Burl reviews Black Sheep! (1996)

 

Hoch now friends, it’s Burl here to review non-classic comedy from the 90s! As I’ve hinted elsewhere, in my review of Men at Work for example, there are an awful lot of bad and unfunny 90s comedy films, and it’s my sad duty to report that today’s picture is one of them! Why sad? Well, because the star of the picture never got to realize his full potential, and because the formula on view here had been used almost precisely in a previous picture, where it resulted in a movie that still wasn’t good but was at least watchable! That movie was Tommy Boy, and this follow-up stinker is known as Black Sheep!

Because Tommy Boy did reasonably well and attracted some goodwill, the Paramount/SNL moviemaking conspiracy decided to replicate it as closely as possible, but without spending extra money on heart, wit, and relevance! Once again we have a good-hearted bozo played by Chris Farley, whose presence we may recall from Dirty Work, paired with a banty and sarcastic foil essayed by David Spade, well-known from his role as the hot dog man in Reality Bites!

Farley is Mike Donnelly, who puts all his portly energy into helping his slickster, nice-guy politician brother Al, played by Tim Matheson – whom we know from Impulse and from Fletch, and who, on a busy movie set, once shoved me out of his way – become the governor of Washington! Wishing him out of the way, the campaign assigns staffer Steve (Spade’s part to play of course) to keep the oaf out of trouble by whatever means necessary! But because both Mike and Steve, but especially Mike, are stupid people, trouble keeps happening to them anyway!

The rival campaign led by Governor Tracy, played by Christine Ebersole from True Crime and Licorice Pizza, decides to make the most of Mike’s oafishness in order to derail Al’s candidacy, but they do so in a haphazard and unfocussed manner, which is how everyone does anything in this movie! Plenty of characters are introduced and not much is done with any of them: from a lunatic veteran who lives in a school bus, played, of course, by Gary Busey from Silver Bullet and Lethal Weapon; to Grant Heslov of Congo playing Mike’s cop friend; or Timothy Carhart from The Manhattan Project as Al’s unctuous political aide; or Bruce McGill from Into the Night as his opposite number on the Governor’s side; or, in the role of a sleazy photographer, Boyd Banks of Crash and Jason X!

Nothing is done with these people because nothing is done with anything! The overwhelming feeling is of a movie being made on the fly with an unfinished script by people who would rather be doing something else! There are very few jokes and none of them are funny, so far as I can recall! I’m fairly sure I saw this in the theatre back when I was a semi-professional reviewer of films, but until I re-watched it more recently, I couldn’t remember a thing about it except that it was bad! It turns out that’s the only thing to remember about it, ha ha!

I’m sorry to be so negative here, but, though I can’t say I’m a big Chris Farley fan, I do think he had some comedy chops and a central core of appealing sweetness, and he had the potential to become something greater! But he was ill-used like so many of the tubby comedians were, and Black Sheep is a shining example of a near-criminal waste of talent! Its summery atmosphere, Pacific Northwest locales and essential good-naturedness are about all it has going for it, so I give this forgettable puctulation one half an appearance by Mudhoney!

Burl reviews Police Academy! (1984)

 

Calling all cars, it’s Burl, here to update you on a popular rip-off comedy of the 1980s! Ha ha, I realize that could describe any number of movies – Up the Creek, for instance, or one of many, many others! But no, this one, which borrows liberally from Stripes and Animal House and both Privates Benjamin and Popsicle, is in fact a picture successful enough to be ripped off itself by movies like Moving Violations and Recruits and Night Patrol! And the picture around which all this rip-offery swirls is of course Police Academy!

 

Ha ha, as is so often the case, I have a little story about seeing this movie! I was thirteen, and went to a party at some friends of my parents, held at a house a street or two over from my own! There were other kids there and the party was sufficiently decadent that we were able to sneak glasses of white wine and eat all the oysters we could manage, and so we were in quite a state by the time we stumbled to the local movie theatre, just around the corner (the same one in which I’d seen movies like Xanadu and Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown), to take in Police Academy! No surprise that it turned out to be the perfect movie for a gang of just-barely teens snookered on pinot gris and seafood aphrodisiacs, ha ha!

