Burl reviews Dark Night of the Scarecrow! (1981)

With a rustle of straw, it’s Burl, here to talk to you all about killer scarecrows! Ha ha, we’ve seen them before in pictures like Scarecrows of course, and everyone remembers the eerie dancing man o’ straw from The Wizard of Oz, but still, when you bring up the subject, everyone’s mind will instantly conjure up images from a television movie more than forty years old – ha ha, yes, I’m talking about Dark Night of the Scarecrow!

The teleplot is simplicity itself! Our setting is a small town in what I believe is meant to be the American South, although it’s patently California! Bubba, a jolly but soft-brained man played by Larry Drake from Darkman and For Keeps?, is playing in the fields with his friend Marylee, a ten year-old girl! Watching from the sidelines is venal postie Otis Hazlerigg, essayed with narrow eyes by Charles Durning from Stick and The Hudsucker Proxy! Otis impugns all sorts of unsavoury motives onto Bubba, but of course he’s projecting in the Bell & Howell style, and in fact the friendship between Bubba and Marylee is completely innocent!

The next thing you know the little girl is attacked by a yard dog and Bubba bursts in through the fence to save her, but initially he gets blamed for her injuries anyway, even though he protests that BUBBA DIDN’T DO IT! Otis rounds up a posse made up of good old boys like Harliss, played by Lane Smith from Night Game; Skeeter, who is Robert F. Lyons from Death Wish II and 10 to Midnight and other Bronsonfests; and Philby, essayed by Claude Earl Jones from I Wanna Hold Your Hand! (Ha ha, somehow I don’t think Claude is a part of the great Earl Jones acting dynasty, but as we know from pictures like A Family Thing, I may well be wrong!) The posse discovers Bubba hiding in a scarecrow and shoots the poor man to death, just before it’s revealed to them that he wasn’t only harmless but a hero for saving the girl!

Well, this hateful lynch mob is instantly acquitted in a highly unbelievable courtroom scene, and soon after this, the scarecrow vengeance begins! The stuffed anthropomorph appears in Harliss’s field and that night the beer-swilling redneck is chawed in his own wood chipper! It next shows up in Philby’s acreage and soon he’s found in his silo, drowned in grain! Panicky Skeeter gets a graveyard klonking from Otis, and there’s a pumpkin-crushing, pitchfork-poking climax wherein we discover that indeed it’s Bubba’s spirit inhabiting the scarecrow that’s behind all this vengeance! And a good thing, too – ha ha, what a disappointment if the killer had turned out to be a more corporeal presence, like the D.A., or the little girl, or Bubba’s rightfully angry mama, who’s played by Jocelyn Brando, older sister to Marlon!

Of course Drake played other soft-brained men in his acting career, most notably on the law show I never watched; and he also played a character called Bubba in his very first film role, in Herschell Gordon Lewis’s hicksploitation drama This Stuff’ll Kill Ya! He was a good actor, and he does fine work here – ha ha, he's a little broad here and there perhaps, but never unrealistic! And Durning is good too – he can play the most avuncular guy you ever saw in movies like Tootsie, but he has this way of just squinting a little bit and presto, he instantly looks evil and pædopheliac! Ha ha, and this is no small trick, given that Otis is for some reason always wearing his silly postal service outfit, complete with blue pith helmet!

So the movie has a couple of solid performances and some cornfield atmosphere (though it could have leaned harder into that I think), and there’s a Halloween costume-ball scene, which I always like in a movie – ha ha, remember Primal Rage? But it suffers a bit from a TV movie blandness, from the So-Cal locations, and also from the padding needed to fill it out to the length required of a movie in a two-hour broadcast slot! The affrights were decidedly muted this time around, but since it really did me a spook-up back when I was eleven, I want to give it some residual credit for that! Some added walking scarecrow action might have been effective, but since that one head-turn we get at the end really works, I’m not completely sure where I stand on that! So in the spirit of my somewhat confused and ambivalent feelings, I’m going to give Dark Night of the Scarecrow two flower leis!

Burl reviews Wes Craven's New Nightmare! (1994)

 

Ha ha and high concepts, it’s Burl, here to review the most po-mo of the Freddy pictures! Freddy became self-aware sometime around February of 1987, at about the time A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 came out, but it wasn’t until this picture appeared seven years later that the circle fully closed! That was when Mr. Wes Craven returned to the director’s chair in old Krugerville and made Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, which is the picture under discussion today!

It was clearly intended as a final hoop-de-doo, with the grand return of not just Wes Craven but also Heather Langenkamp, whom we well recall from Star Trek Into Darkness and other photoplays; and John Saxon from Black Christmas and Blood Beach; and background appearances made by a few other people from the first instalment! Robert Englund, of course, never went away, ha ha! And all of these folks play themselves, at least at first; or in Englund’s case, part of the time!

Langenkamp is herself, married to a special effects man (as she is in real, real life), and has a little son, Dylan, played by little Miko Hughes from Pet Sematary and Apollo 13! She’s plagued by dreams and discovers, to her disquiet, that Craven is planning to make another chapter in the Freddy saga in which she, Langenkamp, will play herself! And the ouroboros continues with the introduction of Robert Shaye and other New Line Cinema executives, all playing themselves too!

