Burl reviews She Demons! (1958)

 

To the beat of the jungle drums it’s Burl, returning to the land of Cunha! Ha ha, we’re all very familiar with, and fond of, his work I’m sure, particularly the Great Quartet of Fifty-Et, which includes Giant from the Unknown, Frankenstein’s Daughter, Missile to the Moon, and the movie I’m gabbing about today, the exotic, buxotic, quixotic She Demons!

The plot is largely lifted from Eyes Without A Face, or would have been if Eyes Without A Face hadn’t come out a year later, ha ha! It seems that there’s been a Gilligan’s Island-style marine mishap, and the castaways include spoiled debutante Jerrie, played by beauteous Irish McCalla, most famous for playing the title role in Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and who, a trivia, was born exactly the same day as the great Dick Miller! The boat captain and generic hero type is Fred Macklin, played by Tod Griffin, who had, after all, already appeared in She Devil so should have known what to expect on this island! There are a couple of crew fellows too: Sammy Ching, played by Victor Sen Yung, famous for his role as number one son Jimmy Chan in the Charlie Chan film series and who also appeared in movies like Moontide, Soldier of Fortune and The Killer Elite; and Kris Kamana, played by Charles Opunui, who had appeared, very briefly, as an “Eskimo” in The Thing From Another World!

After exploring the beach, which looks a lot like Paradise Cove in Malibu, they venture into the island’s interior, which looks a lot like Griffith Park! Unfortunately their buddy Kris suffers a mishap that leaves him chock full of spears, ha ha, and it’s soon revealed that the perpetrators are a group of goochy-faced ladies who like to dance around and attack anyone who happens along! And these ladies, instantly dubbed “She Demons” by our intrepid castaways, turn out to have been created by Colonel Osler, of course!

But who is Colonel Osler? Well, he’s played by Rudolph Anders, who’d essayed plenty of Nazis and other assorted evil Germans before this, and was Dr. Louis Dupont in The Snow Creature, and here he delivers a particularly rootin’-tootin’ performance as a Mengele type guy acting out of the usual maniacal uxoriousness, which of course he’s happy to drop as soon as he claps eyes on Irish! It seems Osler’s wife Mona, played by Leni Tana from Torn Curtain, was involved in a lava accident and needs a replacement face, and local island ladies figure in this treatment somehow, and whenever the procedure fails, as it constantly does, the result, somehow, is a She Demon! The filmmakers don’t really explore the medical whys and wherefores of this, however!

Of course Osler has his Igor figure, here called, imaginatively enough, Igor, and played by familiar face Gene Roth of Strange Illusion, Jet Pilot and Zombies of Mora Tau; he also has a number of generic sub-henchmen who all try to keep their faces in those frowny expressions Nazi henchmen always seem to wear in B pictures! Ha ha! And as the island’s volcano gets rumblier, and Fred and Sammy are captured and tortured while Jerrie is captured and wooed, and then everybody escapes with help from the bandaged Mona, who has finally recognized what a monster her husband is (and whose face, partly revealed near the end, is genuinely gross), and Osler rants and raves and grins and grimaces, and the She Demons keep dancing around, we come to realize just how long 77 minutes can seem!

Nevertheless, I liked this little movie! After all, it starts from a pretty solid foundation, because I’m naturally fond of these little 50s programmers and always enjoy the world of Cunha! In the first half of the movie Jerrie is a supremely annoying spoiled rich girl, but it’s rewarding as she transforms into a regular person! Sammy, for his part, is just a regular sidekick sort of a guy instead of the Asian caricature I was fearing, and that was good too! He’s goofy, but also resourceful and brave! And then it’s always nice to see Nazis on the receiving end of a lava shower, ha ha! It won’t make you change your religion or anything, but you’ll probably enjoy the movie, so I give She Demons two powder-blue cashmere shorties!

