Burl reviews Star Crystal! (1985)

 

Beep boop and by Gar, it’s Burl, here to review low-budget space-based VHS insanity! You know, there was no shortage of Alien rip-off pictures in the wake of that 1979 superhit, and following the grand success of E.T. a few years later there were more than several small-scale coattail riders on that one too! But there was at least one picture to manfully attempt to rip off both hits at once, and the result is just as bifurcated a narrative as you might expect! Ha ha, the movie, for reasons of its own which it keeps to itself, is called Star Crystal!

We begin on a surprisingly convincing Mars, where a pair of louts find a rock – I suppose this may be the titular crystal, but it doesn't much look like one – which they bring onto their ship! Next thing you know the rock has hatched and everyone on the ship is dead because the oxygen got turned off by somebody! The action then relocates to a space station that looks like it was, and according to an article I read about the movie in Cinefantastique magazine, actually was, constructed out of painted water bottles! Then something goes wrong and the space station blows up, and the space ship that escapes has the creature that hatched out of the rock on board!

Well, you know the drill! The crew, an uncommonly stupid and unlikeable bunch, are one by one attacked by the creature and turned into puddles of goo! And then, when there are only two of them left, the alien taps into the ship’s computer and reads all the information therein, which includes the Bible! Yes, ha ha, Holy Bible! This of course has the effect of radically changing his personality, and before you know it, the alien, whose name is Gar, is best buddies with the remaining spacefarers, even after brutally murdering all their friends! Proof of this friendship comes in a hilarious montage during which, as they work on repairing their failed systems, Gar does shenanigans like using his telekinesis to spin a wrench around in mid-air as everybody laughs! And shortly after this jaw-dropping turn of events, the picture comes to an end - an end I will characterize as "unceremonious!"   

Some really head-scratching decisions were made in the production design of this picture, ha ha! The number of sets is pretty minimal, with most of the action taking place in a single room, like a play; but to enter or leave the room the crew must use dog doors for some reason, and then they have to crawl like hens through seemingly kilometres-long tubes to get from one part of the ship to another, as though the craft had been designed by hamsters! No character mentions the absurd inconvenience of this; and one hopes the cast were issued knee pads, since collectively they must crawl a marathon’s worth of distance in those dumb tubes!

The picture reaches some sort of nadir when, after a fatal encounter in the crawl tubes leaves him with his skin melted away, the film’s lone black character turns out to have a black skeleton too! Ha ha, it’s ridiculous! So is the creature, which looks like somebody sculpted a sad-eyed E.T. out of wax and then took a blowtorch to it, and which is shown only in grotesque close-ups for most of the film – his twitchy eyeball or his undulating flesh or his goofy Beaker-like mouth! Ha ha, don't let that image on the poster fool you - it may be Gar's meaner cousin or something, but by garr, it sure isn't Gar! (There are no floating glass coffins either!)

I was really hoping for something approaching those Roger Corman Alien rip-offs of the early 1980s, like Forbidden World and Galaxy of Terror - pictures that may not be good, but show energy and imagination in their mad quest to purloin! No dice with Star Crystal though! My son, a wise old cynic at age 11, declared this the worst movie he’s ever seen and likely ever will see! He maintained that opinion even after we recently watched The Creeping Terror, so you can be certain the ineptitude on display in Star Crystal really made an impact on his young mind, and I guess maybe that’s an achievement in itself! Ha ha! I give Star Crystal one futuristic sippy-bottle of Coke!

Burl reviews Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3! (2023)

Ha ha and pieww-pieww, it’s Burl here with space action-comedy for you! Yes, it’s the summer blockbuster season, and the big shows are being rolled out weekend by weekend; and, seeing as how my son and I recently watched the first two entries in the Guardians of the Galaxy series of pictures, which come from the director of Super, James Gunn, we thought we might go out to catch the third in the series! The official title of this third entry seems to be Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3!

I will here and now confess that I’m no great adherent to the Marvel superhero pictures, which I mostly find cacophonous and bewildering! Well, they’re not that bewildering – I’m not an idiot after all, ha ha – but when watching one I’m always conscious there’s a whole mess of back story and relationship dynamics of which I’m cheerfully unaware, and knowing this tends to dull my enjoyment of their product! But of all the various series, the Guardians of the Galaxy ones have been among the most amusing, both because they seem to sit apart from the Avengers and all those associated heroes, and because there is for the most part a refreshing lack of reverence for the interwoven Marvel universe as a whole!

The Guardians of the Galaxy are of course a motley band of space people who live in a lumpus called Knowhere, are led by a ragamuffin called Quill, played by Chris Pratt from Jurassic World, and occasionally cruise around in their spacecraft doing missions! Ostensibly they’re flying around out there to battle evil, but most of their time seems spent on investigating their own origins and past traumas, as though the whole hero caper is really just some good old fashioned recovered-memory therapy! The first one dramatizes the origins of the group, but takes time to investigate how the battling sisters Gamora (who is green and played by Zoe Saldana from Star Trek Into Darkness) and Nebula (a mostly-blue patchwork essayed by Karen Gillan from Oculus) came to be what they are, which has something to do with their father, a rock monster! Then the second one showed that Quill’s father was secretly a space god played by Kurt Russell!

