Burl reviews Vampires! (1998)

 

Bluh bluh and again bluh, it’s Burl, here to review vampire antics gone southwestern! It’s a picture from what can only be considered John Carpenter’s declining years as a director (though not as a composer of course!), by which point he had only a picture or two left in him, and one of them was The Ward! Ha ha! But this one has still some Carpenterian touches, and if you ask me he never made an unwatchable picture! The movie I’m talking about here is Vampires!

It’s based on a novel, which I suppose accounts for the rich backstory that is implied and/or spelled out as the picture goes along! We open with a Vatican-funded vampire-killing team run by Jack Crow, played in very James Woods fashion by none other than James Woods from Videodrome! This well-equipped posse includes second-in-command Montoya, essayed by Daniel Baldwin from Nothing But Trouble, and familiar faces like Mark Boone Junior from The Quick and the Dead and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa from Big Trouble in Little China, and there’s also a ridealong priest played by Gregory Sierra from Pocket Money and The Towering Inferno!

Well, they clear out an old farmhouse full of vampires, but don’t find the leader of the bite 'ems: the master vampire! They hold a motel party anyway, and of course the master vampire, played by a tall drink of water named Thomas Ian Griffith, shows up and slaughters everybody! Well, everybody but Jack Crow, his buddy Montoya, and a hired evening-lady called Katrina, played by Sheryl Lee from Wild at Heart! Meanwhile a scarlet cardinal essayed by Maximillian Schell from St. Ives sits at home until the surprise at the end!

Montoya takes charge of Katrina and hotel-rooms her, while Jack Crow and a new ridealong priest, a young beard played by Tim Guinee (who encountered vampires again that same year in Blade), track the master vampire! The rest of the movie almost manages a Phantasm II vibe as they follow the fearsome hemogobbler across the country, evade his traps along the way, and finally confront him at the old mission as he’s about to enact his master-vampire plan! Much baring of fangs ensues, ha ha!

Well, I’ll admit it’s a far cry from the glory days of Carpenter – Halloween, say, or The Fog, or The Thing, or Prince of Darkness! But as I say, there are a few moments here and there which remind you this is indeed a movie from that singular Kentucky-born picturemaker – some characteristic framing, camera moves, Hawksian themes, and of course the score, which is much in the mode of his music from They Live! There’s some nice vampire gore and a performance by Woods that’s so hard boiled it seems demented, but, ha ha, that’s Woods for you!

On the frownier side, the picture has kind of a bad script! There are some bon mots, and Woods elevates it all quite a little bit, but there’s no getting around that this is a simplistic and unfulfilling narrative without much in the way of interior logic! The master vampire is fairly boring, too – he’s just a tall guy who glowers a lot! Much more energy should have been spent on every aspect of this guy: his dialogue, his look, his performance, his pep! He should be a memorable and frightening presence, but he’s just not! He seems more like a local longuebönes recruited for a vampire movie mostly because he’s tall!

There’s fun to be had with the movie, make no McSteak™, but potential-wise I think it leaves a lot of good stuff on the table! While I appreciate the unexpected destruction of the team from an unpredictable, Psycho-inspired narrative point of view, at the same time the movie never really recovers from their loss! The picture tries to make the friendship between Crow and Montoya the emotional centrepiece, but that doesn’t work terribly well, and certainly not well enough to revitalize the Hawksian energy of the opening reel! It’s not too scary and it's too often silly, but après tout it remains a John Carpenter movie! I recall going to see it with my dad back in the day, and it was the perfect sort of movie to see with him, so I have that extra affection for it too! I’m going to give Vampires two hardworking winches!

Burl reviews The Monster Squad! (1987)

 

Ha ha and flapping bats, it’s Burl, coming your way with an all-new review! Now I’m a fellow who saw a lot of movies in the 1980s, and I tried to see just about every horror movie that came along, if I could! Ha ha, I even saw Jaws: The Revenge! But one movie I didn’t bother with was today’s entry, The Monster Squad, because it looked to me like a kids’ movie, and by the summer of 1987 I was simply too sophisticated for such nonsense! I was in the first maturity, the false maturity!

And in the intervening years I haven’t spent a lot of energy tracking it down, even though I was and am a big supporter of director Fred Dekker’s previous movie, Night of the Creeps! But for years now I’ve been catching up with pictures like this and watching them with my son, and this Halloween season was the right time to finally watch The Monster Squad! I’ll admit here and now that I was fearful of a Goonies-style scream-fest, with kids talking like particularly loutish adults and plenty of insults for the portly!

And to a degree, that’s what I got! But in this tale of horror-loving tweens battling real Universal monsters (or as close to that as the Universal legal department would allow, given that this is a Tri-Star production), I also got some idea of why the movie is so beloved by people just a few years younger than me! The horror passion on display is genuine and convincing, and extends from the characters to the movie itself! Ha ha, that goes a long way with this viewer! And the portly child Horace, played by the late Brent Chalem from Moving Violations, who is called “fat kid” even by his supposed friends, gets the kind of validation never given to Chunk in The Goonies!

