Burl reviews Somewhere in Time! (1980)

 

Tick tock, it’s Burl here with a touch of time travel for you! Ha ha, when you think of late 70s-early 80s time-travel pictures, what comes to mind? The Final Countdown, of course, and also, no doubt, Time After Time! But there was another time-travel extravaganza of the era, in which not a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, not Jack the Ripper, but a simple lovelorn longuebönes is sent hurtling through the temporal rift! Yes, I’m talking about the cult romance picture Somewhere in Time!

The longuebönes is a playwright named Richard Collier, played by Christopher Reeve, whom we all recall from Monsignor! In 1972, when he’s a young scribe celebrating his first success beneath the proscenium, an old lady approaches, gives him a pocket watch, and whispers “Come back to me!” Ha ha, eerie! But horror isn’t where we’re going with this, more’s the pity: we flash forward eight years by which time Collier is well-known and much-produced, and struggling to finish his next play! He decides on a change of scenery and drives to the giant Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, where he soon becomes infatuated with a woman in a portrait: a famed stage actress from yesteryear called Elise McKenna, played by Jane Seymour from Live and Let Die!

Well, ha ha, he figures out this is the very same old lady who approached him eight years before, and, his infatuation rapidly metastasizing into obsession, he attempts to hypnotize himself into the year 1912 so that he can meet the object of his fancy! Eventually this actually works, and sure, why not? He manages to meet and charm Elise despite energetic counterefforts from her moustache-twirling manager Robinson, essayed by Christopher Plummer, whom we know so well from bad-guy roles in Dragnet and The Silent Partner and Dreamscape and so many others! But Robinson, though evidently in the grip of his own Elise obsession, even willing to employ toughs to rough Collier up, is unable to prevent the couple from achieving their romantic and sexual destinies! However, the ill-timed discovery by Collier of an anachronistic coin in his pocket sends the gangling clockhopper hurtling back into 1980, where he becomes so depressed that he locks himself in his room, turns white, and dies!

Now, ha ha, this movie was no hit when it was released, but in the years since it’s attracted a cult of romantically-minded people nearly as obsessed with the movie as its hero is with Elise! That doesn’t make it a good movie, but it suggests that there’s something to it, some core attraction worth considering! Is it in the concept, or the execution of that concept, or both? I think it’s maybe a bit of both: the concept is compelling but not exactly groundbreaking or unique; the execution is competent but not exactly brilliant, and these virtues together add up to something that a certain sort of person is just going to love!

The story is very simple: maybe, it seems to me, too much so! That simplicity is probably one of the secrets of its appeal to those who love the picture so much that they travel to Mackinac Island every year for the big Somewhere in Time celebration! Yes, there really is one! But there are lots of little virtues here that I appreciated – the location is very nice, and the acting is strong, for example! And it’s dandy to see veterans like Teresa Wright from Shadow of a Doubt, who plays Elise’s latter day companion, Miss Robert, and Bill Erwin from Jet Pilot and Planes, Trains & Automobiles, who is the elderly bellboy Arthur!

And I do like a time travel story! This one suggests a looping and rhyming time structure, especially once we realize that the photo which initially entranced Collier is the same one we see being taken in a later scene, and that her smile in the photograph was her genuine reaction to catching sight of him coming into the room, so the smile was indeed and directly meant for Collier, which is what entranced him about the photo and led him to do his time travel in the first place! Phew, ha ha!

There’s something very 1980 about the picture, and it fits in, or at least alongside, the other movies of the era that fascinated me as a youngster by the insights into the adult condition which I believed they provided! (I’ve spoken about this elsewhere regarding pictures like The Last Married Couple in America, Six Weeks and It’s My Turn!) As a time travel picture it slots more into the dreamy, was-it-even-real tradition of Midnight in Paris than it does the nuts and bolts approach of, say, The Terminator, but I say there’s room enough for all of them! I can’t say I’ve ever fallen under this film’s spell, but I’ll acknowledge that the spell is real, and that weaving a spell for anyone regardless of their predispositions, is a genuine achievement, and so I give Somewhere in Time two old suits!