This time it’s the raccoon man’s turn to look back on his life! The character of Rocket is an irascible procyon with the voice of Bradley Cooper, and at the beginning of the picture a golden boy flies in and tries to kidnap him! After a fearsome battle the golden boy is driven off, but poor Rocket hovers on the edge of death! It turns out the only way to save him is for his pals to bust in to the scientific facility that created the raccoon: a place run by Chukwudi Iwuji from John Wick: Chapter 2 playing “The High Evolutionary,” who’s a maniac with pretensions to godhood! This is our bad guy, and the rest of the movie bounces between the Guardians’ efforts to find the information that can save him, and Rocket’s comatose recollections of his childhood, in which he was caged with three other similarly mutilated weirdo child-animal friends!

It's as melancholy a picture as Marvel will allow, meditating (ha ha, again, as much as Marvel will allow) on loss and survivor’s guilt; and it’s also got a strong anti-vivisectionist message! These things are over and again subsumed by the pieww-pieww, but you can tell Gunn means what he says because there’s significantly less joking around than in the previous installments, and a lot more talking about feelings! There’s a scene that takes place in what I took to be heaven’s antechamber that, for a conversation between two non-human CGI confabulations, is really quite touching! And eventually everyone cries, even the raccoon!

It’s a long, busy picture – ha ha, the Marvel extravaganzas all seem to be in running time and character-number competition with one another – but fairly straightforward when you break it all down! The High Evolutionary is a mean man but gets what’s coming to him, and I could never decide whether Iwuji’s performance was a minor triumph or a silly hamfest – ha ha, or maybe it was both! I liked it, though! Otherwise except for the occasionally dour tone, the movie mostly follows the pattern set by the previous volumes, including the requisite moment of fighting triumph for the tree-man; some literal-mindedness from manmountain Drax, played by Dave Bautista from Dune; a cameo appearance measurable in seconds by Sylvester Stallone from First Blood; and lots of cacophony and endless song cues! Although, ha ha, they seem to have dropped the trope of Quill listening to mix tapes his mother made him – although there are still 1970s AM radio cuts here, the selection is also watered down by what I suppose are simply songs James Gunn likes!

Anyhow, it’s more enjoyable than the usual Marvel nonsense, and it has an alternate earth populated by animal people, so I’ll give Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 two blue jay men!

Burl reviews Jason X! (2001)

 

Hi, it’s Burl reporting… from space! Yes, it’s Friday the 13^th, and therefore time to review another Friday the 13^th picture; and this is one I went to see at the theatre on a date with my then-new girlfriend who later married me anyway! Ha ha! It’s not a good picture, but it was a fun date anyway, because after all, who doesn’t want to see Jason in space! Of course only one picture fits that description, and it’s called Jason X!

Was it a good idea to send Jason into space? I can see the reasoning: ever since the original Friday the 13^th, he’s been skulking around the same summer camp, more or less: at the camp in part 2 and part 6; around nearby homes in part 3, part 4 and part 7; at a local halfway house in part 5 (and that wasn’t Jason anyway); and of course by part 8 they became hysterically desperate to find something different for the goochy-faced madman to do, so they put him on a boat bound for Vancouver! Ha ha! So where else was there for him to go but space?

The picture begins in the Crystal Lake Research Facility, where Jason is being held in chains and being prepared for cryogenic freezing! In charge is an evil doctor played by none other than the director of Scanners, Fast Company, and so many more, David Cronenberg! Ha ha! I guess he was doing it as a favour for his buddy, trick effectsman Jim Isaac, who directed the picture (and who had earlier made The Horror Show)! Anyway, Cronenberg performs his silly lines with the requisite seriousness, then, when Jason escapes, tries to run away but suffers a flying impalement!

Jason ends up getting cryogenically frozen anyway, just like Walt Disney, and so does the science lady who’s been studying the masked killer since he was captured! Four hundred years later a spaceship visiting the now uninhabitable Earth retrieves the pair and revives them! As the ship is populated by a gang of students and their venal professor (played by Jonathan Potts from Body Count, ha ha!), the picture then becomes a spacebound retelling of part 8, with a revived Jason applying some futuristic killing methods (a face-freezing-and-smashing scene is perhaps the most memorable) as well as garden-variety pokings to the students and the crew!

There are some very 2001-era trick visual effects, by which I mean they’re not up to the standards set by the movie 2001 back in 1968, ha ha! The ship itself is very much the type that feels more like a studio in Toronto than an actual working craft, and there’s a distinctly Canadian feel to the whole production - yet another echo of the dire Jason Takes Manhattan! This maple leaf feeling is amplified by the presence of Potts and Cronenberg, as well as a cameo from Robert Silverman, whom we know from so many Cronenberg movies and also from his appearance as Mr. Sykes in Prom Night!

There are clever moments, like the use of the holodeck to recreate Jason’s usual campsite environment and thereby distract him! There’s a lady robot and some nanotechnology, and for whatever reason Jason is turned into a super robot version of himself! The whole is a dog’s breakfast of fan-fiction level ideas afflicted with the usual lack of affrights, though it’s all as slickly produced as any Friday the 13^th picture ever was! It was mildly fun to see it on the big screen, and though it’s bad, some pleasures remain, and so Jason X gets a rating of one and a half nanobots from me! Ha ha, and have a happy Friday the 13^th, everybody!

Burl reviews Galaxy of Terror! (1981)

By grimbus and by garr it’s Burl, here with a review of one of Roger Corman’s early-80s sci-fi/horror hybrids! You all know about such gems as Forbidden World and Humanoids From the Deep, and you may even know about Space Raiders, but the picture I’m reviewing for you today, Galaxy of Terror, is in many ways the most special of them all!

