Burl reviews Surf II! (1983)

 

Hang loose, hodads: at the sign of the shaka shaka and with a big bau bau, it’s Burl, here to review one of the kookier comedies of the 1980s! Ha ha, they made all sorts of teen sex comedies back in those days, and while most of them were fairly normal exercises in peeping tomfoolery and beer-fuelled hoot-n-holler, there were some that yearned to be a little different! Here you might have a Zapped!, incorporating science fiction themes into the mix; there, maybe a School Spirit, which went with the supernatural; and then there were some that couldn’t settle on anything but wholesale weirdness, like The Party Animal! Today’s movie takes a little pinch from each bucket, and the messy and inchoate result was given the title of Surf II!

Ha ha, it’s all like some crazy shenanigram from another dimension! Our location is a coastal surf town, where there are a pair of idjits very like Greg and Steve from Pinball Summer, though not quite as bad as Greg and Steve, because nobody is as bad as Greg and Steve! This pair is Chuck and Bob, played by Eric Stoltz from The Wild Life and Some Kind of Wonderful, and Jeffrey Rogers from Friday the 13^th part III, and instead of a boogie van they drive a dusky orange VW bug! They’re surfers, and so obsessed with the sport that they animatedly exchange surfing stories even as their exasperated girlfriends (one of whom is Brinke Stevens from The Slumber Party Massacre) remove their tops in a bid to get some attention from these dumbasses!

But why they want attention from these clods I couldn’t tell you! Anyway, thankfully there’s much more going on than whatever Chuck and Bob are up to! Strange things, in point of fact, are afoot: surfers are being sucked below by something in the water that looks like a UFO, and are resurfacing as zombie-like punk wasteoids! (And by the way, as an old punk rocker myself, ha ha, I sort of resent the implication that punks are all gross nosepicking dumbasses! They were a pretty prim bunch as I recall, and usually pretty  intelligent!)

Anyway, behind it all is glasses nerd Menlo Schwartzer, played by nerdo di tutti nerdos Eddie Deezen from I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Desperate Moves! He’s a perpetually outraged goon who took too much frazz from the high school surfer bullies, and now is taking revenge against all surfers whether they bullied him or not! He’s invented Buzzz Cola, which is really just motor oil and detritus, and I was never sure about the part where the surfers got sucked down to his lair, because why was that necessary? And what about these mutilations we hear about but never see? And then there's Menlo’s reluctant partner-in-crime, Sparkle, a pretty gal played by Linda Kerridge from Fade to Black and Down Twisted, who once was a homely glasses nerd herself but is now beautiful thanks to Menlo’s weird science!

Chuck and Bob’s fathers, it turns out, are the local distributors of Buzzz Cola! They’re a couple of old surfers, mercenary capitalists in quasi-hippie guise, forever asking people if they can relate! The dads are played by Morgan Paull from Blade Runner and Biff Maynard from Lunch Wagon; the moms by Ruth Buzzi (the female Joe E. Ross, ha ha), whose voice, they say, was heard in The Rescuers, and Brandis Kemp from Clifford; and one of the movie’s most impressive and memorable scenes has the two families shown in a split screen (actually a set built like a split-screen shot) having the same conversation at the same time!

Meanwhile Chief Boyardee, played by Lyle Waggoner from Swamp Country, and Inspector Underwear, who’s none other than Ron Palillo from Friday the 13^th part VI, dopily investigate the disappearances, or mutilations, or personality changes, or whatever is going on! Those character names give you a taste of the level and variety of the movie’s humour, ha ha; and further investigation into the case comes from the school science teacher, Beaker, played by Peter Isackson from Grand Theft Auto! And on the sidelines, watching with increasing incredulity but to absolutely no narrative purpose, is the school principal, Mr. Daddy-O, wielding a megaphone and played by Cleavon Little from Vanishing Point and Blazing Saddles!

And meanwhile again, there’s plenty of beach- and surfing-related buffoonery involving the younger set! One of the first possessed surfers is Jocko, played by Tom Villard from Parasite and One Crazy Summer, who’s a pal of Chuck and Bob, and a pal too of Johnny Big Head, played by Joshua Cadman, who was in The Sure Thing and of course was Bronk in Goin’ All the Way, and whose oft-repeated catch-phrase is "Bau Bau!" There are side antics with Johnny Big Head’s family: his brother Little Big Head played by Pat Romano from Hot Moves, and who became a celebrated stuntman; and his mother Mrs. Big Head, played by Lucy Lee Flippin from Summer School! And there are some sisters, Cindy Lou and Lindy Sue, played by  Corinne Bohrer from The Beach Girls and The Kid With the 200 IQ, and Lucinda Dooling from The Alchemist, and their parents, whom we see for some reason, are played by Terry Kiser from Weekend at Bernie’s and Friday the 13^th part VII, and their mom, Carol Wayne from The Party! And then, just to provide colour commentary, there’s a so-called teen called Becker played by Ralph Seymour from Ghoulies and Killer Party; and finally there's a pair of seat-splitting sand ‘n’ surf superchubbins played by Fred Asparagus from Fatal Beauty and Jim Greenleaf from Joysticks!

Phew! That’s a lot of characters, and a lot of familiar faces playing those characters, and many of those faces are, in their way, beloved by those of us who watch these kinds of movies! Does it add up to something worth sitting through, though? Well as you can see, it’s a complicated case! For example, as we also find in The Party Animal, and who can forget Party Party, the movie has a strangely killer soundtrack that would seem well beyond its budget to afford! We get several Beach Boys tunes of course, since it’s a beach picture; plus She Blinded Me With Science by Thomas Dolby (because of science); a Circle Jerks song (included to underline the ragged wildness of the crazed punks, but to me just plain good music); some Oingo Boingo numbers; a triumphant use of Six Months in a Leaky Boat by Split Enz; songs by The Stray Cats, Talk Talk and The Ventures; and of course Wall of Voodoo’s hit Mexican Radio! Pretty good, ha ha!

