Burl reviews Steele Justice! (1987)

 

Killoo-killay, it’s Burl here with classic VHS action! Ha ha, there sure were a lot of action movies made in the 80s for the booming VHS market! Some of them – many of them in fact – had a theatrical release, but as the decade wore on, such a release became more cursory, more obviously just a promotion for the videocassette release that would allow wide (and double-wide) audiences to see the pictures! In the wake of Beverly Hills Cop and Rambo there was no end to the low-budget cop and war variants eager to cash in, and occasionally there were combo platters aiming to suck from both troughs at once! One of these – its glowering VHS cover familiar to many an 80s kid – is the subject of today’s review: Steele Justice!

Ha ha, is there justice of any other kind? Steele Justice begins at the tail end of the war in Vietnam, with stone-faced, rock-brained John Steele, played by Martin Kove from White Line Fever, Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, and of course Rambo, standing tall in a small hovercraft as it cruises up a jungle tributary! Steele is so tough he wears a live snake as a necktie, and accompanying him is his best pal Lee, essayed by Robert Kim from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off! They discover a bunch of dead bodies and realize their supposed South Vietnamese ally, General Kwan, played by Soon-Tek Oh from The Man With the Golden Gun and Death Wish 4, is not actually a very nice man! Kwan has Steele and Lee shot, but that doesn’t kill them, and Steele in turn shoots Kwan with a gun that shoots knives, but that doesn’t kill him either! And somehow a colonel named Harry played by Joseph Campanella from Hangar 18 figures into this preamble!

A dozen or so years later, Steele is married and divorced from Sela Ward from The Fugitive, and has been employed with and fired from the Los Angeles police department! His buddy Lee is still a cop though, and when Steele bottoms out, Lee is there to help him up! But, uh oh, Lee and most of his family (including a granny with a Moe haircut played by Kimiko Hiroshige from Blade Runner and Fletch) are murdered by Kwan’s evil son, impersonated by Peter Kwong from Big Trouble in Little China; and as a further ignominy it all happens while Steele is relaxing in a bath, so he gets very angry and figures on delivering a little Steele justice!

Kwan has become a respected American business man, and so Steele is faced with a bogomil crisis when Ronny Cox from The Car and The Beast Within shows up as his old boss on the force, Bennett! And there’s another cop played by Bernie Casey from Ants! and Never Say Never Again, who’s more sympathetic to Steele and his methods! While protecting the surviving Lee daughter, played by a terrible actress I’m sorry to say, Steele first bothers, then intimidates, then finally attacks and kills Kwan and his crime bunch!

As though a political psychodrama is lurking camouflaged within the movie, there’s a lot of real estate dedicated to showing the depths in respect, both self- and from everyone else (except for Lee and his family, who are the biggest Steele fans in the world), to which the agate-visaged hero has plummeted since the war! Killing is his only balm, and after the massacre of his only friends he seems almost gleeful at the opportunity to dispense the Steele justice I spoke of earlier! Of course his necktie snake gets involved, and the final fight against Kwan involves the old “battle-atop-a-shipping-crate-being-lifted-by-a-crane-operated-by-?” routine!

It’s a dumb, reductive, reactionary, Reagan-era movie, of minor (but hardly unique) interest thanks to the Asian gangs angle! But the bad guys are allegedly fearsome, and, ha ha, you know General Kwan is really mad when he appears on the scene wearing a floral print dress! Kwan has Shannon Tweed from Dragnet on his side as a fellow crime boss, or at least the daughter of one; meanwhile Phil Fondacaro from Phantasm II and Land of the Dead shows up as a wee bartender, and of course Al Leong henches once again, just as he henched in everything from Lethal Weapon and Die Hard to Death Warrant and Protocol!