Ha ha, when this one came out I tried to go see it with my friend Dave! We were both little kids, but we loved horror movies; and, as Galaxy of Terror was showing in a multiplex and was rated R of course, we bought tickets for a Rocky Horror Picture Show revival then tried to sneak across the hall into the cinema where the movie we really wanted to see was playing! But halfway through the opening credits we felt strong hands clamp on our shoulders, and two burly ushers hoisted us up, marched us to the door, and tossed us out into the street to roll in the gutter! It's too bad, because what a victory it would have been to see this beauty on the big screen!

It’s a Alien knock-off, of course, but only to a point! We open in the office of The Master, a fellow with a glowing red head and the voice of that fine gent Ray Walston, famous for his roles in Silver Streak and Johnny Dangerously! He’s talking to an old space witch played by Mary Ellen O’Neill from Van Nuys Blvd., and he decides the thing to do is to round up a spaceship crew and head to Morganthus, a mystery planet where a previous spaceship crew has disappeared! Thanks to the enthusiasm of spaceship captain Grace Zabriskie, whom we recall from Drop Zone and many fine David Lynch pictures, the characters find themselves on the nightmare planet in no time flat!

Our hero is an upright fellow named Cabren, played by Edward Albert from When Time Ran Out and Getting Even! Ha ha, everybody has lame space-names, like Baelon, the mildly antagonistic character played by erotic film director Zalman King, or empathy-lady Aluma, played by Joanie herself, Erin Moran! Bernard Behrens from The Changeling and The Man With Two Brains is an old man along for the ride; Taafe O’Connor from Hot Chili is the buxom lady with a fear of worms; Robert Englund, Freddy himself from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, is a little guy called Ranger; and Sid Haig, whom you surely remember as the Righteous Brothers’ drummer in Beach Ball, is the virtually mute Quuhod! Ha ha, Quuhod! And Ray Walston is along as the cook, who by an amazing coincidence has the same voice as The Master!

It turns out the planet, and in particular a big pyramid located there, is a place that makes manifest the worst fears of anyone who enters! The first to go is a whinyman played by Jack Blessing from Summer School, who gets eaten by a big doodlebug and we’re glad to be rid of him! The old commander guy goes down a wormhole and is sucked dry by vermiforms; Sid Haig has his beloved crystals turn on him and his own severed arm delivers the death-stab; Zabriskie’s Captain Trantor is incinerated; and poor Erin Moran ends up getting crushed by cable snakes in a crawlhole! Ha ha, yikes! But the worst and the goofiest of all is of course the famous maggot assault, which makes neither psychological nor physiological sense but was intended only as an over-the-top outrage designed by Corman to attract daring or depraved viewers!

There’s some good squoochy gore in here, and mixing this together with ambitious low-budget special effects, James Cameron’s tenpenny production design (and his shock-dancing maggots, ha ha), that stellar oddball cast, and some gloriously dumb metaphysics, we get a heady brew indeed! The movie cares not a fig about making sense, but it does deliver a parade of trick effects you will surely enjoy! I don’t care for the maggot rape, nor for the sensibility that concocted it, but it’s outlandish enough to be more or less ignored, and I’m only glad the actress escaped being crushed by the giant worm prop! Galaxy of Terror is not a movie for everyone, but it’s got a strange hold over me, so with some reservations I award it three redheads!

Burl reviews The Adventures of Baron Munchausen! (1988)

From beneath a speeding cannonball, it’s Burl, here to review a lavish fantasy from the brain of Terry Gilliam! Ha ha, this is the picture that, so far as I can tell, was Gilliam’s first real Troubled Production, and when you hear all the stories about it, you wonder how it could possibly ever have been finished and released! But it was, and it emerged into the world under the title The Adventures of Baron Munchausen! (Of course Brazil was Troubled too, but only in post-production, I believe!)

It’s a picture that cost a big bag of samoleans, and you can tell just by looking at it! Ha ha, I was lucky enough to see it on a big huge screen at a beautifully appointed cinema in London, and I remember being a little disappointed with it! I thought it was pretty spectacular, visually speaking at any rate; but I had seen Brazil a few years earlier, also in London, and with Gilliam present to make comments and answer questions, and that of course was a marvelous treat with which the newer movie could not compete! I finally watched it again last night and was very curious to see how it would play this time around! 

The story, you ask? Ha ha! We begin in a city under siege from the dreaded Turks, and there among the blasting cannonfire we find a theatre company putting on an elaborate show about famous balderdash artist Baron Munchausen! What do you know, the real Munchausen shows up, played by John Neville from Spider and Urban Legend, and he’s put out by the play’s distortion of what he claims are the real facts about his life! He begins telling the tale of his four superpowered friends, or servants, or whatever they are, and how he escaped the Sultan’s headsman thanks to the speedy feet of Eric Idle! Then he’s off on an adventure to gather up his old super-quartet and defeat the Turk before the city is fully trampled beneath his cruel sabah!