Burl reviews Congo! (1995)

 

Burl here, going ape again! And believe me, the movie I’m reviewing today has a lot of ape in it! Gorilla after gorilla in fact, whole swarms of them! No, we’re not talking about Greystoke or Gorillas in the Mist, and we’ve already talked about Link! No, the picture in question is Congo, the monkey mash from the mid-90s that I recall seeing in the theater and even reviewing! My old review is around somewhere, but this one is all new, ha ha, and is moreover based on a very recent re-viewing of the picture!

There’s trouble in Africa! Colonialindustrialists are searching for rare purity diamonds with which to power their lasers, but their expedition is interrupted by simian viciousness of some kind! Meanwhile a vanilla primatologist and his lily-livered pal are planning to return their pet talking ape to the wild, and they are joined by the lady from the tech company who wants to find both the diamonds and her missing ex-fiancé who was on the original diamond quest! It’s a rather charmingly old-fashioned set up, straight out of Allan Quartermain and the Lost City of Gold, gussied up with 90s technology!

There are so many apes, they can be divided into subcategories! We have our hero ape, Amy, who wears a contraption that turns her hand signals into spoken speech; and then there’s a group of regular mountain gorillas; and of course there are the mutant white apes, straight out of White Pongo, but uglier, who are the real plot drivers here! By the end there are seemingly dozens of pongos, all warty-faced, jumping on the secondary characters like they were luggage! But speaking of human characters, the leads are not the most interesting bunch of people! The scientist fellow makes little to no impression, his buddy is a darn pest, and the tech company lady, although played by the good actor Laura Linney, doesn’t fare much better! Linney never really gets a handle on her character, because there isn’t much to get a handle on, ha ha! She must at different points be a cynical executive and a die-hard romantic, a hardy adventuress and a humourless scold, a tough Linda Hamilton type and a damsel in distress; and so it’s a wonder to me that Linney could pull together anything at all!

The cast gets more interesting as you go down the billing! Ernie Hudson from Ghostbusters is particularly good as the gentleman scoundrel safari leader; Tim Curry from The Hunt for Red October does a double ham on rye; and Joe Don Baker from Joysticks gets to kill a TV with a golf club! And, ha ha, there’s more! Bruce Campbell from Army of Darkness shows up at the very beginning, not proving as resilient here as he is in the Evil Dead pictures! And a parade of familiar faces follows: Joe Pantoliano from The Mean Season and Delroy Lindo from The Core show up in quick succession, and sprinkled throughout are appearances from Peter Jason of Prince of Darkness; James Karen from Time Walker; John Hawkes from Future-Kill; and even Jimmy Buffett of Jurassic World fame! Ha ha, the Buff plays an airplane pilot who bails out of his craft and we never see him again! I’ll bet you could make a whole other movie just about his adventures after landing in the jungle in a country in civil war into which he has flown illegally! Buff On the Run, we could call it, or War On Buffett! Ha ha!

But really it’s about ape action, and there’s a lot of it towards the end! The gnarly-faced ‘rillas make jolly adversaries, and it’s almost sad to see them falling into lava by the properly Edgar Rice Burroughs/ H. Rider Haggard erupting-volcano climax! The movie is a slick studio product, dumb as a bag of hammers, curiously old-fashioned, and largely enjoyable! And if you like fake apes, this is your movie! It’s got a lot of ‘em, pretty well done but maybe just a notch below the best Rick Baker work! Anyway, I give Congo two sesame cakes! Ha ha, put down my sesame cake!

Burl reviews Volcano! (1997)

Boom boom it’s Burl, here to review some disaster for you! This is the other volcano movie of 1997, the one that wasn’t Dante’s Peak! No, this one is simply called Volcano; but was it the better or the worse of the two? Well, they’re just different enough from one another to make that question meaningless! Each has its champions, though, and for a long time I might have told you that Volcano was the better one! Now I’m not so sure!

What probably made it seem better was the slightly innovative location: downtown Los Angeles! Dante’s Peak was set just where might expect a volcano movie to be located: in a small town at the base of a volcano! In Volcano, an earthquake opens a caldera to the molten core, and soon it’s lava bombs, magma rolling down the streets, a massive cone rising from the La Brea tar pits! Emergency manager fellow Tommy Lee Jones, clearly saving his best stuff that year for Men in Black, tries to manage the emergency and his pouty daughter at the same time, and an artificially spiky relationship with geologist and Lady Who Saw It Coming, Anne Heche!

