Burl reviews Halloween Ends! (2022)

 

Ha ha and pumpkin guts, it’s Burl, here with a seasonally appropriate review for you! In Octobers past I’ve taken a look at the new version of Halloween from 2018, and its sequel, Halloween Kills, which came along a few years later! And now that the air is crisp again and the leaves are swirling through the air, landing crunchy and brown ‘neath the skeletal branches and grey clouds heavy with the coming snows, I’ve caught up with the third in this tributary of Myersania: the maligned Halloween Ends!

 

In part it’s maligned because it fails to provide exactly what a fan of these films expects and wants, which is to say many repetitive scenes of Michael Myers stalking and killing the people of Haddonfield! It shares this fake-out quality with an earlier production, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, and, to demonstrate its own self-awareness, and also perhaps a bit of wishfulness concerning its legacy, it also shares the opening title font, if not the computerized pumpkin imagery, with that now-celebrated picture! Ha ha, I must say, I was heartened when I espied that italicized, powder-blue lettering!

 

Though this series takes the position that none of the Halloween stories exist except the one told in the original 1978 Halloween, the second picture of the new cycle shares with Halloween II the aspect of taking up exactly where its predecessor left off, and now with Halloween Ends, although instead of telling a loopy story of warlocks and killer robots in a completely different town we’re still in Haddonfield, but a break from the contiguity of the first two is still indicated, because it’s four years after the events depicted in those photoplays! The effective opening scene, set in 2018 like the first two films, introduces us to Corey Creekmuir, a hapless and nerdy babysitter whose ill-fated charge turns out to be a bit of a jerk! This leads to a plummet-related tragedy for which Corey Creekmuir is blamed!

 

Then it’s four years later and Corey Creekmuir is a skulking pariah who is given the hairy eyeball by Haddonfielders and is outright hassled by the local marching band jerks! Meanwhile our favourite donkey girlscout, Laurie Strode, who in the earlier films was a wild-eyed survivalist hiding out in a trap-filled shanty, is now, unaccountably, an apron-wearing, pie-baking granny living in a normal house and writing what sounds like a preachy and unreadable memoir about her experiences with Michael Myers! Her granddaughter is now a nurse with her own set of problems, which Laurie tries to help assuage by introducing her to Corey Creekmuir! There follows a wildly improbable romance, during which time Corey Creekmuir also discovers Michael Myers hiding in a sewer and begins to fall under his baneful influence!

 

So for a while it’s sort of a romance movie and a buddy picture, and then it morphs into a revenge story with Corey Creekmuir using first Michael and then later just his mask and kitchen knife to exact rote revenge against his various enemies! Concurrently to all this there’s been a steady stream of tributes to John Carpenter, and not just to the Halloween-related works either! Corey Creekmuir watches Carpenter’s The Thing at his babysitting gig early in the film (just as Laurie watched the Howard Hawks version in Halloween); there’s a radio station as we saw in The Fog; and Corey Creekmuir works at a junkyard which strongly recalls the wrecker’s yard in Christine!

 

And that’s when we realize that this picture is not a remake of Halloween or even Halloween III, but of Christine! Corey Creekmuir shares much with Arnie from that 1983 release: a surname; an initial cringing nerdishness; Buddy Holly glasses which are broken by bullies, and whose absence signposts the character’s gradual de-nerdification; a cartoonishly angry and overbearing mother; a facility with automobile repair and a large industrial facility in which to practice it; a doomed romance with someone way out of his league; and a willingness to fall under the spell of an evil force in order to exact his revenge, at the eventual cost of his life! Once that finally occurs the movie can get back to half-heartedly portraying Michael Myers as a vaguely dangerous slasher with an unexplained grudge against Laurie Strode - or is it the other way around, ha ha!

 

The picture retains the impression set in the previous two films of Haddonfield as an infinite series of neighbourhoods, an endless, physics-defying expanse of landscape urbanism easily containing all the people, services, streets, overpasses, sewer systems, hovels, mansions and everything else the story may require! The performances from the veteran actors are good: Jamie Lee Curtis, whom we know so well from Grandview U.S.A., once again demonstrates her commitment to the character of Laurie, and Will Patton, famed from The Puppet Masters, once again plays Officer Hawkins, and here very touchingly so as he shyly woos Laurie!

 

I was pleased to see the picture try something different, but I was never sold that this was the best route to take, nor that Corey Creekmuir was the best candidate to take it with! Even more than ever, the movie is dramatically powered by human behavior that ranges from unlikely to downright bizarre; and though the conceit is that their years of fearing Michael Myers has driven everyone in town slightly bonkers (though, strangely, it has never diminished their enthusiasm for Halloween parties and costumes), this just results in a movie that offers no one with whom it is possible to latch on to as a surrogate or narrative helpmate! There are some effective scenes, but too many others that feel as though they were not so much directed as merely gotten over with! I’m glad they went in a weird direction, but I wish it was weirder - ha ha, some killer robots would have hit the spot! I give Halloween Ends two tongue-skipping records!