 

Steve Guttenberg from Cocoon and The Bedroom Window portrays the hero of the piece, Carey Mahoney! Ha ha, who made Steve Guttenberg a star, you ask? This movie did! Mahoney is an allegedly charming parking lot attendant and amateur petty criminal who is forced to join the police academy lest his latest escapade - an aggressive parking job - land him in the pokey! His initial impulse is to get himself thrown out of the academy at the earliest opportunity, but after laying eyes upon the supercute Kim Cattrall, well known from Porky’s and Big Trouble in Little China, he decides to stay and become the best police cadet he can be! But the head instructor Harris, played by G.W. Bailey from Rustler’s Rhapsody and Short Circuit, takes a strong disliking for him, and herein lies the central conflict!

 

Such as it is, anyway, ha ha! Mahoney is only nominally the hero of the piece, because this is really more of an ensemble production featuring all manner of misfits who've joined the academy all at once! Bubba Smith from Black Moon Rising is the towering florist; Donovan Scott from The Best of Times is portly Leslie Barbara; David Graf from Suture is a frothing, dimwitted gun nut; Bruce Mahler from Friday the 13^th part 4 is a clumsy briefcase oaf; and of course Michael Winslow from Grandview U.S.A. is The Man Who Can Make Machine Gun Noises With His Mouth (And Often Does)! George Gaynes from Altered States and Tootsie gives a terrific performance as dotty Commandant Lassard, in charge of the atheneum, while Leslie Easterbrook from Private Resort is Harris’s sexy sub-lieutenant!

 

When I was a wine-drunk thirteen year-old this movie seemed rollicking and uproarious, but in the cold and sober light of day I’m sorry to say it doesn’t provide quite the laffs it once did! But rather than listing its faults, it would take a lot less time to list the things I still like about it: Gaynes’s performance; the Kensington Market locations used in the climax; the random appearances from familiar Canadian character actors like Michael Reynolds and Don Lake; and maybe a few of the gags here and there, but not many! Otherwise it’s pretty dire, my fond memories of the original cinema screening notwithstanding! I’m going to give Police Academy one and a half podiums!

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 Ernest Goes to Camp! (1987)

Ha ha, hello and howdy everybody, do you know what I mean? Yes, it’s Burl, here to review a strange star vehicle from days gone by: a feature film presenting a character who wormed his way into the public consciousness by appearing in a string of commercials in which he speaks to his invisible pal Vern! Ha ha, yes, I’m talking about Ernest, and more specifically about his feature film debut, Ernest Goes to Camp!

Strangely enough I saw this movie in the theatre, and I’ll take a brief digression to tell you why! Ha ha, it was June of 1987, and I was excited to see a new movie that was coming out that summer! I heard about a sneak preview one night, and so my pal Doug and I hurried down to the mall multiplex! In their wisdom, the theatre chain decided to pair this new movie with something they figured would go well with it, Ernest Goes to Camp! When the Ernest picture ended and the sneak preview began, you could hardly hear the sound of the movie over the din of parents rushing their children out of the theatre: for the movie was Full Metal Jacket! (Ha ha, one intrepid dad stuck it out to the end with his two young kids, though!)

So ever since then, those two movies have been inextricably connected in my mind! Watching it again, I realized there were other connections too! Both pictures have predominantly male casts, feature an incompetent who’s bad at everything but shapes up in the end, are set largely in barracks-like environments, employ actors who later participated in the Toy Story series, and climax in scenes of frenzied battle! After a preview setting up the Indigenous legend that’s the backdrop for the titular camp (and which the picture treats with surprising restraint and, by its lights, respect), we meet the halfwit camp handyman, Ernest, played as ever by Jim Varney! Varney of course is also known as the voice of the slinky dog in Toy Story!

Victoria Racimo from Prophecy is the camp’s serious-minded nurse, whom the picture never successfully turns into an object of the neutered Ernest’s romantic interest! Her grandfather is played by famous Italian actor Iron Eyes Cody, well known for his redface roles in Son of Paleface and hundreds of other movies and TV shows; his character, it seems, owns the land the camp is on! Ernest, whose dream it is to one day become a real camp councilor, is put in charge of minding a group of alleged delinquents after these scrubbed-clean teens manage to shatter the leg of their original councilor! Scenes of Ernest trying to make friends with the delinquents are intercut with vignettes involving camp chef Gailard Sartain (whom we know from All of Me and many an Alan Rudolph picture) and his gross food-flinging machine, and scenes of bad guy John Vernon, well known from Sweet Movie, Curtains, Crunch, and Herbie Goes Bananas, doing his bad guy thing without putting too much effort into it!

