Burl reviews Scala! (1990)

 

Taking your ticket, it’s Burl, here with a review of a movie not about movies, but about a movie theatre! I suppose that means it is about movies, ha ha, because a big old movie palace is still and always will be the best place to see one, and this movie is about just such a place! The movie palace in question is London’s late and much-lamented Scala Cinema, and the movie about it is simply called Scala!

Now, I’m no Londoner (ha ha, no, I’m not even British!), but I’ve spent plenty of time in that fine city, and when I was there for a spell in the late 1980s I discovered the Scala! And what a discovery it was! I recall seeing triple bills like Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, Daughters of Darkness and Edge of Sanity, the one with Anthony Perkins! Or, on a different occasion, a De Palma triple-header of Blow Out, Body Double and Dressed to Kill! I saw Videodrome, Un Zoo la Nuit, Danger Diabolik, Barbarella, a trucker’s double-header of Wages of Fear and They Drive By Night, David Mamet’s House of Games and Things Change, and more! Every day the program changed and so every day there were more glorious movies to see, all of them projected on 35mm film, or at least high-quality 16mm, on a big ratty old screen! Oh, ha ha, it was the purest heaven to a fellow like ol’ Burl!

I remember it was a bit scary to go there, which was part of the appeal! You’d take the tube to King’s Cross, emerge into the rat’s nest of streets surrounding that station, and see, as in a vision, a white edifice rising like a massif down the way! Mods, rockers, punks, cinéastes, skids, students, seedcakes, sketchy people of all description with heads full of high fructose skunkfire, would gather to see the show, and none of them wanted any trouble so far as I could see! You could get some food, a beer or glass of wine if you liked, and the seat you settled into would be your own little campsite for the evening! Of course, as is noted by several interviewees in this thirty-minute documentary portrait of the place, the whole cinema rumbled with each passing tube train and the sound system was not exactly double-Dolby; but again, ha ha, all of this only added to the charm!

The movie about the Scala is not nearly so exciting as the actual place was, however! It’s mostly a parade of talking heads, with very little footage of the cinema itself, though I suppose there’s only so much mileage to be had from such B-roll imagery! More pep and wit in the editing would have gone a long mile, though, and if they could have managed some footage of a screening in progress, that might have been nice! There are some clips from at least three movies though: Evil Dead, Glen or Glenda and Mona Lisa, which are cut in for little or no reason!

I suppose these were available because their UK distributor, or producer in the case of Mona Lisa, was Palace Pictures, owned in part by Stephen Wooley, who was also a major player in the Scala and provides many interesting remarks in the doc! Also interviewed are a number of other Scala employees, including Jane Giles, who later made a book about the fabled movie palace! There’s also a great gallery of London eccentrics, including an old chap who offers tribute to his favourite cinema in the form of doggerel; an old lady who likes car chases and other action antics, but not so much “bedroom scenes;” the actor Ralph Brown from Alien 3 and Stoker, who does a bit in the voice of his character Danny from the marvelous Withnail and I; and a soft-spoken, utterly sincere gent whose film obsession is total!

The movie is a bit reminiscent of Out of Print, the tribute to the New Beverly Cinema in L.A., but is only about a third the length! This subject could have supported a feature too, but not necessarily in the style we get here - it would have to be much sharper and more energetic, I think! Still, a nice little portrait of a place close to my heart, and I was glad to discover it on the YouTube! I give Scala two soiled seats! 

Burl reviews And No Birds Sing! (1969)

 

Ha ha and hello, it’s Burl here! Today I’ve got a real obscurity for you: a short feature, or maybe a long short, ha ha, made by a university student’s union in the late 60s, shot in glorious black and white, minimalist in plot and only just over forty minutes long, but with plenty of groovy music, entitled And No Birds Sing!

It’s set in and around a university campus in the 60s, so that’s a pretty marvelous starting point! Our main character is a soporific nonentity called Joey, played as though mostly asleep by one-and-done actor Ian Malcolm! (Ha ha, no, he’s not the leather jacket professor played by Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park!) Joey, bereft of intellectual ambition, of vigor, or of character traits of any kind, is fixated on a fellow student named Virginia, played by Marsha Sadoway! He’s already got a girlfriend though, a perfectly sweet young lady, and though in his brief bit of narration at the beginning of the movie Joey allows that this puts him “in kind of a bind,” he seems to entirely lack any means to deal with it!