There are other characters too, like Tommy Lee’s underling, played by the very solid actor Don Cheadle, from Moving Violations, in a fine but largely wasted performance in which he virtually never leaves the office! John Carroll Lynch, that old son-of-a-Gunderson, plays a subway construction guy who takes the Murray Hamilton role of irritated nonbeliever until he redeems himself by horribly, hilariously, saving a subway driver by jumping knee-deep into lava, into which he melts like the Wicked Witch of the West! Ha ha! And Childs himself, Keith David from The Thing, turns up as a cop!

But the real star is of course the volcano and all its attendant spectacle! The trick effects hold up fairly well, and there are a few satisfactorily suspenseful sequences! The destruction is relatively small-scale when you compare this movie to, say, one of Roland Emmerich’s exercises in wanton ruination, or even something like Pompeii, but that’s not a problem! The problem, I guess, is the script, and the by-the-numbers approach to the whole thing! Ha ha, there’s a real sense that they figured the L.A. location was plenty enough innovation for one movie, and from there they coasted!

I do remember enjoying this one when I saw it in the theater, but really it’s one of the prototypical bland 1990s products! I give Volcano one and a half K rails, but most of that is for explosions and slow-flowing lava! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Dante's Peak! (1997)

Ha ha and mountain peaks, it’s Burl, back again! I thought I’d take you all the way back to 1997, the Year of the Volcano! Ha ha, that was one of those times when two very similar movies opened within a month or two of one another, and in this case it was volcano movies! This one, Dante’s Peak, opened first, in February, and then Volcano, a movie about a volcano bursting up from beneath the streets of Los Angeles, came along in April! Ha ha, of course I went to see both of them!

Dante’s Peak is the more conventional disastershow of the two, perhaps, but also the simpler and more solid picture! It’s pretty straightforward: essentially a heavily embellished version of that Art Carney picture St. Helens: Killer Volcano! Here we are in the pretty little town of Dante’s Peak, where the camera tilts so often up to the menacing matte painted mountain behind them that you get a sore neck in sympathy! Ha ha! Anyway, it’s of course time for their yearly Mountain Daze or whatever, and an expert shows up to proclaim danger and doom, but fails to convince the ambitious mayor, who is played by an actor called Hamilton! Ha ha, sound familiar? It’s Jaws, but with Linda Hamilton instead of Murray, and a volcano instead of a shark!

Like the shark, the volcano even manages to claim a few early victims, notably the couple skinny-dipping in the hot spring who get boiled like sausages when magma burbles into their pool! Yikes, I’ve thought of that every time I’ve dipped a toe into any geothermal pool ever since! Anyway, there’s volcanologist Pierce “The World’s End” Brosnan, his goofy gang of geological scientists and his rather stuffy boss Charles Hallahan, well known from The Thing! There’s also a crabby grandma! There’s a lot of bickering over whether the mountain will blow or not, and the consensus of everyone but the experts is, don’t worry about it! Enjoy Mountain Daze, ha ha!

When the mountain does blow, there’s a pretty impressive run of both destruction and improbable events! Some of the supporting cast meet their demises: Hallahan is swept into a river with a last little Wilhelm Scream, and granny is dissolved in a lake! At another point, Brosnan's truck drives under water! Ha ha, just because he was at that time playing James Bond shouldn’t mean everything he touches became a spy gadget! There really is a tremendous amount of stale Hollywood cheese in this movie – Like Pompeii, it’s a scrupulous throwback to 1970s disaster movies, missing only the large celebrity cast and soap-opery subplots found in movies like When Time Ran Out (which I admit is a key aspect of them)! But, although Dante’s Peak occasionally matches the sadistic showmanship of those earlier movies, generally speaking when the movie isn’t dumb, it’s derivative, and it frequently manages both simultaneously!

