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 Humongous! (1981)

Wauuugghhh, it’s Burl, here with late-summer maniac madness! Yes, it’s another Canadian slasher picture today, this one from the director of Prom Night, so he had previous experience in the form! Ha ha, I recall seeing a poster for this one back in my childhood and thinking it looked pretty darn scary, but of course I was too young to check it out back then! I’ve seen it several times since, though “see” may not be the right word, as the VHS release is so very dark that often you can hardly discern what’s going on! Anyway, the movie is none other than Humongous!

That bad tape transfer has given this movie a reputation as being unwatchably dim, but I suspect and hope there have been subsequent releases which correct this! But even on VHS, one can apprehend the basic story: in an opening scene, set on the Labour Day weekend of 1946, a lady is set upon by a drunken reveler outside a big island lodge house! He achieves his unsavoury object, but is soon set upon by hounds and torn to shreds, and the lady finishes the job with a big rock! 

Then we cut to the present day, which I gather is the Labour Day weekend of 1980, to find a clutch of young folk heading out for a weekend of cabin cruising! We have two brothers, one, Eric, played by David Wallace from Mortuary, and the other, Nick, essayed by John Wildman from Blackout! Eric is a boring bozo, while Nick is a full-on jerk with all manner of issues! Eric’s girlfriend Sandy, played by Janet Julian from Smokey Bites the Dust and Fear City, is a sensible lass (and our clear Final Girl), while Nick’s ladyfriend Donna, played by Joy Boushel from Pinball Summer, has trouble keeping her shirt on, ha ha! And rounding out the quintet is little sister Carla, a female glasses nerd played by Janit Baldwin from Phantom of the Paradise!

Well, after a day cruising around in the family yacht, the fog rolls in and the youths rescue a stranded hoser named Bert! Then of course Nick goes mentyl with sibling resentment and steers the watercraft into some rocks! Everybody jumps off, and we see a small model of the boat go up in flames and explode! By the next morning they’ve all washed up on Dog Island, Bert with his leg broken, Carla missing, and Nick feeling the painful shame of the lamebrain; and by the sound of those moans and groans in the woods it’s nearly time for them to meet Mr. Humongous!

Humongous is the result of the rape scene in the film’s prologue, and he’s played by Garry Robbins, the Canadian Giant himself, who would later play another malformed backwoods psycho in Wrong Turn! Now, Humongous usually gets classified as a slasher film – not least by me, ha ha – but Humongous himself doesn’t actually do any slashing: he kills mainly by bearhug! Nick is the first to go, a relief for the audience; and thereafter we are treated to a lot of dimly-lit searching around the island, the boathouse, and the big old lodge itself! Bert meanwhile is ministered to by Donna, who finds her wherewithal when she collects berries in her décolletage, and removes her shirt one last time to keep the shivering hoser warm; but soon enough Humongous shows up to stomp them!

The rest of the story unfolds pretty much as you might expect – more creeping through impenetrable darkness, and then even at the end, when the boathouse is on fire and the moaning and groaning of the Humongous reaches a crescendo, you still can’t really see what’s going on! Paul Lynch, the director (he also brought us Bullies, ha ha) favours canted angles and shots framed through broken panes of glass and so forth; but none of this helps things much! As far as the slasher taxonomy goes there are a few Special Makeup Effects here – a glimpse of Bert’s floating head, some bloody dogbites – but most of the carnage is lost in the gloom! Similarly, while the Humongous is meant to be monstrous in appearance, we have to take that on trust, ha ha! I couldn’t tell you what he looks like if you offered me one million doll-hairs!

So it all feels a bit of a cheat! If ever I find a better transfer and my impression of the movie is materially improved by the viewing of it, I’ll come back here to append an extra paragraph saying so, as though this review needs an extra paragraph, ha ha! The movie as it stands has its pleasures though: principally a Canadian-ness so intense it seems to have infected even the actors (Julian, Wallace, Baldwin) who were imported from America or thereaboots! The Humongous is not a one-note monster but a fairly sympathetic character whose death one doesn’t mourn precisely, but we don’t really celebrate it either! The ending is downbeat in the way familiar from many other such movies, from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on down: the heroine has survived, but, we wonder, has her sanity? So it’s got some things going for it, but at the same time it’s sorely lacking in pep; the characters are mostly jerks, dimbulbs, or hackysacks; and the attempts at terror frequently fall flat! From my youthful sighting of the poster and many subsequent years of admiring its box on the video shelves, I will always have a fondness for the movie, but in the end that has little to do with the movie itself! I give Humongous one and a half plaid shirts!