As sedimentary as its hero, the picture does nevertheless provide a few hyocks, a modicum of confusion, a fine B movie cast, and occasionally the impression that it must have been written and directed by Clyde the Orang-utan! It sat on shelves in the Action section alongside The Patriot and Instant Justice and Born American, and there perhaps it should stay - but, ha ha, that's up to you! I give Steele Justice one RPG – Rat-Propelled Grenade! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Foreign Correspondent! (1940)

 

By the turning of the windmill, it’s Burl, here with a bit of Hitchcockery for you! Ha ha, this is Hitch in actionman mode, making a big old wartime crowd-pleaser with plenty of derring-do and get-‘er-done sentiment! It’s not the most finely-crafted picture old Alfred ever made, nor his most suspenseful, nor his most rollicking, but there’s a case to be made that, alongside North By Northwest, it’s the one that most effectively combines all these qualities! Ha ha, and the name of the movie is Foreign Correspondent!

It’s set in a very specific period of time, which I always appreciate in a movie! The thunderclouds of war have spread across Europe, and just about everybody knows it’s coming – and there are some shadowy figures, it seems, who want to hurry it along! But before we meet them, we are introduced to Johnny Jones, the putative hero of the picture, a Big Apple newsman who is the right guy to go find out what’s up in Europe, figures his editor, because (and the cop-phobic Hitch loved this no doubt) he once beat up a policeman!

It seems Hitch wanted Gary Cooper for the role, but he got Joel McCrea from Sullivan’s Travels and Ride the High Country! This disappointed the director, who found McCrea too affable; and you can certainly see why he’d want Coop for a two-fisted role like this! Maybe the fact that they were each known by nicknames made up of the first half of their surnames was an extra attraction to Cooper for the portly filmmaker, but who knows! Anyway, I like McCrea – his affability gives a lightness to the picture that helps keep it aloft, and he’s able to get serious when he needs to, as in the Thing From Another World-style coda!

It’s late August of 1939, and you know what that means - Nazis are about to make their move! When Johnny Jones arrives in England, he finds a dyspeptic colleague played by the great Robert Benchley (who also wrote some of the dialogue, or at least his own); the leader of some kind of peace party, Stephen Fisher, played by Herbert Marshall from The Fly; and Fisher’s beautiful daughter Carol, essayed by Laraine Day from The Story of Dr. Wassell! Malarkey of some kind is going on, and things only get weirder after a diplomat called Van Meer, who is instrumental in whatever chance there may be to stave off the Germans and whom Johnny is supposed to interview, gets himself shot in the face in a surprisingly brutal moment!

Johnny also meets the real hero of the picture, or at least I thought so, a debonair newshound called Scott ffolliott (and yes, ha ha, they address the lower-case double Fs), played by the marvelous George Sanders, whom we recall from Doomwatch and Endless Night, and from his own pithy suicide note! ffolliett is a real cool customer, an adventuresman who, it seemed to me, had as much of Hitchcock’s attention as the hero! After the famous windmill scene – well, relatively famous, probably cracking the top ten or twelve of famous Hitch scenes – and Van Meer has mysteriously returned, still played by Albert Bassermann from Alraune, Johnny is hot on the trail of the story, and so naturally it’s time for the movie to hang with ffolliett for a while! Yes, ha ha, it seems for a while that ffolliett (a relation to ffolkes, no doubt!) is the new hero of the movie, and one is not unhappy to have him!

There’s some great stuff here! Edmund Gwenn from Them! and The Trouble With Harry pops up as a hitman who maybe was a bit past his prime! And there are some terrific mugs in the margins, like Mr. Krug, played by Eduardo Cianelli from Strange Cargo, who tortures poor Van Meer with hot jazz music! The special effects and sets are simply top notch, and the plane-crash climax is a corker!

You can tell Hitch wasn’t too interested in the specifics of the peace process or the ginned up McGuffin here – ha ha, as McGuffins go, this is one of the director’s most transparently immaterial! It’s a weird mix of ripped-from-the-headlines reality and the sort of picture they were making in the lead-up to the war, where the evil country would remain pointedly unnamed, perhaps in the hopes of avoiding any kind of intercontinental rile-up! I suppose that’s because history marched on as the picture was being written and prepared, and all of Fisher’s mournful references to “his country” were left over from prewar days!