Burl reviews Wes Craven's New Nightmare! (1994)

 

Ha ha and high concepts, it’s Burl, here to review the most po-mo of the Freddy pictures! Freddy became self-aware sometime around February of 1987, at about the time A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 came out, but it wasn’t until this picture appeared seven years later that the circle fully closed! That was when Mr. Wes Craven returned to the director’s chair in old Krugerville and made Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, which is the picture under discussion today!

It was clearly intended as a final hoop-de-doo, with the grand return of not just Wes Craven but also Heather Langenkamp, whom we well recall from Star Trek Into Darkness and other photoplays; and John Saxon from Black Christmas and Blood Beach; and background appearances made by a few other people from the first instalment! Robert Englund, of course, never went away, ha ha! And all of these folks play themselves, at least at first; or in Englund’s case, part of the time!

Langenkamp is herself, married to a special effects man (as she is in real, real life), and has a little son, Dylan, played by little Miko Hughes from Pet Sematary and Apollo 13! She’s plagued by dreams and discovers, to her disquiet, that Craven is planning to make another chapter in the Freddy saga in which she, Langenkamp, will play herself! And the ouroboros continues with the introduction of Robert Shaye and other New Line Cinema executives, all playing themselves too!

Langenkamp’s dreams persist, and soon she’s spooked by every little thing; her son is going kwazoo; her husband dies in an accident involving a mechanical Freddy arm, a speeding van, a croscharea, and a concrete wall; and ha ha, won’t anybody do something about all these darn earthquakes! Her pal Saxon provides what comfort he can, but pretty soon he’s calling her “Nancy” and treating her like the daughter she was in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street! And Englund is no help – we see him in his palatial home sans putty, where he looks nearly as fresh-faced as he did in Galaxy of Terror, but he’s too wrapped up in his goofy paintings to offer more than token comfort! (I’m not sure if Robert Englund in real, real life is a painter, but if so, as a painter he makes a fine actor! Ha ha!)

The explanation for Freddy’s presence in the “real” world is quite goofball, but acceptably so – it’s clear Craven gave it some thought so it wouldn’t just come off merely as stupid! Some work is required on the part of the viewer: they must accept the premise as quickly and completely as possible in order to wring maximum enjoyment from the movie! Once they do, they’ll find a picture not replete so much with affrights, but one that functions nevertheless an unexpectedly rich thought-piece! Ha ha, it’s still pretty goofy, but overcoming that is the price of admission!

For a Nightmare on Elm Street picture it’s a real longuebönes (112 minutes!), and this running time excess comes from an inflated opening act and then too many scenes of Dylan acting weird! It’s as though he’s possessed by Freddy, but when it turns out that isn’t actually the case, the moments where he screams or talks in a duck voice come off retroactively as filler! He’s mostly a charming little guy though, especially when he talks about his dinosaur friend Rex!

The second half of the movie has more action and standard-issue genre interest, but by then we’ve accepted Heather Langenkamp not as Heather Langenkamp, but as a fictional character who happens to be named Heather Langenkamp – in other words, ha ha, the meta effect has worn off, to the picture’s detriment! Langenkamp’s acting is a lot better in this one than it was in Nightmare 3 however, and even a step up from the first picture, in which she was mostly just fine but no better!

This picture doesn’t turn bad in the second half though, just less interesting! There’s a well-done scene of young Dylan trying to cross a busy freeway, and his mom trying to save him – ha ha, it gets a little silly when a giant Freddy appears in the sky, but this at least has precedent in Nightmare 3! A frowny doctor becomes the main human antagonist without ever becoming bad or evil, and she’s forgotten about once the standard-issue ANOES climax – meaning a lot of scampering around in downtown Freddytown with its hot pipes and steaming boilers and flaming furnaces – asserts itself!

This came before Craven’s Scream or any of the other meta-horror of the 90s, so it had the exciting flavour of the new at the time, and a lot of that residual goodwill persists for me to this day! I enjoyed it in the theatre back then and enjoyed it again more recently, if a little bit less and without the novelty! It could stand to be gorier and scarier and to have better follow-through, but I still had a fine time watching it! I give Wes Craven’s New Nightmare two and a half sloshing pools!

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 The Invisible Man Returns! (1940)

 

With a tap on your shoulder and you turn and no one’s there, it’s Burl, reviewing a tender slice of Universal horror for you! It’s another picture about that paragon of imperception, that clearest of creatures, the least visible of villains, the ethereal evildoer himself, the invisible man! Here, in point of fact, we have the first sequel to the great 1933 James Whale spookshow The Invisible Man, and what else could it be called but The Invisible Man Returns!

But it’s not the same invisible man, because Jack Griffin was cut down by police gunfire in the ’33 picture! This time, it seems a fellow called Geoffrey Radcliffe has been accused of murdering his brother, but only the Yard thinks he’s guilty - everyone else knows he's too nice a guy to have done the deed! So he’s in prison and sentenced to hang, but luckily he’s bosom chums with Dr. Frank Griffin, who's the brother of Jack and privy to the invisibility serum formula! In his cell, hours before his sentence is to be carried out, Radcliffe uses a syringe provided by Griffin to render himself invisible, escapes the gaol, and sets about trying to find the real killer – ha ha, just like OJ did, but this time there really is one!  