Vernon’s character owns a strip-mining company that wants to take over and destroy the land, and of course Ernest moronically manages to help Vernon bamboozle the camp away from its rightful caretaker, Iron Eyes Cody! In a showdown punchup with a beefy mining foreman played by Lyle Alzado from Tapeheads, Ernest is brutally beaten and ends up face down in the dirt, bleeding, and is scorned and abandoned by his charges, except of course the little boy who always liked him! This savage pounding, along with a dim awareness of the profound ramifications of his idiocy cause Ernest’s canoe smile to finally fade, and that night he sings a heart-rending ballad of infinite sadness to his turtle in which he expresses gratitude for the falling rain, as it will hide the tears streaming down his bruised and battered face! Ha ha, pretty grim!

The picture has a few bright moments, and Ernest is not wholly without good-natured charm; and the climax involves a sudden turn into the supernatural, which is a trope I usually like! The picture was a little better than I remembered it (actually, I didn’t remember it at all, other than as a way of marking time before the start of the Kubrick movie), but not much, and I was expecting it to be absolutely bottom-of-the-barrel! It wasn’t that, but it hovered not too far above, and so I give Ernest Goes to Camp one and a half turtle parachutes!

Burl reviews One Crazy Summer! (1986)

 

Hello gumchewers, and all the best of the summer to you! Today I thought I’d review an airy little goofnut from thirty-five summers past! It’s a picture I saw on video with my pals a-way back when, and we probably watched it because we were fans of the director-star combo’s previous work, Better Off Dead! This picture runs a distinct second place to that minor 80s comedy gem, and it goes by the name of One Crazy Summer!

The director in question is Savage Steve Holland, who, like Tim Burton, came from the world of animation and so liked to include little bits of cartoon or stop motion in his live-action features! The star of the picture is John Cusack from Tapeheads and Con Air, but in reality he’s only the star because he was the most high-profile performer when this was made; in fact, despite being the audience-identification character, he’s more a part of an ensemble! Inasmuch as he has an identity at all, the character is defined as a high school graduate known inexplicably as Hoops, whose fondest hope is to find romance and be admitted to a college of the fine arts!

His pal Sweet Calamari, played by one of Bill Murray’s brothers (but not, I think, the one who was in Moving Violations), ushers him to Nantucket Island for the summer! On the way there they encounter struggling songstress Cassandra, played by Demi Moore from Parasite, who is on the run from a motorcycle gang headed by the guy from Goonies! That particular back story is one that remains unexplored, ha ha, as do many others, but this is not a drum-tight narrative we’re dealing with here!

On Nantucket, numerous other personages emerge! There are the Stork brothers, Egg and Clay, played by Bobcat Goldthwait and Tom Villard respectively; and then we have perhaps the most appealing character in the picture, the peace-loving Ack Ack, essayed by Curtis Armstrong, whose father is a warmongering general played by Joe Flaherty from Club Paradise! There are of course bad guys: a family of developers called the Beckersteds, whose goal is to take over a house which Cassandra has inherited and replace it with a soulless condo complex! These nogoodniks are frat bro Teddy, played by Matt Mulhern from Extreme Prejudice and Junior; a dad played by one of the jerk bros from Animal House; and there are sidekicks essayed by the likes of Jeremy Piven from Edge of Tomorrow! Old William Hickey, from Tales From the Darkside: The Movie and suchlike, is the wheelchair-bound but non-evil patriarch of the clan!

All these elements come together in the most obvious and primitive of ways: Hoops falls for Cassandra and he and his band of weirdos must triumph over the Beckersteds, and, as in another summer picture from the era, Summer Rental, it all comes down to a regatta, for which the heroes must employ a watercraft previously considered thoroughly unseaworthy!

It’s all very uncomplicated but good-natured, and the pleasures, when they come, come not from the main plot or cast, but from the material on the margins, which are supplied with gags as though Sergio Aragones had a hand in the script! That would be fine if the gags were funnier, but the laffs, unfortunately, are rather sporadic! The movie’s not without charm though, and it also contains weirdness, and these two qualities are valuable indeed! Bobcat Goldthwait goes so far into his usual 80s persona that he seems deranged, but his performance doesn’t grate the way you might expect, or at least not as consistently as you might expect! Ha ha! There’s a bright and sunny summer atmosphere, and the seaside charm of the Nantucket location occasionally shows through, and of course there are plenty of Jaws references! Though it’s no classic, and not even close, I found my recent re-viewing of this picture enjoyable, and so I give One Crazy Summer two man-eating dolphins!