Burl reviews City in Panic! (1987)

 

Ha ha, speak up everybody, you’re on the air - it’s Burl here to review a fairly obscure little Canadian mystery-slasher picture! It’s one of those grimy, vaguely giallo-inspired movies that came along regularly through the early and mid-80s – pictures like American Nightmare and Evil Judgment are close cousins, it seems to me! The movie we’re talking about today goes by several titles – among them, reportedly, The AIDS Murders – but I’m going to refer to it by the name on the VHS tape I watched: City in Panic!

The city in question is Toronto, and though they don’t name it, it’s pretty identifiable! Ha ha, there are plenty of recognizable cityscape shots, and the piles of dirty snow seen everywhere identify the climate and the season for us as well! It looks like it was a cold shoot - ha ha, as someone who has worked on movies in Toronto in the wintertime, I had real sympathy for the cast of this picture, and even more for the crew!

The panic has already begun as the story begins: enough people, maybe two or three, have been murdered for the police and the public to realize it’s a serial maniac! Because the victims are mainly gay men, the action starts outside the Oak Leaf Steam Baths on Bathurst Street, which I cheered when I saw because, even though I never went to the steam baths, they were in the same building as Mimi’s, a great restaurant at which I used to frequently eat my breakfast! Ha ha, they made a terrific French toast! Mimi’s was a marvelous place, always full of famous, semi-famous, and non-famous musicians, and Mimi herself was a real character!

Anyway, the man comes out of the steam baths looking chagrined and heads home for a shower! The killer is on his tail, and what follows is the most slavish recreation of the Psycho shower scene outside of Gus Van Sant’s weird 1998 remake! Then we’re introduced to the competent but unremarkable actors who will essay our main characters: firstly Dave Miller, impersonated by David Anderson, an anodyne talk radio host who plays with toys as he broadcasts and whose catch phrase is “Speak up, you’re on the air!” The topic du jour on Dave’s radio show is of course the murders, and his position on the matter is tough to define, but it’s apparently at odds with that of the town’s other media giant, a Truman Capote-ish columnist called Alex Ramsey!

Although these two constantly reiterate their respective opinions on the killings and on the approach the police are taking to solve the crimes, I was never quite sure what those positions were! As near as I can tell, Dave is asking the public for patience, opining that the cops have a tough job so let them do it; while Alex Ramsey just wants someone to declare martial law and do whatever they have to do to get this murderous scoundrel off the streets! Meanwhile we meet other characters: Dave’s radio producer Louise, played by Bonnie Beck from Wild Thing; Ramsay’s assistant (and, I think, Dave’s ex?) Elizabeth Price, played by Leeann Nestegard; and Dave’s best friend, who’s also the detective on the case, Barry McKee! We also get to know Barry’s partner, who is the world’s angriest cop!

But the killer seems unstoppable! Kitted out in giallo-wear (black hat, cloak, gloves and glasses), the fiend takes out He-Man, a ponky male stripper who prances about to the screams of the ladies! Ha ha, even the cops, even his best friend, even He-Man’s own physician refers to him only as He-Man! And there’s more! Every so often the killer will roll up in a sweet boogie van right out of Prom Night and put the knife to, oh, let’s say a fellow hanging upside down in the gym, or else a security guard who takes advantage of a glory hole and by garr pays the price! Arghhh, ha ha! A letter M is always carved into the victims, and later on a poster for Fritz Lang’s M provides an important if belated clue to Detective Barry McKee!

I guess I shouldn’t give away the killer or the motive, but despite the fact that the victims are almost all gay men and are afflicted with AIDS (which, in keeping with the mid-80s provenance of the picture, it assumes is an automatic death sentence for anyone who’s got it), it’s not a simple case of murderous homophobia! I suppose the movie is pretty progressive for its day, in that none of the gay folk are simple caricatures; but it’s nevertheless very much of its day, so keep that in mind and be warned if you’re thinking of watching it!

