Burl reviews The Meg! (2018)

Hello chums, it’s Burl, here to review a monster shark picture of recent vintage, The Meg! Ha ha, I have a friend who went out with a girl called Meg for a while, but I believe it ended badly, so I’m sure he never went to see this picture! Now that I’ve seen it, though, I can tell him that it’s not actually very scary at all, and that it has nothing whatever to do with his old flame Meg or her two monster dogs!

No, The Meg is a milquetoast assemblage of parts taken from other water-creature pictures! From Jaws we have an entire scene lifted: a boat, hooked onto the shark, is pulled backward and the winch boom is wrenched free and nearly crushes somebody! Ha ha, I was waiting for Robert Shaw to cry “She’s givin’ way!” Plus we have a child riding an inflatable who is in danger of a chomping, and a swimming dog named Pippin (not Pippet, as in Jaws); but unlike the Spielberg picture, both of these knock-offs survive the enormous icthyo’s depredations!

Plus, nicked from Jaws: The Revenge we have a scene with a banana boat pursued by the beast; from Deep Blue Sea we get a super-rich capitalistic shark enthusiast who catches an unexpected chomp, plus a bald black man who constantly expresses a desire to be somewhere other than where the shark is; and much of the first half of the picture is full of moments borrowed from the underwater epics of 1989: pictures like DeepStar Six, Leviathan and The Abyss! There are even references to The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou shoveled in there!

Much thought seems to have been put into the big shark’s origin, and why there would be a limited number of them! Underwater explorers have developed the theory that the bottom of the Mariana Trench is actually just a layer of cold water, below which is a whole other undersea world, populated by waterbugs, giant squids, megalodons and the like! Ha ha, it doesn’t make any scientific sense of course, but it was nice that they tried! A submarine complex populated by the kind of pan-global gang of professional misfits you find in movies funded by pan-global interests and intended for pan-global audiences runs into trouble when they unwittingly draw the toothy menace up from its usual habitat! Slapheaded action hero Jason Statham, well known from Ghosts of Mars, is called in initially to rescue the survivors of the Mariana expedition, but ultimately he must battle the beast with his fists and steely glare!

It’s all very slickly and internationally carried off, and so eager not to disturb that there’s hardly any sense of menace or suspense to be found in the thing at all! One fact I could hardly believe: there are three, count them three, scenes in which helicopters hover above the giant shark, and not once does it leap from the water to pull a copter down! I’m not sure if that counts as a victory or a defeat for the viewer, an omission or a triumph of thwarted expectations for the picture, but the fact that one assumes it will happen any time a helicopter rotor is heard tells you what kind of movie we’re dealing with! Ha ha!

It’s calculated and silly and harmless and airy, and possesses no virtues aside from briefly expressing disgust at the human tendency toward thoughtless destruction! Not nearly enough people are chewed up, and that the monster never trolls through the crowded beaches sucking up people like a whale feasting on krill counts as a major debit! I give The Meg one single severed arm, which is the only bit of gruesomeness this bland picture deigns to offer!

Burl reviews The Abyss! (1989)

Blub blub it’s Burl! yes, I’m underwater again, and it’s 1989, so I must be reviewing Leviathan! No? Oh, ha ha, then is it Deep Star Six? No? The Rift? Endless Descent? Full Fathom Five? Okay, last guess: The Abyss!

Of course it is the James Cameron picture, famous for its difficult shooting conditions and the subaqueous martinet at its helm, that we’re discussing today! It was partly shot in an abandoned cooling tower owned by Earl Owensby, where a big model undersea base was built, and the actors and crew had to swim around like crappies! Ha ha, it’s funny to think of even the least little touch of Owensby on this big giant Fox production!