It’s a chaotic movie, but all of a setpiece by the end, ha ha! I’ve seen it a couple of times now, and it sure does hold up! The plotting is maybe not completely thought through everywhere, but it’s got it where it counts! I give Foreign Correspondent three and a half phonographs!

Burl reviews The Lost Squadron! (1932)

 

Hello chums, it’s Burl, here with a nifty picture about flying fliers and the flights they flew! It’s a story about some airborne veterans of WWI - the Great War, ha ha - and what happens to these fellows once the hostilities have ceased; and it’s called The Lost Squadron!

It opens in the final five minutes of the war as our heroes try to down as many German planes as they can, and then, as the 11 AM bell strikes on November 11, we see them exchange a last friendly wave with their former enemies and fly back to their airfield! Ha ha, it really pushes the alleged gentlemanly aspects of the war, in much the manner as it was parodied many years later by Monty Python in The Meaning of Life, except here it’s in earnest!

Our boys are upright Gibby, played by Richard Dix from It Happened in Hollywood and The Ghost Ship; Woody, the most carefree of a pretty relaxed bunch, essayed by a cheerful Robert Armstrong from King Kong and The Mad Ghoul; Red, handsome and charming, in the person of Joel McCrea from Foreign Correspondent, Sullivan’s Travels, and of course the great Ride the High Country; and their potatofaced mechanic Fritz, played by Hugh Herbert from The Black Cat and Hellzapoppin’! At their demobbing they are told nothing has changed since they left for Europe, but on their return Stateside they find everything has! Personal disasters - bankruptcy, cuckoldry, so forth - befall each man, which they accept with astonishing stoicism; and one drinking scene and a quick montage later, all but one of them have become rail-riding hobos!

On the distaff side we have Mary Astor from The Palm Beach Story and of course The Maltese Falcon playing Gibby’s ex, the ambitious, inconstant Follette - a character not dissimilar to how Astor herself was perceived by the public a few years later when she was beset by the sort of scandal that small, Puritanical minds think is important! As well there’s a crucial character called The Pest, who is Woody’s little sister and is played by Dorothy Jordan from The Searchers!

Gibby, Red, and Fritz, the three members of the squadron who have become stewbums, make their way to Hollywood, where they discover Woody living the good life as a stunt flier for the then-booming genre of aerial war pictures, and The Pest worrying about him and trying to stop him from his habit of drunk flying! Woody’s glad to see his old pals and convinces them to join him in the lucrative if still dangerous endeavor, and so it is that the squadron once again find themselves facing off against a fiery German enemy: this time the shouty director Von Furst, played by The Man You Love To Hate, Erich von Stroheim! Not only is he a sociopathic martinet in jodhpurs, but he’s now married to Gibby’s old flame Follette, who’s the female star of the movie! Ha ha!

Well that is a coincidence! And it’s not one the perpetually angry Von Furst is willing to countenance: he decides to get rid of Gibby by dousing his plane’s guywires in acid! But the irrepressible Woody takes the sabotaged plane up instead, and when Gibby, having realized what’s happening, goes up and flies alongside Woody trying to warn him about the acid attack on his wires, Woody just laughs and gives him the finger! Ha ha!

Well, after the wires break and Woody crashes in a spectacular conflagration, it’s clear to the remaining three that revenge is required, though there is disagreement on the type! However, before this can be resolved an accidental gunshot claims the autocratic filmmaker, and down the stairs he tumbles! Ha ha, the boys have to pull a Weekend At Bernie’s with Von Furst’s corpse to fool a slow-witted watchman who heard the shot! From there events proceed as they must, with noble subterfuge and sacrifice abounding, and in a final touching coda, the squadron members who’ve succumbed in the course of the story reappear as ghost fliers piloting ghost planes!