Joey’s pal is Alvin, a straight-talking glasses nerd played by Michael Posner in the picture’s best performance! We see these fellows in their classes (one of them an English class taught by Victor Cowie who was in Careful, and who also wrote and directed this picture, in which he discusses the Keats ballad “La Belle Dame sans Merci, containing the line “And no birds sing”) and discover that Joey seems to have no interest in anything but the girl with which he is obsessed, while Alvin is more engaged in the subject at hand!

Joey is just as dissociated from his tolerant-to-a-fault girlfriend, and it only takes a scene or two of the couple conversing to convince you that she should really find someone a little more fun to be with! Ha ha, the guy’s a real drip, and besides, hey lady, Alvin's right there! Anyway, after some scenes on the campus, a bit of outasight nightclub stuff, and shots of Virginia running through the forest looking alternately coy and fearful (which I take to be Joey’s daydreams of his crush acting the dryad), we finally get to the big party scene, held in a house that looked somewhat familiar to me! The people certainly looked familiar - ha ha, I’ve seen photos of my parents attending just such parties!

This is a good, Canadian, Trudeau-the-Elder-era party, with plenty of stubby beer bottles and boxes of Old Dutch chips, and hippies lurking in the corners! Here, Joey manages to ditch his girlfriend, corner Virginia, and profess his devotion; but he gets a bit creepy, and worse than that boring, and ends up passed out on the coat bed! Ha ha! So much for his romantic quest!

The picture has exactly the feel of a movie made by a students’ union, ha ha! I didn’t much care for Joey, who I suppose was meant to be a Ben Braddock of the North, but I did like a couple of his friends and the places he went! Miscommunication seems to be the movie’s abiding theme, as characters frequently misinterpret, don’t understand, or simply don’t seem to hear what the others are saying to them, and again, Joey is the standard bearer for this! In the end it’s a classic example of a movie that follows closely a character who never comes close to earning such devotional scrutiny! I give And No Birds Sing two peace buttons!

Burl reviews Camera 32 27th! (199?)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burl reviews The Lonedale Operator! (1911)

With a silent ha ha, it’s Burl, here to review The Lonedale Operator, one of the hundreds and dozens of short subjects that D. W. Griffith made in the days before his ambition brought him to make Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, and all the rest of the pictures that made his reputation for both good and ill! Ha ha, I think this might be the first silent picture I've reviewed for you since Eternal Love, and I found it on a compilation tape of old silent railroad dramas! There were a couple of Griffiths on that tape, and a less interesting film about rescuing an old grouch from an oncoming train that was produced by Thomas Edison’s company, and a little mini-documentary on the railroad genre as well!

But The Lonedale Operator was well worth a gander! If you’re anything like me, you’re wondering “Ha ha, but what does he operate? A station? A telephone exchange? A train?” It turns out he’s a telegraph operator, but he’s feeling poorly that day and turns over the operation of his post to his lovely daughter! She’s having an affair of the heart with a train engineer, and they share a happy moment before he zooms off in his iron horse!

The next thing you know another train arrives, this one bearing the payroll! But it’s also bearing something else: two rail-riding hobos who climb down from the rods and observe our pretty young operator hauling the heavy cash bag into the station! Ha ha, they seem to say as they rub their hands together with glee! An easy mark! Or so they think!

The young damsel espies these rascals lurking outside her window and almost falls into a faint, but manages to lock the door just in time! As the scoundrels begin bashing their way into the hut, she hurries to send a telegraph of her predicament to the next station down the line - but the operator there is asleep, the dirty dog! The bandits are that much closer to getting in - the door is starting to buckle! Meanwhile the sleepy telegraph man wakes to hear the frantic beeping! He conveys the situation to the young engineer, who jumps into his train and speeds to the rescue!

But alas, he might be too late! The hobos have crashed through two doors now and are in the telegraph office! But wait! What’s that shiny object in her hand? It must be a gun, and the two would-be thieves are kept at bay until the engineer and his fireman burst in! And what was the metallic item in her hand? Not a gun, but a wrench! The two rapscallions offer humble bows before the bravery and bluffing artistry of the heroic young woman! The end!

So it’s got a pretty good plot, but it’s a noteworthy bit of cinema too, being one of the hundreds of one- and two-reelers Griffith made for Biograph, where he was helping to figure out the visual language of narrative cinema, ha ha! He hadn’t fully gamed out reverse shots yet, or eyelines - the bandits outside the window are not at all in line with where the young woman is looking, for example! But on the other hand there are thrilling shots taken from the train’s tender, and a great early example of crosscutting for suspense! It’s a sweet little country thriller, and I give The Lonedale Operator two and a half enormous black bowties!