Radcliffe is played (invisibly, until the very end) by good old Vincent Price, whose face was also obscured in The Abominable Dr. Phibes, but whose sonorous voice is nearly as effective here as it was when he narrated The Devil’s Triangle! John Sutton from Booloo and Return of the Fly is Dr. Frank, who, as the story starts, is trying to find an antidote as quickly as possible, because he’s certain the potion will drive Geoffrey mad just as it did Jack seven years previously!

Sir Cedric Hardwick, who appeared in some Hitchcock pictures and whose voice adorns the original War of the Worlds, is top-billed here, and he plays a fellow who’s evidently an executive at the coal mine owned by the Radcliffe brothers! Meanwhile, Nan Grey from Tower of London (which John Sutton was also in, ha ha) plays Helen Manson, Geoffrey’s fiancée, who of course believes in his innocence and is helping Frank with Geoffrey’s escape, but now has to stand by helplessly as her betrothed becomes more and more devoted to maniacal laughs and paranoia!

Cecil Kellaway, who was in The Under-Pup with Nan Grey, and who later showed up in pictures as diverse as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Spinout, and Getting Straight, plays the dogged Scotland Yard inspector on the case, constantly puffing on a cigar in hopes of, ha ha, smoking out the invisible man! And Alfred himself, Alan Napier, whom we’ll recall from The Premature Burial, is the terrified, scarf-wearing Willie Spears, a gangly but pathetic figure who witnessed the real culprit but, terrified, said nothing and allowed Radcliffe to take the blame! For this he suffers the prolonged wrath of the invisible man!

Most of these people also showed up in The House of the Seven Gables, which, like this picture, was directed by the Teutonic megaphone-shouter Joe May! And I must say that while this doesn’t immediately strike one as a magnificently directed picture, I do think May brought some really nice stylistic touches to it! The script is nothing to write home about, but the cast is strong and there are some quite fantastic trick effects depicting the manipulations of the invisible man! And, ha ha, I also liked that for once there's a happy ending for the walking transparency! It’s a minor picture with some major aspects, like the terrific coal-cart scene! It’s not a patch on its predecessor, which is a movie I really like, but still, I give The Invisible Man Returns two and a half guinea pig harnesses!

Burl reviews Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf! (1984)

 

Ha ha and hairballs, it’s Burl, suffering from a case of sequelitis! You know, most of the time there’s a drop-off in quality between the first movie in a series and the subsequent entries! Ha ha, look at Jaws, an excellent movie with a mediocre sequel and then, ultimately, Jaws: The Revenge! Pew! Nearly as steep is the plunge from the heights of Joe Dante’s wonderful The Howling directly to the sewage pipe known as Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf! Ha ha, can you feature it!

The story is thus: in the aftermath of the first movie, which ended with a newslady transforming into a werewolf while on a live telecast, then being killed with a silver bullet, the newslady’s lunkhead brother Ben, played by Reb Brown from Fastbreak and The Sword and the Sorcerer, and his girlfriend Jenny, essayed by Annie McEnroe from Snowbeast, are approached by none other than Scaramanga himself, Christopher Lee, known to us from such diverse fare as The Man With the Golden Gun, Desperate Moves, and The Gorgon! Lee’s character, Stefan, explains to them that the sister was a werewolf and that they must travel to Transylvania or somewhere so they can kill the queen werewolf, Stirba!

Of course this is a little hard to swallow for the lunkhead couple, but a visit to a punk club called the Slammer, with the names of top acts like GBH, Black Flag, and The Cramps scrawled all over the walls, and where the house band, Babel, sings a song of lycanthropy, soon sorts that out! Then it’s off to central Europe, just in time for a village festival featuring some of the gooniest dancing you’ll ever see! Here they meet an oddment of characters, including a helpful but ill-fated dwarf, and some nefarious fur-sprouters played by the likes of Marsha A. Hunt from Dracula A.D. 1972 and The Sender, Ferdinand Mayne from Frightmare, and Judd Omen from Seems Like Old Times! Ultimately the goal is to kill the werewolf queen Stirba, played in a series of brain-melting outfits by Sybil Danning from Talking Walls!

It’s no easy task to destroy all these monsters! Thanks to a mumbled curse, the poor dwarf has the worst day ever, one so bad that his eyeballs exploding is not the worst thing that happens to him! Stefan assembles a little anti-werewolf brigade and arms them with titanium weapons (the only thing that can kill a werewolf, according to this movie’s hastily extemporized mythology), and then werewolves start popping out of the bushes, spoiling for a fight! At the end of one typically incoherent action scene, in which werewolves are blasted, chopped, poked, and hacked, the lunkhead lets loose with a hysterically triumphant scream, “I told you we’d get these fuzzballs!”