Anyway, the tale tells of a gang of roughbusters who man an underwater oil drilling unit; and never mind the environmental sketchiness of this idea, but the blue-collar posse somehow ingratiates where the analogous roughbusters in Armageddon make you hope their oil rig will be hit by advance meteor shards as soon as possible! The guy in charge is Ed “Creepshow” Harris, playing Bud, and he’s just a regular fella, regular as a bowl of prunes! His ex-wife, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, the lady from Scarface and Slamdance, and who happens to have designed the underwater oil drilling base, descends to the rig with a bunch of marines led by a mustachioed Michael Biehn, well-known from Navy Seals and other Cameron pictures, like Aliens! The idea is that they’re all going to cooperate to find the missing submarine!

Biehn, already kind of a jerk, is busy getting worse from some kind of pressure madness! The appearance of underwater aliens hastens this process, and soon (well, not soon: this is a three-hour movie!), he’s sending a recovered nuclear torpedo on a collision course with the alien ship! Along the way there’s plenty of yelling, bubbles, a punchfight or two, miraculous alien water tendrils, a lot of salt-of-the-earth grassroots-folk stuff, and the surprising revelation that salt-of-the-earth grassroots folk, in addition to being good with tools and fond of jargon, are committed pacifists! Ha ha, that’s a message I can get behind!

The aliens themselves look like angelic parameciums and are not completely ungoofy, especially in a shot of one of them taking Ed Harris by the hand and guiding him Peter Pan style toward their big ship, but this almost doesn’t ruin the movie! Ha ha! Most of the picture holds together well, plays with reasonable seriousness, and serves as a solid underwater adventure! All the acting is good - Harris channels Ralph Kramden, Mastrantonio creates a unique "likeable bitch" character, and honestly, I think this is Biehn’s finest hour - and the verisimilitude Cameron was going for is there in spades! Whether Ed Harris, who vowed never to talk about the experience of making this picture, now considers that it was worth the trouble is unknown to me! Probably not! He probably thinks more fondly on something like The Right Stuff, where he was way up high instead of way down low, or Apollo 13, in which he got to wear a snazzy white vest!

I tend to credit the underwater pictures more than they deserve, and maybe that’s true of The Abyss also! But the fact remains that I both enjoy it and am impressed by its determined physicality! For the first two thirds anyway, ha ha! And the death of Biehn, smashed like an egg, is particularly memorable! I give The Abyss two and a half elbows to the tape player!

Burl reviews Jaws 3-D! (1983)

Dumb-dumb, dumb-dumb, it’s Burl approaching from the starboard side! I’m here today to review one of the dumber of the Jaws pictures, Jaws 3-D! Ha ha, has there ever been a series of pictures with a steeper downward slide than these fish movies? I think not! Look at Jaws, which is so great, and then have a look at this gobbler, and you’ll feel your gorge rise as though you’re on the downslope of the world’s biggest roller coaster!

Jaws 3-D was directed by the production designer of the first one, Joe Alves! I’m afraid he learned nothing about filming effective shark attack scenes, as there aren’t any of them in this movie! Oh sure, there are shark attack scenes, but they’re really just someone getting faked out, and then the next time they turn around, there’s Jaws! Cue the bubbles and the bluh-bluh-bluh!

And in this picture, cue the things that are supposed to stick out into the audience because it was originally in 3-D! I recall the 3-D being pretty effective, but on home video we just sit and puzzle at all the instances of fish heads and spear guns floating, thrusting and poking toward the lens! There’s one nice gruesome bit with a floating severed arm, but that’s not much to hang your hat on! It’s no Parasite, ha ha!

Our setting is Sea World in Florida, owned and operated by flashy slapheaded impresario Louis Gossett Jr.! Working for him he’s got Bess Armstrong, last spotted taking the High Road to China, and Dennis Quaid, whom we know from Dreamscape and Innerspace! When a big shark comes to threaten the waterski pyramid, everyone knows something should be done, but nobody knows quite what!