Burl reviews Parasite! (2019)

Ha ha and ham rolls, it’s Burl, here to review a picture called Parasite! Now, I know just what you’re going to say: “Ha ha, Burl, haven’t you already reviewed Parasite?" No, friends, that was Parasite! This new one is Parasite, and it’s not even about a slimy and rapacious creature, unless that’s how you choose to describe capitalism, and if you do I for one won’t argue!

Of course, Bong Joon-ho already made his literal slimy and rapacious creature movie, The Host, and the funny thing is that you could transpose its title with that of Parasite and it would all make just as much sense as it currently does! Parasite concerns a chronically unemployed family of four, the Kims, who live in a cramped, stink bug-ridden basement apartment, who come across an opportunity to take jobs with a rich family who live in an opulent, modernist house up on a hill! Ha ha, first the son, then the daughter become tutors to the rich Park family’s children; then the Kim father and mother get jobs respectively as the driver and housekeeper to the Parks, with the wealthy family totally unaware that all their new employees are related! The scam seems to be working beautifully until one rainy night…

Ha ha! Well, I’d best not go on with my plot description, because this is a movie best viewed without a thorough awareness of the whole story! There are surprises to come in the second half, and thanks to these the picture in many ways reminded me of Us, which I enjoyed but never did review for you good people! Both movies are parables of inequity at the same time as they are literal, if outlandish, stories of inequity!

But Parasite is the more confidently made and technically accomplished picture, ha ha! It’s mise-en-scene is frequently worthy of Hitchcock, and the acting across the board is superb! Plus it’s very funny, and at the same time contains shots here and there that wouldn’t be out of place in the very scariest of horror pictures; and eventually it even gets a little gory! It’s a terrific movie, and continues South Korea’s tradition of punching above its weight, cinematically!

There’s talk of turning the movie into a TV series, and if that happens my plan is to completely ignore it the way I do most other TV! I’m quite happy with the one self-contained movie, thank you very much! I’m pleased to give Parasite three and a half rotisserie chickens!

Burl reviews Trading Places! (1983)

…And she stepped on the ball! Ha ha and ho ho ho, it’s Burl, here with another non-Christmas movie set around the holidays! Of course I’m talking about Trading Places, the comedy classic made by John “Into the Night” Landis! It’s not a particularly Christmasy picture, but it does have a scene in which one of the stars, Dan “The Great Outdoors” Aykroyd, inebriates himself and dresses as a dirty Santa! Then he says “Bluaaaghhhh, blargh!” Ha ha!

We all know the plot! Here we have the rough-edged but good-hearted ne’er-do-well Billy Ray Valentine, played by Eddie Murphy of Beverly Hills Cop fame, and the posh fancylad Louis Winthorpe III, played by Aykroyd; and we have two elderly superwealthies, the Duke brothers, who like to play hob with people’s lives! Ha ha, the plot begins when the Dukes – Bo is played by Ralph Bellamy from The Wolf Man, and Luke is Don Ameche from Heaven Can Wait – make a bet on whether, if they switch these fellows around, putting Billy Ray in the catbird’s seat and Louis in the gutter, Billy Ray will become a respectable commodities broker and Louis a criminal street bum!

There are many misunderstandings and crenulations, and characters like the kindly butler (Denholm Elliot from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), the kindly prostitute (Jamie Lee Curtis from Grandview U.S.A.) and the not-so-kindly dirtytricksman (Paul Gleason, the well known meanie from Night Game and Die Hard and Welcome to Spring Break and Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home) figure in; and Christmas comes and goes, and there’s a train gorilla and some crop reports, and a big final scene on the commodities trading floor!

Well, it’s the oldest tale in the book, really, and the director, young Landis, tells it in his usual straight-ahead style, with a few ingratiating looks into the lens and other trademark moves! Of course, we have to mention how unbelievably quickly Billy Ray turns from jive-talking con man to expert commodities broker, juggling pork belly futures as he used to handle discarded gutter-butts! We expect to withhold some disbelief in a picture like this, but even with that feature engaged, and an understanding of the exigencies of plot movement, it seems a bit of a quick transformation!