I can’t say the solution to the mystery surprised me, and, ha ha, I’m pretty easily surprised! Also, the movie is simply not terribly well made, even if it could have been worse! Some of the acting is not bad, and some of it is; and it’s not a movie with much of a sense of humour – by the end, I must say, it gets pretty grim! But then suddenly, with a bonk on the head, it’s all done, and the only thing left is to wait for the AIDS to inevitably claim any still-living infected characters, as far as the movie's medical understanding goes! As movies go it’s a bit unusual and it’s a bit Toronto, and those are its main virtues, so I’ll give City in Panic one set of gravity boots!

Burl reviews Till Death Do Us Part! (1982)

 

By hidden camera, it’s Burl, here to report on a piece of oddballania from the Great White North! Ha ha, many strange concoctions have emerged from that land, and the movie under discussion today is not the strangest – but most certainly it is not the most normal, either! It’s claimed in certain quarters to be a made-for-TV movie, but I don’t think that’s true! I think it’s just a plain old freaky little mystery, and it goes by the name of Till Death Do Us Part!

I can see why some would think it’s a TV movie though – the VHS version I saw had been sort of transformed into one with some weird and very apparent editing elisions; a clearly re-cut credits sequence, which shows bits from the movie to come; and an abbreviated running time! I suppose it was chopped and reordered from whatever it started as into a post-hoc TV movie in much the same way as Dr. Moreau surgically alters people into half-animals! So it’s a bit of a mutation, this little movie, but does it still work? Ha ha, sort of!

We open in a big country house at night, with a scullery maid played by Riva Spier from Pinball Summer discovering a young man rocking back and forth in his chair as he watches a screen showing two people engaged in pre-bohankie! The maid steals the big ¾ inch video tape and escapes the house by the tried-and-true method of tying sheets together and shinnying out the window – though, ha ha, her knots are not so good and she takes a tumble! Worse still awaits her in the woods, where she is killed, has a cross carved into her forehead, and is crucified on some trees by person or persons unknown!

Then it’s the next day and we’re back at the country mansion, which proves to be a marriage counselling retreat run by a radical post-Freudian psychologist called Dr. Sigmund Freed, ha ha, who’s played by none other than the director of Mon Oncle Antoine, Claude Jutra! (Some pretty unsavory stories have come out about poor Jutra in recent years, but as they haven’t really been confirmed so far as I’ve heard, and as he’s dead anyway, drowned in the St. Lawrence, I tried not to let that bother me as I watched the movie!) His character is meant to be a crazy unpredictable obsessive wearing a thin veneer of rationality, and for a non-actor he pulls it off pretty well!

Anyway, three married couple arrive for therapy: we have the world’s rudest man, Wally, played by Jack Creley from Tulips and Videodrome, and his long-suffering wife Edna, essayed by Helen Hughes from Incubus; floppy-haired Robert Craig, played by the picture’s requisite American star, James Keach from Cannonball and Vacation, and his wife Dr. Susan Craig, who is played by Candace O’Connor from The Silent Partner; and, late to the party and therefore subject to a fearsome dressing-down from Freed, drugs aficionado Tony, impersonated by veteran summer-camp actor Matt Craven from Meatballs and Indian Summer, along with his wife, played by someone I forget who, ha ha!

Already at the big country house is Freed, of course, along with his wife Honora, played by Toby Tarnow from Utilities; Honora’s brother, who seems mute but later protests that he’s only shy, played not by an actor but by a lighting technician; and Terrence Labrosse as a crusty, gun-toting, bunny-loving handyman! The bickering couples are subjected to various mind games and constant surveillance, and are informed that they must not leave the premises for the entire weekend! Ha ha, but after Freed does things like pretend to machine gun everyone to death, it’s inevitable that they will insist upon leaving in the most strenuous terms! Except, ha ha, they don’t really – they make a lot of noise, but these are not very proactive people!

And eventually, they start dying! Wally, the world’s rudest man, is first to go: bonked on the head with a meat tenderizer, a cross carved in his forehead, and sent plummeting down a well! And it seems to take forever, but eagle-beaked Tony goes next: after a long sequence in which he’s blitzed by mind drugs given him by Freed, he relaxes in a hot tub and is heated to death! (We have to assume this – we don’t see it, but he is later found in the tub looking a little ruddier than usual!) There’s also a knife to the gut! And eventually – ha ha, spoiler alert I suppose – the killer bonks Freed on the head, and the garrulous quack goes down still talking as though nothing has happened, but dies once he’s on the floor!