Anyway, I’m sorry this review was so darn long! Surf II is weird, which is good, but also is bad, which is bad! And mixed in with the badness like spots on a domino are the occasional moments of terrific timing, or a good gag, or a clever shot, or a "Bau Bau," so it’s not a total loss! Why, it gets turkey-points for the breakfast scene alone! Ha ha! It’s hard to quantify the value of this movie exactly, as it is and should be with any work of art, but I guess I’ll give Surf II one and a half cries of "Bau Bau," for how could it be otherwise? Ha ha!

Burl reviews Up the Creek! (1984)

 

With a whitewater smile it’s Burl, reviewing another sophomoric rip-off comedy for you! Ha ha, can you imagine an 80s raucous beer ‘n’ boobs cacklefest so devoted to the form that it features not one or two but three actors from two entirely different previous raucous campus comedy hits in the cast? Well it exists! The picture I’m telling you about is called, quite simply, Up the Creek!

Yes it’s a river rafting picture, but naturally, given the previous experience of its cast, it is in a larger sense a collegiate shenanigan film! Two of the actors are familiar to those many millions who saw Animal House: we’ve got Tim Matheson from Fletch and Impulse in the lead role of smarmy Bob McGraw; and in the Belushi role of Gonzer is Stephen Furst from Silent Rage and National Lampoon’s Class Reunion! And they join forces with Dan Monahan from Porky’s as Max, the loveable horndog! The principal foursome is rounded out by Irwin, who’s played by Sandy Helberg from Spinal Tap, and who evidently represents an attempt to come up with a new collegiate comedy archetype: the nerd with a terrible drinking problem!

These four, the bottom four students at LePetomane University and therefore in the country, are press-ganged by their angry dean, played by the Royal Emperor of Snob himself, John Hillerman from Chinatown and Blazing Saddles, into taking part in some kind of annual inter-school raft race that supposedly has gone on for fifteen years! Of course the competition is a gallery of stock 80s characters: toffee-nosed bad guy Rex played by Jeff East from Deadly Blessing and Pumpkinhead, along with his three bleach-blond fascist pals; plus a random rich man called Tozer who wants the all-blondes to win for some reason and is played by James B. Sikking from Outland; and, for extra value, a quintet of crazed military nutcases led by a lunatic with a serious case of Resting Ernest Face called Lt. Braverman! There’s also a boatload of co-eds, non-snobby variety, of whom the most important is Heather Merriweather and is played by Jennifer Runyon from Ghostbusters; and then there are some cowboys who don’t really factor in at all!

Of course the rivalry between Bob and Rex sharpens when Heather turns her affections to the insouciant hero Bob rather than the perpetually incredulous-looking Rex; this leads to a long exchange of dangerous pranks back and forth, but then, wouldn’t you know it, Irwin is kidnapped by the army guys and staked out naked on the ground! “We’ll find him even if it takes a hundred years,” McGraw vows! And all through this there is a long series of raft explosions – ha ha, truly, there are a lot more exploding rafts in this picture than you might ever guess – and ultimately it comes down to the final confrontation at the finish line, where Tozer conveniently keeps a riverbank summer house which may or may not be destroyed by raging waters!

Thinking of that summer house makes me remember that Up the Creek tries a lot of large-scale physical gags which it can’t always pull off – ha ha, this leads to plenty of reaction shots and astonished people getting covered with dust instead of the allegedly spectacular moments of destruction they’re looking at, which often happen off screen! Still, I give it points for trying that stuff with a mixture of miniatures and full-scale effects, insofar as they could manage it! It’s certainly one of the more ambitious of the collegiate sex comedies of that era!

As douchey as the frat guys are, our heroes, as is so often the case in these pictures, are no better! Bob is as smarmy as Matheson can make him, which is to say considerably; Furst’s character is a grotesque eating machine; the nerd drinks way too much and is kind of obnoxious about it; and Monahan especially looks too old to be involved in things like this, and in any case isn’t given much to do! Anyway, they’re all handily upstaged by a marvelous but oversensitive dog whose top-flight acting abilities are just this side of the furball charmer in The Boogens, ha ha!

In many ways the Platonic ideal of the R-rated 80s comedy, Up the Creek is lamely determined to hit all the bases but not exceed expectations, especially in, say, the screenwriting or acting departments! Still, the showmanship it musters now and then gives it a bit of personality! Of course it all seems to be occurring in a world in which the only authorities are university deans and rich guys who put on raft races, whose rule is so absolute that even army guys can only fume and fulminate uselessly against it; but if it’s plausibility you’re looking for, you’d better try Teen Lust or Goin’ All the Way or one of those! I give Up the Creek one and a half flume rides!

Burl reviews Pinball Summer! (1979)

Bing-bang thunk thunk tilt, it’s Burl, here to review a movie featuring pinball as a theme! It’s the sort of movie that would have featured video arcade games as a theme if it had come out a few years later, but in 1979 it was still pinball times, if only just! Don’t be fooled – a year or two later the movie was re-titled Pick-Up Summer so it could fit more easily into the by-then-popular Porky’s genre, and so it would not be hobbled by its by-then-superannuated pinball theme, but the opening (and closing) song, “Pinball Summer,” gives the game away! So of course I’m going to review it under its original title, which, you won’t be surprised to hear, was Pinball Summer!