It was a real pleasure to watch this peppy little picture, I must say! The stunt flying is impressive, and the cast a real delight, and the pre-Code shenanigans are terrific! The gentlemanly comradeliness of the squadroneers is almost alien in its profundity and relentlessness! Von Stroheim is good in his role as the heavy, even if he’s more or less playing a more homicidal version of himself, and the layers of postmodern irony with which the narrative is infused seems almost unintentional, which fact merely adds another layer, ha ha! It’s a crackerjack and no mistake, so I give The Lost Squadron three toasts to fallen comrades!

Burl reviews Jet Pilot! (1957)

 

Up up and away, it’s Burl, here to review aeronautical derring-do! Ha ha, we’re all familiar with the Duke, which is to say John Wayne, and his many horse operas, from Randy Rides Alone to Rio Bravo! But in today’s picture he’s bestride a different sort of saddle: the pilot’s seat of the latest in jet fighter technology! The picture in question is titled, with admirable prosy, Jet Pilot!  

The Duke stars as Jim Shannon, one of the Air Force’s top wingsmen! When a pretty pilot called Anna, played by Janet Leigh from Halloween H20 and The Fog, drops into the Alaskan air base run by General Jay C. Flippen (an actor we may recall from Thunder Bay) and requests political sanctuary, Shannon is enlisted to keep her company! They fly around together and of course fall in love! Ha ha, but is she truly sweet Anna, wholeheartedly wanting to defect, or is she the duplicitous Olga, sent in order to lure the lovestruck Duke back to Mother Russia?

The answer, it turns out, is “both!” But there’s a lot of back and forth along the way, and plans within plans, and chumps made on both sides! Ha ha, Anna and Shannon even get married, and you know what that means - blanket hornpipe! Considering the political leanings of both the Duke and of Howard Hughes, who produced, or anyway “presents” the picture, we can be pretty sure from the start which side will prevail! In the meantime, some fun is made of Anna’s socialist values, as when she notes that a hotel suite is far too large for just two people, so invites a number of other, including Paul Fix from Night of the Lepus, to bunk with them!

Ha ha, the picture was released in 1957, but a little research taught me that it was shot in 1950, so that all the cutting-edge technology it wanted to show off had long passed its sell-by date! At this remove of course that doesn’t matter much, and so we’re left with a whole heck of a lot of excellent flying footage, with the pilots doing little rollover tricks, and voiceover radio chat between “A for Anna” and “S for Shannon!” But the aeronauts seem to fly everywhere all the time, and it eventually gets tiresome!

When the Duke follows his bride back to Russia, he finds Hans Conried from Summer Stock, The Monster that Challenged the World and The Twonky running the show, and that Anna has reverted to her more Soviet persona, Olga! She flips back and forth between these identities, even seeming to change her hair colour sometimes, and I found it as confusing as the Duke did! Leigh’s character is as split as that of her later co-star in Psycho, ha ha, and when she starts casually murdering people at the end, by tricking them into pulling ejection seat handles at inopportune moments for example, she seems more a narrative instrument than a character at all!

A funny thing about Jet Pilot is that it was directed, nominally at any rate, by Josef Von Sternberg! Ha ha! It really doesn’t seem like his sort of picture, and the picture itself doesn’t seem much like it was directed by von Sternberg! Still and all, that’s a pretty interesting fact! Hughes was the real auteur here, I suppose! But the overlapping part of a Hughes/von Sternberg Venn diagram is eroticism, and somehow this is a strangely sexy movie! Leigh looks great in her flight suit; she loses her harem pants at one point and is almost spotted trouserless by a marching band; and after their marriage, there are several references to the notion that Leigh and Wayne are doing nothing besides bohankie all the day long! It starts right from the beginning, as the Duke observes Leigh warming her bum at a stove and musing “This might be some new form of Russian propaganda!”

 

 

The flying scenes are impressive, but too long and too numerous; the geopolitics are childish and binary of course; and the characters are little more than blank figures moved around the landscape like quoits! It’s entertaining in its 1950s way, but seems more an interesting relic than a piece of cinema! But if you like watching jets fly around, this is the motion picture for you! I give Jet Pilot one and a half barrel rolls!