Well I won’t tell who the killer is, but I will say that I, a notoriously bad guesser of such things, was not surprised at the culprit! Nor do the other characters seem terribly shocked, but this is in keeping with their reactions all throughout the movie, ha ha! They muster only the most feeble of requests to call the police once bodies start turning up! Keach, wearing a truly bizarre hairstyle, turns out to have a secret of his own, and is positioned as the hero, but like everyone else he pretty much just stands around in small-mouthed astonishment as the film’s climax unfolds! (He does deliver one minor punch to Freed, however!) We never really find out what the deal is with the crosses in the forehead, but I assume that’s just a holdover from the Duplessis era in Quebec, where the movie was shot!

It’s a strange little movie: part horror, part country-house murder mystery, part comedy! The bizarre lengths Freed is willing to go and his psychopathic egoism; and the outsized behaviour of many of the other characters, in particular the world’s rudest man and the necro-groper handyman who’s constantly fondling bunny rabbits; and the astonishing passivity of the patients, all help make up the oddballness of the picture, and are what makes it compelling despite the long stretches of not much happening and the unpleasantness of many of the characters! The acting is fine, the direction adequate if unspectacular (the director went on to a long TV career, naturally), and the screenplay eccentric enough to make it interesting! It’s no lost classic, though it is virtually lost, and I’m going to give Till Death Do Us Part two polygraph machines!

Burl reviews Killer Party! (1986)

Feeling somewhat the April fool, it’s Burl, here to review a horror picture that initially was called April Fool’s Day, but when that other April Fool’s Day came out, the non-slasher slasher picture which I remember the Three Dog Night version of Mama Told Me Not to Come was used prominently in the TV ads for, the title was changed to Killer Party!

The sentence above is a bit tangled and convoluted and difficult to decipher, I realize, but those are entirely apposite qualities for a review of this particular picture! It opens with a funeral scene, an EC comic story in miniature with a hateful relative and a vengeful corpse! But no, this proves to be a movie-within-the-movie being watched by a young couple at a drive-in, and when the young woman goes for popcorn, supernatural shenanigans occur and then a hair-metal band begins to play! We see now, thanks to a chyron, that this is a music video by a band called White Sister, and it’s being watched on TV by a loafing co-ed!

Finally the story proper can start, for the co-ed is one of three who serve more or less as our main characters! There’s Phoebe, played by Elaine Wilkes from Sixteen Candles, and Vivia, essayed by Sherry Willis-Burch from Final Exam, and there’s another one too, and of course they are for some incomprehensible reason trying to join a sorority house run by your basic bitchy sorority queen type! There is a lot of talk about goats, and a lot of goat noises, and everyone has to eat goat eyeballs of course! Pranks are pulled, including one involving a jar of bees and some ladies in a hot tub, and that seems to have no connection with anything except to continue the general atmosphere of prankishness!

In fact nothing seems to have anything to do with anything else, or not much at least! This disjunctive story was written by Barney Cohen, from whose quill also flowed Friday the 13^th part 4, and I think the established backstory and structure of the Jason pictures is what this particular scenarist requires in order to turn in a shootable story! The picture was directed by William Fruet, who brought us Spasms and Funeral Home, and usually (Spasms excepted of course), his movies are a lot tighter and more sensical than this!

Lots of other characters show up, but it’s often difficult to discern their narrative function! There’s a smoothtone called Blake played by Martin Hewitt from Alien Predators; a goony weirdo called Martin, played by Ralph Seymour from Ghoulies and Fletch; and an uptight English instructor named Professor Zito, played by the always-welcome Paul Bartel of Piranha and Chopping Mall and Rock n’ Roll High School! All these performances are perfectly adequate, but I for one missed the gallery of 80s Canadian actors who usually show up in these things – still, ha ha, we do easily recognize it as a Canadian film by the snowflakes that are often swirling past the camera lens!

The collegiate shenanigans take up more than an hour of screen time, and I think the beginning of the movie is meant to take place in the fall while the last part tries to justify the original title by occurring in the spring! This time jump, which many will miss, only adds to the dislocated feeling of the movie! But it seems there’s an old frat house where a frat brother was killed in, I want to say, a hazing incident? The sisters wish to hold a spring prank party in the manse, but the ghost of the frat boy, unable to abide anyone associated with the Greek letter clubs, possesses one of the ladies and there follows a series of bloodless slasher-style killings!