Sarah Polley from Blue Monkey and eXistenZ plays a little girl stowaway who joins him on this series of adventures, which include an array of cameos from such performers as Oliver Reed from Spasms, erotomaniacally playing Vulcan, the Roman god of fire; Uma Thurman from Mad Dog and Glory, appearing nude on the half-shell as his wife Venus; Valentina Cortese from When Time Ran Out as the Queen of the Moon; and Robin Williams, or “Ray D. Tutto” as he’s billed here, who is of course well known from Club Paradise and who plays her husband, the King of the Moon! Other familiar faces include Jonathan Pryce from Tomorrow Never Dies as a despicable bureaucrat, Bill Paterson from Comfort and Joy as the actor playing the Baron, and Peter Jeffrey from The Abominable Dr. Phibes as the Sultan! And the Baron’s amazing quartet are played by Gilliam’s Python-buddy Idle; his co-screenwriter Charles McKeown, who also appeared in Spies Like Us; big Winston Dennis from The Commitments; and Jack Purvis from The Dark Crystal as a big-eared blowsman!

It reminds me a lot of Time Bandits, with its child hero on a strange, episodic journey, lots of eccentric characters played by familiar faces and at least one Python, kooky homemade trick effects, giants, midgets, and a scene in which the characters are trapped in an iron cage hanging in a void! The circus-like, Italianate atmosphere comes naturally, given that Gilliam hired some key Fellini collaborators to help him out! Cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, known as Peppino to his friends, and designer Dante Ferretti give the picture a pretty and always compelling atmosphere. and there are plenty of nice miniature trick effects to admire!

But the Time Bandits comparison also reveals some flaws! The story here is less compelling, the characters weaker, the themes and satire duller and more abstract, and, reflecting the sharp increase in budget from the earlier picture and the shift in company from Handmade Pictures to the vast and unfeeling Columbia, the movie seems altogether less handmade than its predecessor! Still, there’s plenty to enjoy: the trick effects are terrific, the cast game, the imagination delightful and abundant! As an inquiry into the nature of truth, it doesn’t get far, but as an epic amusement it’s firing on most, and occasionally all, cylinders! I give The Adventures of Baron Munchausen two and a half-shells! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Red Planet! (2000)

Ha ha and Mars-men, it’s Burl, here to review a picture that takes us on a forgettable journey to the fourth planet from the sun! I know it’s forgettable because, despite seeing it (I think!) in the theatre on its initial run back in 2000, I couldn’t recall a single thing about it, except that it involves astronauts flying to Mars and things not going well for the crew! Ha ha, am I talking about Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars? Nope, the other one: Red Planet!

Well, I watched it again the other night and I figure I’d better review it quick, before the particulars disappear from my mind again as they most assuredly will! Already they’re fading! But I can tell you this much: the year is 2057 or thereabouts, and humans have wrecked and degraded the planet Earth to such a degree that we’re casting around for an alternate world on which to live! Ha ha, sound familiar? Well, Mars is the obvious candidate, and to that end, Earth scientists have been bombarding the crimson planet with algaes in the hope that this will create a breathable atmosphere! However, the algaes have not taken, and an all-white crew of astronauts has been assembled to travel there and find out why!

Val Kilmer, well-known from his roles in Top Secret and Real Genius, plays the space janitor, and the ship is captained by Carrie-Anne Moss, whom we recall from Pompeii! Other crew members include Tom Sizemore, famous for his role in Passenger 57; Benjamin Bratt from Demolition Man; Simon Baker from Land of the Dead; and Terence Stamp, whom we all celebrate for his role in Link! Stamp speaks in the same barbiturated cadence he used in Alien Nation - ha ha, I guess that’s the acting style he reserves for middling, forgettable sci-fi pictures!

Everything goes wrong for this bunch almost the very second they reach the planet - before that, even! A fire breaks out on the ship, and Moss is left to deal with that as the fellows jettison to the surface of Mars! They crash land, their habitat (built, I wonder, by whom, as these are supposedly the first humans on the planet) is all busted and the supplies gone, one of them dies of a busted spleen and another by taking a header off a precipice, and a robot dog becomes angry at them! And still this is only the beginning of their trials!

Thanks to some mystical pronouncements early in the film made by Stamp’s character - by name Chamomile, or Cantinflas, or some such - one assumes there’s some kind of galactic metaphysical hocus-pocus at work here, but the explanations, when they come, are fairly science-based! But truly, nothing seems to go right for the gang! One of the good parts of the movie comes when they crash land on the planet and some special balloons deploy! They get a pretty good shake up when the balloon ship rolls off the edge of Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system! Ha ha!

But good parts are fairly few and far between in this picture! Other than Kilmer harboring a crush on Moss, and Stamp’s avuncular flakiness, there’s not much to these characters! One guy reveals himself to be a jerk - not a full-on bad guy, just a jerk - but then immediately tumbles off a cliff! The Kilmer and Sizemore characters both have the same laid-back persona, and are fairly interchangeable! The robot dog  proves their greatest foe, but it’s not a very thrilling one! There are also some space fleas!

All in all, I remember now why I forgot this movie! Ha ha, I fully intend to do so again, in fact: completely and utterly! It’s not terrible I suppose, and the trick effects are good, and the photography by the always-solid Peter Suschitzky is fine; but for all that, the locations still look like Australia with a red filter over the lens! All in all it’s pretty baloney, so I give Red Planet one and a half talking space suits!

Burl reviews The Rise of Skywalker! (2019)

Ha ha and may the Force be with us all! Yes, it’s Burl, here to review the new Star Wars picture, The Rise of Skywalker! Now, I’m very sorry to be reviewing this one, as there is hardly a shortage of other reviews of it floating around I’m sure, and ol’ Burl’s opinion is about as necessary to the conversation as buttocks on a bug! Still, I saw it, so I figure I might as well review it! Ha ha!