Burl reviews 12 Monkeys! (1995)

 

Chee-chee-chee, it’s Burl here with sweet monkey madness! Ha ha, when you think of Terry Gilliam, you think of big fantasy films that were made under circumstances so impossible it’s a miracle they were ever finished! The Adventures of Baron Munchausen fits into this category of course, and we all know Gilliam has faced an uncommon number of hurdles in his filmmaking: from studio heads who didn’t get or like what he was doing, to catastrophes like the death of his lead actor! Though they’re usually the bigger hits on first release, I think these days we tend to forget his relatively smaller, scandal-free, and less fantastical films – The Fisher King, for instance, or the picture under review today, 12 Monkeys!

Of course, seeing as it involves time travel, 12 Monkeys is hardly free of fantastical elements, and there certainly is imagery that evokes fantasy, like the marvelous shots of zoo animals loose in the city! But the picture mostly aspires to ground-level (or below) grittiness, especially in its future segments, which take place after a terrible airborne plague has killed most of Earth’s human population and forced the survivors to take up a subterranean lifestyle! Our hero is a prisoner in this benighted time, meaning his lifestyle is worse yet; but he is volunteered by a very Gilliam-esque panel of scientist-grotesques to travel back in time, find out how the plague started, and hopefully help find a cure!

This grim slaphead, Cole, is played by Bruce Willis from Die Hard and Last Man Standing, and on his first time-travel attempt he overshoots his mark and lands in 1990! There he’s immediately arrested and confined as a looney in a local hospital for the mentally insane! Here he meets two crucial characters: Jeffrey, a hyper-verbal jumpabout played by Brad Pitt from Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood, and sympathetic Dr. Kathryn Railly, essayed by Madeline Stowe from Stakeout and Short Cuts! Ha ha, he also meets The Riddler himself, Frank Gorshin from Hot Resort and Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, a mean doctor who wants to keep Cole locked up! But with the help of future people the time traveller escapes his solitary cell, and the next thing you know he’s been bumped forward to 1996, the first year of the plague!

His adventures in that year comprise the bulk of the picture and provide clarification on his mission! Believing that Jeffrey, whose father is a world-renowned specialist in infectious viruses played by Christopher Plummer from The Silent Partner and Murder By Decree, and who is involved with an animal rights group called 12 Monkeys, will be responsible for loosing the virus upon the world, Cole tracks him to a dinner party; but only later does he realize that a marble-eyed lab assistant played by David Morse from Max Dugan Returns may also have something to do with the terrible events to come!

 

Cole is not a very talkative person, having had his mind scrambled by catastrophe, incarceration, and time travel, and it seems no matter what period he’s in, people want to give him Silkwood showers! In other words he’s a tough character to enjoy, even if he’s easy to understand, and he sure isn’t a lot of laughs! But he loosens up as the picture progresses, and after he kidnaps Dr. Railly becomes a slightly more conventional hero, and the movie threatens to become commensurately less interesting!  Ha ha! But it rallies with some marvelous plotting in the last act, though there’s also a crude bit of misdirection involving Dr. Railly that the movie doesn’t need! It’s all based on Chris Marker’s La Jetée, a movie I enjoy, and which is most evoked in the airport scene that concludes Gilliam’s version!

It's a good, intelligent bit of speculative fiction, and I remember it really stood out in the mid-90s as something thrillingly different! Yes, it’s a bit of a downer in our pandemic-ridden times, but it has plenty to make up for it! Pitt’s performance is highly entertaining, and it’s nice to see Gilliam’s excesses presented in such a controlled manner! It’s no Brazil (a movie I love, ha ha), but it has plenty of its own charms! I give 12 Monkeys three ropes of saliva!

Burl reviews Millennium! (1989)

 

Prepare for cross check, it’s Burl! Ha ha, yes, the picture I’m reviewing for you today has to do with airplanes, though not quite so much as you may think, and at the same time quite a bit more! Does that sound confusing? If so it fits in well with the movie under discussion, which after all is a time travel piece, and those can get mighty head-scratchy! The picture in question is titled Millennium, which, ha ha, is also the name of my cat, who is also frequently head-scratchy!