The picture was shot by John Lindley, a cinematographer who would go on to lens bigger-budget items like The Serpent and the Rainbow, Field of Dreams, Sneakers, Pleasantville and The Core, so Killer Party looks a little better than many such movies do! That only means that we get a better-lit look at impenetrable goings-on, however, so it’s not a great help! Also, whatever gore the movie had in its first condition – I remember shots in Fangoria of a trident-poked lady and a fellow with a chopped-off hand – has been ruthlessly excised as though by the killer frat boy ghost himself!

I’ll give it this, though: for a movie shot in 1984, it looks awfully 1986! Is that a compliment? I mean it as such – being a year or two ahead of your time counts as an accomplishment, I think! And though almost all of the scare scenes in the last act are poorly staged and free of affrights, there is one good shock moment in the last bit of it, concerning the surprise appearance of the possessed girl on a roof! The very end has some impact too, though it borrows that from Twilight Zone: The Movie! Otherwise it’s all pretty dire: poorly done, scattered, incoherent, sometimes boring, often stupid!

Some folk like it though, and I want to acknowledge them! Me, I can’t find much in it to love, ha ha, and with its pathetic shenanigan-to-carnage ratio it reminded me of Cheerleader Camp: an unforgivable crime! There’s also a theme song that will tend to make your ears bleed! But I liked Vivia, or was it Phoebe, and how she was half sexy goodtime girl, half glasses nerd! I guess I’ll give Killer Party one and a half guillotines, which I’d say is a pretty generous rating, but hey, it’s spring!

Burl reviews He Knows You're Alone! (1980)

 

Sweet gumchewers, hello! It’s Burl, here to review another old school slasher picture, one of the many that came along in the direct wake of Halloween! Of course only one of these pretenders could reign supreme and that’s Friday the 13^th, but that doesn’t mean the others didn’t have something to offer the undiscerning horror viewer! Take, for instance, the picture under close observation today: an east coast stalk-n-slash entitled He Knows You’re Alone!

It all gets going with a pretty decent fake-out – a cliché-filled stalking scene featuring a couple played by Russell Todd, who would later fall victim to Jason in Friday the 13^th part 2 and to robots in Chopping Mall, and Debbie Novak, who had earlier appeared in jiggle comedies Team-Mates and Incoming Freshmen; but this scene turns out to be from a movie on a theatre screen being watched by two young ladies! Ha ha, just like Scream 2! Of course one of these ladies catches a dorsal poking through the seatback, and it turns out she was a bride-to-be, and very likely, according to an obsessed but incompetent moustache cop, the latest victim of a known bride-to-be killer! The killer is a jilted groom whose own abandonment at the altar sent him totally sneebarr, and ever since he’s been killing brides-to-be wherever he may find them, including the obsessed moustache cop’s fiancée!

This of course is, alongside the inciting incident in Hospital Massacre, among the weakest motivations ever tried on in a slasher movie, but never mind that – the actor playing the killer tries to compensate for this nonsense by opening his eyes as wide as possible in every close-up! He actually does convince as a madman, and you certainly buy him as a threatening one, even as you wonder what he does in his spare time and how he earns a living when not stalking brides-to-be!

Our central bride-to-be is called Amy, and she’s played by Caitlin O’Heaney, who appeared in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy and was the beautiful English teacher in Three O’Clock High! She’s marrying an obvious jerk named Phil, but at the same time her old boyfriend Marvin is trying in his ginger-headed way to win her back! Marvin has his own charms, being as how he’s played by Don Scardino from Homer and Rip-Off, but he’s also a morgue assistant, so tends to joke about dead bodies! Ha ha, if this had been more of a whodunit, I’m sure Marvin’s job would have made him a suspect, as it does Bill Paxton’s character in Mortuary!

Amy’s pals include Nancy, a goofy gal played by Elizabeth Kemp from Eating, and Diana the goodtime gal played by Dana Barron of Vacation and Heaven Help Us fame! Midway through the picture, Nancy hooks up with a friendly but pompous jogger played by none other than Tom Hanks from Dragnet and Apollo 13! The whole gang enjoys a midwinter carnival, where, on hearing that Amy has been feeling herself stalked by a tall man in black, Hanks casually dismisses her fears with some psych-babble, exits frame while asking “Ya wanna goober?” and is gone from the film for the duration! Ha ha, he doesn’t even reappear to get slaughtered, as, I will admit, I’d hoped he might!