Langenkamp’s dreams persist, and soon she’s spooked by every little thing; her son is going kwazoo; her husband dies in an accident involving a mechanical Freddy arm, a speeding van, a croscharea, and a concrete wall; and ha ha, won’t anybody do something about all these darn earthquakes! Her pal Saxon provides what comfort he can, but pretty soon he’s calling her “Nancy” and treating her like the daughter she was in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street! And Englund is no help – we see him in his palatial home sans putty, where he looks nearly as fresh-faced as he did in Galaxy of Terror, but he’s too wrapped up in his goofy paintings to offer more than token comfort! (I’m not sure if Robert Englund in real, real life is a painter, but if so, as a painter he makes a fine actor! Ha ha!)

The explanation for Freddy’s presence in the “real” world is quite goofball, but acceptably so – it’s clear Craven gave it some thought so it wouldn’t just come off merely as stupid! Some work is required on the part of the viewer: they must accept the premise as quickly and completely as possible in order to wring maximum enjoyment from the movie! Once they do, they’ll find a picture not replete so much with affrights, but one that functions nevertheless an unexpectedly rich thought-piece! Ha ha, it’s still pretty goofy, but overcoming that is the price of admission!

For a Nightmare on Elm Street picture it’s a real longuebönes (112 minutes!), and this running time excess comes from an inflated opening act and then too many scenes of Dylan acting weird! It’s as though he’s possessed by Freddy, but when it turns out that isn’t actually the case, the moments where he screams or talks in a duck voice come off retroactively as filler! He’s mostly a charming little guy though, especially when he talks about his dinosaur friend Rex!

The second half of the movie has more action and standard-issue genre interest, but by then we’ve accepted Heather Langenkamp not as Heather Langenkamp, but as a fictional character who happens to be named Heather Langenkamp – in other words, ha ha, the meta effect has worn off, to the picture’s detriment! Langenkamp’s acting is a lot better in this one than it was in Nightmare 3 however, and even a step up from the first picture, in which she was mostly just fine but no better!

This picture doesn’t turn bad in the second half though, just less interesting! There’s a well-done scene of young Dylan trying to cross a busy freeway, and his mom trying to save him – ha ha, it gets a little silly when a giant Freddy appears in the sky, but this at least has precedent in Nightmare 3! A frowny doctor becomes the main human antagonist without ever becoming bad or evil, and she’s forgotten about once the standard-issue ANOES climax – meaning a lot of scampering around in downtown Freddytown with its hot pipes and steaming boilers and flaming furnaces – asserts itself!

This came before Craven’s Scream or any of the other meta-horror of the 90s, so it had the exciting flavour of the new at the time, and a lot of that residual goodwill persists for me to this day! I enjoyed it in the theatre back then and enjoyed it again more recently, if a little bit less and without the novelty! It could stand to be gorier and scarier and to have better follow-through, but I still had a fine time watching it! I give Wes Craven’s New Nightmare two and a half sloshing pools!

Burl reviews Killer Party! (1986)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burl reviews Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves! (2023)

 

With a rousing jig and a hoy-te-toy and a merry, merry click of the heels, it’s Burl, here with a review of the latest in theatre hits! At least I assume it’s a hit – ha ha, I don’t keep track of the box office figures, so for all I know it might be a big old flopparoo! But the people in the theatre seemed to like it, so I’m going to guess it’s doing well! Incredibly enough it’s not a sequel, but it is an adaptation of a recognized intellectual property and I guess that’s what counts for daring originality in today’s marketplace! Of course I’m talking about Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves!

Chris Pine from Star Trek Into Darkness plays the role of the roguish, not too bright, charming-scamp hero, Edgin or Ederin or something; but like the other characters do, we’ll just call him Ed! He’s in a jail with his barbarian-lady chum, and they live in a land more fantastical than, say, the world of Ladyhawke, but maybe not quite so much as The Lord of the Rings! Michelle Rodriguez from Machete is the tough gal-pal, who pines not for Pine, but for a three-footer who dwells in a glen in the forest! They escape their prison by means of a birdman even though they were about to get paroled, and immediately begin a series of enfiladed quests with their buddies!

And who are these buddies? Well, there’s a young wizard without, yet, the self-confidence required to master his trade, and a druid lady played by Beverly from It! They also meet a supernaturally benevolent paladin who joins them for a couple of the interior sub-quests and is a big help when it comes time to battle a porky dragon! The antagonist is none other than Hugh Grant from The Lair of the White Worm, a scoundrel of a rapscallion of a nogoodnik, formerly a chum himself, who betrays our heroes and becomes a rich mayor or something, claiming Ed’s daughter as his own, dwelling in a castle, and employing an evil witch to help with his schemes!

I didn’t expect much from this one, I have to say! I was never a D&D player, though I sat in on a game once! My son is playing it every Sunday with some pals though, and I took him and one of the chums to see it at the theatre, where the exhibitors occasionally busted out some old-style showmanship by projecting extra edges to the frame along the side walls! The effect was surprisingly un-annoying and even a little bit immersive! Anyway, I thought I was just being a decent dad by taking some kids to a movie, but darned if I didn’t enjoy myself thoroughly!