There are some compensations! Peter Jason, whom we know from Streets of Fire and Dreamscape and Brewster’s Millions and Prince of Darkness, appears as a crabby townsman, and he’s an actor I always like to see! The craftsmanship behind the camera is generally fine! And I guess there is a certain pleasure in having these old disaster movie beats trotted out with such punchclock precision!

I remember it fondly for some reason, probably because I vaguely recall the experience of seeing it in the theatre! But I can’t recommend it on general terms, I guess! I’m going to give Dante’s Peak one and a half pyroclastic clouds!

Burl reviews Pompeii! (2014)

Well met, stranger, it’s Burl, here to review a new sword & sandal spectacular, and a volcano picture to boot! Ha ha, I always enjoy a volcano picture, and if I can – as I did with Dante’s Peak and Volcano – I try to see them on the big screen! (Sadly, or perhaps happily, I had to settle for a VHS viewing of fine pictures like When Time Ran Out and Melody in Love!)

So that is why I recently found myself at a movie theater settling in to see Pompeii! Ha ha, I figured that, coming from the fellow who made Soldier and Event Horizon, it would be a very pulpy and at least moderately entertaining concoction, and I wasn’t far wrong! It features a story in which almost every single occurrence and plot turn – or ‘beat,’ to use the vernacular – is infallibly predictable; characters who do exactly what is expected of him or her; and a visual scheme, which is to say muddy and CGI-heavy 3D, that will surprise no one!

After a prologue in Britannia, the action moves to Italy, where the movie spends a good deal of time setting up the conflicts! We have our taciturn hero, Milo, a gladiator-slave, and his cage-mate Atticus, with whom he enjoys a relationship quite similar to that between Kirk Douglas and Woody Strode in Spartacus! There are cruel overseers and merchants, also straight from Spartacus, but without one ounce of the louche, epicene charm found in the performances of Peter Ustinov and Charles Laughton!

We have the rich family, generally goodhearted folks played by Jared Harris from The Ward and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Carrie-Anne Moss from those Matrix pictures, and Emily Browning from Ghost Ship as Cassia, the daughter! And of course we have the nasty Romans, headed by Kiefer “Stand By Me” Sutherland! Ha ha, Kiefer has fallen for Cassia just as Laurence Olivier once fell for Jean Simmons, though he shows no indication of preferring oysters to snails or vice versa!

All of this trundles along for a while, with the occasional earth tremor or ominous tilt up to Vesuvius to remind us that this is, or will eventually become, a volcano picture! But for long stretches it feels like any old 1960s peplum, and that, I think, is the aspect I enjoyed the most! Ha ha, it felt like I’d gone back in time to a point at which one could go see Demetrius and the Gladiators or Hercules in the Haunted World at your local cinema!

Then the volcano pops and for the rest of the picture we have spewing ash and lava bombs and all manner of PG-13 destruction! Ha ha, there’s some thrills to be had here, but all the clichés of historical spectacle, the constant, goofy anachronism and the rote romance conspire to keep us at arms’ length from everything, and preclude any real involvement in the drama!

I wish the picture was even sillier than it actually is, and that it was better able to transcend the restrictions of its PG rating, but it still fits pretty well into the “expensive B-picture pulp movie” category! Still, in the end it’s just not very good, and almost all the enjoyment I got out of it came from what I myself had brought in! I’m going to give Pompeii one and a half lava bombs, which is an infinitesimal fraction of the number we see in the movie! Ha ha!

Burl reviews When Time Ran Out...! (1980)

Boom, crash, aieeee, it’s Burl! Yes, those are the sound effects typically heard in a disaster picture, and today I’m going to review the biggest disaster of them all, Irwin Allen’s gigantic megaproduction When Time Ran Out…!

Like the previous Allen triumph The Towering Inferno, this one features Paul Newman wearing a hardhat! (He also wears the hat from Hud, ha ha!) But it must be said right off the top that this picture represents neither Irwin Allen’s nor Paul Newman’s finest moments! You could watch The Silver Chalice a thousand times and it still wouldn’t be as bad as When Time Ran Out…!