Of course most of Amy’s friends, and some of the friends of their friends, and even a poor friendly dressmaker played by Joseph Leon from Brewster’s Millions, fall to the bug-eyed maniac’s cutlery one by one! There’s only a bit of blood in most of these sequences and no Special Makeup Effects (as the credits usually put it), the exception being when a rather goofy-looking severed head is discovered in a fishtank! Ha ha, having once made an equally goofy special effects head for a movie myself, I was pretty tickled to see it!

The climax of the picture takes place in the strangely vast town morgue, simply because that’s the building Amy happens across as she’s blindly running from the killer! I guess Marvin is there and she might have picked it because of that, but he’s not a lot of help, and nor is the exquisitely stupid moustache cop once he finally happens upon the scene! But there are some tense sequences in that morgue, as well as some that should be tense but weren’t given enough care and skill to be as scary as they should be! That there’s any real suspense at all still puts the picture ahead of most of its slasher brethren, though! In this way it reminded me of Eyes of a Stranger, right down to the head in the fishtank, ha ha, except that instead of Florida, this one is set in midwinter Staten Island! At least, it was shot there – it’s probably meant to be set in a Haddonfield-like small town!

It was the first directorial effort from Armand Mastroianni, who later brought us such laxomorphs as The Supernaturals and Cameron’s Closet, and while he’s no John Carpenter, he did a fair job here! There’s also some nice photography from Gerald Feil, one of those guys who had a strangely broad-based career in film, and also happened to shoot 3-D slasher spectaculars like Friday the 13^th part III and Silent Madness! The cast includes stalwarts like James Rebhorn from If Lucy Fell and Shadows and Fog in the role of a horny professor, and Paul Gleason from Die Hard and Night Game playing, of course, a cop! We even get a touch of Steve James, whom we know from Avenging Force and so many other action pictures, and who should have been a star!

It’ll always be remembered as Tom Hanks’s debut movie, but it has a little extra going for it, like the generally strong cast and the appealing midwinter atmosphere! It’s no classic: the script is highly mediocre, the concept ridiculous, the ending extremely weak (the killer is trapped in a room and presumably arrested by local cops), and the last twist even more so, and the whole thing is fairly pointless, but, ha ha, we’ve all seen much worse, I’d guess! I’ll give He Knows You’re Alone two mildly ribald Boy Scout singalongs!

Burl reviews Three on a Meathook! (1972)

 

With a great chopping motion it’s Burl, here to review a down-and-dirty grindhouse number from the 1970s! Ha ha, I like these gritty little pictures, which together form a microgenre I haven’t yet named, but maybe we can call Psychodrama 16! These movies either were shot in 16mm or look like they were, and have some kind of slashery element without actually being slasher pictures, usually; and they frequently center around a single location with a fairly small cast, some family drama, and a lot of bright red blood! Movies like Crazed, Blood Mania, Axe, Scream Bloody Murder, and more fit comfortably into the Psychodrama 16 category, and so does today’s movie, Three on a Meathook!

It’s the second picture from William Girdler, who later brought us such fare as Grizzly and The Manitou before dying too young in a helicopter crash! Clearly he was a big fan of Psycho, because here he’s not only working from the same real-life looney-tune story, he begins his movie by panning across a cityscape to find one certain window in which a couple has just finished making sweet love before the woman has to rush off somewhere, just as Hitchcock did with his own horror picture! The difference here, or one difference anyway, is that the lady in Psycho was wearing a bra, and the lady in this picture is not, ha ha! (The lady, by the way, is played by Linda Thompson, who was Miss Tennessee Universe, then shacked up with Elvis, became a regular on Hee Haw, married Caitlyn Jenner avant la change, and later turned up in Robocop 2! Ha ha, what a life!)

Well, the lady and her friends go on a little camping trip, and stop to do some skinny dipping, and the next thing you know they’re on the side of the road with a conked-out car! Along comes Billy, a genial ginger farm boy, who offers them a place to sleep on the theory that “Pa won’t mind!” Pa, played by Charles Kissinger, whose entire acting career, just about, anyway, was in Girdler pictures, very much does mind; but Billy insists the girls stay anyway! Ha ha, of course once an unseen killer begins a campaign of poking, shotgun blasting, and neck chopping, the poor girls are doomed to stay on the farm forever!