It’s no Conan the Barbarian, but it’s got some laffs along with the usual not-quite-Peter-Jackson level fantasy action scenes! Hugh Grant, whose stammery smarm was always ready and able to be put in the service of evil, gives good value here, and Pine, playing a hero halfway between Han Solo and Jack Burton, does exactly what the picture needs him to do with unshaven aplomb! It’s all nonsense of course, and nonsense with an airy, arbitrary feeling to it; and the story and structure sure could have been a lot stronger; and I for one would have liked more of the grotesque creatures - sucking worms and so forth - that I remember from the monster manuals; but it hits some emotional beats with surprising solidity and integrates the comedy with the fantasy in fine fashion!

Even though it’s machine-tooled to be the first of a series (which they’d better hurry up on before Pine ages out of his scalawag years), it’s nevertheless still at this moment a standalone film and not a sequel, remake, reboot, or requindle; and although it’s derived from an age-old and highly recognizable IP, it’s not one with which I was overly familiar; and the effect of all this on me, and of attending with a pair of 11 year-olds, was the feeling of an old-fashioned 80s-era outing to the movies, which feeling probably brought me more pleasure than the movie itself! But the film is amusing too, and so in spite of its cumbersome title, I’m going to give Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves two and a half gelatinous cubes!

Burl reviews Leprechaun! (1992)

 

Ai-te-ti-te-ti-te-ti, it’s Burl, here with a touch of the shamrock for you at this very Irish time o’ the year! Yes, as I write this it’s St. Paddy’s Day, a day for the wearin’ of the green, and I’ve just revisited a picture I saw in the theatre some thirty years ago – all by myself as I recall because no one would go with me! Ha ha, I can’t say I blame them! The movie is no classic, that’s for sure, but I suppose it has a few lucky charms scattered here and there! Yes, I’m talking about Leprechaun!

The picture begins with a limousine roaring through the wilds of what is supposed to be North Dakota, but is patently California! An auld Oirishman returns to his homestead and to his wife, babbling about how he caught a leprechaun while attending his mother’s funeral on the old sod and took his gold and now they’re rich! Rich! The couple, the O’Grady’s, are played by Shay Duffin from 10 to Midnight and Pamela Mant from Freaked, but what they don’t know is the leprechaun has packed himself as luggage and is in the house with them! These elderlies are soon dispatched or incapacitated by jolly little Warwick Davis in scare makeup by Gabe Bartalos, whose work we enjoyed in Frankenhooker!

Ten years later a father, played by the sort of guy who looks at home modelling in Land's End catalogues, drags his unwilling daughter Tori (a role essayed by a pre-stardom Jennifer Aniston, whom we know best from her part in Office Space) out to a very “Look what we built!”-looking rural house! It’s the usual dynamic: the earnest dad keen on rustification versus the mobile phone-toting glamourpuss, fully citified, whining about cobwebs and bugs and poor reception! A motley gang of painters soon appears, made up of one (1) studly fellow called Nathan, played by Ken Olandt from Summer School, one (1) paint-splattered oaf named Ozzie, essayed by Mark Holton whom you’ll recall from his role as Chubby in Teen Wolf, and one (1) precocious kid!

Naturally it’s the oaf who brushes away the four-leaf clover that affects the magical mini-man as a cross does a vampire, and thereby releases him from the crate that’s been his prison for a decade! At first nobody believes the oaf's tale of a rampaging leprechaun, but when the be-buckled entity shows himself, snapping his teeth and demanding always the return of his gold, they don’t demonstrate nearly the level of surprise I’d have expected from people suddenly presented with hard-biting evidence of a supernatural entity they had previously thought restricted to Disney movies and cereal boxes! There is much running around the house, and the leprechaun avails himself of a variety of conveyances, including but not limited to a tricycle, a skateboard, and two separate motorized go-karts!  

Of course Warwick Davis is known and beloved from The Force Awakens and many other Star Wars pictures, playing jolly forest teddies or else mystical elves of magic! But here he puts on a merry rumbustification indeed in the role of the corrugated, doggerel-spouting Emerald Isle pixie! Ha ha! And there are a few other familiar faces in the cast too, like one of the Darryls, namely John Voldstad from Joysticks, who gets bloodily pogo-sticked to death by the elf; and William Newman from Silver Bullet and The Serpent and the Rainbow playing Sheriff Cronin, whose face is almost as deep-creased as the leprechaun's, and who never leaves the police station!

Although this cast provides some merriment, the movie is never in the least bit scary, nor well-written, nor craftily directed! It also fails to whip up any atmosphere, whether uncanny or Irish! Warwick Davis and his makeup are about the only effable virtues the movie can boast, yet it’s nevertheless a breezy and reasonably good-natured concoction with a few bloody moments! Again, I certainly don’t blame anyone who demurred from seeing it with me at the Towne Cinema all those years ago, but I didn’t hate watching it again on this year’s St. Patrick’s Day! I give Leprechaun one and a half buckled hats!

Burl reviews Pulse! (1988)

 

Bzzt bzzt, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m going back to the 80s horror well today, reviewing a picture that’s well-regarded by aficionados of the form! It’s one of those so-called “safe horrors” with which the decade was so generously supplied, and it’s a PG-13 joint in the bargain, with an eleven year-old hero! It all takes place on a Spielbergian suburban street, and features a premise Stephen King might have rejected as too obvious! Ha ha, the picture is called Pulse!