But there’s lots to enjoy! The cast is great, even when they’re playing the oldest clichés in the book, like poor Jamie Lee and her hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold! Eddie Murphy provides one of his finer performances, if you ask ol’ Burl, and Dan Aykroyd does prep-school nimrod almost as well as he does earnest techno-drone, which is saying an awful lot! It would have been nice to see John Candy in here somewhere, but you can’t have it all, I guess! I’m going to give Trading Places three eye-rolling gorillas that were somehow not created by Rick Baker!

Burl reviews Summer Rental! (1985)

Hi, Burl here with another movie review – a fluffy summer holdover called Summer Rental! This was one of the first starring vehicles for John Candy: he’d spent years as a second banana – albeit a big one – supporting comedy stars like Tom Hanks (in Splash and Volunteers), Richard Pryor (in Brewster’s Millions), Bill Murray (in Stripes) and Elliot Gould (in The Silent Partner)! But thanks to this picture, we could look forward to such Candy-centric pictures as Armed and Dangerous and Uncle Buck!

Candy plays Jack Chester, an air traffic controller showing signs of burnout! He’s ordered to take a vacation, so he loads up the family and it’s next stop: Florida! There they take up residence in a seaside shack, and Candy meets two older men who will become important to what scanty shreds of a plot Summer Rental has to offer! The two men are Richard Crenna, whom we know from such films as Death Ship and The Evil, playing a local big-shot and sailor-man who’s managed to win the regatta every year for nearly a decade; and the other is a pirate restauranteur played by Rip “Extreme Prejudice” Torn, who becomes Candy’s ally and sailing mentor!

Karen Austin, whom we may know from Fish Hawk and Far From Home, plays Candy’s wife here, and does so in the same amiably boilerplate way as Stephanie Faracy would in The Great Outdoors a few years later! Kerri Green, who captured hearts in Lucas and The Goonies, plays his eldest daughter, and there are a couple of other kids as well!

The movie clocks in at a lean 87 minutes, but is very obviously missing entire subplots that someone (the studio, or maybe director Carl “All of Me” Reiner) decided should be given the chop! Ha ha, John “Demon Knight” Larroquette shows up as a solicitous vacationer who helps the family (minus Candy) get into a screening of Top Secret, and is perfectly positioned to serve as a romantic rival to Candy, but then poof! He’s gone! There was other stuff like that too!

Altogether it wrecks the image of the finely-crafted 80s Paramount entertainment machines I described in reviewing Footloose, because the movie is kind of muddled, ha ha! (It reminded me of another 1985 Paramount picture, Blue City, in that way!) There’s not a whole lot of forward momentum, or vim, or pep, or, frankly, laffs! Sure, Candy is funny and appealing, because he always was! Crenna and Torn are good too, but the script, I think, is the culprit here! Ha ha, no jokes! Reiner’s direction is a little bland too! It’s a pretty forgettable little fushtwanger and has all the plot of an actual vacation, so I’ll just give Summer Rental one and a half elderly Chinese pirates!

Burl reviews Spring Break! (1983)

Hi, Burl here, in the company of some Lauderdale Ladies, to review for you one of the top beach pictures of the first half of 1983, Spring Break! Ha ha, like Spring Breakers, which I recently watched, this picture tells of four non-Floridians who arrive on the beaches of that strange and venerable state for the spring break week, and contains many shots of b*kini-clad ladies! But, ha ha, there the resemblance ends!

An odd thing about this picture is that it comes courtesy of Sean Cunningham, the director of Friday the 13th! It’s a remarkable change of pace, sure, but there are similarities as well, like the presence of so many young people, some dumb dialogue and unlikely situations, and of course the score by Harry Manfrancini! You can rest assured there are some screaming shock violins, ha ha!

Oh, you were hoping for a synopsis? Well, there are two nerds, Nelson and Adam, played by David Knell from Total Recall (can’t say I remember him in that, ha ha!) and Perry Lang from Teen Lust and Alligator, who arrive in Fort Lauderdale with the intention of having a good time! Nelson is on the lam from his nasty politician stepfather, played by Donald “Wolfen” Symington, so he’s a bit nervous! But it turns out the room they’ve booked has also been booked by O.T. Blastem and his pal Stu, a couple of New York sharpies! Ha ha, what a confusion!