After this lively sequence the picture settles into its psychodrama! Pa claims that Billy did the killings while under one of his tarnation spells, and though the horrified lad can remember nothing, he accepts that, by the process of elimination – because Pa surely couldn’t have done it, could he – he indeed must be the killer! After eating a little of Pa’s special smoked meat, Billy goes off to the city to take in a retrospective screening of The Graduate, then listen to a glitter-funk band called American Xpress play for what seems like three hours! At the bar Billy meets a friendly waitress named Sherry, played by Sherry Steiner from God Told Me To and The Yum Yum Girls, and the next thing you know he’s become drunk as a skunk, peed his pants, and slept over at the waitress’s place! This leads to romance, an invitation to visit the farm, and a climax in which the truth is finally revealed – but not before a pick-axing here and a cleavering there!

Billy is essayed by the redheaded James Carroll Pickett, who reminded me of the 70s gingers from movies like American Graffiti, Rip-Off, Drive-In and The Van, but the horror version! Ha ha, on reflection, this picture is a bit like Homer with a homer-cidal twist! It also reminded me of X, and it occurred to me that if that picture was directly inspired by anything, it might be Three on a Meathook just as much as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre! But these pictures are all the children of Psycho, and after aping the opening, Girdler also replays the end of the Hitchcock picture, with several minutes dedicated to a psychiatrist explaining what was going on in the killer's head!

Of course it bears noting that the movie is generally pretty terrible! There are pacing issues, which the ten minutes of American Xpress sure doesn’t help; some bad acting, though Pickett is solid and likeable as Billy; and a general ineptitude of mise-en-scene! There are a few moments that might be described as thrilling or scary, but they’re pretty rare! Still, the gritty early-70s atmosphere is genuine and pervasive, so if that’s your bag, you might well have a terrific time with this picture! Ha ha, I give Three on a Meathook one and a half orders of smoked “veal!”

Burl reviews Edge of the Axe! (1987)

 

¡Hoy! ¡Hoy! It’s Burl here to review an Iberian/Californian co-production slasher picture from the venerable Spanio-English director José Ramón Larraz, who of course also brought us Scream…and Die! His pictures from the 1970s had a certain sleazy something, but by the late 80s he was taking a different approach, and that’s all too evident in his slasher picture Edge of the Axe!

The action is set in the woods of California, though some of the killing scenes were clearly shot later, probably back in Spain, because they involve characters and locations that are never part of the main action! But the first murder is set in a car wash, and I have to say that one is not badly done, though it’s competently shot enough that you can easily see how it might have been done better still! Ha ha, is that churlish? I hope not! But the scene serves to show us what the deal is in this picture: a white-masked axeman giving the chop to seemingly random ladies!

From there we meet our two main characters, who also serve as our two main suspects! We’ve got computer nerd Gerald, played by Barton Faulks from Future-Kill, and Page Mosely from Girls Nite Out as an exterminator called Richard Simmons! He’s married to an older wealthy lady named Laura, played by Patty Shepard from The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman, and she’s worried, quite rightly, that her vermin-killing husband might be playing bohankie with other ladies on the side!

In fact he is carrying on with another lady, and taking her on motorboat rides in fact, while meanwhile Gerald has met Lillian, played by Christina Marie Lane from The Allnighter! He presents her with a computer, upon which she immediately pastes a picture of Dudley Do-Right, and hooks her up to a proto-Internet so they can play games together and communicate in a sort of email system that reads aloud all their messages in a hollow, echoing, affectless voice! During all this the chop crimes continue, and law enforcement in the town is represented by the crustiest, least helpful sheriff in slasher movie history, played by Fred Holliday from Airport, who, after four or five axe murders, remarks that this could develop into an ugly situation! Ha ha, this fellow is like the angry Far Side version of Chief Newby from My Bloody Valentine!

While the exterminator and his new girlfriend sort of fade from the story, faces familiar from Iberian horror pop up throughout the film: Alicia Moro from Slugs, Jack Taylor from Pieces, and Conrado San Martín from The Awful Dr. Orloff all make appearances, and more often than not get the chop! As more and more townsfolk are forced to undergo the major barbarisms, and corpses pop up everywhere, sometimes literally, it’s easy to forget that this axe murderer also counts among his victims a pig, a dog, and a fish! The dog in particular made me sad – he looked like a nice little guy!