Burl reviews Rambo: First Blood part II! (1985)

Fighting the battle for cinema, it’s Burl, here to review a continuation of the saga that began with First Blood and apparently ended, in a pretty pedestrian way, ha ha, with Rambo: Last Blood! The installment I’ve got in mind today is the one that was the biggest hit of all, Rambo: First Blood part II! Ha ha, it was a true phenomenon back in 1985, though I ignored both it and all the flying-bamboo-splinter pictures* that followed, like Missing In Action and such stuff!

As the picture begins, our unkempt hero is breaking rocks in the pokey, where he was put after busting up a town and traumatizing its police force in the original picture! Good old Colonel Trautman, played as ever by Richard Crenna from Summer Rental, appears as though out of a dream and offers the taciturn convict a chance to do a mission back in ‘Nam, to discover and photograph any P.O.W.s who’ve been left behind! (Or is that abbreviation pluralized as “P.s O.W.?” Ha ha!)

As ever, our compact, shag-headed hero is played by Sylvester Stallone, known from pictures like Cliffhanger! He’s as clam-lipped as ever, and when he gets to the Far East base of operations, which is an airplane hangar outfitted with all sorts of communications equipment, he finds it staffed by Charles Napier from Last Embrace, assisted by Martin Kove from White Line Fever and Steele Justice, and Andy Wood from The Annihilators! Napier wears a tie and complains about the heat a lot, ha ha, and I think it was a canny decision to cast a tough-guy actor like Napier rather than some pencil-neck to play the duplicitous bureaucrat who has no interest in finding the lost men, and in fact wants to keep the whole problem buried! One assumes a fellow tough customer will be on Rambo's side, but nope!

The action begins when our bandanna-wrapped tousle-head finally makes it into the jungle, after a spot of bother parachuting from his plane, ha ha! He meets his contact, a Vietnamese lady who seals her fate by expressing a desire to make this her last resistance job and move to America in search of the quiet life! From then on, once Rambo discovers a rat-infested cage filled with barely-alive American soldiers, it’s budda-budda this and exploding-arrow that! We get the famous scene where our muscle-bound sweat factory is captured by Russians, who are coloneled by Steven Berkoff from Beverly Hills Cop, dipped in a pigpoo pit, and electrocuted on a homemade bedspring torture mat; and the even more famous scene in which he smears himself with mud Predator-style and camouflages himself against an embankment on the remote chance that an enemy soldier will pause right at that spot for a smoke or a bite of candy! Ha ha, and guess what - it happens!

There are explosions and helicopter chases and bazookas going off and more budda-budda-budda, and it’s all captured in high 80s style by Cobra director George P. Cosmatos, and photographed, if you can believe it, by Jack Cardiff, who shot The African Queen and Ghost Story and many other marvelous-looking pictures! It’s a supremely ridiculous movie, displaying all the subtlety of a Sgt. Rock comic, but apparently in earnest! Its moronic jingoism and crepe-paper warmongery are so cartoonish as to be dismissable with a laugh and a slight wave, and really, so far as I’m concerned, the final word on the picture may be granted to Gremlins 2!

Rambo: First Blood part 2 is deeply dumb and occasionally irritating, but brisk and entertaining too, and so long as you watch it with wallpaper eyes and a frosty mug in hand, I think we can grant it one and a half machoman bucknives!

 

* A coinage, I believe, of Mr. Ebert’s!

Burl reviews The Adventures of Baron Munchausen! (1988)

From beneath a speeding cannonball, it’s Burl, here to review a lavish fantasy from the brain of Terry Gilliam! Ha ha, this is the picture that, so far as I can tell, was Gilliam’s first real Troubled Production, and when you hear all the stories about it, you wonder how it could possibly ever have been finished and released! But it was, and it emerged into the world under the title The Adventures of Baron Munchausen! (Of course Brazil was Troubled too, but only in post-production, I believe!)