I’ll say right at the start that the most striking thing about my viewing of the picture was just the sort of manufactured nostalgia the Disney people are I suppose counting on! It so happens that I saw the movie in the very same (though much changed) movie theatre in which I saw the original 1977 Star Wars with my father! This time around I was again with my father, and also this time with my son, who is about the same age as I was when I saw the first one! Ha ha! So there we have roughly the same sort of circular, multigenerational progression pattern as we see in the films themselves, and that gave me a brief, synthetically warm feeling about the old cockles!

And the movie itself? Ha ha! On the way in my son wondered  in what sort of deadly space orb the Resistance fighters would blow up this time, and I don’t wonder at his eight year-old’s cynicism! We were both surprised to find that an orb is not blown up at the climax; rather, a series of towers and starships! But otherwise things played out in the way you’d expect a reunion concert from some old favourite hit band might, with all the old hits recycled and special guests wheeled out like Hannibal Lecter on his pushcart!

Why, the old Colt .45 himself, Lando Calrissian - still played with great suavité by Billy Dee Williams from Fear City and Deadly Illusion and Number One With A Bullet - appears, and gets to mack on the ladies, even Leia, sort of! There are other Special Guest Stars too, like Wedge, and what looks to be the son of Porkins (equally ill-fated, I'm afraid), and also a Jawa shouting “Boutini!” (Ha ha, we still don’t know what that means, do we?) For a while I thought we might get a cameo from The All-Consuming Sarlacc, or maybe his brother, but it never happened!

Still, the new cast - including John Boyega from Attack the Block, Oscar Isaac from Inside Llewyn Davis, and Adam Driver from The Dead Don't Die - continues to perform with energy and aplomb (though I lost count of how many times the action stopped for tears to roll down Daisy Ridley’s cheek), and director J. J. Abrams, returning to the galaxy far, far away from The Force Awakens a few years ago, keeps things moving at a frantic, sometimes too-frantic, pace! Ha ha, I wish he’d do a movie like Super 8 again! Both as a film and as a nostalgia generating machine, I enjoyed that one quite a bit! In the case of this new movie, sure, I liked hanging out with Chewie and enjoyed Luke’s appearance as a hologram, and C3-PO was not too annoying this time around! (Chewie, when shown naked without his bandolier, looks more like Bigfoot than ever!) And Emperor Bolpatine, ugly as an old pike, is still played in Creep Factor 5 by Ian MacDiarmid, and can still shoot lightning from his fingers! Quite a bit of it, actually!

In the end I preferred the last entry, which is to say The Last Jedi! Ha ha, it’s strange to see how this latest trilogy is shaping up like the first trilogy did, with the middle installment somehow the most complex and interesting of the three! Rogue One is still the best of the new pictures in terms of creating a palpable, lived-in universe, though! Few of the worlds seen in the other ones, including the endless, boring desert planets, feel like real places in which societies might have developed!

With its (too) many cute creatures and pointless new cute robot, its slavish devotion to ironing out complexity, and its desperate, machine-tooled, get-the-band-back-together mentality, this new picture has clearly been Disneyfied to within an inch of its life, and despite a welcome appearance from Richard E. Grant of How To Get Ahead in Advertising, I can’t bring myself to award The Rise of Skywalker more than one and a half collapsing outfits!

Burl reviews The Right Stuff! (1983)

Ad astra, friends, it’s Burl! No, I’m not reviewing the recent Brad Pitt movie by that title, not yet anyway, but instead a picture suffused with the spirit of this inspiring phrase! Ha ha, yes, I’m talking about The Right Stuff!

This movie was a pretty big deal back in the early 1980s, as I recall, though not in terms of box office! I guess it’s a pretty long picture, and people were worried they might have to go to the bathroom in their spacesuits, ha ha! I wish I’d seen it in the theatre, you bet, and why my family didn't go is a mystery to me, because we usually took in all the epics! It’s a beautifully shot picture - take a bow, Caleb Deschanel! - and would have played magnificently on the big screen, I am sure!

Of course it’s the story of the beginnings of the American space program, before they even had a thing called NASA, and plays a little like a prequel to Apollo 13! It starts with Chuck Yeager, played by Sam Shepard from The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and his ladywife Glennis, personified by Barbara Hershey from Hoosiers! They ride horses, banter a bit, and then old Chuck goes and breaks the sound barrier! After that we get into the recruitment and training of the Mercury 7 astronauts, and as the space flights start, we get all sorts of ups and downs both technical and personal!

The cast, of course, is extraordinary! The Mercury 7 include Scott Glenn from The Hunt for Red October as Alan Shepherd; Ed Harris, well known from Creepshow, as John Glenn, no doubt drawing on this experience when he played control room chief Gene Kranz in Apollo 13; Dennis Quaid, playing Gordon Cooper the same way he later played Tuck Pendleton in Innerspace; Fred Ward from UFOria playing Gus Grissom with great wounded dignity; Scott Paulin from Forbidden World as Deke Slayton; Charles Frank from Russkies as Scott Carpenter; and Lance Henriksen from Aliens, The Visitor, The Horror Show, and many, many others, as Wally Schirra, who later sold ointments on TV as I recall!