Burl reviews Stereo! (1969)

Ha ha, the motion picture case under study this meridian unit is a sixty-two minute celluloid aggregation presented in a ratio of approximately 1:1.85 and projected at 24.17 frames per second! The title is simply Stereo, and it represents the earliest attempt at a feature-length, or anyway nearly feature-length, picture by David Cronenberg! Ha ha, he’s the director best known for Fast Company, which this film does not resemble!

Well, ha ha, I’m not sure I can summarize the plot of Stereo for you! It’s not a plot-based picture! But it takes place in some Canada of the future, in which, we are asked to accept, a “Canadian Academy of Erotic Enquiry” has been established! This cerebral future time is characterized by the appearance of psychics into the population pool! The psychics have all been rounded up so that someone called Dr. Luther Stringfellow can perform sexual experiments on them! Meanwhile, a fellow in a black cape strides about and makes fish faces at everything he sees! Ha ha! A few different voices sort of explain for us what’s going on, and we hazily recognize that there are concerns with the sexy-psychic program, but ultimately, we learn, so much information has been taken in through the experiments that it will take months to analyze it all and figure everything out! Ha ha, no kidding!

It’s virtually a silent film, with only the sporadic and impenetrable narration to engage our ears! Cronenberg manages some striking black and white images, such as the upside-down silhouette lady and many fine architecture-based compositions! Then there are scenes where men kiss men and ladies, ladies! Ha ha! It gives the picture a modern feel, and, given the times in which it was made, marks an early instance of Cronenberg reaching out very deliberately to push buttons! Ha ha, that’s why he’s great!

Stereo is juvenilia for certain, but worth a look! It might drive you a bit crazy, but you’ll be the better person for watching it, I think! It comes across as parody sometimes, but it’s chock full of intriguisms in the same was as, say, Waking Life or something! But of course they’re delivered in a rather underbaked way! It’s a grad student film and no mistake, ha ha! In the wrong mood you’ll find it something of a ponderosa, but still, I give Stereo two hearty helicopter landings!

Burl reviews Attack of the Killer Squirrel! (198?)

Hi, Burl here to review another of the strange home-made movies I found in a video store bin a decade ago, and am only getting around to watching now! This one is called Attack of the Killer Squirrel, and judging by the cars and clothing, it appears to have been made some time in the middle 1980s, likely somewhere in Ontario! (There's one more of these left to review, it should be said - and that one is probably the strangest of them all! Ha ha!)

This squirrel picture is similar to one of the other tapes I found, Attack of the Flesh Eating Tree!!, in that it depicts the unexpected aggression of a species previously considered harmless, but is different in many other key aspects! For instance, where the tree picture was shot on video, this one is a Super-8 production all the way! The filmmakers are clearly younger as well – of driving age, but only just! And these fellows had a bit more imagination than the tree filmmakers, though they still aren’t examples of protean cinematic genius as far as I can tell!

The picture begins with people being attacked by a renegade squirrel out in the woods! The little rodent manages to decapitate one of its victims, ha ha, so we get to see a mannequin head rolling around the forest floor! The victim, a policeman, collects his head and runs back to civilization, where he pops his head back on, dons an ascot, and teams up with a grizzled, curmudgeonly squirrel hunter named Quint! Ha ha, that’s where Attack of the Killer Squirrel follows the lead of Grizzly, Blades and Tentacles, and many other such univerbal titles, and becomes a rip-off/spoof of Jaws!

After more attacks and much hubbub involving a pair of craven, comic-relief constables, Quint and the policeman – who frequently removes his head or has it knocked off to humourous effect – drive out to an abandoned playground for a final encounter with the voracious little beast! The squirrel can fly at high speeds, so he’s truly a dangerous adversary! After the failure of a bazooka-like “secret weapon,” the pair must improvise a solution! They take a giant slingshot and fire the policeman’s head at the squirrel, and this flattens the rodent so that it may never kill again! The pair walk off into the sunset, exchanging murmured quips!