The kid actors are okay, with the weakest of them probably being the one who plays the lead, Sean! Sean’s cop dad, played by Stephen Macht from Nightwing and Amityville 1992: It’s About Time, and his mom, played by Mary Ellen Trainor who was in Die Hard and also played the mom in The Goonies, are having marital problems, and that part of the movie is a drag, but it doesn’t take up much screen time! The monster actors are pretty good - there’s a Frankenstein Monster played by the marvelous, towering Tom Noonan, celebrated from his appearances in Wolfen and F/X; and a werewolf played by King Vidiot from Joysticks, Jonathan Gries! I wasn’t such a fan of the movie’s Dracula, though - he seemed too posh and uncommitted to his evil most of the time!

Leonardo Cimino from Dune as the Scary German Guy, who is in fact an affable concentration camp survivor, is a delight, but unfortunately there’s an irritating performance from Stan Shaw, an actor I usually like in pictures such as Truck Turner and Snake Eyes and Daylight, as a perpetually sarcastic cop who gets blown up by Dracula! On the backside of the camera, Dekker does a fine job of keeping things moving, and makes sure the kids have an awesome treehouse of horror to hang out in! I wasn’t a big fan of the way the picture looks pictorially, though - the wide screen was a good choice, but the cinematography seemed too bright to me, not evocative of the Germanic look of the Universal pictures! Ha ha, that would have been nice!

The monster designs and makeup are almost all great though, the exception once again being Dracula, who looks like a local actor in a dinner theatre production of the Deane/Balderston play! And there’s some fine carnage for an ostensible kids’ movie, and plenty of adult-ish talk too! It was pretty enjoyable, but frankly no Night of the Creeps! But it was no Goonies either, and for that we can all be grateful! I give The Monster Squad two Return of the Living Dead movie posters!

Burl reviews The Lost Boys! (1987)

Ha ha and hemogobblers, it’s Burl, here to review a goofy movie about cool vampires! Yes, of course I’m talking about The Lost Boys, which many consider one of the key vampire pictures of the 1980s, alongside Fright Night, Near Dark, and to a lesser extent, Vamp!

But as silly or juvenile as those movies can occasionally be, they at least seem more or less made for adults, whereas The Lost Boys, its R rating aside, is, to me, a close cousin to The Goonies or something like that! Frankly, even back when I went to the theater to see the movie in the summer of ’87, having been primed by the exciting-looking stills in Fangoria magazine, I didn’t care much for it!

Watching it again as a putative adult, it’s still neither a good vampire movie nor an effectively scary movie, nor a terribly good movie at all! It has an entertaining, empty slickness to it though, and some good-looking photography from, of all people, Michael Chapman; and the horror end is held up somewhat by some nice makeup trick effects from Greg Cannom (who does the same vampire cheekbone and eyebone makeups he did in Vamp)! There’s even a little bit of gore, though would-be treats like the exploding head are cut away from very quickly and subsumed in showers of sparks while they’re happening! But this is one of those pictures that can be handily summed up in a single image, and that image is of an oiled-up shirtless guy playing the saxophone on a beach!

Aside from that guy, the cast has some ringers! Dianne Weist from It’s My Turn plays the single mom forced by circumstance to move herself and her two sons to the town of Santa Carla, “murder capital of the world,” where her eccentric dad, Barnard Hughes, dwells in a large folk-art cabin! Jason “Keyhole” Patric, going full mannequin, plays the older brother who first comes into conflict with, then is seduced into joining, the local vampire club! Jami Gertz is the token lady in the gang, and there’s a kid too, but the potential of a vampire kid, a bitter and ageless being in a child’s body, so compelling and horrifically realized in Near Dark, is completely ignored here! Kiefer Sutherland, playing just about the same character he did in Stand By Me: that is, a bully with pretensions to suavity, runs the club, and they like to race dirtbikes, hang from bridges, and generally fly around putting a biting on the good people of Santa Carla!

Of course the two Coreys are present and accounted for: Haim from Watchers, and Feldman from Friday the 13^th part 4! Corey plays the younger brother, while Corey of course plays one of the Frog brothers, a fraternal order of pubescent Van Helsings who know the town is full of vampires and would like nothing better than to vanquish them! And then of course there’s the local video store owner, played by the famous milquetoast from Death Valley, Edward Herrmann, who sports the movie’s most hilarious 80s fashions and who may know more about the bloodsucking than he’s ready to tell!

The vampires, meanwhile, hang out in an old hotel that sunk into a crack or something, where they hang upside down and worship Jim Morrison! They’re a squirrely bunch, and one is pleased when they go down much more easily than most movie vampires do! A few squirts of holy water here, a stake in the heart there, and these frilled-shirt laddies are done like dinner! Ha ha! And there’s a death by stereo too!

When I first heard this movie was being made, I thought the title implied a rich new rethinking of the vampire legend! Ha ha, how wrong I was! It’s a fashion show as much as it is a movie: fun, if you like that sort of thing, but desperately inessential! I give The Lost Boys two garlic T-shirts, and even that feels a bit too generous!