Ol’ Burl does enjoy a disaster picture, ha ha, so I was pretty sure I’d be able to overlook the inevitable dramatic, performative, pictorial and structural flaws in this one and milk some good-time enjoyment from it! But the movie is so absurdly top-loaded with soap opera that the real disaster is not the flying fireballs, tsunamis or lava flows, but the slow crushing weight of stilted melodrama! My gosh, there are probably more soap suds in this picture than in all the Airport movies combined!

The set-up is as follows: Newman is an oil man supervising a drill site on a remote Pacific island that is definitely not part of the Hawaiian archipelago! The island is owned by Newman’s oil partner Bob Spangler, a hotelier played by the poor man’s Charleton Heston, namely James Franciscus, who is married to Veronica Hamel, the daughter of his other business partner, William Holden! Ha ha, with me so far? Franciscus is having an affair d'amour with an island lady played by Barbara Carrera, and she in turn is engaged to Edward Albert, the manager of the hotel who is secretly the half brother of Bob Spangler! In the meantime, Burgess “Grumpy Old Men” Meredith and his wife, retired high-wire walkers, are on the island for one last fling before her heart gives out; and Red Buttons, a white-collar criminal, has been pursued there by New York City cop Ernest Borgnine!

Ha ha, all of this takes a while to set up, and on top of it you have the science lab at the opening of the local volcano crater and the endless arguments about whether the volcano is going to blow! Bob Spangler is the bad guy here, out-Hamiltoning both Murray Hamilton from Jaws and Linda Hamilton from Dante’s Peak in his energetic disavowals of any possible disaster! But that’s okay, because in one of the movie’s best parts, Bob Spangler, his hotel, his absurdly loyal wife, his thick-headed girlfriend and all the silly guests who were dumb enough to stay at the hotel rather than seek higher ground with Newman and most of the other stars, are wiped out instantly by a giant lava bomb! Ha ha!

The thing with this picture is that, while there are a few good bits here and there (the lava bomb, the tsunami that gets both Alex Karras and his fighting cock, Pat Morita tumbling into lava, and a bit with a precarious volcano elevator), even the disaster movie parts are so slowly-paced as to be nearly as tedious as the romance-drama! The climax involves a lot of slow creeping across a disintegrating bridge, and this seems to take forever! And dramatically the movie is all askew: if you ask me, the real hero of the picture is Burgess Meredith, not Paul Newman (who was by his own admission only around to pick up a paycheque anyway), and the most touching relationship is between Buttons and Borgnine! It’s got to be one of the very worst disaster pictures ever made, ha ha, and it’s my privilege to give When Time Ran Out… a grand total of one unlucky bearded scientist!

Burl reviews Melody in Love! (1978)

Ha ha, this is Burl speaking to you from “under the volcano!” Some readers may recollect my recent review of Summer Night Fever and recall how thoroughly I enjoyed it! Inspired, excited and emboldened by that viewing experience, I reached for a similar-looking European sex romp of the 1970s, Melody in Love!

Well ha ha, although I can’t claim it made me feel as HAPPY as Summer Night Fever did, I will say that Melody in Love is one of the more bizarre movies I’ve ever reviewed here on my blog, and if you scan your way down the list of titles I’ve discussed, you’ll see that’s really saying something! It’s a German picture, but since it takes place in Mauritius among a spectacular array of races and nationalities, it has a polyglot flavour that can hardly be beat!

But it also has a plot that can hardly be deciphered! Melody, a young lady, has come to Mauritius to holiday with her older lady cousin, a married woman with a baby that gets forgotten about somewhere in the middle of the movie! Her husband Octavio is a skindiving treasure hunter, and we see him hard at work fighting sharks and knifing them like a big jerk! Separate from all this, there is a pair of friends vacationing on this island paradise, one of whom is a girls’ school teacher being pursued by three of his comelier students! The other one ends up meeting with the older cousin lady and by extension Melody! Meanwhile the volcano under which all of these characters romp is apparently ready to blow its top any minute! We know this because every now and again the characters stop to mention how much they fear an eruption, and because the opening credits run over beautiful slow-motion shots of flying globs of lava! Just as if Chekhov had set a play in a gun shop during a gunfighters’ convention on Gunfire Amnesty Day, there’s a certain inevitability to the conclusion!