Well, Simon MacCorkindale, the poor man’s Michael York, whom we know well from The Sword and the Sorcerer, has an idea! So far as I can tell he’s playing a sort of bloodthirsty Jacques Cousteau, and he wants to blast the shark with grenades! Quaid and Armstrong are of a different mind, and Louis Gossett Jr., well, he’ll go with whatever sells the most tickets! But the big shark turns out to be just a baby, and the mother is roaming around the underwater hamster tubes of the artificial lagoon!

It all builds to some hilarious scenes of MacCorkindale being eaten and a fantastically terrible trick effects sequence of the shark busting her way into the underwater control room! Poor Fred, the affable technician, is eaten, but then later somehow the previously munched-on MacCorkindale is partially regurgitated back up past Fred so that his hand, clutching one of his grenades, is lifelessly waving within Quaid’s reach! Ha ha, you can guess the rest!

It’s all exquisitely terrible in the way only a 1983 release can be! With the sea park setting, the flamboyant Gossett Jr. performance, the 3-D and the terrible script, it should be so much more entertaining than it is! I give Jaws 3-D one game of stand-up, whatever that is! Ha ha!

Burl reviews The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou! (2004)

Ahoy-hoy, it’s Burl, here to review a picture that underwhelmed me a bit when I saw it in the cinema, but which has doggedly, or dogfishedly, risen in my estimation ever since! That picture is The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and to say that this is one of the most artificial movies Wes Anderson has yet made is to accuse it of no little artifice!

As I watched this recently with my son, he asked me what the movie was about, and ha ha, for him I had no answer! We simply follow Steve Zissou, a self-hating American version of Jacques Cousteau, as he and his international band of misfits search, and film their search, for the enormous jaguar shark that chewed up his friend Esteban! There are many complications, including the appearance of a young man who may or may not be Steve’s son; a bond company stooge along to keep the budget in check; pirates; a pregnant journalist; a crabby wife; and a rival superstar ocean scientist!

But that’s just the plot stuff! Ha ha, the real joys are conceptual or visual or detail-based! All the made-up sea creatures and phenomena, and the crayon-coloured animations of same, are simple delights! The idea of Steve Zissou and his ship, the Belafonte (which is shown to us in great detail thanks to an amazing set), and the extracts from his films, and movie posters for older pictures like The Battling Eels of Antibes and Shadow Creatures of the Lurisia Archipelago, enchant us still deeper into this aqua-centric world!

And the cast is large and spectacular! Bill Murray makes a good Zissou, and Owen Wilson seems to be channeling Val Kilmer’s performance in Tombstone, but with less cynicism and coughing! There’s Willem "Streets of Fire" Dafoe, hamming it up as a needy German; Jeff "Into the Night" Goldbum doing it up right as the part-gay rival; Anjelica Huston underplaying to a fault as the wife; Michael Gambon smooth as paste playing the type of producer most of us in the movie business have met; But Cort as the bond company stooge; and Cate Blanchett all nervy as the reporter! There’s a sweet cameo from Seymour "Eye of the Tiger" Cassel in the role of Esteban, which makes you wish there were more of him in the movie, maybe in flashback form!

Of course none of the characters seem quite real, which makes it hard to connect with the personal drama in the story! Anderson’s patented attempts at pathos through slow timing and understated delivery might do the job in the moment, but they don’t manage much depth, or hit home on an emotional level, except occasionally! “I hated fathers and never wanted to be one,” says Steve at one point, and one can sort of understand that sentiment even if one doesn’t share it!

The picture may not plough deep, but it ploughs smoothly and provides many joys along the way! It tries a little too hard to put an emotional punching on us, but that’s something Anderson has gotten better and subtler at as he goes along, so it didn’t bother me much here! Ha ha, I guess I applied some kind of latent maturity filter to my viewing! Anyway, it’s a fun picture and a very funny one too, and piled high with good music, fulsome performances, and an end credits sequence charmingly borrowed from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai! Ha ha! I give The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou three rubber tides!

