John Landis movie, including one from John Landis himself, along with William Dear, who directed Timerider, William Lustig, who directed Maniac Cop, and both Joel and Ethan Coen, who directed many fine pictures like The Hudsucker Proxy! Producers like Sean Daniel and Stuart Cornfeld also get a look in, as do Raimi cronies like Josh Becker, Scott Spiegel, and of course Bruce Campbell, who appears at the end as a Final Shemp!

There’s no wasted time in this scrappy picture, and though disbelief must frequently be suspended throughout its running time, the viewing experience is fun enough to make that effort both worthwhile and painless! Ha ha, it’s safe to say I’m a Raimi supporter, though I never have seen his baseball picture, nor his Oz sequel neither! Maybe one day! And although Darkman is not my favourite of his works, I did and do enjoy it, and so I give it a robust three dipping birds!

Burl reviews Rolling Thunder! (1977)

Burl here, presenting a write-up concerning the revenge drama Rolling Thunder! This is a picture beloved by many, and I myself, having seen it before, years ago, remembered it fondly! Five years before John Rambo got himself lost in the B.C. mountains, here is the Vietnam veteran movie that actually drew first blood, ha ha!

William “The Dark” Devane plays Major Charles Rane, who commanded troops in ‘Nam and then ended up a POW for almost ten years! He returns Stateside with his fellow prisoner, a wreck played by Tommy Lee Jones from The Fugitive! Of course everything has changed for The Major: his infant son has grown into a boy, his wife has taken up with another fellow; a cop, a decent enough guy, but one who calls his stepson “runt!” On the upside, The Major attracts the attentions of a local POW groupie (Linda Haynes from Human Experiments) and is gifted, by a local car dealership or chamber of commerce, a golden dollar for every day he was imprisoned! Further on the downside, his cask of gold attracts the attentions of a foul violence gang who kill his family and grind off The Major’s hand in a garbarator!

The leader of this terrible violence gang is none other than James Best, a terrific actor whom we all know from The Killer Shrews and of course, his role as Roscoe P. Coltrane! Q-Q-Q indeed! Luke Askew from The Beast Within is in the gang too, and a couple of other fellows besides! Dabney Coleman from Cloak & Dagger takes on the small role as The Major’s Army shrink, but nothing this braindoctor can say will take away The Major’s thirst for blood vengeance or the silver hook he now sports for a hand! Ha ha! The Major enlists his buddy Tommy Lee Jones to help, and it’s kind of touching: Tommy Lee asks no questions, but simply says “I’ll get my gear!” Of course it’s because he wants to help The Major, but also because he can’t adjust to and just plain hates his Stateside life, ha ha! And one sympathizes with him completely whenever his family is shown!

The picture was directed by John “Best Seller” Flynn, and is probably the movie on which his reputation for no-nonsense action-drama largely is based! Because, ha ha, it’s pretty good! Having a Paul Schrader/Heywood Gould script doesn’t hurt of course, and the photography by Jordan “Blade Runner” Cronenweth is ideal for the picture, and the cast is pretty darn strong! The final scenes, which recall those of Taxi Driver in their “man’s gotta do” brutality, are particularly memorable! (Those expecting wall-to-wall blood action will probably consider the picture too much of a drama for their tastes, but that’s their loss! I think when I saw it as a teenager, I was a little underwhelmed, but I feel differently now!)

It’s a simple picture, and from that comes its strength! It actually fits into a microgenre I like: movies that were given the green light on the basis of their exploitable elements, but are actually artistic works of serious purpose! And yet they fulfill their genre requirements nicely! Ha ha, I can’t think of other examples right off the top of my mind, but there are plenty – maybe Cockfighter is another one!

Anyway, it’s a movie of well-oiled craftsmanship, and it delivers the goods! It’s not brilliant, but it’s a very fine low-budgeter, and William Devane going from this to The Dark in less than two years impresses me with his range! I find him an interesting-looking fellow, like the half-simian Kennedy brother they kept in the White House attic! In any event, I’m going to give Rolling Thunder three pairs of mirrored sunglasses!

Burl reviews White Line Fever! (1975)

Hi, Burl here, putting the hammer down and roaring back to life! Ha ha, Carrol Jo Hummer! Yes, good buddies, that’s the name of the main character in White Line Fever, and I like it so much, and it gets repeated so much in the movie, that I just have to say ha ha and repeat once more, Carrol Jo Hummer! Of course Carrol Jo Hummer is played by good old Jan Michael Vincent, whom we know well from pictures like Enemy Territory and Shadow of the Hawk!

Well, White Line Fever is not so much a trucking movie as it is a trucker’s movie! The distinction is important! Most trucker pictures are workingman films, or purport to be, but this one actually walks the walk that it talks! It’s about as pro-union a picture as you’ll find outside of Matewan, and that’s a fine thing as far as old Burl is concerned! You see, Carrol Jo Hummer (ha ha!) is an independent trucker, and he’s trying to get out from under the heavy thumb of the corrupt and greedy company that wants to control all the trucking in the state of Arizona!