Ha ha, speaking of murmured quips, the soundtrack to this peculiar movie demands some attention! You’ve probably seen a few Robert Altman pictures and noted his technique of overlapping dialogue in a naturalistic way: Attack of the Killer Squirrel goes him one better by featuring a constant cacophony of utterances, some of which is intelligible and much of which is not! It’s as if you’re attending a cocktail party at which people are only talking about squirrels, but you have some water in your ears so you can’t properly hear what’s being said! Combined with the stutter and grain of Super-8, this bizarre post-dubbing produces an avant-garde, almost hypnotic effect!

It keeps you watching, I’ll say that much for it! It’s another production made by amateurs for fun, so ha ha, it would be unfair to heap a whole bunch of criticism and negative vibes on it! There’s some imagination here (the death of Robert Shaw in Jaws is recreated on a playground slide, for instance, though this Quint doesn't get eaten), some effort put into the trick effects, and some good-natured playfulness; and on top of all this it was actually shot on film, so I’m going to give Attack of the Killer Squirrel two visible squirrel propulsion wires!

Burl reviews Attack of the Flesh Eating Tree!! (199?)

Ha ha, it’s Burl here to review an arboreal obscurity made, as near as I can judge (by the clothes, hairstyles and a ham-handed reference to Twin Peaks, ha ha), sometime in the early 1990s! It’s called Attack of the Flesh Eating Tree!!, and yes, those double exclamation points are part of the movie’s official title as it appears in the opening credits!

I found this VHS tape for sale in a video store on Bathurst Street in Toronto at least a decade ago! I bought it and two other similar tapes (which will be reviewed here soon, you can bet!) for a dollar apiece, but never watched them until now! I assumed it was a completely homemade bit of tomfoolery, and as it turns out I wasn’t far wrong!

The movie is set at a lakeside lodge, owned by a couple who are in the midst of some kind of marital discord! It seems the man – a bald, mustachioed nerd who looks like anything but a lothario – had performed an infidelity, and the lady has photographs of same! The man apologizes and says it’s all over and he never loved that other lady! The wife, probably the most terrible actor in a movie full of them, makes him go sleep on the couch anyway, ha ha! But they have to pretend to be happy over the next couple of days, as the lady is hosting a reunion of some kind!

The next day there are several more ladies at the lodge, along with one fellow who is the boyfriend of one of them! The main couple needn’t pretend to be happy, because none of the other reunionees is! They all seem to be mean, vaguely brain-damaged people who can only speak in what’s meant to be cuttingly nasty badinage, but comes off as children improvising a fight scene for the school production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf!

Anyway, the flesh-eating tree can’t come along too soon, ha ha, and to the movie’s credit we don’t have to wait too long for an attack! Two of the ladies go off to play shuffleboard in the woods, and the tree eats them up! Ha ha, its bite is every bit as bad as its bark, turns out! Then it chomps a lady on the dock as she prepares to go swimming, and soon after that it knocks her boyfriend on the head and puts a biting on him too! Then we have many more scenes of the tree munching its way through the cast, until all that’s left are the couple we met at the beginning!

I’m going to go ahead and tell you the ending of the picture in some detail, because the odds of you ever actually seeing it are approximately nil! So here’s the big climax: the tree eats up the lady, but her husband, a most unlikely hero, grabs an axe and chops away at the foliaged fiend! The tree spurts blood and collapses, and the man is able to pull his lady wife out from its maw, and they declare their love for one another! Ha ha, the end!

Well, this has all the professionalism and production values of a movie made over the weekend by a group of people who’ve never held a camera before! You might be asking yourself “Ha ha, how did they pull off the complicated creature effects that would be necessary in a movie about a flesh-eating tree? Well, the short answer is, they didn’t! But the creature is not without charm: it operates an awful lot like the raging carpet creature in that classic of le bad cinema we all know and love, The Creeping Terror! That’s the one where, whenever the monster eats someone, the victim has to actually crawl into the monster’s mouth for the ingestion to be successful, and if the eatee is a lady, her bum usually gets stuck in the craw for a few moments before the final gulping! Ha ha, same thing here!

The acting is atrocious and the script is worse, and there’s no evidence of any special effort or talent among the filmmakers! But the monster has some appeal, and the location used, which according to the credits was somewhere near Muskoka, Ontario, is quite lovely! There’s a stunning boathouse, and if you’re a boathouse aficionado like ol’ Burl is, you’ll enjoy that! In the end it was clearly just made for fun, so how critically harsh can you be? I give Attack of the Flesh Eating Tree!! one and a half Sony Walkmen!