That and the name are the only connections between this movie and my cat, however! It begins on an airplane captained by Lawrence Dane of Scanners fame, but it bumps into another plane and crashes! When crash investigator Bill, played by songsmith Kris Kristofferson from Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, discovers some looney evidence among the wreckage, and repeatedly notices an attractive blonde lady and committed cigarette smoker called Louise Baltimore (none other than Cheryl Ladd, whom I remember from the 70s as being a brunette), he starts to think something’s gone bizarre! And indeed it has! We quickly learn that Ladd and her attractive co-workers are future people who beam onto crashing planes, zap the passengers into relative safety, and replace their bodies with lookalike husks! Ha ha, they don’t much explore the mechanics of all this, nor do we really learn where the passengers end up, but we get the sense that, while the future people are not evil, they’re also not completely altruistic in their motivations!

Anyway, most of the movie is Bill trying to figure things out, and accidentally zapping himself with one of the zappers the future people carry around; but occasionally we visit the future, where there’s a robot named Sherman, one of the fussy ones who affect an air of superiority while still remaining generally servile, played by Robert Joy from Amityville 3-D! There’s also an old guy called Coventry, in charge of time-travel theoretics and also responsible for warning people about paradoxes, who’s played by Brent Carver from Shadow Dancing, but who looks a little like Sting in community theatre-grade old age makeup!

In the present day of 1989, we have Daniel J. Travanti from St. Ives playing a glasses professor who’s got his suspicions about what’s going on! Ha ha, I quite liked Travanti’s performance here - he takes full advantage of those strings some people attach to their eyewear! There are also all sorts of Canadian actors in the margins of all the time periods: in addition to those already mentioned, we have Maury Chaykin from Curtains, Al Waxman from Spasms, Lloyd Bochner from Point Blank, Gary Reineke from Rituals, Eugene Clark from Land of the Dead, Michael J. Reynolds from Rolling Vengeance, Peter Dvorsky from Videodrome, and more of them besides! Ha ha, it must have been a big deal in the Toronto film acting community, this movie! And behind the megaphone we find the director of Bells and Logan’s Run, Michael Anderson!

The picture’s got some fine ideas in it (like the notion that the future people must continually smoke to maintain the air quality they’re used to in their benighted epoch), some decent time-travel stuff (I liked the scenes set in the early 1960s, especially the snazzy stewardess outfits), and a preoccupation with paradoxes you don’t find in every time travel picture! It also has an inordinate amount of blah-blah-blah, some mighty terrible trick effects, some off-putting confusions, and some moments in which the audience is well ahead of the hero in figuring things out, which is rarely a good idea in movies! Plus there’s a bit in the film in which there’s a jump forward in time (in the normal movie sense of eliding unnecessary scenes), when I thought to myself “Ha ha, thank goodness they jumped past those scenes which could only have been tiresome and obligatory-seeming despite not really being obligatory,” only to have the picture then flash back and show us all those scenes after all!

Every now and again a weird sci-fi co-production emerges from the Great Northern Dominion: The Neptune Factor, The Last Chase, and Johnny Mnemonic are all good examples, and certainly this is too! They’re usually not too successful, ha ha, and can never compete in the international market in the way they seem designed to! Millennium is in no sense a success, but it is weird and slightly compelling in its way, and it has a goofy robot in it, so I give it one and a half pillbox hats!

Burl reviews Frankenstein Unbound! (1990)

 

Attention pilgrims, it’s Burl, here to review the work of a legendary filmmaker! The legendary filmmaker’s name of course is Roger Corman: the fellow who brought us such distinguished works as A Bucket of Blood, Rock All Night, Sorority Girl, and Attack of the Crab Monsters! He took a little break from directing movies which ended up lasting twenty years (though he produced them, and still produces them, with wild abandon), and his return to the director’s chair was this curious item, Frankenstein Unbound!

We begin in the future year of 2031, where a scientist called Buchanan, played by the terrific John Hurt of Only Lovers Left Alive, is putting the finishing touches on his superweapon! The superweapon dissolves matter, but it also opens up some kind of temporal time rift, such as we saw in The Philadelphia Experiment, but here shaped like a purple vagina; and after Buchanan drives home in his talking car to find a bunch of kids in his yard holding a funeral for a bike for some reason, he and his sapient auto get sucked up by the time rift and deposited in 1817, near Lake Geneva!