The wives are just as strong a group: Veronica Cartwright from Nightmares; Pamela Reed from Junior; Kathy Baker from Edward Scissorhands; and Mary Jo Deschanel from 2010, in which she played a different astronaut’s wife! Plus we get Donald Moffat from The Thing as a cranky LBJ; a pair of comedy-relief recruiters seeking out the spacemen for the program, who are played with an Artoo and Threepio dynamic by Harry Shearer of Godzilla and Jeff Goldblum of Into the Night; a proto-NASA official played by John P. Ryan of Avenging Force; another official type played by David Clennon of Matinee; the always-welcome Levon Helm from Staying Together, playing mechanic-designer-gum supplier Jack Ridley; and the great Royal Dano, playing another in his long line of cadaverously allegorical memento moris!

The picture is in many ways a remarkable thing: at once mythmaking and myth-deflating; a resolutely personal telling of a defiantly epic story; traditional and grounded while reveling in outrageous eccentricities and gross-out gaggery! Ha ha! It celebrates individual achievement while insisting the same is not possible without communal effort, wastes no time on flag-waving, and its stand-up-and-cheer moments come as much from small moments, like John Glenn backing up his shy, stammering wife when she doesn’t want to meet Johnson, as from aeronautical triumphs!

Ha ha, I wonder if there’s a Russian version of this story! If there is, I’d like to see it! In the meantime, this excellent telling of the tale from the American side will have to do! I give The Right Stuff three and a half nurses peeking through portholes!

Burl reviews Apollo 13! (1995)

Blast off it’s me, Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to review a movie of rocketmen, and I have to say that it’s a picture I’ve always held in fond regard! I’m not much for the rah-rah Americana - ha ha, I’m not even American! - so that this picture avoids all the obvious touchstones, like the snapping flags that, say, Peter Berg or Michael Bay would have added had they told this story, makes me like it all the more! Oh, I just shuddered at the thought of Berg, Bay or some like-minded simp making this instead of Opie “The Paper” Cunningham!

And if Opie Cunningham were here, I would clap him on the back and tell him he did a fine job with this tale of accidents in space! In fact it’s my second-favourite of his pictures, right after Grand Theft Auto! He’s always been one of those craftsmanlike directors, but he’s got his high points and low points like anyone else! Rush, for example, was pretty good, and Cocoon and Backdraft both have their moments! Gung Ho, on the other hand, is an unfunny anti-union jackanapes, and those DaVinci Code pictures are crazy nonsense! Yes, the more I think about it, the more I realize Apollo 13 is streets ahead of most of Opie’s work, and that’s even before I recall that Roger Corman has a cameo in it, playing a senator, ha ha!

Of course we all know the true-life story! Three astronauts bound for the moon have their plans changed when an electrical blauchup plays havoc with their spaceship! The commander of the mission, Jim Lovell is played by the imperturbable Tom Hanks, whom we all know best from Dragnet; pilot Jack Swigert is portrayed by Kevin Bacon, famed from his appearance in Friday the 13^th; and third guy Fred Haise is brought to life by the sadly late, but always great, Bill Paxton, beloved for his appearances in movies as diverse as Mortuary and Streets of Fire! All of these actors acquit themselves marvelously from the opening bar-b-que scenes (there has to be a bar-b-que scene in these astronaut movies, ha ha!) through the space crisis and right up to splashdown!

The scenes in Mission Control are excellent too - some of the best moments involve these gentlemen (and they were all men back then) solving problems and doing math! Ed Harris, who’d been to space himself in The Right Stuff, but who’s best known for his roles in eccentric productions like Knightriders, Creepshow, and Walker, rules the roost down in Houston, but he has able support from the likes of Clint “Ticks” Howard and Gary Sinise, who would get a chance to attend a bar-b-que before going to space in Mission to Mars! Kathleen Quinlan from Wild Thing helps ensure that the family scenes are not a drag, as they could easily have been in a story like this! It helps that the editors ably keep things bouncing around from the ship to Mission Control to the home front so that you never get tired of any one group, location, or situation!

Well, it’s a solid middlebrow Hollywood picture, and that can hardly be denied! It doesn’t juice up the action or overplay the drama or invent bad guys or try to lay blame! It looks good thanks to the portly cinematographer, Dean Cundey, and it projects an air of absolute plausibility! And the moment where Lovell’s young son (played by Miko Hughes, who was Gage in Pet Sematary) asks “Was it the door?” always makes me momentarily misty for some reason! Good work, Ron Howard, ha ha! I give Apollo 13 three steely-eyed missile men!

Burl reviews When Worlds Collide! (1951)

Good day, it’s Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to tell you all about the end of the world, George Pal-style! Pal is the pal who brought us The War of the Worlds, but this picture, When Worlds Collide, is an earlier and much more comprehensive tale of planetary destruction!

Right from the start this stood out from other 1950s sci-fi spectaculars, because the hero is not a scientist, nor even particularly a brain wizard! He’s a simple courier, a pilot whose job is transporting mysterious black boxes from one place to another and not asking any questions! This time, through a minor subterfuge, he finds out what he’s carrying, and he isn’t too pleased about it! Ha ha, it’s astronomical proof that the earth will within months be completely destroyed by a hurtling space-star!

The plot thickens from there! The scientists who’ve figured all this out get laughed at by the UN and some other scientists, and so they hook up with some millionaires and commence to building a spacecraft which will, everyone hopes, take them safely to a planet hurtling along in the star’s orbit! Ha ha, then there’s a gentlemanly romantic triangle right out of It Came From Beneath the Sea, and there’s lots of hand-wringing from our beak-nosed hero about whether he should go along on the spacecraft ride!