Burl reviews Innocent Blood! (1992)

Ya pastrami, it’s Burl, here to review a John Landis horror picture I’d somehow never before seen! Ha ha, I guess this movie, Innocent Blood, is really the only other full-length Landis horror movie besides An American Werewolf in London, and it’s kind of a mystery why I didn’t go see it back when it first came out in 1992! I was going to see lots of movies back then, mostly at the budget cinema, and as a horror-loving Landis fan it’s inexplicable that I gave it a pass! Just one of those things, I guess! Now that I think of it, I was living in another city at that time and probably didn’t have much disposable income! Not like now, ha ha, ha ha, ha!

Well, I’ve finally caught up to the picture! I’d always assumed it was a fairly lightweight mock-horror picture, without much, you’ll pardon the expression, bite, ha ha! But turned out to be stronger meat than I’d supposed, featuring plenty of nudity and a decent helping of gore! Ha ha, a pleasant surprise!

It seems that a French vampiress is living in Pittsburgh for some reason (perhaps it’s  the same reason a British vampire is living in Detroit in Only Lovers Left Alive!), where she tries to live a low-key existence by preying exclusively on criminals! This backfires when she puts a non-fatal biting on good old Robert Loggia, whom we know from Psycho II and Armed and Dangerous and orange juice commercials; he’s a brutal capo who is at first totally confused to find himself a vampire, but eventually realizes it might just be a good way to conduct his business!

 Our pretty hemogobbler, wishing to rectify her mistake, hooks up with undercover cop Anthony LaPaglia, from Betsy’s Wedding, and chases after old Loggia! But Loggia puts a biting on several of his underlings, figuring that by such a strategy he’ll soon be the ruler of the underworld in more ways than one, ha ha! He first bites his lawyer, Don “Toy Story” Rickles, but this ends in Rickles’ spectacular demise in a hospital when the curtains are opened to let in the daylight! Linnea “Witchtrap” Quigley plays the screaming nurse!

There are plenty of director cameos of course, this being a Landis picture! We see Sam “The Quick and the Dead” Raimi (a better actor here than he was in Indian Summer, ha ha!), Dario “Opera” Argento, Michael “Fletch” Ritchie and Frank “The Dark Crystal” Oz! And there are plenty of other familiar faces: David Proval from Mean Streets and Vice Versa; Kim “The Club” Coates, Marshall “Stand By Me” Bell, Angela “F/X” Bassett, Luis “The Limey” Guzmán; and, in the role of the cowardly paparazzo, Tom “Creepshow” Savini! Everyone in the movie is watching other movies: vampire pictures of course, of both Universal and Hammer varieties, but also The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Phantom of the Rue Morgue (the clip used includes that great skylight gorilla jump, ha ha!) and even Strangers on a Train!

I was indeed gratified that the movie delivered the goods, along with many incidental pleasures! On the other hand, at nearly two hours in length it’s absurdly overstretched, and it feels it! There’s a great deal of dialogue and incident I would classify as “dumb,” though, ha ha, I hate to be so negative! And I can’t say that Anne Parillaud, the vampiress, is very effective in the role! But in the end the good stuff just barely outweighs the bad, and while it’s no classic, it’s an enjoyable time at the movies! Had I seen in in the theater back in 1992, I’d have probably liked it even better! I give Innocent Blood two trademark Landis wildcat roars!

Burl reviews Lifeforce! (1985)

Ha ha! Burl here, returning to the Tobe Hooper well so soon after The Texas Chainsaw Massacre part 2! In fact I’m staying within the Cannon Years, that period in which Hooper made films for the Golan-Globus boys! Today’s picture, Lifeforce, was the first and surely the most expensive of the three!

Now, I’ll say up front that I don’t have what you might call a fetish for this picture, exactly, but I find myself hugely tickled by its weird, self-serious craziness! In other words, ha ha, I like it! Nobody else does, but I do! You’ve found the one person! And what’s more, I like all the acting in the picture! And boy, is there a lot of acting in this picture!

Now some of you may not have seen Lifeforce, so I’ll give you an idea of the story! Ha ha, it actually hews pretty closely to Dracula! There’s a multinational space mission to go check out Halley’s Comet, and the captain is probably the last person who would be put in charge of a spacecraft in real life, none other than Steve Railsback from Armed and Dangerous! Near the comet is a behoimeth of an alien ship, and inside that are some dead giant bats and three naked people - two fellows and a pretty lady - reposing in crystal coffins!

Commander Railsback falls for the lady instantly, and who can blame him; but on the way back to Earth, everybody else on the ship dies of energy depletion! Earth people find the derelict floating in orbit, and the space people, and then, back at Space Headquarters in London, there are incidents involving naked ladies rising, blue swirling lights, an extreme case of wrinkleface, and running through doors, oh so many, many doors! Ha ha!

The escape pod lands and Commander Railsback joins the brain trust: A thanatologist played by Frank Finlay; SAS man Peter “The Hunt For Red October” Firth; and ever-sleepy Michael “For Your Eyes Only” Gothard in the role of some kind of doctor who catches a half-suck from the space lady! And the chase is on before the space vampire plague destroys the city and the very planet itself!