But this is a movie on the mellow side, so the conflict is resolved with a minimum of hassle! Soon the four vacationers have formed a team, with O.T. and Stu helping their nerdly counterparts learn how to have a grand old time! There are little romances set a-brewing, and between these there are contests of various kinds, including bellyflop, teeny-bikini, banana-eating and wet T-shirt! (I’ll leave you to discover in which of these competitions a fellow named “Crazy Gut-Gut” takes part!) And the plot elements finally come to the fore when Nelson’s stepdad has his henchmen kidnap the lad and imprison him on the boat! Meanwhile the hotel, run by a kindly lady and staffed exclusively by a guy named Eesh (who was also in Fear City, which is why he looked familiar to me), is in danger of being bought out by that very same stepdad! A bit of a coincidence, but no biggie, man!

Of course, with the help of the spring break partycrew, some cream pies and a few Millers, everything works out! The hotel is saved and the stepdad’s life and career are ruined! This seems only just! Then everybody kisses and says goodbye – perhaps only until next year!

Ha ha, this is a pretty enjoyable picture in its way, and it certainly lives up to its own modest ambitions! The casting is about perfect, especially with the nerds – and I was astonished to see that one of the nerds, Adam I think, looked, walked and talked just like Bruce Allenby! Ha ha, it’s true! There are actually a few pretty good songs on the soundtrack, which was amazing (ha ha, NRBQ is always welcome!) and plenty of great 1980s stuff to look at!

I cannot, won’t and will not make a case that this is a top-flight picture, and there are probably even better 80s beach pictures out there! But when this one is right, it’s right, so I’m going to give Spring Break two and a half crazy gut-guts and a big bellyflop splash!

Burl reviews Caddyshack! (1980)

Fore! Ha ha, no, it’s just Burl here with a golf movie for you! Yes, quite naturally it’s Caddyshack – no Tin Cup here, ha ha! (Although if I’m going to review all the movies, I guess I’ll have to see that one eventually!) You might be saying “Ha ha, Burl, is this another one of the 80s comedies you’ve never seen before?” I say no, it’s not – in fact I’ve seen Caddyshack many times before!

But I recently acquired a copy on VHS, so I thought I’d give it another look! It’s a pretty good test tape to use when you want to show off your system, or just give it a workout! Ha ha! And of course it has those marvelous gopher trick effects, where he dances to that terrific Kenny Loggins song! The last four words of that sentence, by the way, are reserved exclusively for ‘Theme From Caddyshack (I’m Alright)!”

The picture’s about golf, and features four separate comedy-men doing less a quartet of characters sharing a coherent story than a bunch of routines at an ad-hoc variety show with a vaguely sporting background! Rodney Dangerfield, Chevy “Funny Farm” Chase, Ted Knight and Bill “Ghostbusters” Murray mostly orbit around one another, doing their thing (nouveau-riche oaf; playboy smoothy; uptight snob and drooling halfwit, respectively) and only occasionally interacting with one another in scenes which mostly seem made up and improved on the spot just to provide that interaction!

So it’s not a plot-heavy picture, ha ha! What plot there is comes from the Meatballs school of dramaturgy: a younger lad required the guidance of the older comedy gents around him! This time the kid is older and not as drippy, and it’s Chase who offers him council, not Murray! In the meantime there’s a clash of values between Dangerfield, who’s so gauche he’s droit, and Knight, who does the uptight patrician-gone-sour thing better than just about anyone!

Chevy Chase is meant to be a rich man and a superior golf player, but there’s not much more to him! Murray tells a great, extemporized story about the Dalai Lama and otherwise chases the animatronic gopher! There’s an Irish waitress and (I think?) two individual rich blondes! Or they might have been the same person – I’m just not sure! Ha ha!

It’s ramshackle and the seams sure do show, but it’s a funny picture with a good heart, and there’s a reason it’s lasted as a favourite for as long as it has! I’ve never seen the sequel, but I understand it to be dire, even though it was directed by Allan “Get Crazy” Arkush! Caddyshack is a breezy and untroubled concoction, and I give it three free bowls of soup!

Burl reviews You Can't Cheat An Honest Man! (1939)

Hello all you chumps! Ha ha, I don’t really mean to call you chumps – I’m just channeling the spirit of W.C. Fields! Because it occurred to me recently that there’s a big gap in my classic comedy watching experience – a big gap shaped just like Fields! Aside from It’s A Gift, I’ve only ever seen bits and pieces of his movies and routines! And so it was that I decided it would be good to watch one of his later pictures, You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man!