But there’s still Stirba, werewolf bitch, to contend with, and since Stefan is her brother he’ll take care of that! And none too soon, because, ha ha, it’s a true croque-en-boeuf, this picture! Unbelievably poor editing and direction gives it a distinctly ESL feel, as though it was a three-hour foreign film cut down to ninety minutes for North American blockheads with no attention span! The script is monumentally dumb, and it all seems a concerted plot to make Christopher Lee look goofier than he has on screen since donning the reservoir-tipped hat in Starship Invasions! However, the man’s boundless reserves of dignity keep his honour intact, though the other performers are not so lucky, ha ha!

It’s a bad movie and the people who made it should feel bad! How could the director, Philippe Mora, have gone from the entertaining transformational antics of The Beast Within to this? It’s a puzzlement, as it always is when someone’s sense of craft completely deserts them! However, some of the trick effects are entertaining, and Christopher Lee is always a pleasure to watch, so it’s not completely without worth! I give Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf one pair of new wave fancy-glasses!

Burl reviews Land of the Dead! (2005)

 

Urrgh, groww, gnarr, it’s Burl shuffling at you with a zombie movie to review! And not just any old zombie movie, but one from the acknowledged grandmaster, George A. Romero, who of course brought us Creepshow and many other horror entertainments! And Creepshow had zombies – three of them, to be precise – but it’s the …of the Dead series for which this beardsman is most thoroughly celebrated! The one under review today is the biggest-budgeted of them all: Land of the Dead!

I’m a very big fan of Night of the Living Dead and especially Dawn of the Dead – ha ha, a great favourite, that one! Then, when Day of the Dead came out, and played at the grandest movie theatre in town when I was but fourteen years old, I managed to sneak in to see it opening night, and even got myself one of the promotional badges they were handing out! It was a night of great triumph: the first time I successfully sneaked in to an R rated movie; and so Day of the Dead stands as a sentimental favourite and always will! And so, as you can imagine, when Land of the Dead came along twenty years later I was pretty excited to see it too!

So I rushed out to the movie theatre, and what I beheld there was this: a slick, enjoyably meaty zombie picture with a nicely Romeroesque political dimension to it – ha ha, in other words, almost exactly what I was hoping for! Still, it’s never ascended to the pantheon occupied by the first two in the series! It’s a lot more lighthearted than Day of the Dead, though, which, with all its yelling, is a movie that can really harsh your mellow! On the other hand, I quite enjoy the picture! But we’re here to talk about Land of the Dead, aren’t we! Yes, ha ha!

Our story once again begins some unspecified amount of time after the zombie apocalypse, and society in Pittsburgh is bifurcated between the regular folk, who live in dirty slums where they indulge in every vice and yet keep it together enough to provide the children with puppet shows, and the rich, who dwell in comfort, as though nothing had ever changed, in a big tower called Fiddler’s Green! This edifice is run by Kaufman, who’s played by an unusually reserved Dennis Hopper, an actor we recall from My Science Project and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre part 2!

Pittsburgh gets its supplies by means of night raids on nearby towns that have been overrun by zombies but still have shops full of canned goods and booze! Simon Baker from Red Planet plays Riley, the good guy who designed and is in charge of the main raiding vehicle, which they call Dead Reckoning! This conveyance, an armored truck thing reminiscent of the Landmaster from Damnation Alley, can shoot fireworks, machine guns, and mortars, and becomes the central item of interest as the movie progresses!

John Leguizamo from Die Hard 2 and Collateral Damage plays Cholo, the second-in-command who first works for Kaufman, then is snubbed by him, and so in his resentment becomes compelled to steal Dead Reckoning and threaten to shell the city with it! Riley, in the company of his old buddy Charlie, a puttyface played by Robert Joy from Amityville 3-D (and looking very much like he did in the final moments of that film), and his new friend Slack, a lady played by Asia Argento from The Church, form a repo gang who intend to get it back: not for Kaufman, whom they all dislike, but to save innocent lives in the slum zone! Meanwhile the zombies are being organized, after a fashion, by zombie liberation activist Big Daddy, a gaspumping zombie played by Eugene Clark from Trial & Error! As Riley and his bunch close in on Chulo, the zombies cross the river simply by walking across it under water, and the final battle for life, freedom, and Fiddler’s Green is under way!

The movie was released in the heart of the Bush years, in the midst of the war in Iraq, and serves pretty well as a political parable in the old Romero style! Hopper’s character is the Bush analogue of course, with Fiddler’s Green and Pittsburgh in general standing in for North America; while the zombies are the foreign hordes supposedly clamoring to destroy it or at least take it over! As political parables go it’s not subtle, and it lacks the lively cleverness of Dawn, but it’s still nice to see horror movies with subtext, even if that subtext isn’t very sub! Ha ha! And is it gory? Ha ha, you bet it is, especially in the unrated edition I just watched! You get face pullings, head stompings, all manner of grue!