 

It’s the story of a pair of assholes and the unpleasantness they sow up and down the banks of the St. Lawrence Seaway, or at least the Ottawa River and the Lake of Two Mountains! Ha ha, I’m sure sorry to be so crudely blunt in my choice of language here, but it’s hard to overstate just what incredible pricks these two characters are! Their names are Greg and Steve – Greg is played by Michael Zelniker from Hog Wild and Naked Lunch; Steve by Carl Marotte from My Bloody Valentine and Breaking All the Rules – and they drive around in their (admittedly sweet) boogie van all day insulting people and making life especially hard for a pair of sisters, Donna and Suzy! Donna is played by Karen Stephen from Happy Birthday To Me, and Suzy by Helene Udy from Incubus!

They also torment a biker gang leader called Bert, played by Tom Kovacs from Scanners! He’s sort of the Erich Von Zipper figure and serves as the putative antagonist, but the friction between the jerk duo and Bert (who’s a bit of a knob himself, but not as bad as Greg and Steve because nobody's as bad as Greg and Steve) is entirely the fault of the former, as is all the other trouble they get into! Why the ladies put up with these immature canker sores for even a moment is a true mystery! 

Their frequent sexual harassment of women extends to Sally, played by Joy Boushel from Humongous, Terror Train and The Fly, who is a waitress at the hamburger joint they patronize and is also the semi-steady girlfriend of Bert! The pals bounce between the burger place and a proto-arcade run by a fellow called Pete, who, for reasons of his own, decides to stage a pinball contest that will determine exactly who is the best player around! What masquerades as a plot in this picture simply involves one group trying to steal the trophy from the other group, back and forth; and never for one moment do you care who has the treasured item at any given moment or who will keep it in the end!

Pete happens to employ a doughy dimwit called Whimpy, who also has a thing for Sally, so Whimpy and Bert work out some kind of creepy deal for Bert to win the pinball trophy through manifest dishonesty! But that goes nowhere, petering out like everything else in the movie; and meanwhile a local flasher played by Wally Martin from Wild Thing opens his raincoat to any and all in the vicinity! While all this is occurring, a hideous talking pinball machine called Arthur grins and blinks its teeth like a lunatic; there’s an underwhelming bout of strip pinball; the bikers engage in some Peeping Tom-ism that so arouses one of them he begins crazily humping his gangmate; and Greg and Steve continue to act like absolute dickwads to everyone they meet!

It’s amusing how many of the actors were in the Canadian horror pictures of the time! Ha ha, I recognized plenty of these mugs – several of the performers here also showed up in My Bloody Valentine, which makes sense because it was directed by the same fellow who helmed this pinball caper, George Mihalka; and then there’s horror veteran Boushel, who goes for an underwear-clad ride down the road astride the aforementioned hideous pinball machine Arthur; and there’s also a local city counsellor played by Roland Nincheri from Evil Judgment and Visiting Hours; and Riva Spier from Rabid and Ghostkeeper; and of course the flasher, who was in Shivers and The Pyx!

In a more generous mood I might award this plotless, brainless concoction the distinction of being Canada’s sincere attempt to copy such wonderful Crown Internationals as Malibu Beach or The Van; but no one in those movies, not even Dugan, is so thoroughly unpleasant as Greg and Steve, the alleged heroes of this picture, so that honour is off the table! Nothing that happens makes much sense, there’s no follow-through to any action or event; the number of funny jokes adds up to something near zero; and Greg and Steve, need I repeat myself yet again, are so off-putting as to ruin the viewing experience even if anything else about the movie was good! Ha ha, I sure did hate those dorks, Greg and Steve! Because of them, and because very little else in the movie even comes close to making up for their terribly fuckery, except possibly their boogie van, I give Pinball Summer one comment from Arthur, which isn’t worth very much I’m afraid!

 

 

Burl reviews Zapped!! (1983)

 

Bzzzztt, it’s Burl here with some science psycho-pervations for you! Ha ha, here we have a precursor to the science wizard pictures of the mid-80s, like Weird Science and My Science Project, or the more reality-based (and better) The Manhattan Project; and of course a descendant of the Dexter Riley movies of the decade before, of which The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes is an example recently reviewed! But here we have a movie that started out with the innocence of a Dexter Riley movie, or even a Flubber and Shaggy Dog-era Disney picture, but, in the wake of Porky’s, was garnished with some extra boobs and bums to bring it up to 80s code! Yes, I’m talking about Zapped!!

Ha ha, it’s always nice to review a movie that comes with its own exclamation point! Zapped! is the story of nerdly-but-dreamy school science wizard Barney Springboro, played by Cha-Chi himself, Scott Baio, well known for being The Boy Who Drank Too Much, and, more recently, for being a bit of a right-wing loon! As the movie opens he’s got mice swimming around in diving suits for some reason, and we learn that he’s growing special orchids for the school principal, played by Robert Mandan, the super familiar-looking guy from The Carey Treatment, and growing special mary-hoo-wanna for his best buddy Peyton, played by crinkle-haired Willie Aames from Paradise! Peyton is a strange amalgam of types: a horndog party animal who’s also a spoiled rich kid, and also, I gather, supposed to be sort of an unpopular nerd! I guess they just had him be whatever they felt was convenient for the movie in any given moment, ha ha!   

Felice Schachter is a nosy teen newshound called Bernadette who always wants to report on whatever Cha-Chi is up to with his science! What he’s most recently up to is falling victim to a lab accident that gives him Carrie-style psychokinesis, and when Peyton finds out about the power, he immediately enlists Cha-Chi to help him win first a baseball game, and then against the frat house boys in casino gambling! This causes complications and confusions, because at the same time, Cha-Chi and Bernadette are becoming fond of each other, and Bernadette strongly disapproves of the gambling; while meantime Peyton is trying his best with Jane, the randomly flatulent queen of the campus played by Heather Thomas from Red Blooded American Girl, who is dating Greg Bradford from Lovelines, the usual blond BMOC quasi-fascist and head of the casino frat house! Ha ha, phew, it’s a situation so complicated I had to use a run-on sentence to describe it!