Naturally, as we know from history, Dr. Frankenstein was conducting his notorious experiments in this area, and of course, once Buchanan and his talking car have figured out where and when they are, and Buchanan has hidden his talking car in a bramble, he walks into a bar and the first person he meets is none other than the modern Prometheus! The good doctor is played by Raul Julia from The Eyes of Laura Mars as an imperious dandy, and after he gets a look at Buchanan’s digital watch, he’s pleased in return to show off the hulking creature he’s built! Nick Brimble from Lust for a Vampire plays the monster, a brutal oaf who speaks in a tragic, baronial timbre, is covered in face putty, and is happy to knock people’s heads off when he takes a mind to!

Meanwhile, of course, Mary Wollstoncraft (that is, the future Mary Shelley) is hanging around, played by Bridget Fonda from Singles, and there are brief, fey, pointless appearances from Byron and Shelley, essayed respectively by Jason Patric from The Lost Boys and rocksman Michael Hutchence from Dogs in Space! And then there’s Catherine Rabett from The Living Daylights as Frankenstein’ sweetheart Elizabeth, who gets cracked open like a walnut by the creature!

Yes, he’ll do violence all right, that creature, and he’s mad mainly because of the meat! Ha ha, no, he’s mad because Frankenstein has thus far refused to make him a mate, but then the doctor obliges him after all, and the mate seems to have CDs growing out the sides of her head; and then the time rift reappears, sending Buchanan, Dr. Frankenstein, the creature and his new jerrybuilt ladyfriend to some kind of frozen future wasteland! Ha ha, the talking car gets left behind in nineteenth century Switzerland, where it presumably will roll around the countryside startling locals with loud honks or unexpected badinage!

The climax involves more killing and the predictable revelation that the wasteland is actually the world of the future, which has come to this sad state thanks to Buchanan’s superweapon, and which he’s fated to wander alone for the rest of his days! Ha ha! I guess this is meant to function as a sort of corollary or echo of the monster’s self-imposed Arctic exile as depicted in the book!

Well, it’s a strange picture, and an odd choice for Corman! Of course, he made all sorts of pictures in his career, so maybe there is no odd choice for him! It’s a bit akin to the Poe films he made, Premature Burial and suchlike, but it has more heads and arms being ripped off than those ones did, ha ha! And it’s less elegantly made, frequently goofy, and in places demonstrates genuine ineptitude! But it also has really effective bits, as when the creature is chasing down Elizabeth’s carriage, or when he goes ape on the torch-bearing townsfolk!

I’m glad it exists though, as a curio if not a compelling piece of cinema; and it’s really not that much goofier than its contemporaries, films like Gothic and Haunted Summer! I thought the stitched-together multicoloured eye on the poster was a pretty cool image, meant no doubt as a metaphoric synecdoche for the creature itself - but it turns out that’s what the monster’s eyes really look like! Ha ha, talk about impractical! But there’s the movie in a nutshell for you - and look, a synecdoche after all! I give Frankenstein Unbound, or F.U. as some may prefer to call it, two vaporized Statues of Liberty models!

Burl reviews The Philadelphia Experiment! (1984)

 

Hurtling through a time tube, it’s Burl, here to review a four-dimensional film from my VHS-spent youth! Now, I’m not talking about The Terminator here, nor Time After Time! I’m not even talking about The Final Countdown, but rather a picture that might have passed that one going the other way in the time tube, a picture known to all as The Philadelphia Experiment!

This is apparently something that John Carpenter was gong to direct, and I’m sure that would have been enjoyable, but he ended up only as an executive producer! This fact puts the movie into a small little group: Mid-Budget Movies Of The 1980s That Carpenter Had Something To Do With But Didn’t Direct, and this is a group which includes Black Moon Rising and not a lot else - ha ha, maybe those cable TV Westerns he wrote that came along in the early 1990s!