Fields had a pretend feud going with famed radio ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, and more particularly with Bergen’s little pal Charlie McCarthy! This movie was largely a framework within which to carry that feud over to the motion picture medium, and apparently it paid solid dividends at the box office! Though, ha ha, the word is that Fields disliked making the picture, and didn’t get along with credited director George Marshall!

Here, Fields is Larson E. Whipsnade, a circus owner in debt up to his lampshade! He’s in constant conflict with two of his star attractions, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy! Ha ha, some of the Bergen-McCarthy scenes, especially a sequence in which Fields feeds the little dummy to the alligators, give off a distinct Dead of Night vibe, as we are shown in no uncertain terms that Charlie is alive, sentient and capable of independent locomotion! It’s pretty creepy, especially if you’ve seen as many living-dummy movies as ol’ Burl has, ha ha!

To the extent that the movie provides a plot, it’s that Larson’s daughter, who worries about her father’s financial well-being (as well she should, ha ha!), falls in love with Edgar Bergen, and by extension Charlie McCarthy too, I suppose, but agrees to marry the rich dewberry Roger Bel-Goode instead! But then Larson arrives at the Bel-Goode mansion in a chariot, terrifies the lady of the house with all his talk of snakes, and then engages in a downright hilarious ping-pong game with a Frenchman! The money problems are not resolved, but Larson and his daughter are chased out of the house for a reuniting (grudging on Larson’s part) with Bergen and his hated manikin!

It’s true that this picture has a stodgy vaudevillian feel to it, with skits instead of scenes and probably too much Bergen and McCarthy! But I’m not overly familiar with the famed duo’s routines, so I didn’t mind that! Fields is funnier though, and I wished there was more of him! I chuckled quite a bit, especially when Bel-Goodie père calls Larson a pharisee, a pecksniff and an egregious tartuffle! Ha ha, Roger is then told by the tomato-nosed con man that “if there is such a thing as a tartuffle, you sir are just that thing!”

It’s not considered on of W. C. Fields’s greatest works I suppose, but I thought it was a pretty funny picture, and I’m going to give You Can’t Cheat An Honest Man two and a half ca-nables! 

Burl reviews Protocol! (1984)

With a ditzy smile and a wave, it’s Burl, here to review a Goldie Hawn movie for you! Ha ha, I don’t think I’ve seen many Goldie Hawn movies, and certainly none from her 80s batch! Nope, never seen Private Benjamin, never seen Overboard or Bird on a Wire or Swing Shift, never even seen Wildcats! I think I saw Foul Play once, and maybe Best Friends for some reason, and at some point in the future I’ll probably have a look at Seems Like Old Times! Still, considering what a big star she was, there’s not much Goldie in my movie-watching history!

That’s why I thought I’d tackle Protocol! Ha ha, I’d never heard much of anything good about it, but occasionally, as with All of Me or The Money Pit, I’ll watch a mid-80s comedy for just no real reason at all! So I put it on and let ‘er unspool!

Well, Goldie plays some kind of sexy waitress at a jungle-themed Washington, DC, strip club, one of those PG-rated strip club where no one actually strips! One evening she accidentally saves an emir from assassination, and her grateful government gives her a job in the protocol office! This is all very contrived of course, but that would be forgivable if, as is the case with a similar picture from the same era, Spies Like Us, it was just a tiny little bit funny! But it’s not, ha ha! It’s not funny at all! The only time I came close to chuckling was when Goldie decided to host a party for the emir at her old peeler bar, and the club owner put up a banner reading “Welcome Amir!”

When I saw in the credits that there were some experienced character actors in the cast, and that the screenplay was by Snyder himself from Grumpy Old Men, Buck Henry, I thought maybe I was in for an unheralded treat! Nope! It’s a dreary, laffless exercise! Pondering this, I thought maybe it was actually a clever and pointed political anti-Gipper satire in disguise, some kind of Iran-Contra analogy perhaps! Nope again, I’m pretty sure! I sought in vain for an Ollie North stand-in, or a lightly disguised Sandinista!