Also meanwhile, Miss Burnhart, played by Sue Ann Langdon from Without Warning, is trying to make time with the principal and also to bust Cha-Chi for weed cultivation! And Cha-Chi’s prune juice-guzzling dad, played by Roger Bowen from M*A*S*H and Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home, is sleeping through everything, and his mom, essayed by Mews Small from Sleeper, stays awake, terrified, believing her son possessed by the devil and recruiting priests to exorcise him after his powers have been revealed to her in the form of a flying ventriloquist’s dummy!

Barney’s other friend is Dexter the baseball coach, played by the great Scatman Crothers from The King of Marvin Gardens and The Shining! Ha ha, it’s always nice to see him! LaWanda Page from Mausoleum plays Dexter’s wife, and is the main antagonist in an insane hophead dream Dexter has when he’s exposed to big billows of pot smoke from the furnace: he goes bicycling with Albert Einstein and chatting about relativity, until suddenly his wife comes thundering along in a chariot, dressed as Attila the Hun, bellowing threats and firing pork products at him from a bazooka!

Ha ha, and there are plenty of other familiar faces in the margins! We get Jewel Shepard from Raw Force and The Return of the Living Dead; “Boof” from Teen Wolf makes a small appearance; and there’s even a walk on from I Wanna Hold Your Hand’s Eddie Deezen, who wears a driving cap, a cardigan, a bowtie, and a shirt that reads “God’s Gift to Women,” and only sticks around long enough to accuse his friend of constant masturbation!

It sounds like I’ve been describing a parade of nonstop delights, but I’ve got to report the shocking truth: it’s not a good movie, ha ha! Sure, Cha-Chi makes dresses fly up and cardigans come apart with the power of his mind, but on the other hand Cha-Chi makes dresses fly up and cardigans come apart with the power of his mind, and it’s just all so stupid! The character of Peyton, meanwhile, is so smarmy you could spread him on toast! My goodness, what a self-satisfied, smirky, misguidedly entitled nougat he is! But you can’t argue with that supporting cast, and it does seem like a Dexter Riley movie with sleaze, which is in theory a really appealing concept! But of all the Zapped!s you could imagine might result from that concoction, the Zapped! we got would be well at the low end of those expectations! I give it one tiny scuba suit!

Burl reviews Party Party! (1983)

 

Ha ha and hello, it’s Burl here to wish you a belated Happy New Year! And I’m doing that because I finally caught up to a New Year’s Eve-set youth movie that enjoys a near-legendary status among those who were in the right place and time, and at the right age, when it came along! And the name given to this formative production is not just a title, not merely a description, but serves also, even primarily, as a clear-throated, full-chested, arms-extended and head-tilted-back statement of intent: Party Party!

In the early 80s the horny teens were getting their due on screen: there was Porky’s, Spring Break, Hot Bubblegum, and oh so many more! It was all about music, sexy times, shenanigans, and consequence-free fun, and these pictures were being made all around the world! North London wanted in on the glory, so they all got together and created this picture, which takes place largely at a New Year’s Eve house party party! The host is a weedy nonentity called Larry, who organizes the party party unbeknownst to his parents and I suppose is meant to be the film’s Everyman figure! He’s played by Perry Fenwick, whom we may recall as a different sort of a party party host in Mona Lisa, ha ha!

Larry’s pals include an unbelievably awkward idiot called Toby, played by Daniel Peacock, who co-wrote the movie and later appeared in The Jewel of the Nile! His other buddy is Johnny, a grifter, a player and an inveterate advice-giver essayed by fiveheaded Karl Howman from The Long Good Friday! We meet this crew, or two of them anyway, as they race around Hendon in an alleged “fast, flash motor,” dodging angry motorcyclists, and then picking up Larry at a church! We concurrently meet a bunch of other characters who will be attending the party party also, including two gal pals, one a schlubby girl called Shirley, played by Caroline Quentin from Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire, and the other a more comely sort named Brenda, essayed by Kim Thomson from Screamtime and The Tall Guy!

Over at the station house we find a lady cop called Rebecca, played by Phoebe Nicholls, who was John Merrick’s mother in The Elephant Man; another cop played by skinless Frank from Hellraiser himself, Sean Chapman; and a third bobby called Terry, played by Gary Olsen from Outland, who announces his intention to get right pissed and follows that pledge up in spectacular fashion! And separate from all these folk is the movie’s main antagonist, Bobby, an enormous bearded bully boy played by Clive Mantle from Alien 3!

Just how old are these people, I wondered as I watched the movie! Ha ha, Larry seems like a teenager, more or less, but his good pal Johnny, with his Phil Collins-style receding hairline, seems a decade or more older! Toby, the gurning half-wit, has the ageless quality many intellectually impaired people possess; the coppers are at least in their late twenties or older; and the big bully Bobby might be forty or more! Ha ha! How did they all happen to be at this very same party party, anyway? It’s a true New Year’s mystery!

Another New Year’s mystery is the soundtrack! Ha ha, how on earth did they afford all these tunes? Somehow they convinced Elvis Costello to write and warble a theme song, and while it’s the most terrible song he ever did, it’s still amazing that it exists! There are songs by The Clash, David Bowie, Sting, Madness, The Stranglers, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, and lots more! It makes sense that the movie’s not widely available to see these days, because ha ha, how could you begin to license all that? It’s an impressive feat for a clearly low-budget picture!

But aside from that, is the movie itself any good? Well, it’s an odd thing: I really strongly disliked almost every single character in this photoplay, and didn’t give, as they say over there, a toss about any of them! Toby in particular is almost supernaturally lacking in social graces, and many’s the time he gets called a berk or a prat! And he most certainly is those things! But somehow, by the end of the movie, when the parents return to find their house near-trashed and must be fed the outrageous lie that the party party was all the time in their honour, I found myself smiling slightly and hoping it all worked out, as stupid as the situation was!