It begins with suburbanite Bill, played by Cliff De Young from F/X and Secret Admirer, woken in the night by a kerfuffle across the way! It seems the mean old man across the street has gone nuts and is breaking up his house! The next day Bill’s son David, essayed by wee Joey Lawrence from Summer Rental, arrives for an extended summer visit and is welcomed with open arms and a racing-themed bedroom by Bill and his new wife Ellen, a non-wicked stepmom played by Roxanne Hart from Highlander!

It takes a little while, but weird happenings start to become evident! With the parents away, David tries to watch the ballgame, but all the blobs of solder in his TV go crazy and he’s reduced to listening to the game on the radio instead! Later a gas main breaks while David is trapped in the garage, and he’s nearly suffocated! Ellen begins to believe David’s assertion that something uncanny is happening with the utilities, but Bill, a staunch realist, refuses to accept it, and his position is backed up by the tradespeople who periodically come by to check things out! These are played by the likes of Damone from Fast Times and Joe from The Annihilators, and they offer boring explanations which only further convince Ellen and David that something supernatural must be afoot!

Meanwhile the kid next door, a walking bowl cut called Stevie played by Joey’s brother Matthew Lawrence from Planes, Trains & Automobiles and Tales From the Darkside: The Movie, gives David the lowdown on the mean old man across the way! And a weird old duck played by Charles Tyner from Best Seller pops up with dire warnings about an evil electrical pulse that makes its way from house to house! There’s also a subplot involving a VHS tape of Starman, which I’ll confess I didn’t really understand, but all this sets the scene for a shower scalding, and then David and Bill, now at last a team, wage a final battle with the hydro, the plumbing, and the natural gas!

As I say, this is a fondly-regarded movie, but I’m not entirely sure why! It’s well produced, with nice photography, including lots of macro images of crazed solder blobs, and good physical trick effects; but things never get as creepy as they should! The provenance and motivations of the dreadful pulse are never revealed, and that’s fine; but the ambiguity is not in the service of unease the way it ought to be! It also takes a while for things to get going, and the movie feels weirdly trapped on its one street location, and not in a way that increases the feeling of peril and imprisonment!

Still, the cast is good and it’s slickly made, and there are a few moments that might have you eyeing your own utilities askance! It’s similar in many ways to Bells, though with a supernatural rather than a revenge-based explanation, and like that picture it could have used a bit more pep! I certainly didn’t hate it, though, so I give Pulse two racecar beds!

Burl reviews Cameron's Closet! (1988)

 

Hello closeteers, it’s Burl, here to catch up on some 1980s horror I missed the first time around! Or else I may have seen it and then completely forgotten it, ha ha! At any rate, I got my hands on a VHS copy of Cameron’s Closet and recently watched it, and I’m here to tell you all about it!

It comes from the director of He Knows You’re Alone and The Supernaturals, and I suppose it represents a slight step up from those works! It’s a bit more elaborate at any rate, but not to any great effect I’m afraid! The picture opens by introducing us to Cameron, a ten year-old boy with astonishing psychic powers who’s being studied by his father and a scientist pal! Cameron can put marbles in a jar or rearrange plastic letters merely by will alone, ha ha, but evidently his talents also extend to raising evil closet demons!

This is where his dad, played by Tab Hunter from pictures like Ride the Wild Surf and The Kid From Left Field, and the researcher pal, essayed by Chuck McCann from Herbie Rides Again and Lunch Wagon – in truth a good actor, but also the poor man’s Robert Prosky – start to get worried! Soon Tab is dead, his head cut off by an errant machete, and Cameron is off to live with his mom, played by Kim Lankford from Malibu Beach! The mom has a meathead boyfriend who venerates his car above all else, and one night he gets his eyes burned out and is fired out Cameron’s bedroom window as though from a cannon, landing of course, ha ha, on his beloved car!

Well this brings Detective Talliaferro, played by Cotter Smith from The Post, in on the Cameron closet case! He’s been having waking closet nightmares, which annoys his partner Leigh McCloskey (from Inferno and Fraternity Vacation), and is being forced to attend sessions with police psychiatrist Dr. Nora Haley, played by Mel Harris from Wanted: Dead or Alive! After Talliaferro’s partner runs afoul of the demon in Cameron’s closet, the investigation is on, and after further deaths, including one by interior superboil, and a near-chopping by ceiling fan of Cameron himself, the final confrontation is on!

Ha ha, this is an American picture, but there are a lot of Italian names in the credits, and the pastaland influence is everywhere evident! Cameron himself isn’t an evil child, but there are enough glowing eyes and psychic shenanigans to recall The Visitor (though it never gets as loopy, of course, because what could), and Cameron himself is terrorized nearly as much as little Bob in The House by the Cemetery! Thanks to the competent work of later-to-be-superstar cinematographer Russell Carpenter and a generally solid set of actors (even Cameron is pretty good!), the movie rises above its budget; but it’s when the demon itself comes onto the scene that things falter! He’s a creation of Carlo Rambaldi, who brought us such lovable animatronics as E.T., but on this job I think he may have been a bit drunk! The thing looks like a big raisin with teeth, as though he brought his creature from Possession out of a long, imperfect storage and gave it a quick coat of red-brown housepaint before shoving it in front of the camera! Ha ha!