Ha ha, this is one nutty movie! It all seems to stem from one decision: casting buggy Steve Railsback in the lead! That’s a very strange decision, and seems to me it could have easily gone another way, if, for example, Golan and Globus had decided “Ha ha, we’re spending so much on this picture, let’s get a star! Let’s get Steve Guttenberg!” I see you shiver, but it could have happened! Anyway, I think Railsback gets it completely right! He’s totally bonkers, but when you discover what his character’s been going through for almost the whole film, you realize there was no other way he could have played it!

The other actors all do their own thing, which normally might be considered a criticism, but here somehow works just fine, like a crazy orchestra that plays random notes off tempo and out of tune but comes up with a mad, atonal masterpiece! I particularly like Frank Finlay’s performance, the pleasures of which for me are best exemplified in the moment he says “I seem to… sense it!” If you notice that moment, you’ll know what I’m talking about! Firth, with his authority and clipped delivery, makes a terrific policeman, and Gothard, who was always effective and is again here, really sells the idea that he’s ready to barf and fall fast asleep, in that order!

There are yet more fine actors to enjoy! Patrick Stewart from Dune shows up as a possessed asylum keeper who gets first sat on and then kissed by Railsback; and the creepy headmaster from A Clockwork Orange plays Britain’s foreign minister! (It seems like a questionable bit of casting until you recall the sordid tales from the ‘70s that are now coming up in UK media!) And behind the scenes we have such heavyweights as Alan Hume, the cinematographer who was shooting the Bond pictures and Return of the Jedi around this time; and Henry Mancini, who provides a score of ludicrous but I think admirable bombast!

Then there are the trick effects, which are splendid! There are lovely green spacescapes, bubbly ship interiors, and I’ve always liked the twinkly blue slit-scan light effect that is so frequently used in the picture, though I associate it more with Douglas Trumbull than John Dykstra! Plenty of Special Makeup Effects too, which for me were again mainlined through Fangoria, creating an instant vampire-like hunger to see the film! Ha ha!

It’s a demented and stupid movie in so many ways, but the simple unlikelihood of such a thing ever being made draws me to it! I surely do recognize its weaknesses, but uniqueness is a quality to be valued and I know of no other movie quite like Lifeforce! It’s at once a sci-fi adventure, a psycho-sex thriller, a zombie apocalypse and a totally crazy goofshow, and I’m going to give it three handy-dandy leaded-iron swords!

Burl reviews Only Lovers Left Alive! (2013)

Bluh bluh, it’s Burl, here to review a vampire picture for you! But yes, you’re right, it’s not quite the usual vampire picture, but a vampire picture made by Jim Jarmusch! And if you’re now making the assumption that the vampires in Only Lovers Left Alive are louche, international sophisticates who consume culture as hungrily as they do blood, you’d be entirely correct! Ha ha!

I have a long and fulsome relationship with Jarmusch films! For example, I saw Mystery Train at a premiere festival screening – the North American if not the world premiere, in fact – and at the end of it, after Jarmusch did a little Q&A, they rolled a piano out onto the stage and Screamin’ jay Hawkins ran out and jumped on top of it, pounding on the keyboard upside down and shooting fireballs from his fingertips! Ha ha, it was great! Another time I saw Year of the Horse at a midnight screening where Jim and, of all people, Henry Silva came out and did a marvelous talk! I’ve seen as many as possible in the movie theatre: Stranger Than Paradise, Dead Man, Ghost Dog and so forth! In short, I’m a fan!

And so along came Only Lovers Left Alive, and it did not disappoint! The picture stars Tilda Swinton, who has of late been populating Wes Anderson films like Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Tom Hiddleston, of The Avengers and Midnight in Paris fame, as two vampires named Adam and Eve, married but living apart, and still very much in love! They don’t put a biting on people, but get their blood from hospitals, and each of them have spent centuries reading, listening to music, learning about science and so forth! The only area of interest they don’t pursue is history, since, ha ha, they’ve lived it!

Eve dwells in Tangiers and hangs out with aging grampire Christopher Marlowe, who really did write Shakespeare’s plays and who is portrayed by that aging old grampire John Hurt! Adam, on the other hand, is a mopey postrocker living in the wildernesses of Detroit; his Renfield is an eager-to-please longhair named Ian, played by Anton Yelschin from Fright Night and Star Trek Into Darkness! We get a sense of their lifestyles and the things they enjoy doing, and after a while Eve journeys to Detroit to visit her hubby! (She books nighttime flights to get there, and the movie ignores the fact that there’s no such thing as a transatlantic flight which takes place entirely at night! But never mind!)

Soon, as foretold by dreams, Eve’s sister-buddy arrives to shake things up! Ha ha, she’s played by Mia “Stoker” Wasikowska like a vampire version of Ian Holm’s daughter from The Sweet Hereafter! A crisis point is arrived at and the two hemogobblers recuse themselves to Tangiers, where more problems await!

But you can forget about all the character and plot stuff I just told you, because really this movie is about what Jim Jarmusch would do if he was a vampire, and more particularly a movie about appreciating cool stuff! They’re really just a pair of superfans, immortal observers of the great cultural tapestry mankind is weaving just (it seems) for them, and which they embellish regularly themselves!