Anyway, The Philadelphia Experiment begins in 1943 with a group of Navy men participating in a science experiment intended to make ships invisible to German radar! Instead the test ship is blasted into a time tube, and when two sailors, played by Michael Paré from Streets of Fire and Bad Moon and Bobby Di Cicco from I Wanna Hold Your Hand and The Supernaturals, leap over the railing, they land in Utah c. 1984! Finding an empty bottle of Löwenbräu has them worried the Germans might be lurking around, but on entering a café to discover Humanoids From the Deep playing on TV, they realize some crazy time travel must have occurred!

From here much of the movie is a chase, with an army base security chief played by Kene Holliday from No Small Affair pursuing them from the wastelands of Utah to the orange groves of California and back again! And here we have the root problem with the movie: for every scene in which the police or the Army security folks almost catch the two sailors, and there are many of these, we miss out on some potentially interesting time travel ramification scene! Oh sure, we get a few instances of Paré watching TV or goggling at modern miracles like the aluminum can, but the whole second act is just a big chase, with little scenes of Paré getting to know his new future friend Allison Hayes, who is not fifty feet tall, but is played by Nancy Allen from Robocop!

Along the way, for reasons never made clear, DiCicco’s character suffers fits and ends up disappearing back to 1943! Paré becomes terrified that this will happen to him too, but that's also confusing since I thought he wanted to go home! Still, it’s a good thing he doesn’t, because it turns out that what’s going on is that the scientist who did the experiment back in 1943, who is now elderly and played by Eric Christmas from The Changeling and Porky’s, is up to his old tricks again, and this time has tried to make a small fake town invisible to radar! Ha ha! But this has opened a time tube and all of 1984 is at risk of being sucked into it! Christmas somehow knows that the only solution is to put Paré into a space suit, pop him out the top of a tank and up into the time tube, and have him turn off the generator in the ship! Of course, ha ha, he doesn’t just turn it off, but smashes everything in the control room, especially the evidently critical array of time bulbs, because after all that’s more exciting and cinematic than just turning off a switch!

Louise Latham from The Sugarland Express shows up playing the oldlady version of a friend of Paré’s from 1943, and the picture also features an early appearance from Stephen Tobolowsky from Single White Female, back when he was still moderately behaired! He’s still a glasses nerd, though! But none of this changes the fact that the movie seriously mishandles the potential of its premise! It’s entertaining enough, and the fact that I watched this more than once back in the VHS days, and even had the poster up in my room, seems to confirm that; but you can’t escape the feeling that somewhere, in some dimension or behind some time portal, a much better and more thoughtful movie called The Philadelphia Experiment was made! I give this Philadelphia Experiment one and a half punk rockers!

Burl revews Time After Time! (1979)

Whizzing crazily through time, it’s Burl, here with a time travel suspense-romance that brings us from the gaslit streets of Victorian London to the hills and bridges and concrete canyons of modern-day, or at least 1979, San Francisco! Ha ha, yes, it’s Time After Time -  ha ha, no, not the Cyndi Lauper song, but the movie we all know and love from Mr. Nicholas Meyer!

The story begins in Victorian times, with Mr. H. G. Wells, as essayed by Malcolm McDowell from Get Crazy, inviting his friends over to hear about his invention of a time machine! Ha ha, his buddies don’t believe him, all except Dr. John Leslie Stevens, who turns out to be better known as Jack the Ripper and is played by Morgan himself, David Warner from Nightwing and The Omen; and when the bobbies come a-knocking, he flees the scene in the time machine, doodle-doodle-doo! Luckily the machine has an automatic come-back system, so Wells follows tout suite, and finds out that his new address is San Francisco circa ‘79! Ha ha!

Why San Francisco and not London, you may ask? It has something to do with a Welles exhibit being put on in the City By the Bay! In any case I don’t think we’re meant to think much about it: the focus is on Wells’s dislocation and his steep learning curve as he tries to get used to swingin’ 70s California life! After all, the first person he meets in the new century is a very young Corey Feldman, the lad from Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter! Wells cleverly tracks the Ripper down by going to banks, and in doing so attracts the attentions of currency exchange officer Amy, played by Mary Steenburgen from A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy!