The picture was shot in Toronto, not Pittsburgh, so the margins are filled with familiar Canadian actors like Earl Pastko from Roadkill, Robin Ward from Flick (supplying a mellifluous voiceover extolling the bourgeois virtues of Fiddler’s Green), Heidi von Palleske from Dead Ringers, and Boyd Banks from Crash! Of course Tom Savini, whose moustache-acting we’ll recall from movies like Creepshow 2 (where his moustache is prosthetically obscured, ha ha) and Innocent Blood, turns up in zombie form as the same biker, Mr. Machete, that he played in Dawn of the Dead!

It’s an entertaining and slick picture that suffers from thin characterizations (the hero’s defining personality trait is that he’s the hero, ha ha, and a pretty bland one at that) and is narratively underbaked! It doesn’t offer all the satisfactions I might have hoped for, but it still ticks plenty of boxes, and in spite of occasional moments of profound dumnitude, I think of the picture with fondness! I give Land of the Dead two and a half skyflowers!

Burl reviews King Kong Lives! (1986)

With a mighty roar and a monkey two-step, it’s Burl comin’ at you with sweet monster madness! Ha ha, today I’m reviewing a movie I dutifully went to see back around Christmas of 1986, because in theory there’s nothing wrong with going to see monsters and destruction on the big screen! In theory! And that theory gets a bit of a stress test when the movie in question is King Kong Lives! Ha ha!

Yes, this is the work of Dino De Laurentiis, who wanted to make a direct follow-up to his big hit from a decade before, the 1976 King Kong! In fact he starts this with footage from the ’76 picture, showing the mighty ape tumbling from the World Trade Centre – but, ha ha, turns out that didn’t kill him! No, he’s been on life support in a big warehouse, and now Dr. Amy Franklin, the world’s leading expert in giant ape transplants, played by Linda Hamilton from Dante’s Peak, is ready to fit Kong with the biggest Jarvik-7 ever seen! Ha ha, let's call it the Jarvik-7000! The problem is, to survive the procedure Kong needs a blood transfusion, but who could possibly be the donor?

Luckily at that moment a generic adventurer played by Brian Kerwin from Hometown U.S.A., sporting the generic adventurer name of Hank Mitchell and wearing the requisite generic adventurer hat, is in the wilds of Borneo running from a giant hand! The hand is attached (allegedly) to a Lady Kong, and in short order she’s been captured and shipped to a warehouse nearby to Kong's, and then Kong gets his blood transfusion and his artificial heart, which is inserted somehow without leaving a visible scar on Kong's mighty chest! Of course the apes can sniff each other out over vast distances, and once they're aware of each other, nothing, not chains, not guns, not front-end loaders, can keep these aspiring lovebirds from each other’s company!

They escape into the hills, and hard-case Colonel Nevitt, played by John Ashton from Some Kind of Wonderful, is sent after them! Of course Dr. Amy and Hank Mitchell team up in an effort to find them first and prevent the trigger-happy armyman from harming the super-simians! The apes, meanwhile, can’t keep their paws off one another, and soon it's a case of sweet monkey love, ha ha! There’s concurrent human bohankie occurring nearby in the sleeping bag occupied by Dr. Amy and Hank Mitchell! But soon the army comes with their tanks and helicopters and knockout gasses, and Lady Kong is captured!

Kong himself takes to the hills, where he broods and plans and eats gators and is briefly trapped by rednecks out for a wild time! He escapes their trap and takes a bloody vengeance upon the hillbillies, breaking one of them clean in half and popping another in his mouth like a junior mint! He then busts his ladyfriend out of the missile silo they’ve put her in, and of course it turns out she’s pregnant! Ha ha, Kongratulations! After a final climactic ruction, during which the big guy stomps Col. Nevitt into the loam, Lady Kong gives birth to a gorilla, and the giant ape life cycle continues!

Kong himself is played by Peter Elliott, who essayed many an ape in pictures like Greystoke and Congo, and here he sports a perpetually bewildered expression thanks to the stiff mechanics of Carlo Rambaldi’s apesuit! But I think he might give the best performance in the picture anyway, ha ha! The rest of the actors seem trapped in some weird limbo where they want to look at once like they’re taking this material seriously, and are also completely aware that it’s ridiculous! In trying to have it both ways they end up delivering bland and lifeless performances, devoid of the ham and the pep this kooky movie requires!

It’s a bad movie, of that there can be no doubt, and a misguided one too, but I’d be lying if I told you it had no entertainment value! There’s some good model work in it, though not all the trick effects are fully up to snuff, ha ha! The emotional stakes are genuine, though – you really do root for the Kongs! By all other cinematic or dramaturgical measures, this is a terrible movie, and even I, who saw it on the big screen at a relatively impressionable age, can’t find much to admire! I give King Kong Lives one and a half hillbilly hunters!

Burl reviews No Time to Die! (2021)

 

With a creak of ancient bones, it’s Burl, here to review the newest James Bond adventure featuring an actor nearly as old as Roger Moore was in his last 007 show, A View To A Kill! Of course the actor I’m talking about is Daniel Craig, well-known for providing the villain’s voice in The Adventures of Tintin, and though he is getting a bit long in the tooth - ha ha, he’s older than me, for gosh sakes! - he’s still a formidable presence and looks decent in formal wear! But it’s probably a good thing that this picture, No Time to Die, is his last outing as the double-naught spy!