Some of the dialogue and the stuff struck me as rather obvious or hamhanded; but many other times I was pleasantly struck by a flourish or an idea! There’s a marvelous scene in a movie palace that felt almost like a centerpiece or Holy Motors-style entr’acte! The punchline to this scene made me actually wince, for I saw the movie in a cavernous theatre which is, in a few days’ time at this writing, due to close its doors forever! I have a real history with this particular downtown threeplex – a movie of my own premiered there, after all – and will miss it most heartily!

I enjoyed this vampire picture, so different from and yet so indebted to the Hammer vampire pictures of yore! I’ll give Only Lovers Left Alive three faces melting in acid!

Burl reviews The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman! (1970)

El lobo fantastic, it’s Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to review another effort from Paul Naschy, the Iberian Chaney Jr., who of course also starred in House of Psychotic Women! This picture is called The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman (though I saw it under the title Blood Moon), and it’s one of the many movies in which old Naschy plays his tragic continuing character Count Waldemar Daninsky!

Having evidently been “killed” in the previous installment of the Daninsky saga, this picture opens with old Waldemar on a slab as a haughty coroner digs out the silver bullets from his chest! Ha ha, this proves an unwise gambit, as Waldemar soon sprouts a shaggy growth on his face and puts a biting on the coroner and his pal! Then the bulky lycanthrope moves into a large house in the country, the sort avoided by sensible villagers, especially around Walpurgis Night!

Ah yes, Walpurgis Night! It sits on the opposite side of the calendar as Halloween, but it’s apparently just as spooky, as Waldemar emphasizes to the two nubile young ladies who show up at his castle after they suffer car trouble while hunting for the resting place of a notorious witch! Waldemar is looking for the very same witch, so everyone gets along splendidly! Ha ha, one of the ladies even falls in love with Waldemar!

But of course there are complications! The witch is also a hemogobbler, and she’s resurrected easily enough when one of the ladies cuts herself over the grave! Isn’t that always the way, ha ha! Then for a while we get alternating werewolf and vampire attacks, some of them pretty bloody but not memorably so! The vampiress is often shown approaching her victims in slow motion and this produces a genuinely eerie effect – I think it’s more successful here than it was in those Blind Dead pictures, and this picture came first!

But for the most part it’s a pretty talky picture, and you have to wait a long time for the promised monster mash! The climax, when it comes, is a bit of a disappointment! Waldemar spends the whole picture worrying and warning about the horrors of Walpurgis Night, but not a whole lot seems to happen on that fateful evening! Nothing more out of the ordinary than has already been occurring, anyway!

So that’s too bad, but the matted werewolf makeup and Naschy’s committed performance from beneath it will certainly keep you interested! There are pretty ladies and spooky scenes, and a monster battle with a foamy disintegration at the end – ha ha, what more do you want! I’m going to give The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman two painted-on widow’s peaks!

Burl review's 'Salem's Lot! (1979)

Bluh bluh, it’s Burl, here to tell you all about the vampires! Yes, I’m reviewing ‘Salem’s Lot today – the full length 1979 mini series, which I came across on VHS recently, and of course which was sequelized by none other than Larry Cohen in A Return to 'Salem's Lot! Ha ha, I got a whole box of VHS tapes through the kindness of a family member, all of them like new, and this double cassette was among them! (There was also a double cassette special edition of Hellraiser, and naturally Children of the Corn was in there too!)

Anyway, I was one of the millions of youngsters terrified by ‘Salem’s Lot on its original airing! At least I think that’s when I saw it, though I would have been pretty young! I remember some of the key scenes, like the kid whose younger brother appeared floating at the window (extra scary for me because I had – well, still have! – a younger brother of the same type!) and Mike the gravedigger jumping down into the grave and opening up the coffin! But the scariest scene for me was when the two guys (Mike and somebody else, I think) are transporting the big crate which we know contains the Nosferatu-esque hemogobbler Mr. Barlow!

Ha ha, it was all pretty scary at the time, and while it’s not so much any more, it remains a creepy and well-done television movie, which feels a lot quicker than its three hour running time would indicate! The story, for those who require it, has a writer returning to the small Maine town he was born in (ha ha, yes, as a matter of fact this is a Stephen King story!) and investigating the creepy house he once got spooked by as a child! Coincidentally, a vampire and his friend have just moved into that very house, and soon the townspeople are looking a mite pastier than before! Ha ha!

The picture was directed by Tobe Hooper, the man who later brought us such gems as The Funhouse and Lifeforce, and who at that time had just been fired from directing The Dark! He does an okay job on what must have been a tight schedule and low budget! The real draw, at least nowadays, is the cast, specifically the great James “Bigger Than Life” Mason as the vampire’s friend! Ha ha, he’s a lot like the handyman in Fright Night, in that he isn’t himself a vampire, but appears to have some superstrength and possibly other powers as well! And both of those fellows go down hard as they’re descending a staircase in a menacing fashion! Very similar scenes, ha ha!