The movie bounces around from light fish-out-of-water comedy to tender romance to ripper murders in which mutilated prostitutes are hung up on lampposts! Charles Cioffi from Klute and Remo Williams appears as a police who’s trying to figure out why ripper murders are happening in Frisky, and meanwhile, at the same time Amy finally realizes who her gentlemanly new boyfriend actually is, and that he is in fact a time traveler, Amy’s pal from the bank is dismembered in an encounter with the murderous Stevens!

With its Miklos Rosza score, the film feels lushly appointed, even if it doesn’t always look that way! Ha ha, Meyer’s filmmaking skills are fairly basic, it must be said, and San Francisco has looked better in nearly every film set there that I can think of! (The Guy Maddin/Johnson Brothers pastiche film The Green Fog offers instructive and immediate confirmation on this - ha ha, even Herbie Rides Again has more Frisco atmosphere!) The premise is clever and engaging, and the actors are charming, but the movie also offers a distinct feeling of not fully rising to its potential! It’s nevertheless a fun divertissement, and something many are fond of!

I remember seeing it on TV as a youth, and I liked it then well enough, so I understand the residual fondness! But as pleasant as it is, ripper murders notwithstanding, its highs do not rise all that terribly high! It’s competent Hollywood entertainment, full stop, and so I give Time After Time two and a half pomme frites!

Burl reviews Bill & Ted Face the Music! (2020)

Ha ha dudes and dudettes, and a most excellent hello to you all! Yes, I’m here to review the very belatedly produced third entry into the Bill & Ted time travel fantasia series! Now, I’ve seen the first of the pictures, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, but never the second, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey! So I was a little worried that I wouldn’t know the whole story of what was going on in this newest entry, Bill & Ted Face the Music!

Well, that turned out not to be a major problem! Familiarity with the characters and their adventures in the first picture proved sufficient background to the tale of Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Ted “Theodore” Logan, who are older now and have not yet managed to compose the world-uniting song the future people prophecied they would write! While they and their band Wyld Stallyns did indeed enjoy a taste of fame, they are now has-beens, forgotten by everyone! Having married their Middle Ages princesses, they have each fathered a daughter who acts exactly in the manner to which we who have witnessed their previous excellent adventures are familiar: perpetual expressions of slacker bewilderment, regular use of overfancy language delivered in California surfer style, glee expressed in air-guitar solos! They’re stoners without drugs, and all too evidently unprepared for the challenges the narrative will throw at them!

Keanu Reeves, well known from John Wick Chapter 2, once again plays Ted, and Alex Winter from The Lost Boys is Bill! It all comes down to a plea from the future people to compose the cosmic song, and their efforts to race through time to snag it from their future selves, while evading a maudlin killer robot the future people have sent after them for some reason! The meat of the movie is their encounters with their future selves, three, five, eight years into the future, and the revelation that these older Bills and Teds are at once craftier, more venal, and even bigger imbeciles than their affable present-day incarnations! If you remember the small scene in the original picture in which pre-Excellent Adventure Bill and Ted, loitering in the parking lot of the Circle K, meet their slightly further along selves, who are friendly enough but also deliver both advice and needless riddles, then the middle act of this picture will be familiar!

William Sadler from Hard to Kill, Demon Knight, and Die Hard 2 returns from the second picture to play the German-accented, oversensitive Spirit of Death, while Hal Landon Jr. from Eraserhead and Amy Stoch from Summer School are fellow returnees, playing respectively Ted’s iron-nosed dad and his ex-stepmother/new stepsister! There are eventually more characters than the movie can really support, but the nature of the picture is such that the usual virtues we look for, like economy of action, elegance of design, or cleanliness of narrative line, don’t much count! Instead it’s gags and nostalgia, which the film delivers not in plenty, but in an acceptable quantity!

It’s a slicker and more expensive picture than the first one at least, and I’d imagine the second one too! It seems good-hearted and un-cynical, which is a refreshing thing in these crazy days, so I liked that! But ultimately there’s not a whole lot to it, and it doesn’t lodge in the mind for very long after a viewing! Maybe if I watch it again (and, having a nine year-old who’s grown to enjoy the slacker antics of Bill and Ted, I surely will), it’ll grow on me a bit, and someday find a place in an old Burl’s heart! Until then, I give Bill & Ted Face the Music two theremin solos!