In fact he’s already there as the picture begins - happily retired from the spy game, or so he thinks! Ha ha, he’s on perpetual vacation with Dr. Madeline Swann from the previous picture, Spectre, again played by Léa Seydoux from Midnight in Paris and The Grand Budapest Hotel! But an apparent betrayal ends in a car chase and a melancholy parting by train, and will Bond ever learn to love and trust again? Ha ha, persistent musical and dialogue quotes from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service strewn throughout the picture would seem to make this a doomed prospect!

Various events transpire (the picture run 163 minutes, so there’s plenty of time for events to transpire!) which lead to Bond taking up his old job again! There’s a new 007 in MI6’s employ though, a lady in fact, who might be present as a paving of the way for an all-new iteration of the superspy, but they don’t give her all that much to do, nor is she provided with the kind of charisma and hard focus that would have left us with the impression that she was taking up the mantle for future Eon productions! Oh well!

Anyway, the usual gang is still there: M, played by Ralph Fiennes from Spider and Strange Days; Ben Whishaw, the voice of Paddington, as a now less pimply Q; Jeffrey Wright from Only Lovers Left Alive as Felix Leiter; and there’s even a scene for Blofeld, still essayed by Christoph Waltz from Django Unchained! Altogether there’s the feel of a classic rock band at work, reformed in 2021 to play the old hits with some new compositions salted in for the audience to fidget to! But of course it’s the old hits everyone wants to hear, ha ha!

We get a nice scene set in Cuba with a delightful, high-kicking junior agent played by Ana de Armas from Knives Out, and also a scene at a S.P.E.C.T.R.E. party that seems borrowed from toxin-based pictures like Getting Even! Ha ha! Of course there was no end to the borrowing from Bond pictures by Getting Even, so I guess that’s fair enough! And then the whole thing wraps up on the bad guy’s private island, which is nice because we haven’t seen a bad guy with his own private island since maybe The Man with the Golden Gun! (Oh, ha ha, I’m wrong - I think the glooper-faced fellow in Skyfall had his own island, but the climax of the picture wasn’t set there!)

One distinct improvement over Spectre is that, when we get an establishing shot featuring the Tower Bridge, the River Thames, the London Eye, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, they no longer feel it necessary to superimpose the label “London!” Ha ha, thanks for trusting us to recognize the city on our own, filmmakers! Your faith in us is simply awe-inspiring!

The picture looks terrific, as most of the recent Bond outings have, and the action scenes, when they come, are of a reasonably thrilling calibre! There’s a good bit set at a snowy cabin at the beginning of the picture, but later, as the movie enters its third hour, there’s a feeling that the whole thing might be going on a bit too long! Then there’s an ending that I won’t get into, but that isn’t what you might call the traditional Bond ending! It does give us Louis Armstrong warble-croaking “We Have All the Time in the World,” so it’s far from a complete loss!

It tries mightily to be something more than a routine spy adventure and it halfway succeeds! The bad guy’s plan is very rote and not explained very well, and he himself is something of a wet sandwich! The tormented romance between Bond and Swann didn’t affect me in the way the filmmakers clearly hoped it would - maybe I just don’t recall the ins and outs of Spectre clearly enough for that! I went through half the picture thinking she was Blofeld’s daughter, only to realize that she was actually his psychiatrist, which, as the sometime girlfriend of her patient’s arch-enemy, must violate some little-invoked clause in the Book of Headshrinker’s Ethics! Ha ha! In any case, it was a night out at the movies, and no mistake! Since I don’t seem to have picked up any covid in the course of going to see it, I give No Time to Die two slinkys!

Burl reviews Halloween Kills! (2021)

 

Boo to you and boo to you too, it’s Burl, here with some slasher sequel action! Ha ha, yes, it’s true - after my experience with Malignant, I returned to the cinema for more horror! This time I was the only guy in there, thanks to my clever policy of seeing matinees if possible! As a fellow who more or less enjoys the Halloween series, it was a real treat to see this pumpkin-flavoured madness on the big screen, though I wished there was no pandemic and I could comfortably watch it in a crowd!

Of course we know from my recent review of the 2018 Halloween that this cycle of films makes a point of ignoring all the other Halloween pictures except the 1978 Carpenter original! But, like the 1981 Halloween II, this newest picture, Halloween Kills, takes up right at the moment its predecessor ends, though with the addition of an extended flashback to that terrible night in late October of 1978! Eventually we get another flashback which rewrites the end of the original film, or at least rewrites the beginning of (and obviates the entirety of) its sequel!

Jamie Lee Curtis, famed from her appearances in Prom Night and Trading Places, returns in the role of Laurie Strode, former donkey girlscout, now vengeance granny! But she’s too injured from her encounter with Michael to do much beyond lie in her hospital bed and soliloquize about the terror and the evil, and occasionally to reminisce with her roommate, Will Patton, who got grievously injured in the previous picture by a rogue Turk, but somehow survived!  

