Burl reviews Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds! (1977)

 

Screech screech and aiyeeee it’s Burl, here with Japanese monster action! Ha ha, when I was a kid I had several issues of a magazine called Hammer’s House of Horror, and one of them contained a piece on a movie called Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds! The article was allegedly a review, but the author obviously hadn’t seen the movie and didn’t try to hide that fact; but the write-up, which described centipedes acting up and eels appearing in people’s beds, along with the accompanying photos of dinosaurs and monster birds, made it look like a must-see!

Now all these years later, thanks to the magic of the internet, I’ve managed to catch up with this (in my mind) legendary movie! Now, first off, the title: despite the plurals, the movie contains just one dinosaur and one monster bird! (I guess you could say it’s the titular legend speaking of multiple creatures rather than being a promise of the title itself, but I still say the plural is a bit of pocus!) Secondly, there were no centipedes or eels to be found, unless I nodded off for a minute and missed them! And, I’m sorry to say, nodding off during this picture is a definite risk!

The story is set at one of the lakes which surround Mount Fuji, and I really liked that specificity because I didn’t previously know much about this region! Dinosaurs and monster birds aside, it looks quite pleasant! Nearby is that forest you’ve heard about where people go to kill themselves, and that gets a mention in the movie too – a skeleton discovered there is dismissed as just another suicide, rather than being recognized as the dinosaur and/or monster bird victim that it is!

We open with a woman – a would-be suicide, I think – wandering in the woods! She falls into a cave (there’s a terrific shot of her plummeting toward the camera), where she finds some eggs, and then an egg cracks open and she sees a goochy eye staring back at her! Then we meet the picture’s alleged hero, a geologist called Takashi, who’s described in the film’s IMdB synopsis as an “action scientist,” and ha ha, I guess that’s what he is! On the other hand, for most of the picture he seems almost as sleepy as the Russ Tamblyn character in War of the Gargantuas, a film I was strongly reminded of as I watched this monster bird movie!

The scientist sees the story of the woman who discovered the giant eggs on TV and instantly becomes obsessed first with finding the eggs and then, once he realizes the possibility, with seeing an actual living dinosaur, which was also a pet project of his late father's! Once at the lake, Takashi hooks up with an old flame, Akiko, who is an underwater photographer! More stuff happens, not much of it having to do with either dinosaurs or monster birds though, and finally the picture borrows a scene whole from Jaws (a major inspiration on the first half of this movie) when two wiseacres panic people with a fake fin in the lake! The stunt cruelly interrupts a country music concert held on a floating barge, but thankfully the two pranksters are first swirled in the water like the turds they are, then chomped! A third fellow witnesses this, but, in a heartrending scene, no one will believe him when he reports it!

The monster rumours extend far enough to bring a Scotsman, who tells everybody that, as a Scotsman, he knows it’s no picnic dealing with giant lake monsters! Akiko can certainly confirm this once her diving buddy is chomped in half by the dinosaur, but the gruesome tragedy doesn’t prevent her from taking a shower (providing the picture with that rarity in the kaiju genre: a nude scene!) and doing a cheesecake underwear scene which concludes with a cutaway shot of a doll in diving gear with pink troll doll hair!

When the monster bird finally shows up, it’s almost worth the wait! He grabs people with his talons and then drops them like a jerk; he buffets them with his wings and slaps them with his tail, then causes them all to blow up! Inevitably the two props battle it out, bumping into each other and making screeching noises! A volcanic eruption puts a stop to this rumbustification and provides a seemingly endless final scene in which the two leads are caught in a deadly situation, dangling from a log over a river of bubbling lava!