But like I say, there’s at least a solid supporting cast! The emir is played by Richard Romanus from Mean Streets, and his buddy, a party animal guru, is André Gregory, André himself from My Dinner With André! Chris “Fright Night” Sarandon is the love interest with whom Goldie has absolutely no chemistry! Cliff De “Secret Admirer” Young is doing his besuited slimeball thing, which requires, and gets, no effort from him; and we also get both Kenneths: Kenneth “For Keeps” Mars and Kenneth “Dune/’Salem’s Lot/Malone” McMillan! Plus there’s a secret cameo from another future Fright Night alumnus, Amanda Bearse, playing a soap opera actor, and familiar faces like Archie “Innerspace” Hahn and Paul "The Devonsville Terror” Willson as T.V. newscasters! And don’t forget a friendly appearance from Al “Die Hard” Leong as a cook!

I suppose I’m itemizing the (mostly wasted) supporting cast this way because, ha ha, there’s not much more to talk about! It’s also a way to offer you links to better and more interesting movie reviews! This is a lousy picture: it’s boring, it’s repetitive and it has a grindingly abrasive party scene that feels as though it will last forever! Grasping for something on the plus side, I’ll say that the treatment of Goldie’s gay roommates was refreshingly mature for the period, and it's always nice to hear dotty-Ronnie jokes! Anyway, I give Protocol one half of an exploding electric toilet!

Burl reviews Loving and Laughing! (1971)

Eh bon, eh bon, c’est Burl! Oui, it’s your old ami Burl, ici avec another review d’un pellicule Franco-Canadien! The picture is one of a late-60s / early 70s cycle known as Maple Syrup Porn, and is called Loving and Laughing!

Ha ha, this is certainly a free-spirited movie, all right! Here’s a bit of trivia about it: none other than David “A Dangerous Method” Cronenberg campaigned hard to get the job directing the thing! And who can blame him, since it must have been a real gas to work on this film, as you’ll see! Anyway, poor Cronenberg didn’t get the gig, of course – a fellow named John Sole did, and then apparently never directed another movie ever again! Maybe he felt he’d done it all with this one!

This is the closest Canada ever came to making its own Malibu Beach, at least in ol’ Burl’s opinion! There’s more of a plot, but not much! It’s a hippie Trading Places more or less, and begins with a fellow named Reggie, the scion of an Anglo old-money Montreal family, leaving his overbearing mother for a summer trip to Vermont, where he’ll teach the daughter of a family friend to speak French! Along the way his car breaks down and he meets up with a funky bunch of free-wheeling Quebecois hippies! After a bit of skinny-dipping, they take Reggie to their commune! Lucien, the de facto leader of the commune, helps Reggie adapt to hippie life, and the two decide that Lucien should go on to Vermont instead of Reggie! Since the cops are after Lucien due to his fondness for marijuana weed, he agrees, and from then on it’s a case of two story threads running in parallel!

At the commune, there are several scenes of Reggie bumbling through the communal lifestyle, slowly losing his bourgeois inhibitions while wooing a lady called Lovely, and in Vermont, Lucien settles in with the rich American family: a hot-blooded mother, a sexy blonde fitness enthusiast, the pulchritudinous young lady to whom he is meant to be teaching French, and the delicate, lilac-scented son in the family, Edgar! There’s also a flirtatious French maid who regularly forgets to button up her blouse! “Ha ha, it’s going to be a long, hard summer!” Lucien moans!

It’s lighthearted shenanigans from here on in, with seemingly every scene ending with everybody taking off their clothes! Even when there’s trouble with the law – as there is in both Quebec and Vermont – nudity runs rampant! Ha ha, it’s pretty gritty nudity, it must be said, but there’s a sunny, carefree attitude to it that’s undeniably appealing! And there’s a very strange scene in which Lucien apparently uncovers the fact that the entire U.S. Army is gay! Ha ha!

As with Malibu Beach, there’s no distinct forward motion to the narrative, leaving it anyone’s guess where the movie is going or when it might be over! But also as with Malibu Beach, you don’t want it to be over, because the world of Loving and Laughing is a gentle, groovy, gossamer place, where potential buzzkills are swatted away with the flick of a whifflebird feather! As with any number of other pictures – The Beach Girls, Cheerleaders Beach Party and King Frat all come to mind – there’s a scene in which a dull, bourgeois party is reduced to a gigglefest by the spiking of the canapés with pot!

It may not be a very exciting movie, but it’s a comfortable place to spend an hour and a half, I’ll tell you that! It’s frequently bizarre, and, ha ha, it’s a time capsule par excellence! And as a bonus, it ends with a couple making sweet love on top of Percé Rock! I’m going to give Loving and Laughing three flexing buttocks!