My own first visit to Blighty wasn’t until 1985 or so, but I still remember the sort of dingy chill with which Thatcher’s England was permeated at that time, and this movie captures that miasma in absolute spades! There’s no art to the picture at all, no dimension to the characters (even to the suicidally lonely dowdy-girl), and not nearly the pep such a movie should have; but it has occasional bursts of energy, shows evidence of talent in the cast, and gets the feeling of a big drunken house party mostly right! It’s not a good movie by any stretch, but I can just about see why it would be so cherished by people who caught it at the right instant in their lives! But, ha ha, where did all those pies for the big pie fight come from, anyway? I give Party Party one and a half fast flash cars!

Burl reviews The Rosebud Beach Hotel! (1984)

 

Ha ha, it’s Burl – may I take your bags? Yes, today I have a review of a hotel picture for you, and this is a genre that can run from the trashily venerable, like Arthur Hailey’s Hotel, to the plain old trashy, like Mountaintop Motel Massacre! (A subset of the genre is the off-season hotel picture, and this would include Daughters of Darkness and of course The Shining!) This movie is none of those, however: instead, it’s an eighties comedy called The Rosebud Beach Hotel!

 

The plot is simple! A nervous nebbish called Elliot, played by bosom buddy Peter Scolari, whom we recall from Ticks, and who here stammers more than any three Hugh Grants, is invited to manage the failing beach hotel of the title! Colleen Camp from D.A.R.Y.L. and Track 29 is his foxy girlfriend Tracy, who at first appears to be the usual snooty, control-freak rich girl, but thankfully is something more! She takes it upon herself to co-manage the hotel with Elliot, unbeknownst to her swordsman father, King! King is played by none other than the magnificent Christopher Lee, whom we recall so well from Nothing But the Night and many other big roles!

 

Of course Elliot is being set up to fail by King, who has hired a professional arsonist called Matches to burn down the hotel! Ha ha, Matches, played by Hamilton Camp from No Small Affair and City Heat, takes his time getting things ready, so there’s plenty of time for Elliot and Tracy to meet and interact with the wacky employees and guests at the hotel, once the previous manager has gone; and this latter personage is a cameo appearance from Chuck McCann, whom we recall with pleasure from Herbie Rides Again and Cameron’s Closet!

 

The hotel features a pair of allegedly funny doormen, Leonard and Dennis, played by Jonathan Schmock from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and James Vallely from Some Kind of Wonderful, and two singing chambermaids played by the Currie sisters, Marie and Cherie! Ha ha, Cherie we remember from Parasite and other pictures, while Marie didn’t have much of a film career beyond this movie, I guess because she was too busy discovering radium, ha ha! Hank Garrett from The Sentinel and Johnny Dangerously plays Kramer, the basement-dwelling survivalist-custodian! Fran Drescher from UHF and The Big Picture and of course Spinal Tap is the local prostitute, who, along with her fellow working girls is recruited to the bellstaff, and Eddie Deezen from I Wanna Hold Your Hand is a freakout guest who claims to be a visiting alien! This claim is later proved correct, ha ha! Meanwhile, the torch man goes into paroxysms of orgasmic delight whenever he spies a flame, and becomes the unlikely object of Drescher’s lust!

 

The movie is a lighthearted frothcoction with a surprising amount of nudity and a professional cast apparently having fun! It’s a little disheartening to think that Christopher Lee did this and Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf in the same year, but from our twenty-first century perspective we know that Lee and his dignity are invulnerable, and that in any case his career rebounded in fine style! And I like Cherie Curie and all – ha ha, I’ve met her, been to her house, and even directed her in a movie, and I enjoy The Runaways (the band; I haven’t seen the movie) – but the songs she and her sister sing in this movie are all just terrible, and they seem to go on forever! Sometimes they go on forever in conjunction with other things that are also going on forever, like an interminable scene of drunken seductive dancing, ha ha, so that part of the movie gets you down! On the other hand, The Rosebud Beach Hotel might be your only chance to see Fran Drescher and Eddie Deezen exchange dialogue!

 

It’s got a little more going on than the usual 80s sex comedy, with some good physical comedy from Scolari, a stranger-than-usual Deezen, and Lee doing his thing in his typically committed manner! I can’t say this is a good picture – it sure could use some pep and some extra laffs, and maybe a little bit of style – but as these things go it’s fairly painless! Ha ha, I’m going to give The Rosebud Beach Hotel one and a half exploding palm trees!

Burl reviews Hot Bubblegum! (1981)

 

Ya-da-da-da-da-da la bamba, it’s Burl, reviewing for you some Israeli teen sex comedy! Ha ha, the teen sex comedy was not born in Israel of course – there were American pictures like The Cheerleaders that came earlier – but it could be argued that the Holy Land’s Lemon Popsicle series of films codified the genre and put it into a shape that would become all-too common through the late 70s and well into the 80s! This one, the third in the series, is called Hot Bubblegum!

Boaz Davidson, who went on from this directly to Hospital Massacre, and thence to The Last American Virgin, which is nothing more or less than a Stateside version of a Lemon Popsicle picture, was the director of this one! It starts with a bang, introducing us to the central trio of idiots: Yftach Katzur as the ratfaced Benji; Jonathan Sagall as Bobby, the allegedly handsome one; and of course Zachi Noy as Huey, or Yudale, the ducktailed slobbo! There’s also a skinny little glasses nerd called Victor, but he doesn’t figure in much as the picture wears on!