This absurdly overstretched sequence and its uncertain terminus are frustrating but apt for a movie that’s a frequent bore and a narratively unstructured mess, ha ha! Plus, the monster bird looks like a really ugly version of one of those dino-head grabber toys, and the dinosaur has a freakishly pliable neck! Other trick effects are actually pretty good though, and the slight nudity and slightly more frequent gore give the whole thing a grindhouse feel; also we get the occasional striking shot or moment, like that plummet in the cave! Too often it’s tedious though, and sure could have used more monster attacks, more people being eaten up like junior mints, better characters, a proper story, and a heavy dose of pep! If it comes down to a choice, stick with War of the Gargantuas, but if you do watch Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds you will be able to wring at least some enjoyment from it! I give this picture one and a half depth charges!

Burl reviews Leviathan! (1989)

 

Speaking bubbly, it’s Burl, ducking my head beneath the waves to bring you a review of yet another of the underwater monster movies of 1989! You’ll remember it well, I’m sure: in January we got Deep Star Six, in August we plunged down The Abyss, and somewhere in between, in around March of that year I believe, came this picture, Leviathan!

As has likely been noted by every single other reviewer, if you took Alien and The Thing, mashed them together, plunged them to the bottom of the sea, and made them not very good, you’d get Leviathan! Ha ha, it’s amazing how precisely the picture tries to ape those two predecessors! It’s shameless, really; and then you add on the fact that it was only one of several underwater creature pictures that year, and it starts to seem pretty darn derivative!

Our characters are undersea miners nearly at the end of their ninety-day tour of duty! The boss man is Beck, played by Peter Weller from Buckaroo Banzai and Robocop, and his character note – his single character note – is that he’s not an administrator by trade or avocation, but a geologist, and struggles with the people-managing parts of his job! Richard Crenna from First Blood plays the Wilford Brimley part of the doctor who, on realizing that the problem won’t be cured simply by the application of a little Bon-Zoe, comes to believe the goings-on at the undersea mine must be kept at all costs from infecting the rest of the world!

But wait, just what are the goings-on? Well, the resident jackanapes, an unpleasant, bathrobe-wearing workplace harasser and all-around reprobate called Sixpack, mysteriously tolerated by the rest of the crew and played by Daniel Stern from C.H.U.D., discovers a sunken Russian vessel called Leviathan, and filches some vodka from it! He and a lady called Bo, essayed by Lisa Eilbacher from 10 to Midnight and Beverly Hills Cop, sip from the vodka flask and soon start growing scales and other assorted bodily unpleasantnesses! The rest of the crew, which includes Amanda Pays from The Kindred (in which, you’ll recall, she turns into a fish mutant, ha ha!), Ernie Hudson from Ghostbusters, Hector Elizondo from Pocket Money and The Fat Black Pussycat, and Michael Carmine from Invasion U.S.A., realize, to their horror, that their former colleagues are blobbing together and becoming weird bloodthirsty monsters!

Meg Foster from They Live plays the evil company woman with whom Beck occasionally teleconferences; she’s always hanging up on him and is of no help anyway, so the miners arm themselves with an assortment of makeshift weapons, including a flamethrower, I suppose because Alien and The Thing had them too, a highly impractical-looking saw, a fire axe, and also a hedge trimmer for some reason! The biology of the monsters is pretty confusing: there’s the blobbing together, but also presumably some kind of cell-like division, which, if that happens, is kept off screen! Tentacles that are chopped off swim around and grow into new monsters, or expel toothy eel things that look like the monster from Parasite! In short, you never know how many monsters there are, what they might look like, or what needs to be done for the monster peril to be defeated!

All the monster scenes are terribly staged and incomprehensibly edited, and one gets the sense that thanks to this incompetence, a lot of the creature effects crew’s hard work was elided, obscured, and otherwise ignored! Behind the megaphone is George P. Cosmatos, who brought us Rambo and Cobra (or at least so the credits claim) and directed Weller in a rat picture called Of Unknown Origin, and he brings one or two moments of style to the movie but otherwise works in a very static, pep-free mode! The underwater stuff is done in the same dry-studio way they did that old Irwin Allen show about the bottom of the sea, but, with some fine camerawork and by sending the occasional big-jawed fish across the screen on a string, the effect is not too bad!