Burl reviews My Science Project! (1985)

 

By all the brain wizards, it’s Burl, here to review another of the many science lad pictures that came out in the years 1985 through 1986! If you cast your net wide, you can see just how many of them there were: you’ve got Back to the Future, Explorers, Weird Science, Real Genius, The Manhattan Project, Deadly Friend, The Wizard of Science, proto-examples like WarGames, fringe constituents like Flight of the Navigator and D.A.R.Y.L., and then of course today’s entry, My Science Project!

The picture opens with a nice flashback sequence set in the 1950s, showing a plus-fours-sporting Dwight Eisenhower - played by an actor called Robert Beer, who also played Eisenhower in The Right Stuff, and in fact only ever played Eisenhower in every movie he ever appeared in - being shown a UFO, and ordering it dismantled and buried! Thirty years later, grease-stained high school gearhead John Stockwell, who played a grease-stained high school gearhead in Christine, must come up with a project to satisfy his mad hippie science teacher played appealingly by Dennis Hopper from Black Widow! Crawling around in a junkyard, Stockwell comes across a piece of the UFO, and from there it’s the dimwitted greaseball, his bookish tagalong semi-sweetie, an unsavory, finger-gloved best friend played by Fisher Stevens from The Burning, and an intolerable glasses nerd called Sherman, all trying to prevent the device, or gizmo, or whatnot, from opening up a time portal and causing life on earth to become an interdimensional four-vector crossways of simultaneous overlapping gravitomagnetic streams of spacetime! Ha ha!

In theory this sounds interesting, but in practice we get lots of blue-light optical effects, sparking batteries, and a high school invaded by cavemen, conquistadors, Viet Cong soldiers, and a dinosaur, and not much pondering on the larger implications! The trick effects, in particular the dinosaur, are well done, and the desert-town setting is visually appealing and occasionally atmospheric! But the picture is narratively chonky and tonally muddled in a way that usually indicates either bad direction or studio mutilation, or both! Given that the director was a first-timer, and his only feature credit after this was the Whoopi-dinosaur buddy-cop amscray Theodore Rex (which indicates at least that he knew the best part of his debut was the T-Rex), one is tempted to blame him; but Touchstone Pictures was, I believe, known to “touch” their pictures quite a lot before releasing them! Ha ha!

So it’s not a great picture, but it’s occasionally fun, particularly when Dennis Hopper is on screen! There’s a supporting cast of familiar faces too, like Barry Corbin from This House Possessed, playing Stockwell’s dad; Ann Wedgeworth from No Small Affair playing his new stepmom; Richard Masur from The Thing as a tough-guy detective; small roles for Robert DoQui from Cloak & Dagger and Jackson Bostwick from The Prey; and of course Michael Berryman from Deadly Blessing, again playing a mutant! For these worthies, and for some nice trick effects, and for a premise that might have been squandered, but at least had promise, and for the featured appearance of a cherry GTO, I give My Science Project a grade of one and a half laughing stewbums!

Burl reviews Army of Darkness! (1992)

 

Klaatu Burlada Niktoo! Yes, it’s Burl, here to review a movie for you, as I so often enjoy to do! Now here’s a movie I’ve been fond of for quite a few years, though I confess to being fonder of its series forbears than of this picture itself! However, it’s still a tremendous lot of fun, and the movie of course is the third in the Evil Dead trilogy, Army of Darkness!

It’s a curious little trio, because each picture has a different tone, and each to some extent must repeat or at least recap what has come before for those who have not seen the earlier entry, or entries; and at the same time must serve those who like all three! For the record, I love the first one, but am fonder still of the second, which I managed to see in the theatre on opening night by sneaky means! This third adventure of the hapless Ash against the army of Deadites is by almost every measure - budget, spectacle, and laff-count excepted -  the least of the three!

The overarching story involves Ash, played by Bruce Campbell from Maniac Cop and The Hudsucker Proxy, a slightly dim shopman who goes on a weekend vacation to a cabin in the woods, fights devils, and is whisked by a vortex back to medieval England! There he must fight more devils and quest for a copy of the unholy Necronomicon, the all-purpose demon book that contains a spell which the local wizard, played by Ian Abercrombie from Von Ryan’s Express and The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood, can use to send our man Ash back to his position in housewares at S-Mart!