It’s narratively incoherent, frequently derivative, and often stupid, but it’s got some zest and pizazz here and there, with the eyeless meathead shooting out the window a particular highlight! The trick makeup effects range from mannequin-style (the machete decapitation) to sort of scary (a smiley zombie creature), but are pretty delightful at either extreme! It’s dumbbell horror and there’s no denying it, but I give Cameron’s Closet two refitted He-Man dolls anyway!

Burl reviews Krampus! (2015)

 

Ha ha ha, merry Christmas! Yes, it’s Burl, and of course we’re well into the Christmas movie season, and I’ve already watched a number of the usual suspects this month: Gremlins, Christmas Vacation, A Christmas Story, Die Hard, so forth! But I also watched one that was new to me: a little PG-13 horror dingle-dangle called Krampus! Now, I know there’s a little cottage industry of direct-to-video Krampus pictures out there, but the one I’m talking about is the relatively big-budget one that came from the director of Trick ‘r Treat! As mentioned, it’s a PG-13, so rather than having the Krampus rip people’s heads off or stick them with icicles, the picture features a family besieged by an army of demonic toys like some kind of unimaginably slick Full Moon movie! Ha ha!

Charles Band could only dream of a cast of mildly recognizable faces such as Krampus has on offer! Adam Scott from Our Idiot Brother and Who Loves the Sun is Tom, the dad, and Toni Collette from Fright Night and The Way Way Back is Sarah, the mom; they have two kids, a younger boy called Max and a teenage girl named Beth, and Tom’s German-speaking mother is there to make traditional Bavarian treats! As in Christmas Vacation, the homestyle holiday is interrupted by the arrival of a gang of downmarket relations, including David Koechner from Dirty Work as Howard, the gun-crazed über-American slaphead, plus his wife and three kids (a pair of tomboy bullies, a baby, and a pre-teen dunderklumpen who never says a word), and the grouchy lush Aunt Dorothy, played by Conchata Ferrell from For Keeps?

Young Max is so upset by these goofs that he rips up his letter to Santa and sends it flying to the four winds! This act alone is sufficient to conjure up the Krampus, a horned and hoofed demon who leaps from rooftop to rooftop and employs random tactics to harass the un-festive! Homicidal gingerbread men, humongous toothy jack-in-the-boxes, dirty elves borrowed from Icelandic mythology: all this and more eventually shows up to bedevil this extended family! Ha ha! Omi knows what’s going on, because as a girl, back in the old country, she had a run-in with the Krampus! Kids start disappearing, either into the uncanny blizzard that has the family trapped, or up the chimney, or in the cavernous attic!

Max, who started it all with his Santa-ripping shenanigans, is more or less our hero, but the ending leaves the efficacy of his heroics in question! Ha ha, the whole last act seems kind of piecemeal, and this stands in contrast to the first part of the movie, which concentrates on being a sort of family Christmas comedy, almost entirely sans horreur! I thought this was a good decision, ha ha, and it would have been an even better decision had the affrights, when they do come, been more effective! But they’re not, particularly, and nor are the comedic parts particularly uproarious!

There are some rewarding moments, though, and the performances are good, and I liked the opening scene with the slow-motion shopping frenzy, even if that has very little to do with anything! It’s no seasonal classic, but it was enjoyable enough counter-Christmas programming to watch with the family by the fire! An R rated version might have been more fun, but this was perfectly fine as it was! I give Krampus two and a half vinartertas!

Burl reviews A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child! (1989)

 

One, two, Burl’s coming for you! Ha ha, and by “you,” I mean Freddy Krueger of course, the laughing scarface in the stripèd sweater, the fellow who appeared in a few enjoyable pictures and then, having transformed into a jokester in a knife-glove, foisted upon the world such pictures as A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master! Ha ha, I didn’t like that one much, and I remembered its direct sequel, A Nightmare on Elm Street: Dream Child, as being even worse! Well, I watched that one again the other night, and you know what? It’s not worse!

It’s not a whole lot better either, but it is better, and, as with its two immediate predecessors, I saw it in the theatre with a gang of pals, so it’s possible the agreeability of that experience will bleed into my opinion of the picture! I’ll try to avoid that! What I will say is that Wes Craven never came within a mile of this film - ha ha, he was too busy making Shocker, which I guess was his attempt to make a new Freddy type of fellow! Luckily for all, I think, Horace Pinker didn’t make it!

Maybe you’re wondering why I’ve omitted the number 5 from the title - ha ha, well, that’s how they do it on the title card in the movie itself, and so that’s how I’ll say it too! I guess they were trying to downplay how far along in the series they were! In any case, this one is a direct continuation from number 4, with Lisa Wilcox from Gimme an ‘F’ once again styled as a forty year-old lady to play the character of Alice, yet another Elm Street kid who’s become the target of the fedora-topped dreamaniac!

Alice has a boyfriend called Handsome Dan, and pals like Yvonne, played by Kelly Jo Minter from Summer School; Mark, essayed by a pretty bad actor called Joe Seely from Armed and Dangerous; and Zandalee herself, pretty Erika Anderson, as Greta! Yvonne’s dad looks like an amiable oaf, but Mark, Greta, and Dan have parents who oppress them in one way or another, though this never comes to much either narratively or thematically! Alice herself has an AA dad played by Nicholas Mele from The Lonely Guy, and another parent (Dan’s, I think?) is played by Burr De Benning from Armed Response, but we never find out if these parents too were part of the original John Saxon mob that burned up Freddy back when he was just a creepy, handsy janitor!