It’s a picture that cost a big bag of samoleans, and you can tell just by looking at it! Ha ha, I was lucky enough to see it on a big huge screen at a beautifully appointed cinema in London, and I remember being a little disappointed with it! I thought it was pretty spectacular, visually speaking at any rate; but I had seen Brazil a few years earlier, also in London, and with Gilliam present to make comments and answer questions, and that of course was a marvelous treat with which the newer movie could not compete! I finally watched it again last night and was very curious to see how it would play this time around! 

The story, you ask? Ha ha! We begin in a city under siege from the dreaded Turks, and there among the blasting cannonfire we find a theatre company putting on an elaborate show about famous balderdash artist Baron Munchausen! What do you know, the real Munchausen shows up, played by John Neville from Spider and Urban Legend, and he’s put out by the play’s distortion of what he claims are the real facts about his life! He begins telling the tale of his four superpowered friends, or servants, or whatever they are, and how he escaped the Sultan’s headsman thanks to the speedy feet of Eric Idle! Then he’s off on an adventure to gather up his old super-quartet and defeat the Turk before the city is fully trampled beneath his cruel sabah!

Sarah Polley from Blue Monkey and eXistenZ plays a little girl stowaway who joins him on this series of adventures, which include an array of cameos from such performers as Oliver Reed from Spasms, erotomaniacally playing Vulcan, the Roman god of fire; Uma Thurman from Mad Dog and Glory, appearing nude on the half-shell as his wife Venus; Valentina Cortese from When Time Ran Out as the Queen of the Moon; and Robin Williams, or “Ray D. Tutto” as he’s billed here, who is of course well known from Club Paradise and who plays her husband, the King of the Moon! Other familiar faces include Jonathan Pryce from Tomorrow Never Dies as a despicable bureaucrat, Bill Paterson from Comfort and Joy as the actor playing the Baron, and Peter Jeffrey from The Abominable Dr. Phibes as the Sultan! And the Baron’s amazing quartet are played by Gilliam’s Python-buddy Idle; his co-screenwriter Charles McKeown, who also appeared in Spies Like Us; big Winston Dennis from The Commitments; and Jack Purvis from The Dark Crystal as a big-eared blowsman!

It reminds me a lot of Time Bandits, with its child hero on a strange, episodic journey, lots of eccentric characters played by familiar faces and at least one Python, kooky homemade trick effects, giants, midgets, and a scene in which the characters are trapped in an iron cage hanging in a void! The circus-like, Italianate atmosphere comes naturally, given that Gilliam hired some key Fellini collaborators to help him out! Cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, known as Peppino to his friends, and designer Dante Ferretti give the picture a pretty and always compelling atmosphere. and there are plenty of nice miniature trick effects to admire!

But the Time Bandits comparison also reveals some flaws! The story here is less compelling, the characters weaker, the themes and satire duller and more abstract, and, reflecting the sharp increase in budget from the earlier picture and the shift in company from Handmade Pictures to the vast and unfeeling Columbia, the movie seems altogether less handmade than its predecessor! Still, there’s plenty to enjoy: the trick effects are terrific, the cast game, the imagination delightful and abundant! As an inquiry into the nature of truth, it doesn’t get far, but as an epic amusement it’s firing on most, and occasionally all, cylinders! I give The Adventures of Baron Munchausen two and a half-shells! Ha ha!

Burl reviews House! (1986)

 

Ding dong, it’s Burl at the door! Ha ha, today I’m going to maintain my occasional habit of telling little stories about my personal experience with whatever movie I happen to be reviewing! The funny thing about today’s movie is that my personal experience involves not seeing it! Ha ha, the movie I’m talking about is House, and not the crazy Japanese one either but the one Steve Miner made to escape the curse of making movies like Friday the 13^th part 2 and Friday the 13^th part 3-D!