Burl reviews Deep Star Six! (1989)

Blub blub, it’s Burl, here to review one of the several underwater movies that were released in 1989! These titles included The Abyss, Leviathan, and this one, Deep Star Six! Ha ha, I did my duty by seeing each one of these in the theatre, though I missed out entirely on their waterlogged little contemporaries, Endless Descent and Full Fathom Five!

Of the big three, Deep Star Six is the closest to being something Roger Corman might have made! It’s a killer crawdad picture after all, as a creature resembling a vagina dentata with google eyes invades an underwater facility and wreaks – well, not quite as much direct havoc as you might hope, but he certainly causes problems! Ha ha! And the movie was directed by Sean S. Cunningham, he of Friday the 13th fame, so you know B-movie goofiness is a distinct possibility!

Deep Star Six is set in another one of your standard-issue seabottom complexes, this one some sort of military-industrial operation involving undersea missile platforms! It doesn’t really matter what they’re doing down there, because whatever it was, it would probably have lead to the same thing: the reckless opening of a cavern and the release of the crabby creature!

Ha ha, he’s no mere Island Claws-style giant crab – more of a close cousin to one of the grabby varmints from The Lost Continent, I would say! It’s what the monster from Blood Beach probably should have looked like, ha ha if we were ever given a proper look at him! But the hardshell in Deep Star Six, as irate and hungry as he is, doesn’t create nearly as much trouble for the characters as they give themselves! One of them, a Hudson figure played by Miguel “Robocop” Ferrer, is about the whiniest fellow ever seen on screen, and his tenure on the undersea platform is a catalogue of fatal blunders! It’s really just one fatal blunder after another with this guy, ha ha, and of course he saves his last one for himself!

The boss of the platform is, if you can believe it, the guy from The Gods Must Be Crazy! Ha ha, no, not N!xau, but the other one! (I wish it had been N!xau, though -  that would have been great!) His staff includes B.J. from that terrific program B.J. and the Bear, and, in another unfortunately abbreviated role, a neckbearded Thom Bray from Prince of Darkness, also known as the nerd from Riptide! (Or was it Simon & Simon?) There’s also a Russian guy who reminded me so strongly of Yakov Smirnoff I thought I was watching Brewster’s Millions again! Really, most of the cast are TV actors willing to get wet, and they’re a game bunch!

As I’ve implied, the monster doesn’t get all that much to do in the picture! I don’t think he puts an actual biting on more than two of them, though one of these incidents, the guy in the metal diving suit who gets chomped like a Jolly Rancher, is memorable! Ha ha! The rest is blunders, poor judgment and faulty equipment! Of course this is all indirectly caused or helped along by the crustacean’s presence, but still, he should have got those big flappy jaws working away more, and not just to emit roars like the Creeping Terror carpet monsters! The movie as a whole takes too long to get going, and there’s some soap opera stuff that might have been dropped!

A final scene, shot in a studio tank so obvious it lends an air of poetic unreality, brings us just the sort of shock moment Cunningham supplied at the end of Friday the 13^th, and thus is the movie concluded! It’s a real beezer, though I kind of like the look of it, and was amazed to think of myself at an age where movies I saw first-run at the theatres have trick effect shots that now look like something you’d have seen in Irwin Allen’s Voyage To the Bottom of the Sea! For being number three but trying harder, but also for not showing as much pep as it could have, I give Deep Star Six one and a half nonsense vector-graphic radar screens!

Burl reviews The Hunt For Red October! (1990)

Ha ha, be glorious, our age-old motherland, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m here to review a submarine picture, The Hunt For Red October! Now, I like a submarine picture, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t say I like them as much as I thrill to a good dirigible movie! And I have a friend who counts submarine movies as his very favourite genre of them all, and so I have additional sympathy for them on that account!