Of course the dream murders are the engine that powers these vehicles, and again, for the most part, they just come off as little skits in which Freddy can perform homicidal charades in the guise of a chef or a surgeon or a motorcycle! One fellow turns into a cartoon or something, and finds a new definition of “paper cut,” ha ha! The idea is that Alice is pregnant and Freddy is somehow funneling himself through the dreams of the fetus and thereby able to pick off Alice’s friends! Ha ha, even internally, the logic is a mess - I mean, the fetus is not even a fetus, being only days old over the period of the story! It would be a little, undreaming clump of cells! Some of you evangelicals may disagree with me on that, but it’s true!

The movies try to be fun lite-horror, but I’ve always felt the more unsavory aspects of Freddy, like his repeated use of the word “bitch,” his origin story as the child of a gang-raped nun (an event dramatized in this movie, unfortunately), and of course his pre-conflagration career as a child molester, sit ill with his status as a comic-bookish anti-hero firing off catch phrases! But in the last act this picture suddenly decides to try harder and show off a little imagination! Ha ha, the dream world becomes an Escher-like maze of staircases unmoored to conventional planimetrics or everyday physics, and indeed reminiscent, unusually for this series, of an actual dream! Another noteworthy moment has fake heads on tendons popping out of Freddy’s back like riot balloons! Ha ha!

But most of the picture is saddled with poor dialogue, so-so acting, and rote dream sequences, so it’s no great glahoonick in the end - not a patch on the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, nor the enjoyable Dream Warriors! And every single special effect seems to have been done by a different artist or company, and that lends the thing a real patchwork quality! I wasn’t sorry I watched it, but nor was I transported back to August 31, 1989, when I saw it at the downtown mall multiplex! I give A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child one and a half ugly baby carriages!

Burl reviews Damien: Omen II! (1978)

 

Wahhh duu wahhh, it’s Burl, back with yet another tale of demonio-religious horror! This one is the sequel to The Omen, of course, and for some reason they gave it the title Damien: Omen II! This had the curious result of giving a whole, particularly stupid generation the idea that the proper name for all the films in the series is Damien Omen Child! In my video store days I had to rent the movies to these nudniks, so I know what I’m talking about! “Ha ha, did you want Damien Omen Child 1, Damien Omen Child 2, or Damien Omen Child 3?” I eventually found myself asking!

This one picks up with what seems like a scene cut from the earlier installment, following the archeologist Bugenhagen as he drives around like a madman in his jeep! As in the first installment he's played, uncredited as always, by Leo McKern from X the Unknown! He brings his pal, played by Ian Hendry from Get Carter, down underground to see a special wall upon which images of the devil have been painted, and what do you know: it’s Damien Omen Child! But then the devil immediately kills them!

Seven years later Damien Omen Child is living with his uncle and aunt, played by William Holden from The Towering Inferno and When Time Ran Out and Lee Grant, who was in Mulholland Drive and directed Staying Together! Ha ha! Sylvia Sidney from Snowbeast is the old aunt, and of course immediately she expresses a distaste for Damien Omen Child, the devil kills her! Here the movie settles into a pattern: somebody finds out something weird about Damien, sound crazy to other people when they try to explain what they’ve discovered, and then the devil kills them!

The devil’s victims include, roughly in order of introduction and demise, Elizabeth Shepherd from Head Office as a lady reporter who gets her eyes pecked out and then is creamed by a truck; Lew Ayres from ‘Salem’s Lot as a Thorn Corporation executive who falls through the ice and drowns; Allan Arbus from The Last Married Couple in America, another Thorn employee, who suffers blowsy at a pesticide factory; Meschach Taylor from The Beast Within, as a doctor who realizes Damien has jackal blood and is immediately bisected by a runaway elevator cable (the picture’s most elaborate, spectacular, and gory death); and Nicholas Pryor from Executive Decision, who loses his nut and gets hit by a train!

But it’s not as though everyone is against Damien Omen Child, oh no! He has some pals! The devilish lad is attending a military academy, where Lance Henrikson from Aliens and Pumpkinhead is large and in charge as a satanic sarge, and where Damien Omen Child gradually unweaves his own identity; and meanwhile Robert Foxworth from Prophecy and Ants! plays a weasely Thorn Corp. exec who reveres the cloven-footed one, and on the side is trying to effect some kind of nasty scheme involving the global food supply, though I confess I never figured out exactly what he was up to! Most of the movie is the devil murders, spaced out as regularly as stations on a subway line, and like his predecessor Gregory Peck, Holden takes forever to cotton on to the deviltry in his midst! Ha ha, he never seems to think it strange that everyone he knows is dying by freak deaths, even when that fact is pointed out to him!

It’s one of those Hollywood lumpuses, put together stolidly by veterans with no real motivation or instinct to transgress! There’s a general curiosity about what’s going to happen, renewed every ten minutes or so with a devil killing, but no sense of gathering doom, no atmosphere, no apocalypse, no affrights! On the other hand there’s a general Hollywood craftsmanship and a couple of memorable moments, and you get talents like Jerry Goldsmith plying their crafts! It’s still square oldtimer huggermugger though, and I give Damien: Omen II one and a half exploding furnaces!