Also in the cast we find Bonnie Bedelia, the lady from the Die Hard pictures, as the writer’s ill-fated ladyfriend; Geoffrey “The Fat Black Pussycat” Lewis as the ill-fated gravedigger; George “Massage Parlor Hookers” Dzundza as the ill-fated cuckold; Fred “Moving Violations” Willard as the ill-fated realtor; Ed “Exorcist III” Flanders as an ill-fated doctor; Kenneth “Dune” McMillan as the surprisingly not ill-fated town constable; and a bunch of fine old-timers like Lew Ayres, Marie Windsor and Elisha Cook Jr., who also battled Blacula and is of course well known from his role as Grandpa in The Trouble With Grandpa! Phew, that’s a lot of actors! And I haven’t even mentioned scary-faced Reggie Nalder, who plays the ghoulish head vampire, or Hutch himself, who plays the rather bland hero!

Ha ha, that was one of the big changes from the King book that improved things, I thought – making the vampire more of a hideous bloodsucking animal than the urbane, sarcastic man-‘bout-town he is in the novel! It’s sort of the opposite of Christine, where they got rid of the backseat corpse of Roland D. LeBay! But ‘Salem’s Lot goes for the gusto with this great vampire; and it also pushes the violence about as far as it could go in a 1979 TV movie!

It’s an entertaining and engaging watch, a little chintzy and flat here and there, and too willing to let loose threads flap around everywhere; but overall it’s not too bad! I’m going to give ‘Salem’s Lot two and a half glowing bottles of holy water!

Burl reviews A Return to 'Salem's Lot! (1987)

Ha ha, bluh bluh! It’s Burl here with a review of a vampire picture! This one is A Return to ‘Salem’s Lot, Larry Cohen’s name-only sequel to the Tobe Hooper adaptation of the Stephen King book! You probably recall that TV movie – it was spooky, especially when the kid shows up at the window! So it’s pretty strange that Larry Cohen got the job of making the sequel, because his movies are a lot of things, but they’re not spooky!

He makes idea movies, I guess you might say! There’s always one or two ideas in there that make you go “Ha ha, that’s pretty cool!” But then he usually forgets about the meat and potatoes of making a genre movie, which is to say the actual writing and directing parts! He does those things, technically speaking, but he just doesn’t do them very well!

But perhaps I’m being unfair! A better way to say it is that he doesn’t make movies the way we’re all used to movies being made! That’s just his way, and it’s not intrinsically bad – it’s just that the decisions he makes usually don’t work as well as if he’d gone a more conventional route, or if, better yet, he’d chosen another, better iconoclastic direction!

All this is by way of saying that I’m a Larry Cohen fan, but am heavily prejudiced against his movies! I guess that’s why I never bothered seeing this particular movie until the other day! It’s strange – I’ve seen most of his pictures, and have even seen It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive more than once, but I always steered clear of this one! Turns out it’s a pretty enjoyable little snapparoo!

Michael Moriarty (of course!) plays some kind of anthropologist, or what Larry Cohen imagines an anthropologist to be, and through subterfuge he is lured to the vampire-ridden down of ‘Salem’s Lot and enlisted by the local hemogobblers to write the history of their race! Therein lies the notion that is the true heart of the picture: the idea that the vampires have their own history in parallel to that of humans, and that they see themselves as essentially harmless (they feed off cows, ha ha!) and unfairly maligned!

But Moriarty’s incredibly foul-mouthed son, who’s along for the ride, becomes enamored of bloodsucking ways, and he starts looking a little pale and swearing more than usual when the sun hits his eyes! Ha ha, he truly lays a salty tongue on everyone! In the meantime a gobblety-faced creature is lurking in the woods and munching on stray teenagers! Pretty soon none other than Sam Fuller shows up to help battle the fiends!

Sam Fuller turns out to be exactly what the picture needs, and he helps shore up Michael Moriarty’s typically fine performance! Andrew Duggan is really good as the lead vampire, Judge Axel, who is also, I believe, meant to be the gobblety-faced vampire who lurks in the woods; and there are a number of other veterans performers who do a fine job! But all the under-thirty thespians are just wretched, ha ha, and it really hurts the picture!

This is the sort of thing that gives Larry Cohen movies their amateurish, community-theater reputation! It’s too bad! I sure wish old Lar would take a little extra time casting his pictures and working with the actors! It’s like he said, okay, I’ve got Moriarty, no need to bother with actors any more! Well, I could go on, but there comes a point when, as a Larry Cohen fan, you just go okay, God Told Me To, okay, The Stuff, okay, It Lives Again, okay Q, okay fine! And you leave it at that! In the meantime, I give A Return to ‘Salem’s Lot two and a half vanloads of punk rock victims!

Burl reviews Vamp! (1986)

Bluh bluh, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m here to review a vampire picture today, Vamp, and it’s one that doesn’t get talked about all that much! I discovered the movie on video, and it was one of those pictures that I considered at the time to be incredibly stylish, and the (considerable) entertainment value of which arose directly from that style! But just to give you some perspective, other movies I felt that way about included Fandango and Three O’ Clock High!

These were not my favourite movies or anything, but I enjoyed them! And when I watched Vamp again very recently, I still enjoyed it, and once again wondered why it didn’t become a bigger sensation! The style is pretty sophomoric, with red and green gels, canted angles and overhead shots getting plenty of play! But it still has a genuinely cinematic energy that I find compelling! Plus it has a decent soundtrack, including a song by Concrete Blonde, whose music was all over the place in those days, livening up pictures like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and The Hidden!