This picture, based on the only Tom Clancy book I ever bothered to read – ha ha, flag-waving technothrillers are not so much my thing – begins with Soviet silver-fox sub driver Sean Connery guiding his new super-secret extra-fat submarine out into the sea with the intention of never taking it back! Marko Ramius is his name, and he wishes to defect, ha ha! (The whole movie, it should be noted, was a bit out of date geopolitically speaking by the time it came out in 1990!) His officers are of similar mind, so the only thing he’s got to do is evade the entire Soviet navy, ditch the crew and persuade the American he means them no harm!

And all the Americans do believe he means them harm except for one: Alec Baldwin! He plays a boffin called Jack Ryan who apparently has his PhD in Marko Ramius Studies! He also talks to himself a lot, which Baldwin sells as well as he can, but still comes off as a little silly! Anyway, there’s a long series of scenes in which Ryan tries to convince everyone from Admiral James Earl Jones (whom we recall from Conan the Barbarian) right through to sub captain Scott “The Keep” Glenn, and everybody in between!

This was John McTiernan’s next picture after Die Hard, so I remember going to see it in breathless anticipation of a thrilling action picture! It’s certainly not that, because model submarines just aren’t that exciting to watch! There’s a big explosion at the end, and a bit of a shootout too, but the movie is mostly lots of chatting! Still, it’s slickly done in the grand Hollywood style, so I won’t claim it’s not entertaining!

And as you know, I’m much more “ha ha” than “rah-rah,” so I was cheered to realize that, while the picture was certainly a grand celebration of all that was tough and manly about the military and intelligence forces, and of their hardware and their deep, abiding brotherhood, it was much less so, and much less stupidly so, than many other pictures! So it had that going for it! It’s still pretty kooky in parts, though!

The real attraction? Ha ha, that cast! You’ve got Connery and Baldwin, both solid, and Glenn and Jones giving fine support, and then other ringers like Sam “Jurassic Park III” Neill giving a touching performance as the Russian officer who only wants to live in Montana, and Peter “Lifeforce” Firth as a nasty Rooskie, and Joss Ackland and Courtney B. Vance and of course the Legend himself, Tim Curry! It’s a talented bunch, ha ha!

It tries very hard to make the situation as hair-raising and suspenseful as possible, but that means everything stops periodically so Jack Ryan can remind everyone of the dreadful stakes involved! This eventually begins to have the opposite effect of what is intended, and you’re left with a bunch of people standing around in an attractively-lit metal tube! Ha ha, it’s an okay Hollywood bunticulation, but on the whole I’m going to give The Hunt For Red October just one and a half caterpillar drives!

Burl reviews It Came From Beneath the Sea! (1955)

Hi, Burl here! I was pretty sad when, recently, I learned of the passing of Mr. Ray Harryhausen! He was pretty elderly, but still, there’s a significant figure in Hollywood history, pfft, gone! He was a talented man and I doff my cap to his great works! They still and always will look better to me than the digital creatures!

It Came From Beneath the Sea is probably not the best showcase of his work, as it was a low-budget production – legendarily so low that the movie’s enormous killer octopus has only six tentacles instead of eight, ha ha! Even so, the monster is not shown quite as much as it otherwise might be! Nevertheless, a giant killer octopus movie is something ol’ Burl can usually appreciate, unless it’s a cheap CGI picture from the 2000s or later! Ha ha! And yes, you sm*rt alecs out there, I do enjoy Tentacles! Watch for a review coming soon!

But what about It Came From Beneath the Sea? Well, it’s your basic 1950s monster movie in many ways, though here, where they are usually in opposition to some degree, science and military forces work together in harmony to vanquish the beast! In fact, there’s a bit of a science/military love triangle, and it’s dealt with in as amicable and adult a manner as can be imagined!

The movie starts with sub captain Ken “Innerspace” Tobey feeling the squeeze, and later, after several more incidents involving a murderous calamari which has risen from the depths, creature scientists Faith Domergue and John Curtis are brought in! The trio work together, battling not just the beaked terror, but the special feelings that are growing between jarhead Tobey and the lady scientist!