Like Summer Night Fever, this movie features some ridiculous songs from the pen of Gerhard Heintz! There’s one about how honeymoon’s for loving, loving all the day, that has to be heard to be believed! The picture also features random kung-fu fighting; a street knifing; an array of Peeping Tom-isms; a battle with an octopus; some beach dancing; a scene where Octavio and his skindiving pals bring up a treasure chest (it looks like something that might have been bought at Pier 1 the day before) which, upon proving empty, prompts great roars of Walter Huston-like laughter from the group; and a great number of unclad ladies! And then, finally, the volcano goes off and causes smoky flashpot explosions along the hillside!

Well, it has enough of the European 70s decadence seen in Summer Night Fever to make a viewing worthwhile, and it’s got exotic locations too, and of course Melody herself is spectacularly pretty; but it’s really the excessive weirdness that seals the deal! It’s a kooky picture, and no mistake! I give Melody in Love two mysteriously disappearing schoolteachers!

 

 

Burl reviews You Only Live Twice! (1967)

Hi, it’s Burl here with a review of a James Bond movie, namely 1967’s pen-penultimate Connery adventure, You Only Live Twice! This is probably the worst of the 1960s Bond movies, I’m sorry to say, and nearly the worst of the Connery pictures, but that doesn’t mean it’s all that bad! Ha ha, when you’re in competition with the likes of Goldfinger, From Russia With Love and Thunderball, there’s no shame in coming up short!

I watched the movie again because, as a part of my self-imposed summer reading program, I just recently finally read the book! And hoo-boy, is it a weird one! It starts with Bond engaged in a high-stakes game of rock-paper-scissors; then flashes back to describe how depressed and incompetent Bond had become after the death of his wife Tracy at the hands of the notorious Blofeld! So M gives him a mission in Japan, where Bond discovers that none other than Blofeld himself has set up a castle with a garden of every poisonous plant, animal and fish he can find! When Bond is captured, he’s placed on a torture-toilet that is equipped to send boiling mud up his inner rectus! He escapes from that one and manages to give old Blofeld a pretty stiff neck-twist, but then gets bonked on the head and comes to believe he’s a Japanese pearl fisherman! The book ends with him still firmly believing that, but planning a trip to Vladivostok anyway! Altogether a weird one!

The movie, which was adapted by none other than my favourite childhood writer Roald Dahl, is much more conventional! They keep Blofeld being in Japan, and they keep the piranha fish and some of the character names, but that’s about it! Actually, they also keep one of the dumbest and least-cinematic aspects of the book also: the idea that James Bond could be convincingly transformed into an itinerant Japanese labourer by the liberal application of tanning jelly and the donning of a goofy blouse! Ha ha, it doesn’t work for a second on the page or the screen, no big surprise!

So it seems Blofeld is planning to start World War III by pretending that the Russians and the Americans are eating each others’ spacecraft! Left unexplained is exactly how the B man thinks he’ll escape Armageddon, and what he plans to do among the smoking ruins if he does; but I guess he is after all supposed to be a bit crackers! Bond, having gained ninja skills in a matter of days, manages to impregnate Blofeld’s impregnable volcano fortress, where he comes this close to being shot into space! I’d say this movie in combination with Moonraker represents convincing evidence that James Bond and space travel simply do not mix!

Anyway, it all ends with a gun battle, a number of small explosions and then some really big ones! Ha ha, that’s not a bad way to end things in a Bond movie I guess, but I did hope for something better from Dahl, whose Henry Sugar story fascinated me in my youth! Still, it’s a James Bond movie and has some of the usual great elements in it, so I give it two pointless minicopters!