The story is pretty simple: three college fellows are tasked by the fraternity they hope to join to procure a stripper for a big frat party! It’s a similar starting point to that fine fellow 80s horror-comedy, Night of the Creeps! The lads are played by Chris Makepeace from Meatballs, Robert Rusler from A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 and Weird Science (he plays pretty much the same character in all three of these pictures, ha ha!) and Gedde Watanabe from Sixteen Candles and Gremlins 2: The New Batch! They end up at a peeler bar run by none other than Grace Jones, and from there it’s vampire antics all the night long!

I recall Vamp getting compared to Fright Night a lot at the time, and I guess that’s fair! But it’s also quite a bit like After Hours, the fine Scorsese picture about one man’s scary night in the big city – in other words, it’s an example of what Roger Ebert (I think!) calls the One-Damn-Thing-After-Another movie! Poor old Makepeace is nearly eaten by an elevator, chomps on a cock-a-roach, has his lifestyle shirt assaulted, faces down a nefarious albino, and his best pal is turned into a vampire! Also, he’s involved in an incredible car spinout, which is one of the best parts of the picture!

The acting is pretty good all around, and Grace Jones is a particular standout, even though she doesn’t have a lot to do! But she does a (ha ha) BURL-esque dance in paint-makeup designed by Keith Haring himself (who also made a chair for the scene), and also has a pretty sexy scene with the smarmy, oft-doomed Rusler! There’s a little bit of blood and gore in this scene, and one or two others, which livens the movie up still further! Her vampire meltdown at the end is a little on the budget side of things, especially when compared to something like Fright Night, but it serves the purpose pretty well!

Vamp is not a movie I can defend with logical arguments or eloquent verbiage! It’s just a little, neglected movie that I used to enjoy most heartily, and which I’m glad I now own the DVD of! I was happy to watch it again, and I’m going to give it two and a half flying little girl vampires!

Burl reviews Fright Night! (2011)

Ha ha! That’s right, it’s Burl talking! As I write, it’s one of my favorite seasons of the year: the time of the late-summer horror releases! For years, Hollywood seems to have held a couple of horror movies in reserve for August, and this year is no exception! Back in August of 1985, the original Fright Night came out, and now, following that pattern twenty-six years later, a new remake comes along! In 3-D, ha ha!

Of course there have been some changes made! The original took place in a kind of Spielbergy back-lot neighborhood, like in The ‘burbs, and this one takes place in more of a Spielbergy tract-home neighborhood, like in Poltergeist: a little square in the middle of the desert that seems like some sort of drunken city planner’s error! The bright lights of Vegas are not far away from this benighted place, but you have to drive through a stretch of dark desert to get there, and so there is a distinct sense of isolation patrolling the streets of the drab sub-suburb!

And of course isolation is the last thing you want when a vampire named Jerry moves next door, as happens to poor Charlie Brewster! His ex-pal Evil Ed, who is less of an outrageously h*moer*tic monster enthusiast and more of a straight-up nerd in this version, is the first one to twig to the presence of the fiendish hemogobbler, but all his attempts to persuade his now-cool buddy Charlie of Count Jerry’s evil intentions come to naught!

Some restructuring of the plot and incidents means that we get significantly less Evil Ed in this version than in the original, and now that I think of it, I don’t even know if he is referred to as “Evil” in the new one! That would be a bit of a loss, but also in keeping with what I see as the deficiencies of this remake! A guy who was a horror fan in the original is now a garden-variety nerd; the horror star whom the hero turns to for vamp-killing help in the original is now a cheeseball Vegas magician! But while I decry these alterations in the severest terms, I can also understand why they had to be made! In 1985 Peter Cushing was still walking around, and Vincent Price and John Carradine too – all the great second-wave horror stars! But who would you plausibly model such a character on today? Robert Englund? Tony Todd? Those guys are great, but they don’t know anything about vampires! Ha ha, it’s not like you’re going to ask the cast of those Twilight movies, which aren’t worth a cruickshank if you ask me!

So while I’d like to say that the changes in this new version of Fright Night don’t amount to a butterberry, I just can’t condemn them too much! For the most part the movie is a solid and entertaining bit of disposable summer cinema and a worthy successor to a movie that is itself pleasant enough – and a personal favorite, ha ha! –  but no world-beater! I give it two and a half sharpened Century 21 signs! It’s a pretty good night out, so go on and give it a try!

Burl reviews The Keep! (1983)

Hello! Yes, you guessed it, it’s Burl! I’m here to review an old Michael Mann movie called The Keep! This one’s pretty hard to find unless you’re a VHS collector like me, but if you enjoy the films of Mann, particularly Manhunter, you might find the effort worthwhile!

Apparently the original cut of this movie was three hours long, which is not as unusual as you might think, but in this case, being cut down to 93 minutes resulted in a very oddball and choppy movie indeed! It’s not so much that the story is hard to follow, though there are certain aspects which could really use some clarification, but the movie feels rather like it was made from a treatment rather than a fleshed-out screenplay!