I do admit I quite liked that aspect – that he’s not really qualified to go along on the ride, and knows it, and genuinely wishes to demur from the trip for selfless reasons! Of course when he’s presented with a legitimate, if fictional, scenario in which his presence has value, he’s pretty quick to claim his seat, ha ha!

And then there’s the nasty millionaire, whose job is to be as one-note cynical as the scientists are one-note humanitarians! The resulting debates are pretty basic, but still more nuanced than I for one am used to seeing in 50s sci-fi! Less nuanced are the two score candidates for space-salvation: all of them are as lily-white as you could imagine! There’s some talk of other countries building their own spaceships, but still, a little diversity would have been pretty cool!

Still, we have nice trick effects, glorious Technicolor, and fine paintings and designs from Chesley Bonestell, whose art has graced everything from The War of the Worlds to Shellac records! The picture moves at a pretty good clip and really does feature plenty of destruction! The world really does end at the end of it, and though the handful of survivors indeed do make it to the unbelievably habitable planet, it’s still pretty grim to think of everybody else on earth perishing in earthquake, fire and flood! Yikes!

It’s a fine disaster picture, and I was glad to finally catch up with it! I give When Worlds Collide three rail-riding spaceships!

Burl reviews Prometheus! (2012)

Hi, Burl here with a review of a brand-new movie! It’s a prequel to Alien, which is a movie ol’ Burl is pretty fond of, and it addresses what to me was always one of the central questions of the original film: just who was that big guy in the chair, and what was his story? Ha ha! He was known as the Space Jockey, and it was always assumed that he and his race were just another bunch of hapless arrivistes on that desolate planet where the green eggs roamed! But there’s more to his story, or so Mister Ridley Scott would have us believe!

It seems that a couple of scientists have discovered some cave-painting indications that we ought to go to a certain planet and check it out! They happen to land exactly where the action is on this planet – don’t ask me how – and the next thing you know they’re checking out some caves as though they were characters in an early-80s Alien rip-off, like Horror Planet or Galaxy of Terror or something of that nature! Boy, they sure do spend a lot of time in those caves!

All of this takes place in a world that’s just as grey and bottle-green as you might imagine, so drained of colour that even the Rubik’s Cubes are monochromatic! The scientists and spaceship crew are not very interesting people on the whole, with none of the “we’re just doing a job” resignation seen in the Alien or even Aliens crew members - even though several times in Prometheus the characters explicitly talk about how they're just on the ship doing a job for the paycheque! What they need is Harry Dean Stanton and Yaphet Kotto on board, grousing to beat the band!

I couldn’t even figure out if the people of this future time (the year 2093, that is) had ever yet met aliens, or if their encounters with them in this movie represented a big first! Remember in Aliens when Hudson asks “Ha ha, is this just another bug hunt?” Right there in one line you knew that they were already familiar with aliens, but that humans were just a bunch of imperialistic jerks who would sooner fire their plasma rifles at an E.T. than get to know it!

But here we haven’t really got a clue how incredible this is all supposed to be! It's treated as pretty routine for the most part! There’s an old man along for the ride, or maybe a young man with putty all over his face, it was hard to tell; but he at least seemed pretty impressed with the alien contact! And there are a few different aliens who show up, some humanoid and others more tentacle-based! I won’t give too much away, but we do indeed see some thrashing tentacles in this picture! Ha ha, a part I didn’t quite understand was why the one fellow became a psycho zombie! That just happened so there could be an extra action scene I think, and also so we could get rid of some of these characters whose names we never even heard! In Aliens, even Wierzbowski was named for us before his untimely demise!

I will say this: I liked the robot in Prometheus! The robot was a good actor, and his love of Lawrence of Arabia was a nice touch! The captain was a pretty good guy too! Ha ha, I would have done just like him and straight up asked that Charlize Theron if she was a robot too or what! I won’t give away the answer here though, ha ha!

The movie reminded me of Forbidden World in many ways if you want the truth, and you can take that however you like! But I will say that, in spite of the unbelievably sketchy characterizations, no matter that the thing falls apart logically at the slightest rational thought (the Space Jockey doesn’t even end up in the spot where he’s later found by the Alien crew, ha ha!), and forget about the fact that the musical score keeps threatening to become the Star Trek fanfare, this picture has some really enjoyable aspects!

It looks great, it sounds great and it has a gloomy atmosphere I thought was nicely antithetical to blockbuster summer success! I like that it tries to philosophize a bit, even if nonsensically! It’s a thinking man’s movie as made by morons, but at least it tries to be something other than An Efficient Thrill Machine! It’s a funny movie: the more I think about it, the more I liked it! It’s no Alien, but it doesn’t embarrass its host either, and when it comes bursting out from the 1979 picture’s gut this summer, everyone involved can stand tall and proud! I give Prometheus two and a half alien bongos!

Burl reviews Explorers! (1985)

Hi, Burl here to take YOU on a journey to… outer space! Ha ha, Joe Dante seems to have made a real specialty out of directing big-budget Hollywood mainstream movies that somehow still mostly managed to completely dodge the popular mindset as much as the most abstruse art film! He managed this with all sorts of pictures: Innerspace, The ‘Burbs, Matinee, Gremlins 2, Small Soldiers and even Looney Tunes: Back In Action!

Explorers, for its part, sailed past the cultural zeitgeist like a bubble-enclosed Tilt-A-Whirl car hurtling past the moon, and flopped like a fried fish on its summer 1985 release! It’s a great idea for a young persons’ adventure film though, which is probably why I was captivated by it back when I was a young person! I saw it more than once in the theatre, but I guess there weren’t many others like me that year!