Anyway, these three, plus occasionally Victor, are up to their usual hijinks, which in this case is spying on ladies changing in a beachside structure, and of course Yudale plunges through the roof and hits the floor with a grotesque slapping sound! Then a lady pummels him with a shoe and calls him a sex maniac – not the last time this will happen to Yudale in the movie, and for good reason – and he runs and jumps into a big hole dug in the sand, which his friends immediately fill up, trapping him like the unfortunates in Creepshow! Then a little kid pees in his face, ha ha!

Back in the old VHS days, my pals and I loved these opening scenes! We thought the movie was a real piece of work, and our nickname for the main character, Benji, was “Ratatouille!” Indeed he is quite a ratboy, and it’s hard to understand why the local girls seem so intent on dating him! The slim narrative through-line of the picture is Ratatouille’s inability to decide between committing to his sweet freckleface of a girlfriend Doris, or to carry on with the gap-toothed partygal Nikki! Why either one would give him the time of day is the picture’s great mystery!

I’ll tell you, these three guys are real jerks, and everything they do is some form of sexual assault! They’re peeping toms, they spike drinks, they lie, cheat, misrepresent in their neverending quest for bohankie; and when they’re called out on all this criminal dishonesty, they get pouty and surly, or at least Ratatouille does! He’s the pettiest, jerkiest, most childish character in a movie chock full of them, and greasier than a duck’s underwear too; and his dad, the old perv, is no better! The scenes in which a pulchritudinous cousin comes to stay with the family are cringy enough to cause cramps!

I’ve seen a few other Lemon Popsicle movies, namely Baby Love, Going Steady, and the army one, Private Popsicle, but can hardly recall a thing about them! I assume they’re equally off-putting, however, and probably don’t even have the microscopically small redemptive moments we find here, like the characters getting peed on in the face, or landing painfully on concrete, or whispering "a-doobee-doo" in each other's ears! Ha ha, re-watching this one (which took three or four viewing sessions, so gruelling was the experience) did not make me eager to have another look at any of the others! Maybe the first one, Lemon Popsicle, would be interesting to see for historical purposes, but on the other hand, probably not!

It’s not surprising to find in the opening credits that the English language soundtrack was supervised by Mel Welles, who of course played Abu Habib Bibubu in Smokey Bites the Dust! The soundtrack is chock full of Welles-isms, and several of the voices, especially the father, sound like old Mel must have performed them himself! Ha ha, he sure loved to do his Old Jewish Guy voice! It’s hard to fathom how this early Cannon work could have afforded to license the wall-to-wall hits that are constantly playing in the background (it’s the best use of “La Bamba” outside of Birdy, I have to admit), but maybe they just didn’t bother with all the technicalities, like the asking and the licensing and the paying! Ha ha, that’s Golan and Globus for you, I guess!

This is one stinky movie, but for the laughs it gave my friends and I back in the 80s, I guess I have to give it some small credit! Watching it now as a grown-ass man was a painful experience, however, and I don’t recommend it to anyone! It also manages to make the act of looking at nude ladies actively unpleasant – not because there’s anything wrong with the ladies, but because of the context and the way the scenes are shot! And there’s not much of that here anyway, so nude lady enthusiasts are encouraged to look elsewhere for their fix! In the meanwhile I’m going to award Hot Bubblegum one half of a pathetic shoe mirror!

Burl reviews Slumber Party '57! (1976)

 

With a golly gee and a hey daddy-o, it’s Burl, here with another one of those flashback teen sex comedies that came out in the wake of American Graffiti! The form reached its apotheosis with Porky’s, and maybe its height of classiness, relatively speaking, with Mischief, but it was the first knock-offs, the ones from the 70s like Hometown U.S.A., that really give the impression of desperate coattail riding with a T&A twist! Ha ha, and another of these cras-cren-bons, perhaps the greatest of them in fact, is the skinfest known as Slumber Party ’57! 

It hasn’t got a story so much as it has a carelessly geomantic structure! After the first of the requisite easily-licensed 50s hits (or 60s hits; the picture is unconcerned with strict fidelity to its period), we meet five young ladies, apparently high school students but clearly in their early to mid 20s! Ha ha! Debra Winger from Black Widow is one of them (an appearance that has long since dropped off the bottom of her resumé); Noelle North, who also showed up in the superficially similar Sweater Girls, is another; Rainbeaux Smith from The Pom Pom Girls, Massacre at Central High, and Parasite, is still another, and there are yet more played by actresses I failed to recognize! Their boyfriends being away for a weekend football trip, the ladies decide to hold the titular party, and, once they’ve had a nude pool frolic, proceed to each tell the story of how she lost her virginity!

 

The bulk of the movie is these stories, told one by one in flashback, and set to more easily-licensed doo-wah hits, which are always played in their entirety to justify the cost! There’s a Daisy Mae type who tells the tale of her deflowering at the hands of the local moonshiner, a Li’l Abner who manages a roll in the hay somewhere between his still blowing up and being chased by revenooers! Noelle North next tells her story: she’s in her room reading Lolita while her parents hold a party downstairs; one of the guests, played by Will Hutchins from The Horror at 37,000 Feet, blunders in and stammers his way to a seduction! But this goes sour when North’s burly dad, in a frightening appearance from Bill Thurman, the sheriff in Creature From Black Lake, bursts in and puts his daughter over his knee for a good llarrupin’! The girls all agree that they secretly enjoy such treatment from their fathers, urgh!