So as I’ve read the book it was based on and have seen the movie several times over the years (I even saw it in the theatre!), I was tempted to review not the movie, but the movie I imagine Michael Mann would have released if he could! (He was pretty clout-free in those days, I guess!) However, that seems a little pointless, since none of us can watch that picture, and I’m fairly sure that, even if the elements were still locked away in the Paramount vaults somewhere, and were made available to him, Mann will never bother trying to piece together a director’s cut! Still, ha ha, you never know!

The story is set in Romania in the earlier days of the Second World War! German soldiers truck into a little town and set up camp in an old castle-like structure, which soon proves to harbor something even nastier than Nazis! At least, that’s what the movie wants you to think, but as the creature only kills Nazis and, at least in the final cut, gives no hints as to his larger goals, he comes off as rather a decent chap!

Soon SS-Einsatzkommondo Sturmbannfuhrer Gabriel Byrne arrives, believing the killings are the work of partisan villagers! He starts shooting people at random, hoping to smoke the partisans out, but no such luck! The highly mysterious and purple-eyed Scott Glenn, whom we recall from The Right Stuff, shows up almost but not quite wearing his net shirt from Urban Cowboy, and is soon making sweet love to the pretty daughter of a Jewish academic played by Ian McKellen in old age makeup! As in Heaven Can Wait, we get to see an actor we now know as an old man in speculative old man drag years before actually becoming an old man! But the supernatural creature makes a deal with the old professor, and zaps him young again! 

However, even the indescribably ancient power of this ferocious being is no match for Ian McKellen’s eyebags! It all leads to a finale involving many, many optical effects and colorful animations, courtesy of special effects man Wally Veevers, whose final film this was! Speaking of the special effects, I want to mention the great smoke effects used to cloak the monster during one excellent scene where he saves the professor’s daughter from a rape attempt, and then carries her back to her room! Really cool trick effects, I have to say!

In the end, though, despite several nice visual moments and some committed thesping, the movie is just too nonsensical to rate very highly! Also, I have to say, the Tangerine Dream score is a little bit bonkers, and frankly kind of chortle-worthy! I certainly appreciate the attempt to do something different, but in this case it didn’t really work! Sorry Mann! I give this movie, or at least the truncated cut of it, one and a half glowing nickel crosses!

Burl reviews Fright Night! (1985)

Hi, Burl here! I have to say, I have some pretty fond memories of the summer movies of 1985! I’d probably have fond memories of the summer movies from any year of my youth, but 1985 is on my mind because today I thought I’d review the original version of Fright Night!

So many wonderful pictures came out that summer! In May there was James Bond fighting Christopher Walken on a blimp in A View To A Kill, Chevy Chase using hilarity to fight Tim Matheson in Fletch and Rambo fighting just about everybody in Rambo! In June came The Goonies (which I dutifully saw, but thought was pretty dumb), Silverado (which I saw later and felt was okay), Cocoon (which I saw in the theatre twice in one night so that I could play a joke on my friend!) and St. Elmo’s Fire, which isn’t worth a carbuncle, but for some reason I really love the poster! Ha ha, the heat this summer is at St. Elmo’s Fire! A great capper of that month was Lifeforce, an awesome picture I will certainly try to review soon!

And then in July it started to get really good! There was Back to the Future, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Day of the Dead, and the movie that I thought was way better than The Goonies, Joe Dante’s great Explorers! And finally there was August, with all sorts of fine films: the Teen Scientist Trilogy of Weird Science, Real Genius and My Science Project, along with such fantastic fare as Teen Wolf, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Better Off Dead, Return of the Living Dead, Godzilla 1985 and, of course, the subject of today’s review, Fright Night!

The movie starts with a great crane shot past a very familiar-looking neighborhood (I think it was the same one as in The ‘burbs or maybe some other downmarket Spielberg production) to the house of Charley Brewster, a teen lothario just about to score with his rather dowdy girlfriend – when all of a sudden a scream pierces the night! Seems a vampire has moved in next door, and he’s brought his handyman with him!

Charley loves horror movies, but not as much as his pal Evil Ed does, and so he relies on Ed to help him figure out how to stop the undead fiend! They consult a local horror movie star, played by the great Roddy McDowell from Heads, and he gets drawn into the case very much against his will! There’s lots of biting and running around, and poor Evil Ed is overcome by the creature of the night! But eventually they get rid of the vampire – sort of!

Evil Ed is a really fascinating character, and he was played by Wendell Tvedt from Fraternity Vacation! Have you seen that one? It’s got Tim Robbins in it as a frat boy, and Barbara Crampton from Re-Animator, a movie I love! Anyway Evil Ed quit the legitimate cinema and started making homosexual pornoo! But now I understand he’s making regular horror movies again, and I think that’s great! Not that there was anything wrong with his other movies as long as he enjoyed making them!

But Fright Night was one of my favorite movies of that whole exalted summer, and remains a movie I enjoy! Some very horrible vampire fashions are in it, and some so-so music (some good music too), but it has a lot of pep, some excellent trick effects, a clever script, and a classic mid-80s look, courtesy of Some Kind of Wonderful cinematographer Jan Kiesser! I give Fright Night three vampire bats!