You see, it was around this time of year in 1986 when House was released into theatres! For whatever reason, the powers that be rated it R in my bailiwick, and that meant no one under 18 could see the movie under any circumstances! Ha ha, this rating still mystifies me! Anyway, it was playing at the theatre around the corner from me, and I and two of my friends decided to try our luck! One friend, Rob, would have no trouble getting past the crabby old lady at the ticket booth: at age fifteen, he looked more like he was twenty! My pal Dave, on the other hand, had just turned sixteen, but looked ten! (I myself was fifteen and looked fifteen, ha ha!)

So before the movie I snipped off a bunch of hair from Dave’s head and used spirit gum to construct a fulsome moustache on his upper lip! I worked hard at it and it looked fantastic, but when I was done there was no time left to make one for myself! When we got there, Rob sailed through with no problem, and then Dave, with his big fake blonde moustache, made it in as well! Of course it was me who was refused entrance to the movie, and I had to go home and wait as Rob and Dave enjoyed the film! When they arrived back at my house they said the picture was only okay, and I assumed they were just being nice so I wouldn’t feel bad for missing it!

When I finally saw it, I realized they were right: it was only okay, if even that! And now that I’ve watched it again, my opinion on the movie must be revised still further downward! Here’s the story: a grocery boy arrives at a big Victorian house to find that the old lady who lives there has hanged herself! Her nephew, a big-time horror novelist struggling to write something uncharacteristic (a popular sort of a character, thanks to Stephen King), inherits the house! His name is Roger Cobb, he’s played by William Katt from Butch and Sundance: The Early Days, and his crowded backstory involves the mysterious disappearance of his son, and, separately, a touch of guilt from his Vietnam days, which is what he’s trying to write a book about!

Never mind that William Katt seems much too young to have fought in Vietnam, ha ha, especially seeing as how he doesn’t look any younger in the flashbacks! And it is a flashback-heavy movie, and also a movie of extremely terrible scoopneck sweaters! Luckily Roger’s next-door neighbor is a goofy but kind-hearted guy played by George Wendt from Fletch and Dreamscape, and the scenes involving him have some appeal! Kay Lenz from White Line Fever is Roger’s ex-wife, and Richard Moll from The Sword and the Sorcerer is the old Army buddy who reappears as an angry zombie-man!

The picture occasionally dips a toe into the rubber reality you find in Nightmare on Elm Street pictures, but it seems much more interested in simply having monsters pop out of closets to startle Roger! There are some odd tonal shifts, but neither Miner nor anyone else possessed the deftness of touch to weave these together with any style or elegance! It’s never the least bit scary, and the reason for the R rating that kept me out all those years ago is completely baffling! Ha ha, around here pictures like The Thing and Ghost Story were rated PG, and I and my friends went to see them with impunity and without adults! I can only assume a lozenge became stuck in the throat of somebody on the ratings committee while they were adjudging House, and so the picture got that R!

The upshot: it’s a mediocre mid-level horror picture, professionally made and slick enough, with a few bright spots here and there and some cartoonish monsters! It’s badly edited and relies very heavily on some low dolly shots of the house, which it only needed one or two of instead of the dozen or so that we get! And what’s with that Swedish neighbor cadging child care from Roger? I could discern no point to the sequence, other than to show us that Roger’s fatherhood instincts are still intact! Ha ha, it’s a pretty bad movie, and I award House one wet sweater!

Burl reviews The Guns of Navarone! (1961)

Like a false Englishman it’s Burl, here with a review for you! It’s a World War II picture today, a purely fictional one, but a reasonably thrilling and involving tale of derring-do nevertheless! Yes, I’m here to tell you now about the big-budget Columbia Pictures British-American superproduction The Guns of Navarone!

Ha ha, you’ve probably heard of this one! It was a big hit in its day, with a multinational cast of stars and a solid hook on which to hang its story! We start with Gregory Peck from Spellbound, arriving on a plane to meet up with the jolly-looking James Robertson Justice! Ha ha, now there’s an actor I’d like to see more of! Anyway, the mission is to destroy two giant guns the Nazis have set up in the Aegean Sea so that a British flotilla is able to sail past and rescue a couple of thousand stranded soldiers! Ha ha, David Niven from Murder By Death, Anthony Quinn from The Last Action Hero, Anthony Quayle, Stanley Baker, and Moondoggie himself, James Darren, make up the rest of the commando brigade!