And then there are the minor characters who met Michael that first time he came home! Ha ha, it’s quite a gallery! Anthony Michael Hall from Out of Bounds plays Tommy Doyle, the kid being babysat by Laurie in the old picture, grown into a big solid man whose hobbies include bird whistling and mob inciting, and another fellow plays Lonnie, the kid who was kind of a bully in grade school and gets scared away from the Myers house by an uncharacteristically playful Dr. Loomis, but in this picture he seems to be the object of bullying, which I suppose is part of the film’s “what goes around comes around” theme!

But many of the original actors return from the Carpenter picture: the original Lindsey, played then and now by Kyle Richards from The Car; the psychiatric nurse played by Nancy Stephens, whose character was killed in Halloween H2O, but of course that never happened as far as this movie is concerned; and Charles Cyphers from Truck Turner and The Fog, whose Sheriff Brackett is no longer the police chief but has become a very grampy-looking hospital security guard! Many of these people either become involved in or else try to stop a homicidal mob on the trail of Michael, or else become involved in it and then try to stop it! The mob sets great store in their catch phrase, “Evil Dies Tonight,” but frankly their follow-through is lousy!

The mob provides plenty of victims, but other victims are just minding their own business! People in their homes are poked, bonked, neckbroke, and gouged! Of them all, I’d most like to hang out with Big John and Little John, the affectionate couple who have moved into Michael’s old house, where they smoke pot and watch John Cassavetes movies - and Little John is played by none other than the fellow who directed Anthony Michael Hall as Walter Paisley in that A Bucket of Blood remake! Ha ha!

They really tossed a lot of mackerels in the pot for this one! There are some gross murders with plenty of marinara; an effective score from Carpenter, his son, and a buddy; a confused ideology; a sad scene involving another escaped patient who is mistaken for Michael by the mob despite the two-foot height difference in the men; not a whole lot in the way of affrights or basic common sense; and lots of references to the other Halloween pictures, even to Halloween III! (Ha ha, I think the movie’s reality should have included the events of both Part I and Part III, with some somber references in the dialogue to the great mask massacre of ’82!)

And yet for all the silly behavior and bloodthirstiness, Halloween Kills is what David Lynch refers to as a “neighbourhood film!” I think the fact that Haddonfield is supposed to be a small town yet runs on for endless streets is a sort of tip-off to this picture’s alternative universe: as though it exists in a Tardis and everything is magnified and under which magnification a simple local madman may be catapulted to mythical status and motivate half the town into forming a violence gang, and the stairwells of the Haddonfield hospital seem to be twenty stories high! From almost any aspect - rational, narrative, geographical - it makes little to no sense, but nevertheless I give Halloween Kills two smoking pumpkins!

Burl reviews Halloween! (2018)

 

Ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-HA-ha, it’s Burl, laughing the famous Halloween theme tune for you! And I know what you’re saying: “Ha ha, Burl, haven’t you already reviewed Halloween?” Yes I have, but now I’m reviewing the recent remake of that picture, or actually more of a belated sequel: the 2018 picture known, like its inspiration, simply as Halloween!

This new picture was directed by David Gordon Green, who brought us Prince Avalanche, and the idea here is that every other sequel, including Halloween II, Halloween 4, Halloween 5, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, and any other sequels there might be, are completely ignored! Halloween III: Season of the Witch, being as it’s a story that has nothing to do with Michael Myers or Haddonfield, is not necessarily being ignored - ha ha, we just don’t know one way or the other! And as for those Zombie ones, well, I haven’t seen them, but I detected no references to them in this picture!

Jamie Lee Curtis, whom we know so well from Prom Night and Grandview U.S.A. and so many others, is of course once again Laurie Strode, and, as in Halloween H20 (the existence of which is, naturally, also ignored), she’s a jumpy, paranoid mess as a result of her terrible experience from her days as a babysitting teen! Now though, instead of channeling her fear and rage into running a private academy for jerks, she has become a doomsday prepper with a house full of guns and alarms and locks and bolts and bars! She has installed such survivalist accouterments as a gun cubby and a swivel counter, and has made sure her house is fitted with louvered closets so she can re-experience the trauma of her babysitting days any time she chooses! Ha ha, she reminded me a bit of Rambo in his final adventure, Last Blood!

Between installing floodlights and target shooting at mannequins, she has found the time to have a daughter, played by Judy Greer from The Descendants and Jurassic World! But her paranoid ways have driven her daughter away, and Laurie’s penchant for wine-guzzling and angry non-sequiturs even have her granddaughter, a teen who calls Laurie “grandmother” as though she were addressing Mrs. Manson Mingott from The Age of Innocence instead of Laurie Strode from Halloween, looking at her a bit askance!

But what about Michael, you ask? Well, he’s been in an institution, standing on a checkerboard floor and attended to by another crazy doctor now that Loomis is long gone! The new headshrinker is Haluk Bilginer from Ishtar, and his idea of therapy is to let a pair of dimbulb podcasters approach Michael on his checkerboard floor and dangle the old Shatner mask in front of him! Ha ha, of course these podcasters are made short work of once Michael escapes his checkerboard and heads back to Haddonfield!