Between their stories the girls leave the mansion they’re slumber partying in to grab a bite to eat at the local drive-in ask-n’-wait, where they meet an out-of-control hophead played by Rafael Campos from Astro Zombies and soon find themselves in a street race with him! Ha ha, can’t make a movie like this without a street race! After the final boringly gymnogynous tale is told, and they’re all revealed to be spurious anyway, the girls must deal first with a cat burglar played by Larry Gelman from Dreamscape (who might as well have been voted “Least Likely To Ever Portray A Cat Burglar" at his acting school), and then with a cop played by Joe E. Ross, who says “Ooh, ooh!” a lot just as he did in Car 54, Where Are You, and is clearly delighted when he’s surrounded by nubile girls and Debra Winger starts kissing him! Ha ha, Debra Winger and Joe E. Ross: truly a thespian summit for the ages! 

The movie leans right in to its exploitation angle, with few opportunities for nudity ignored and several more invented! The young ladies come off well, though - several give good, spirited performances and are at a consistently higher level than the movie they’re in! Which, all things considered, is a bad movie! The script is unspeakable, the direction pretty foursquare, and it’s filled with anachronisms, like the drive-in screening of Cauldron of Blood, which wasn’t even shot until 1967! Ha ha, and I wonder if Debra Winger wants to forget about this movie more for the nudity or for the Joe E. Ross scene! I give Slumber Party ’57 one giggling hillbilly!

Burl reviews Crunch! (1979)

 

43, 27, 62, hut hut hut, it’s Burl, here to review an old-fashioned teen sex comedy which features plenty of foot-ball! Ha ha, this is a picture that sits right at the junction between the 1970s cheerleader pictures like The Pom Pom Girls and the 1980s antecedents like Porky’s! It’s perhaps best known under the ludicrous title The Kinky Coaches and the Pom Pom Pussycats, and also gets called Heartbreak High for no particular reason, but the title it was made under, which was also the title of the version I saw, is simply Crunch!

I guess that title refers to the clashing of foot-ball lines, because there’s quite a bit of that particular sport in this picture! The funny thing is, despite being a study of two rival schools for whom foot-ball glory means everything, which is a state of mind we associate uniquely with the United States, and indeed being explicitly set in the States, though the specific state or town is left unnamed, this is in fact a Canadian picture! It therefore has a strangely ersatz quality, a feeling of community playacting, and in no scene is this more apparent than late in the movie when the foot-ball teams are supposed to be singing the Star Spangled Banner and it’s obvious that nobody on screen knows the words! Ha ha!

Inasmuch as there exists a narrative, it concerns the football rivalry between the City High Moose (no doubt a typical American team name, ha ha!) and the Johnson High Eagles! The Moose are coached by a deep-voiced hard case called Bulldog, played by John Vernon from Sweet Movie and Curtains and Fraternity Vacation, who has a pathological attachment to a pair of long johns he feels he must wear for his team to win! Coaching the Eagles is the considerably more easy-going Arnoldi, essayed by Robert Forster from Alligator, The Banker, and The Descendants! Meanwhile a sportscaster played by Norman Fell from Bullitt, The Graduate, and Catch-22 prowls around trying to get interviews with the coaches about the big upcoming game!

We get to know some of the students on both of the teams, and none of them are particularly likeable! The Eagles’ star quarterback and general BMOC is Gary Leonard, played by Kimberly McKeever from Scanners and Visiting Hours, and he’s one of those possessive, inconstant boyfriends, who tries to get his girlfriend to forget about her causes and just play bohankie with him! His Moose counterpart and personal rival is Plitt, played by Thom Haverstock from Hog Wild and Terror Train, an oily creep who pretends to care about causes in a bid to make sweet love to Gary’s girlfriend! Anthony Sherwood from City on Fire and Wild Thing is in there, and there’s a gross guy called Pigger who snorts and oinks a lot, and sits down so hard on a cream pie that the entire Eagles team is covered in futz!

There are pranks and inter-team one-upmanships, and the Eagles successfully steal Coach Bulldog’s precious long johns! There’s a crazy sports-themed sex scene involving Forster going practically crazy with lust, and a game of strip-poker held in a boogie van that simultaneously recalls many moments in the Crown International filmography while predicting others in the rush of 80s teen sex comedies to come! In the middle of it all there’s a rather sweet-natured scene in which Forster and Vernon, evidently upholding a longstanding tradition, share a pre-game drink and wish each other good luck on the gridiron! 

It’s all pretty lackluster, though! Fell gives a grimly un-Roperish performance as the sportscaster, which leads one to wonder why he’s there at all! The direction is artless and the humour pretty muted, and the climactic football game seems to go on forever! Ha ha, foot-ball’s a pretty boring game to watch on screen, I always find - even the game in M*A*S*H gets a little tedious! I won’t say I didn’t enjoy parts of Crunch, because I did; but in the end, I can’t give it more than one unicycle-riding chicken!

Burl reviews Joysticks! (1983)

Beep, beep, boop, it’s Burl, here to review a comedy about video games! Ha ha, totally awesome video games, as the theme song repeatedly, maddeningly insists! And I have to admit, many of the cabinet games seen in this movie are indeed totally awesome! The picture itself, however, is not! Of course I’m talking about Joysticks!

This photoplay comes from Greydon Clark, the auteur behind such entertainments as Satan’s Cheerleaders, Without Warning, and that one about the mutant cat! Here he’s in Teen Sex Comedy mode, chronicling the arrival of a glasses nerd, named Eugene of course, who comes to work at a video arcade called Video Arcade! It’s run by a perpetually smirking featherhair played by Scott McGinnis of Secret Admirer, and its most devoted patron is a portly, flatulent fellow played by Jim Greenleaf, who greatly resembles the portly, flatulent fellow in Cheerleader Camp, but whom we know from his portrayal of Ox in Evilspeak, Blatz in Pigs vs. Freaks, and Fat Solowitz in Gorp!