Burl reviews Pet Sematary! (1989)

 

Ha ha and housecats, it’s Burl! Yes, I thought I’d review the first filmed version of Stephen King’s book Pet Sematary, which, as I recall, I saw at the theatre on a date with my first real girlfriend, Ingra! I don’t think Ingra liked it very much, as she was not what you would call a horror movie aficionado! She did turn me on to all sorts of great books though, so I have plenty to thank her for! And we also once checked into a motel under the names “Mr. and Mrs. Buster Hideaway,” and you can say what you like about this younger generation, but I don’t think the kids are doing that sort of thing any more! Ha ha! And I suppose motel clerks are more scrupulous about checking identifications than they used to be!

But on to the movie! Now, I thought it was a pretty good idea to hire Mary Lambert to direct it, even though it was originally supposed to be George A. Romero at the helm! I don’t know why Romero bowed out, or was taken off it, or what happened, but it seemed like a lady director (sadly novel in those days, and less so now but not by all that much) who’d done Madonna videos and the art-crime picture Siesta would be a pretty bold choice! But you know, though she did a perfectly adequate job, there was nothing special about her approach so far as I could tell!

Dale Midkiff from Nightmare Weekend plays a carved wooden figure representing Louis Creed, the dad who works as a university doctor! Denise Crosby from Miracle Mile, looking comely in a pinched sort of a way, is the mom; and of course there are two sweet kids: preadolescent Ellie and the charming toddler Gage, who is played by Miko Hughes from Apollo 13 and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare! Because they have kids and a housecat too, the parents know the best thing to do would be to move into a house on a road down which massive tanker trucks hurtle constantly like screaming engines of death! Ha ha, the perfect place to raise a family!

Across this road of sorrow lives the elderly neighbor, Jud, played delightfully by Fred Gwynne from The Secret of My Success! Gwynne’s performance is a real high point in the picture, with his delightful Mainer accent and old-duck mannerisms and just plain Gwynne-ness! Of course we know where the story goes from here: Jud tells his new pal Louis all about the secret cemetery back yonder, the one that has the power to resuscitate the dead! Tragedy strikes soon after, and the use of the baneful graveyard brings about a lot more death and despair to the family Creed!

Brad Greenquist from The Bedroom Window and The Chair plays the world’s least-helpful ghost, who manifests in the form of a walking meatloaf much like Jack from An American Werewolf in London, but without the comradeliness! He’s clearly just there to add some affrights, or at least some goriness, to the proceedings while the main story unfolds at the pace and in the progression that it must!

The King book is one of his most emotionally resonant, but the movie comes nowhere close to replicating this! Part of the fault lies with Midkiff, who, I’m sorry to say, just isn’t a very good actor; another part with King himself, who wrote the screenplay! The whole movie seems to have gone through a studio scrubbing process, which I suppose accounts for the blunted edges of Lambert’s style! It’s got a inappropriately-bright 80s look and some goofy optical effects, and so the atmosphere so badly required by this tale is largely, though not entirely, absent!

It all hoves a bit to the mediocre side, and the remake, which I also watched recently, doesn’t improve things much! I’d like to see what Romero might have done with the story, maybe using a script written by someone with more distance from the material, but I guess we’ll never know how that might have turned out! I’m gong to give this iteration of Pet Sematary two frozen cats, and at least half of that, I’ll admit, is for Fred Gwynne! Ha ha!

Burl reviews The Prophecy! (1995)

 

Ha ha, now please listen friends as I read to you a passage from the Book of Burl, Chapter 19, Verse 95! Yes, I’m reviewing a religious thriller for you today, hot on the heels of The Omen, and here we have a film that has caused no small amount of title confusion in its day, which I may have witnessed first-hand in my days as a video store clerk! But there are no mutant bears in this picture, for it is not Prophecy but the Dimension Pictures extravaganza The Prophecy! I remember seeing it in the movie theatre, where, as is my habit, I developed a fondness for it out of all proportion to the movie’s worth, ha ha! But I’ve never seen any of the many sequels, so I can’t have liked it that much! I watched it again just recently, and even absent the extra layer of delight provided by the big-screen experience, the picture rolled out a jelly-like layer of enjoyment!

Our protagonist is Thomas Daggett, a would-be priest who suffers a sudden de-faithifying just as he’s taking his vows, and the next thing you know it’s years later and he’s become an iron-nosed cop! Daggett is played by Elias Koteas from Crash and Collateral Damage, and soon his old pal Some Kind of Wonderful, which is to say Eric Stoltz from The Wild Life and The Fly II, turns up playing the sort of angel who, like Harry Dean Stanton in One Magic Christmas, might easily be mistaken for a hobo! Stoltz’s character Simon is on the lookout for the soul of the nastiest man on earth, which he hopes to save from the movie’s real bad guy, the angel Gabriel! Gabriel is of course played by Christopher Walken, who did the religious thriller thing in The Sentinel and is of course also famous for playing McBain! Walken here has perhaps the worst hairstyling he’s ever had in a picture, and that’s saying a considerable lot, ha ha, especially if you've seen The Dead Zone!