Ha ha, I liked that Domergue’s scientific credentials were never questioned, even though she was – gasp! – an extremely pretty lady; though whenever there’s coffee to be made, guess who ends up making it! But she holds her end up when it comes to octo-battling! And there’s plenty of that by the time the suction-cupped fiend makes its way to San Francisco!

The trick effects in this picture are very nice, I must say! The physics and spatial relations are not always completely within the arena of the plausible, perhaps – how does this stadium-sized beast linger just meters away from the waterline on a beach, ha ha – but if you can forget about that (easy enough!), the movie is full of cephalopodic enjoyments! I was a little disappointed that we never got to see the mighty calamari’s vicious snapping beak, but I guess you can’t have everything! It does slap people down as they’re fleeing in terror along the streets of North Beach, so I guess that’s something!

I find it an enjoyable picture, and the excellent Harryhausen work puts it streets ahead of most 50s creature movies! (Ha ha, I also enjoy all of those, it need hardly be said!) I give It Came From Beneath the Sea two and a half awkward dinners for three!

Burl reviews We Dive At Dawn! (1943)

Hi friends! Yes, it’s Burl here to review a movie! I guess if I’m well-known for anything, it’s for my love of very specific movie genres! (Ha ha, remember this?: http://www.avclub.com/articles/favorite-microgenres,33330/) Well, another genre I’m partial to is the submarine picture, and today I’ve got a doozy for you! It’s called We Dive At Dawn, and it’s a dilly of a sub story!

A while back I read a book called One Of Our Submarines, by Commander Edward Young, D.S.O., D.S.C., R.N.V.(S.)R.! It’s a terrific book, covering Young’s submarine commands during WWII as well as the lead-up to it! There’s lots of detail for the submarine enthusiast, as well as plenty of what-ho and pip-pip! It’s kind of like the anti-Das Boot in a way – there’s danger and discomfort, but nothing a cuppa or maybe a tot of the good can’t cure!

We Dive At Dawn is very much in the same spirit! It’s a fictional story, but much concerned with the realistic, minute-to-minute details of running a submarine! Plenty of levers pulled and courses plotted and periscopes raised and hatchways opened! It’s pretty clear they had the enthusiastic participation of the Royal Navy in the making of this picture, and considering its Boys’ Own adventure spirit, no wonder! Ha ha, anyone would want to join this submarine of jolly lads!

The movie is pretty neatly divided into three parts! In the beginning, we meet the seamen on land, as they return from an uneventful mission and disperse for what they expect to be nearly a fortnight of leave! The skipper is planning to date quite a few ladies, ha ha; the torpedosman is reluctantly planning to get married; the coxswain, his brother-in-law to be, is planning to make sure he goes through with it; and the hydrophonesman, a grumpy drunkard, wants to reconcile with his div*rce-minded wife!

All of these vignettes are interrupted by a sudden mission which cuts their shore leave short! It seems the German ship Brandenburg is making her way into the North Sea en route to the Baltic, and the boys of the submarine Sea Tiger are being sent to sink her before she gets there! The second part of the movie is the chase and attempted sinking of the Brandenburg, which indeed makes it to the Baltic, but, despite not having enough fuel for the trip, Skipper John Mills decides to maintain the chase! They send off their fish – the torpedoes, that is – and only by clever subterfuge, ha ha, do they manage to escape the retributive depth charges!

They’re practically dead in the water though, low on juice! The last part of the movie is a daring raid on an occupied Danish island to secure more fuel, and there the movie becomes a proper action picture with lots of machine gun fire and explosions and ululating Jerries! Great stuff!

It’s a rousing wartime picture, and anyone who likes a submarine movie will find plenty to enjoy here! The acting is excellent, with great performers like John Mills, Eric Portman and Niall MacGinnis giving their all for Queen and Country, the sets and special effects are marvelous, and the photography is gritty and realistic! I give this stirring adventure three friendly Danish captains!