The end has more twists than a chimp’s beanbucket, or anyway seems to, and I’ll confess that between the muddy VHS sound and the forced air furnace of my home some of the dialogue was lost, and I didn’t always follow what was what and who was who in that climax! But I know that Lane’s performance as Lillian was a pretty good one, and that’s maybe in part a testament to Larraz’s years of experience too! But apparently he thinks of this one as his worst picture, and ha ha, I’m in no rush to challenge him on that! I'll commend him, though, for including a few actual Special Makeup Effects in his movie, mostly in the form of corpses discovered later, but there are a few chopped fingers and such too! All in all, I give Edge of the Axe one and a half Color of Money posters!

Burl reviews X! (2022)

 

Hi alla y’all, it’s Burl, here with a tale of Texas terror! Ha ha, the letter X has been used in horror movie titles before, but as with X the Unknown and The Amazing Mr. X and Jason X and The Man From Planet X and The Strange World of Planet X, there’s usually a little something accompanying that single character! Not so here! The picture I’ve just come home from seeing is called X, very simply and tout court!

Yes, it comes from that horror upstart Ti West, whose casually-metered pictures I quite like! He’ll tell the story the way he wants to, by gum, and no newfangled pacing trends are going to force him to do any different! But this picture is maybe one of his bigger crowd-pleasers in that respect, and certainly it’s not lacking for provocative content! It’s terrific to see, in fact: a modern picture that’s in large part about sex! I keep hearing how chaste the younger generations are these days, so maybe X will seem pretty alien to them!

It starts with a little gang of Texan youths driving in a van along the hot highway on their way to an old house in the middle of nowhere in the 1970s! Ha ha, clearly we’re in Tobe Hooper territory here - the opening gets most, but certainly not all, of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre referencing out of the way, and the pond gator we meet later gives us that touch of Eaten Alive!

It’s 1979, and the gang is out to produce a cheap little 16mm pornoo picture! Of course we know they’re really making a horror film, even if they’re not aware of it, but for quite a while we follow them as they beaver away at this enterprise! The picture is being produced by Wayne, played by Martin Henderson from The Ring; his girlfriend Maxine, essayed in feathered locks by Mia Goth, has a taste for the devil’s dandruff, and is one of the pornoo stars! The male star is none other than a be-Afroed Kid Cudi, whom we recall from Bill and Ted Face the Music, and there’s another star, a blonde lady (the pornoo is called “Farmer’s Daughters”), and then the film-geek director/cameraman and his withdrawn sound recordist girlfriend, played by Jenna Ortega from that new Scream picture!

The farm they’ve chosen for their location is owned by an elderly couple not evidently overfond of company! The old folks have a slightly rubberized look, like Robert Englund in The Mangler, or Winona Ryder in Edward Scissorhands, and ha ha, when they made the old gent’s prosthetics there must have been some leftover orc makeup at the WETA workshop because he’s a pretty gruesome customer! And these are full-body makeups, it should be noted, ha ha!

It all goes wrong for these would-be filmmakers, but I won’t detail just exactly how! There are plenty of referential bits: Psycho is embraced as energetically as TCM, right down to the dialogue! (Come to think of it, strange these characters didn’t mention TCM, as it would have loomed pretty large on their cultural firmament just then!) Things simultaneously go in surprising directions and exactly how you think they will, and there’s a deeper theme that underlines the importance of the genre these characters have chosen to work in! The bookending sequences have James Gaylin from The Meg playing the local sheriff, who just can’t believe what he’s finding on this crazy farm, and who gets the last word!

It’s a well-mounted, well acted movie, even if really just a slasher picture with unusual (or maybe not so unusual) motivations! The Texan accents are creditable, the location a reasonable simulacrum of Texas (the picture was shot in New Zealand), and the whole thing put together with a casual, anachronistic fearlessness! It never gets all that scary, but there are some seat-clutchers along the way! I enjoyed myself, but, ha ha, I was the only one in the theatre, except when a couple of kids came in and stayed for fifteen minutes of so through some of the gnarlier scenes! Ha ha! Anyway, I brought a beer along and had a fine old time at the movies, so I give X three roll-outs!

 

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!