Will Patton from The Puppet Masters plays the local lawman, and there are other assorted victims or potential victims wandering around the town! Michael enjoys a little welcome-home killing spree once he arrives in Haddonfield, which we the audience mainly observe from outside the windows! It’s a pretty effective sequence! Meanwhile, Laurie, her daughter, her granddaughter, and the good-time comedy slaphead dad who seems like a holdover from more lighthearted David Gordon Green projects, are all arguing about whether Laurie is too paranoid or not paranoid enough; and Michael, who is emphatically not related to Laurie this time around (phew!) nevertheless seems to have some kind of Laurie Strode homing beacon implant which has him on a steady course toward the strapped granny’s security castle!

Head-bashing is Michael’s favored killing method this time around, frequently with messy results! Even Laurie catches a bonk, though a non-fatal one! Yes, there’s significantly more grue than in the original picture, which features approximately zero Special Makeup Effects but is a far superior movie nevertheless! I think that should go without saying, but after all, this is a movie review, ha ha, so critical comparisons like that are part of the game! This new one isn’t the worst potato on the block though - it’s entertaining enough, and does a fine job of making Michael a primal force of evil and all that, but it never does manage to bring us that skittering-leaves October atmosphere the original provided so satisfyingly, even though it was shot in the summer and on a much lower budget!

It’s always a pleasure to see Jamie Lee Curtis on screen though, and I appreciated that they kept it reasonably simple and didn’t try to add family connections, cult antics, or supernatural mumbo-de-jumbo! I give this newest Halloween two dollops of peanut butter!

Burl reviews Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man! (1943)

 

Ha ha and arooo, by the light of the full moon it’s Burl, here to review some Universal monster horror! This isn’t the best of the run, but it’s far from the worst, and like any of them it makes for some fine October viewing! The name of this picture is, and could only be, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man!

It serves more as a sequel to The Wolf Man than anything else, though by the end it plays as a standard Frankenstein picture! Our man Lon Chaney Jr., known from My Favorite Brunette, is the constantly anguished Larry Talbot, who, as the picture begins, reposes peacefully in his grave, not bothering anyone! In a striking sequence marvelously directed by Roy William Neill, who also brought us the delights of The Scarlet Claw, two foolish grave robbers decide to pilfer the Talbot family crypt, and on the night of the full moon no less! Ha ha, these two miscreants are soon weeping copious tears as the hirsute terror revives himself and goes full wolfman! (An interesting trivia is that one of the robbers is played by Cyril Delevanti, who later appeared in pictures like Son of Dracula, The Night of the Iguana, and Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad, played Johnnycake Jones in the Hudson’s Bay teleseries, and ended his career in Jack Arnold’s blaxploitation picture Black Eye, playing a character called Talbot! Ha ha!)

A hapless Welsh constable catches a fatal wolfmanning as well, and then Larry is found dazed and confused and human again, and having no idea how he ended up sleeping rough on the streets of Cardiff! He tracks down Maria Ouspenskaya, the old Gypsy woman whose son Bela put a biting on Larry in the first picture and turned him into a werewolf, but all she can do is point him in the direction of a certain science doctor she knows of! Well, of course this is Dr. Frankenstein, but when Larry arrives at the castle, he discovers two astonishing things: one, the doctor is dead; and two, the Gypsy woman’s son Bela, thought dead, has somehow been transformed into a Frankenstein Monster, and is reposing in an ice cave beneath the ground!

Of course Bela, the new Frankenstein Monster, is played by the great Bela Lugosi from Island of Lost  Souls! Replacing the departed doctor is a new doctor, Dr. Mannering, played by Patric Knowles from Another Thin Man! He quickly becomes obsessed with the secrets of life and death, which alarms Frankenstein’s daughter, Baroness Elsa, while down in the town the mayor, Lionel Atwill from Night Monster, tries to keep the increasingly anxious townspeople from lighting up their torches for a mob run up to the castle!

Ha ha, this mob is headed by the local malcontent, a large gentleman with a fulsome walrus moustache and a delightfully modern taste in shirts, who’s played by Rex Evans from Midnight Lace! And his gang includes the great Dwight Frye of Dracula fame! It all comes to a head just as Frankenstein Monster and the Wolf Man are finally throwing down for their climactic monstero-a-monstero, and while I won’t tell you who wins, I will say that the results are inconclusive thanks to a great wall of water unleashed by the constantly grousing Evans!

The bald fact is that if you like Universal monster movies, you’ll like this one, because it’s got just about everything you could hope for from the form! It’s a bit scary, a bit silly, and suffused with backlot atmosphere, and the tone does get a bit grim with Larry Talbot's constant hankering for the sweet release of death! This was the first of the monster-mash pictures, but not the last, and of course eventually the comedians would get involved and we’d have such works as Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff! But at this point they were still trying to be scary, and they halfway succeeded! I give Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man two and a half ice windows!