Kay Lenz, from Moving Violation, plays Carrol Jo’s long-suffering wife, and here I really mean suffering! Ha ha, she really gets the short end of the stick here, and no mistake! But she sticks by Carrol Jo, at least until she’s beaten so badly that she becomes insensate and unable to either stick by or not stick by any man in particular!

The movie features some excellent character actors, like R. G. Armstrong, the kindly doctor in The Beast Within, and L. Q. Jones, who was the sheriff in that very same picture! Ha ha, old L.Q. sure plays a good bad guy! Sam Laws from Get Crazy is here, as is the excellent Slim “The Howling” Pickens! But of course the finest actor we find in this movie, which is saying a lot, is the great Dick Miller, from The Long Ride Home and so many other pictures, who here plays a friendly, good-hearted, squirrel hunting jacket-wearing trucker named Birdie!

The picture has a strange, only-in-the-70s ending, wherein the bad guys are not really vanquished in any substantive way; though Carrol Jo performs a symbolic gesture which puts him in the hospital, but wins him the acclaim of an Arizona crowd, including Dick Miller, who’s sitting on a wall wearing his best squirrel-hunting jacket! Ha ha! But aside from L.Q. Jones, who catches a punching, the bad guys responsible for all the pain and suffering undergone by Mr. and Mrs. Carrol Jo remain unpunished!

But that makes it a more interesting movie by many leagues! Ha ha, with its unusual approach to trucker cinema, its pro-union bona fides and its cast of marvelous faces, White Line Fever is an enjoyable little exercise in long-haul filmmaking! Ha ha, sure, it’s a bit dumb here and there, but I’m going to give White Line Fever two and a half Glass Houses!

Burl reviews The Devil Doll! (1936)

Eh bonjour, c’est Burl! Hà hà, the picture I wanted to tell you about today is The Devil Doll, which is to say the old Tod Browning one, not that spooky British cheapie from the early 60s! This one is typically eccentric for a Browning picture, featuring as it does a vengeance-crazed Devil’s Island escapee donning old lady drag in an absolutely batty plan to get satisfaction from the bankster blackguards who lied and killed to put him behind bars!

The murderous ex-banker is played by Lionel Barrymore, who was also in Browning’s Mark of the Vampire! Ha ha, his Hal Holbrookian voice is not very Parisian (which all the characters are supposed to be), but his performance is a cured-ham delight, particularly when he’s dressed up as old Mme. Mandelip!

Let me back up a bit: Barrymore’s character, Paul Lavond, busts out of Devil’s Island with a chum: an ailing old scientist with a bonkers idea to save the world from the hassles of overpopulation: shrink everybody to one-sixth their size! Ha ha, the idea is that there’s a lot more food for us! But the plan neglects to take into account the problems of raising and slaughtering, say, a cow as big as a double-decker bus! Or how to fish for a tuna the size of a small submarine! Ha ha, what about all the houses? The clothes? The machines? The cost involved in replacing all of this, even if smaller, would be astronomical! And who goes into the shrinking machine first, and who last? Wouldn’t there be gangs of stubborn giants roaming the world? Or is everyone compelled to be miniaturized? That sounds unworkable!

Ha ha, you can see I’ve put some thought into this! But this bizarre plan is only a small part of the picture – the real crux is Barrymore’s revenge against the confederacy of bunces he blames (correctly) for ruining his life! When he sees that the old scientist can create doll people controllable by mental impulses, he gets an idea that’s only slightly less bonkers: assume the persona of Mme. Mandelip, an old lady who makes hyper-realistic dolls; sell a doll person to his enemies, then have the doll person poison the enemy during the night! Robert Greig from Tower of London plays the chief enemy, and he gets a poking whilst in his bed – a poking from which he’ll never recover!

Meanwhile there’s drama with the now-deceased scientist’s wife, who is a sort of cross between the Bride of Frankenstein and Igor, and who wants Barrymore to help continue her husband’s kookywork! Barrymore, however, only wants revenge, and then he’ll have nothing to do with miniaturizing the world! And of course there’s Barrymore’s daughter, played by Maureen O’Sullivan from Too Scared to Scream, and who believes her father to have been a crook and a murderer and hates him for it; and her romance with a penurious cab driver! There’s a marvelously melodramatic ending to cap it all!

That’s a lot packed into a short running time, and, perhaps as a result of this there’s a lot of weird atmosphere in the movie; very indistinct, though! Hard to pin down! But one thing worth pointing out are the excellent special effects, and in particular the amazing oversized sets built to show the homunculi in close-ups! Wow, ha ha! Maybe the movie could have used a few cigar-chomping midgets disguised as babies, but you could say that about most movies! I give The Devil Doll three stricken bankers!