Here we find three young lads: a sci-fi loving everyman played by Ethan Hawke, a genius glasses nerd essayed by the late River Phoenix, and the afterward-unknown Jason Presson as a tough-façaded poorboy with mechanical and construction skills! These fellows are caught up in science madness when Hawke’s crazy computer-generated dreams prove to be instructions on interstellar flight radioed in directly to his brain by aliens! The dreamed-up schematics render it possible for Phoenix to generate a flying soap bubble which they can ride around in! Presson constructs a ship out of an old Tilt-A-Whirl car, a garbage can and some other stuff, and they’re off, with esteemed character actor Dick "Rock All Night" Miller staring up at them in awe!

I have to say, as much as I’ve always enjoyed this unusual picture, even back in 1985 I felt somewhat let down by the picture’s final act! The characters themselves are meant to be underwhelmed by what they find out in the nether reaches of the universe, so I guess it makes sense; but by the time they leave the spacecraft and their new alien friends, they’ve made some sort of emotional connection with their situation that the audience just doesn’t share! The special effects are pretty good in a 1985 way, the sets by Hitchcock veteran Robert Boyle are spectacular, and Rob Bottin’s alien suits are sophisticated silliness! And the upshot of it all, which is that the aliens have learned about Earth exclusively through TV broadcasts and therefore believe humans to be violent cretins while they themselves communicate in moronic catchphrases, is an undeniably salient point, if facile even for a young person’s movie!

But the first two thirds of the picture, in which the three young leads all acquit themselves well – and Jason Presson might be the best of these young actors actually, with the subtlest and most complex characterization – and in which we learn that Dick Miller once had these dreams beamed to him as well, makes up for the inadequacies of the space sequences! It’s full of great bits, like the drive-in Starcrash parody, James Cromwell searching for ze bug bomb, or anything involving Dick Miller! And Jerry Goldsmith’s score is grand, one of his best of the '80s! (I wish the songs used in the picture lived up to it – the kids name their spaceship after a Springsteen song, "Thunder Road," but we hear nothing of Boss quality on the soundtrack!)

Ha ha, I’m going to give Explorers three and a half phone calls to Gordon, mostly just for existing! And for Dick Miller too, of course! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Dune! (1984)

It is by Burl alone I set my review in motion! Ha ha, it's me to review a science-fiction spectacular! I guess Dune didn’t do all that well at the box office when it came out back around Christmas of 1984! Ha ha, it was no Star Wars, that’s for certain! I’m not even sure it was a Flash Gordon or a Last Starfighter! But it was and always shall be a Dune, which is to say among the strangest and most unique science fiction pictures ever made!

Ha ha, it still amazes me that David Lynch was hired to direct this mammoth project, given that he’d only made two feature films before this, and one of them was an impenetrable art movie that took him ten years to complete! But I’m glad he was! Of course, there were other attempts to make Dune before this, most famously the Alejandro Jodorowsky kick at it, which would have been crazy that’s for sure! I think Ridley Scott was going to try as well, which is less exciting; but if it had happened during his Alien / Blade Runner phase and not his Somebody To Watch Over Me period, it might have been something pretty special!

A lot of people mourn the non-existence of these versions, and Dino De Laurentiis was probably among them, ha ha, but I’m pretty happy with this Lynch one! It would have been nice if he’d been allowed to make it as long as he wanted, but it had to be 137 minutes and not a second longer, so they could fit in two shows a night! Too bad, because you can really see the forced compression in the final product!

I don’t know if there’s anyone reading this who doesn’t know the plot, but here it is in even more of a nutshell than Lynch had to put it! It’s the future, and there’s a really valuable spice that everyone wants, more precious than cardamom! You can only get it on planet Dune, and the good Atredies and the nasty Harkonnen families both want to control it! But Paul Atredies is destined to be the king of the universe no matter what the bald witches, Emperor Toulouse-Lautrec or the space slugs say, and the race of leather daddies who live in the desert and their giant pet worms have their own opinions on all these matters; and later it rains!

You can see how it would be hard to fit all that into just over two hours and make all the crazy detours you’d want to make if you were David Lynch! Ha ha, thank goodness for Transcendental Meditation! No, he wasn’t entirely successful, but he made a good fist of it, as they say, and the movie certainly looks fantastic! I love the brassy look it all has, and the supporting cast is almost too excellent, since most of them get pretty short shrift when it comes to screen time! Why hire an Oscar winner like Linda Hunt if you’re just going to have her creep fearfully into a room and then leave again? Well, I’m sure that wasn’t the plan, but that’s how it turned out!

And there’s some good creatures in here, thanks to that old rascal Carlo Rambaldi! The worms are amazing of course, and I always wondered what would happen if, as is suffered by one of the characters, you got eaten by one! And who, I wonder, would win in a fight, a sand worm or The All-Consuming Sarlacc from Return of the Jedi? Meanwhile, the space slugs who control the universe, but are really little more than glorified bus drivers, are particularly gross! But even grosser is the Baron Harkonnen, who I’m not even sure was a Carlo Rambaldi creation or not! Certainly he looks even worse than that famous piece of poo, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial!

For giving it a darn good try even if it could have been so much better, I award Dune three incredibly bushy eyebrow guys with smeared lipstick! But I do have one question: How did Toto of all rock groups get the job of doing the score, and why didn’t they do any more movie work? Ha ha, they did a pretty good job with this one!