Of course the plot is not the thing here, ha ha! It’s all about the goofery, and the goofery in question is turbo-powered by director Sam Raimi’s great love for the Three Stooges! I share this love, so the poinks and slaps and facewashings which Ash endures, and sometimes dishes out, go a long mile with me! The amazing amount of punishment poor Ash is subjected to is the running joke in all the Evil Dead pictures, and it’s a good one!

Ha ha, and at times, this picture recalls one of the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad movies, or Jason and the Argonauts, except there’s no ship’s crew or Argonauts along, just Ash! We get little showcase segments like Ash fighting miniature versions of himself that have arisen from shards of mirror; Ash splitting in two; Ash trying to claim the book but forgetting the words of his magic spell; and then a whole lot of action japery once it becomes a castle siege!

The picture has all sorts of attractions, like the old-style trick effects, the goofy-gruesome monster design, the uproarious tough-guy dialogue, and of course a special cameo appearance from Bridget Fonda, whom we recall from Single White Female! Campbell pulls off the role of Ash as few others could, and his willingness to be abused by his director is admirable! Ha ha, it’s a rollicking, old-fashioned good time at the movies! I give Army of Darkness three requests for sugar!

Burl reviews Hot Tub Time Machine 2! (2015)

Howdy howdy, it’s Burl, and today I’ve got a review for you of a picture that, ha ha, I can’t believe I watched all of! It was so bad, I’ve got to tell you, and not just bad, but sort of ugly and desperate! But I’m getting ahead of myself: the picture is Hot Tub Time Machine 2, and you now may feel free in joining me in my bewilderment: ha ha, Burl, just why did you watch it? And why are you reviewing it?

Ha ha, I have no proper answer, but we’ll see if I can find one! Now, I did see the original Hot Tub Time Machine in the moviehouse way back in 2010, and, perhaps because I saw it in optimal conditions, which is to say with a group of pals and under certain, ha ha, herbal influences, I enjoyed myself!

I can’t say the same about the sequel! I can hardly bring myself to describe the nonsense plot, but it has something to do with a reworked present involving the loathsome character Lou (played by Rob Corddry from In A World… and The Way Way Back) who stayed back in the mid-80s and has used his knowledge of the future to become a wealthy tech giant! Nick, the more likeable character, has himself stolen future pop songs from the likes of Lisa Loeb and become a famed pop crooner! The babyfat teen who was in the first one is now a butler for some reason, and John Cusack has, evidently, vaporized into nothingness, or been reduced to a singularity, or caught in a moebius whirl, or some other time travel-related affliction! Anyway, he’s nowhere to be seen!

Lou falls victim to a shotgunning, well-deserved, and the race into time is on so that he may be saved! Ha ha, why? Anyway, they end up in the future, where they meet Adam Scott from Our Idiot Brother, who is some relation to Cusack’s character, and wears a grey skirt! Chevy Chase, well-known from Fletch and Christmas Vacation, shows up briefly to deliver puzzling dialogue! Then there occurs a vast number of pop-culture jokes and a lot of movie references! Ha ha, The Terminator is mentioned of course, and pictures like National Treasure and even The Lawnmower Man, just for no real reason!

But seventy-five percent of the gags revolve around the human wil*is, and injuries to the human w*llis, and places in which the human will*s may be ins*rted! Ha ha, it gets pretty wearing! It would be okay if the gags were funny – after all, ol’ Burl’s got nothing against the human wi*lis, or ribald gaggery in general – but they’re not! And, as I mentioned, there’s a strange air of desperation floating over the whole thing, like when drunks shout jokes they believe to be witty into your face at a party!

The only thing worse that the humour are the sad attempts to jiggle our emotions! Ha ha, it just doesn’t work! Almost nothing works, in fact! I’ll admit that a couple of the future technology ideas were clever, and I liked the vengeful car even though that subplot really went nowhere, and there may have been one wan smile in there somewhere, so all in all I’m going to give Hot Tub Time Machine 2 one half of an electric jumpsuit and then never think about it again! Ha ha!