The cast, as you can see, is pretty great, and they certainly spent some money on the sets and trick effects! They might have spent more time on the body horror aspect before getting to the monsters, and would that they’d given the characters more than one single characteristic each (Sixpack is an unpleasant horndog; Pays loves money; Hudson hates waves; Eilbacher has nice breasts; Carmine, in the role of DeJesus, is obsessed with Alpine skiing; Elizondo, the shop steward, is a by-the-book union man; and Crenna’s doctor is never around when you need him), but I remember having fun with this in the theatre, as I had fun with all the underwater movies that year, so I’m going to give Leviathan one and a half tube worms!

Burl reviews Deep Blue Sea! (1999)

 

Blub blub it’s Burl, here with more underwater action-horror for you! As you may recall, I have a fondness for such photoplays: the soggybottoms of 1989, for instance, like Deep Star Six and Leviathan and The Abyss! Movies that aren’t necessarily set at underwater complexes but feature water monsters are pretty good too, and the picture under review today, Deep Blue Sea, attempts to combine the charms of two such pictures, Jaws and Deep Rising! Ha ha, I’m surprised they didn’t call it Deep Jaws! And now I hear you asking: well Burl, did they succeed in grafting these two water movies into one satisfying cinematic concoction? Read on, MacDuck!

From Deep Rising they took the 90s-era digital monster effects, a little bit of tomato paste, a lot of goofy dialogue, a gang of non-characters, a big storm, and the word “deep!” From Jaws they took sharks! All of this is set at an underwater installation that differs from the above-named 1989 pictures in that it’s not at the bottom of the sea, but rather some small distance below the surface, with much of it floating like an artificial island! We explore this facility in the company of Mr. Samuel L. Jackson, known from such movies as Exorcist III and Die Hard With A Vengeance, who plays Russell Franklin, the millionairesman who funded the project!

Thomas Jane is a surly diver called Carter and Saffron Burrows is Dr. Susan; and other characters are played by Jacqueline McKenzie from Malignant, Michael Rapaport from Metro, LL Cool J from Halloween H2O (as “Preacher,” cook, parrot owner, and man of God), and of course Stellan Skarsgård from The Hunt for Red October and Dune Part One as The Doc! Their goal? Make sea sharks smart as a way of somehow curing Alzheimer’s! (Ha ha, strangely they ignore the fact that they already have an animal aboard their station that can talk, which is Preacher’s foul-mouthed parrot, so why not test on him!)

Ha ha, it’s a noble goal, but when the inevitable storm comes and wreaks havoc, and the topside portion of the facility is destroyed and the supersmart sea sharks released from their pen, the characters are left wishing maybe they hadn’t poked so much at the bitey fish! Ha ha, naturally the sea sharks want revenge, and they take it out mostly on The Doc, who gets his arm chomped off for starters, then when they’re trying to helicopter him out of there, a shark nabs him off the end of the cable, carries him around a bit underwater, then uses him as a battering ram to get through an underwater window! Oh, poor Doc!

But his hilarious death scene is not the most notable or memorable in the picture - ha ha, that honor of course goes to Samuel L. Jackson, and while since that time there have been many copycat sudden-death scenes to dilute the impact of this one, it still remains amusing, and I can assure you that it was a real gudukus in the theater back when it was new!

When I watched the picture again recently, of course the moment was not so incredible, and while one can’t blame the movie for that, one can blame it for the terrible script, the wafer-thin characterizations, the relentless borrowing from other, better pictures, and the lack of affrights! It’s one of those pictures that takes a while to get going, but once it does, it stays going, so it’s got that going for it! And it does have some moments sprinkled here and there - not many, ha ha, but some! So in the end, when all the bubbles have risen to the surface, I give Deep Blue Sea one and a half parrot-munchings!

Burl reviews The Abyss! (1989)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burl reviews Deep Star Six! (1989)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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