The nastiest man on earth turns out to be some old army man who lives in a dry dusty Arizona desert town! Except he doesn’t live there, he’s dead, ha ha, and even though he’s dead they needed an actor for the role! So they got Patrick McAllister, who hadn’t acted since he played an expectant father in It’s Alive, but that’s fine because all he has to do is lie there in his uniform and get kissed by the film’s other male stars! Virginia Madsen from Dune and Slam Dance plays the friendly teacher of the little girl who is used by Stoltz as a storage vessel for the black and corrupted soul of the army man, which makes her feel sick and occasionally discourse about cutting the heads off of China-men! Yikes!

Meanwhile Walken, in the company of the whiniest Igor-type assistant ever, tracks the girl down to the little town! Daggett has arrived there too, and so the back half of the picture is a game of cat and mouse between Daggett, who wants to protect the girl, and Walken, who wants to tear her apart to get the soul! Why does anyone want this horrible old man’s soul at all? Ha ha, I was never really sure! But things become complicated when Lucifer, played by Viggo Mortenson from A Dangerous Method, appears and threatens everybody with baroque punishments!

So many people and angels are arrayed against Gabriel that the film takes on the feel of a novelty chess tournament with one guy playing against a whole crowd! Walken’s performance is certainly entertaining, and the movie itself is the right sort of hokum to serve as a decorative showcase for it! It’s the only movie directed by the guy who wrote Highlander, and as such aspires to a more complicated mythology than it can afford!

Ha ha, I like the low-tech way the angels have of appearing in a scene - I’d have expected some bad 90s morphing effect and light-show kerfuffle, but instead they just suddenly rush in from outside the frame! Or else they’re already waiting in a room, perched on the back of a chair as is their custom! (Of course there are plenty of 90s era trick effects at other points in the picture and once Mortensen explodes into birds!) You know, it’s always reminded me of another 90’s Dimension horror picture, Phantoms, with which it shares murky storytelling, a cinematographer, and a curiously star-studded cast!

It’s got a bit of gory stuff and it’s entertaining nonsense that doesn’t overstay its welcome, but it very much has that “worked over to a fault by the Weinsteins” feel to it, and that’s never been a good thing, and still less now! The Prophecy is okay, but not good enough to make me want to watch more of them! I give it (generously, I think) two boxed faces!

Burl reviews Tilbury! (1987)

 

Hèi hèi, it’s Bürl, here to review some Icelandic cinema! Actually this may have been more of a TV movie, ha ha, but I’m not completely certain! If it was, then Icelandic TV was more permissive than the North American variety, because this picture contains a little bit of nudity, some bloody violence, and some salty language! It also contains a strange mythology, but then what Icelandic tale does not! The picture tells the tale of a tilburi, and it’s called Tilbury!

Now, as I mentioned, there are plenty of odd tales in Icelandic mythology - ha ha, I myself have written a film treatment concerning the strange saga of the Necro-Pants, and I hope one day that one can be committed to film! This particular myth holds that a woman who wants more butter in her life can conjure up an imp called a tilburi, which requires that she hold a rib bone wrapped in wool between her breasts and douse it in communion wine, along with some other witchy acts! Then the goblin will appear and steal the milk from livestock at neighbouring farms, and when it returns will spit out a hideous green butter “of unusual consistency,” according to the movie’s opening narration! Then of course it desires to suck blood from a teat which grows out of the woman’s thigh!

That’s the myth in its broadest strokes, though what’s missing is an explanation of why anyone would want butter that badly! Perhaps I’m not properly appreciating the level of privation on Icelandic farms, but surely there must be more desirable commodities than butter! At any rate, the story is set at the opening of the war, in the spring and summer of 1940, when the little island nation is overrun by British soldiers on the lookout for Germans! A goonybird pastor’s son called Audun, who scarfs down dairy products as quickly as his slavering jaws can consume them, goes to Reykjavík in search of a bigger swimming pool in which to practice his distinctive leaping stroke, and also is asked to keep an eye on Gudrún, a young lady from the town whose father is worried about her in the free-living environs of the capitol!

And so he should be, because Gudrún has conjured a tilburi! He takes the form of Major Tilbury, a big-nosed British officer, who rides around in a sidecar and distributes Cadbury chocolate to the children! Ha ha! From there the tale darkens considerably, as everyone dances to the “Let’s All Go To The Lobby” intermission song and Major Tilbury begins to show off his butter-redistribution skills as well as his Freddy Krueger fingernails!

At times the picture seems like one of the early gentle comedies of Bill Forsyth, at others more like a piece of filmed experimental theatre a la Futz! At still other moments it’s downright horrific; in fact this hour-long TV drama manages more affrights in its scant running time than the entire Friday the 13^th film series! It makes plain the otherness of the creature, and its seperateness from the Icelandic population, by equating it with the British and American soldiers who have overwhelmed the country; and the more so by making the tilburi an officer rather than an enlisted man! By the end an American Tilbury has showed up, and he distributes Hershey chocolate instead of Cadbury!

I enjoyed this curious photoplay, and I recommend it to all! It’s not a lavish piece of cinema, but it’s a highly effective one, and has that great Icelandic sense of humour without diluting any of the scariness! I give Tilbury three basement Nazis!