Video Arcade is a popular place, but there are forces gathering in opposition to it! On the one hand we have King Vidiot, played by Jon Gries from Number One With A Bullet, a faux-punk with a posse of gals who beep and boop and robot-walk like Twiki himself! On the other we have an uptight businessman played by the marvelous Joe Don Baker from The Pack and Fletch and The Living Daylights, whose daughter loves to visit Video Arcade and play all the games it has to offer! Ha ha, I always love to find Joe Don playing a bad guy in a movie, because he so often seems to be having the time of his life, especially in pictures like Getting Even! He’s a little stiff here, especially when King Vidiot is crawling all over him, but he’s still our Joe Don!

Once Joe Don and King Vidiot have joined forces, it comes down to a video game challenge: giant Pac-Man, which the featherhair is unable to play without sweating due to a romantic trauma he suffered! But Dorfus, Video Arcade's best player, has been kidnapped by Joe Don’s idiot henchmen! Bound and gagged, Dorfus can only fart for help! His plea is heard, and he is rescued by a sexual admirer! He makes it back to Video Arcade, ready to jump in and grab the oversized joysticks, but our noble featherhair contends that he must overcome his debilitating debility! Ha ha, I don’t think it will be giving away anything to tell you that indeed he does, and wins the day for Video Arcade!

Of course everything going on in this picture is very dumb and artlessly captured, and there are entirely too many Pac-Man scene transitions! Some of the acting is better than you’d think, though - the tightpants in the lead, who also played “Mr. Adventure” in Star Trek III, don’t forget, is almost at the smirky level of someone like Tim Matheson! Gries fully commits to his role of King Vidiot, and also it’s nice to see a movie starring both Leif Green and Jim Greenleaf! These are small compensations though, nearly microscopic, and I give Joysticks just one and a half little tiny motorcycles!

Burl reviews Gimme an 'F'! (1984)

Ha ha, it’s that dancin’ fool Burl, here to review yet another movie about a cheerleader camp! It’s not Cheerleader Camp, of course, because I already reviewed that one; today’s picture, however, features all the necessary components for a cheerleader camp picture - pom poms, gymnastics, squads competing for the big prize - except the one it could have used most: a murderous killer! Ha ha! And the movie we’re talking about today sports the vaguely unsavory title Gimme an 'F'!

I’ll say right up front that this is a slightly odd one! In some ways it presents as a raunchy sex comedy: the camp is called “Camp Beaverview” (the campers eat at the “Beaverteria”), and by the third act the antagonists are being pelted with enormous urine balloons; but on the other hand, though opportunities are rampant, there are virtually no nude ladies in the film, and the plot spends an awful lot of time on the dramatic life choice problems of Tommy Hamilton, the head counselor played by Stephen Shellen from American Gothic! (In this, I think the movie believes itself to be imitating Meatballs, but it’s not a very good imitation, ha ha!)

Tommy’s problem is that he loves antics and to teach the art of cheerleading, but feels that, at twenty-five, he’s too old for both these pursuits! He’s apparently not too old to romance sixteen year-old campers though, which he just barely manages to do without committing any arrestable offences! Tommy has a girlfriend who’s displeased with him not because of the antics, but because he wants to stop doing them! (She’s also not too chuffed about the sixteen year-old!) Tommy’s flashdancing pal is Roscoe, played by Mark Keyloun from Sudden Impact, and Roscoe, whose urine fills those balloons late in the picture, is the very definition of an anticsman, so this makes it even harder for Tommy!

Aside from the counselors, we meet plenty of the cheerleading campers too! There’s an evil team, the Falcons (pronounced “faaalcon,” as Americans will do); a sweet and inexperienced team called the Molene Ducks; and, just for good measure, a team of sympathetic tough girls! Familiar faces dot all of these squads, faces belonging to the likes of Jennifer Cooke from Friday the 13th part 6, Daphne Ashbrook from Quiet Cool, Tyra Ferrell from Tapeheads and Exorcist III, and Darcy DeMoss from Return to Horror High and For Keeps! John Karlen from Impulse plays Bucky, the owner of the camp, whose constant outrage at Tommy and his antics is perfectly within reason! It’s that Ghostbusters thing: the villain may be a jerk, but he has a solid point nevertheless!

Bucky is trying desperately to impress a group of Japanese investors led by the always-enjoyable Clyde Kusatsu from In the Line of Fire and Godzilla! And yes, this group is always introduced with the bonging of a gong on the soundtrack! Classy move, Gimme an 'F'! Meanwhile Roscoe falls in love with a member of the Faaaaalcons, and to impress the surly object of his affections, he delivers chocolates and swings down from trees, but is only made the guest of honor at a slap party for his troubles! In an extreme of desperation he dresses like Wez from The Road Warrior, and surprisingly that is what works!

After performing a long underwear dance in the shower, Tommy makes an ill-advised bet with Bucky that the Ducks, a meek bunch of klutzes, can beat the fearsome Faaaaaalcons in the big final competition all these camps seem to have! (The performance scenes seemed to me ridiculously elaborate productions for a modest sleepaway camp!) No prizes for guessing that the Ducks transform from goodie-two-shoed stumblebums to sexy professional dancers in a matter of days, and the pee-soaked Bucky loses both his bet and his sanity!

Gimme an F seems like a movie made by strippers and pornographers who, jaded by years of exposure to skin and sex, get their biggest thrill from clothing being left on! Ha ha! It was written by Jim V. Hart, whose next credit would be Steven Spielberg’s Hook, another movie with weird tonal shifts! The filmmaking is nothing to write home about, and while there are some impressively athletic performances, the lack of charm in the leads is everywhere evident! They come off as a bunch of jerks: Bill Murray could prank Morty in Meatballs and not seem too mean about it, but these guys can’t even fire a pissbomb at a nasty crank without coming off as despicable! Ha ha, Gimme an 'F' is a pretty poor and forgettable movie and I award it one locker room flashdance!