The urgency of the mission, the near-impossibility of it (enhanced by the assumption by chief planner Justice that it is impossible), and the consequences should it fail, are set out with great clarity in the early part of the picture! From there it’s a series of suspenseful near-misses and daredevil cliffclimbing actions and bursts of gunfire and unfortunate setbacks! Ha ha, it truly seems like an ill-fated venture for the sextet, even after they meet up with two lady members of the Greek Resistance, doughty Irene Papas and beautiful, mute Gia Scala!

Perhaps to offset the presentation of wartime as a grand, if risky, boys’ adventure story, there is plenty of dialogue about the ethics of doing this or that ruthless action on behalf of the greater good! Ha ha, there’s perhaps a bit too much of it, in fact, though I appreciate the general anti-war sentiment that is the cumulative effect of these often heated discussions! And you didn’t often see Peck shout and bluster and wave his gun around, but by the last act, wracked with guilt and uncertainty, that’s what he’s doing all right!

A curious thing about Peck’s character: he’s supposed to be an Englishman, but Peck makes no attempt whatever to put on an accent or use English phraseology! Ha ha, this lack of limey jargon could be because the script was written by American screenwriter/producer Carl Foreman, then fresh off the blacklist! In any case, I spent most of the movie assuming Peck was supposed to be a visiting American, and I assume many other viewers assumed the same!

In the end, The Guns of Navarone is nothing more than a solid Hollywood product with pretty fair trick effects (though the cliffclimbing scene is pretty obviously just the actors flat on their bellies!) and some noble intentions! It’s thoroughly middlebrow, reasonably entertaining, and fun to pair up with something like 10 to Midnight or Happy Birthday To Me, which came from the same director, J. Lee Thompson! The big guns at the end are a little creepy, but impressive; and it’s satisfying to see the Nazis who’ve been running the things get blown to flinders! Ha ha! I give The Guns of Navarone two and a half surprise popout seagulls!

Burl reviews Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb! (1964)

Ha ha, it’s Burl here, living it up on Condition Red! Yes, I’m here to review one of the best movies I can think of, a fine work from Mr. Stanley Kubrick, the maker of pictures like The Shining and Full Metal Jacket! Of course I’m talking about the great Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, a movie I’ve seen many times! It’s one of my father’s two favourite motion pictures, the other one being Richard Fleischer’s The Vikings!

Do we all know the plot of this anti-war satire? Ha ha, of course we do: it’s more or less the same as Fail Safe, the movie in which Henry Fonda was inducted as President In Movies For Life! In Kubrick’s movie, it seems that General Jack D. Ripper, played by Sterling Hayden from such marvelous pictures as The Asphalt Jungle and The Long Goodbye, has gone hot bananas and decided to start World War III by sending impossible-to-countermand orders to his in-flight bomber pilots! Ha ha, he’s worried about precious bodily fluids and whatnot, so naturally global decimation is the only solution!

Peter Sellers, whom we know from Down Among the Z Men and Being There, plays three roles in the movie: a visiting British officer stationed at Ripper’s air base, and morally tasked with trying to talk him out of his mad plan; the American president, Merkin Muffley, desperately trying to convince his Soviet counterpart that the nuclear firestorm shortly to ravage his country was not delivered purposefully, or at least not purposefully by him; and of course the good doctor of the title, the cartoonish ex-Nazi Strangelove!  

George C. Scott from Exorcist III plays another manic general who indulges in a little fighting in the War Room, and makes the odd comment to his pal Jack Creley from Tulips; and, back at the air base near the end of the picture, Keenan Wynn from Piranha and The Dark and Herbie Rides Again appears as the blockheaded Colonel Bat Guano! In the airplane, our third major location, we find Slim Pickens from This House Possessed and White Line Fever and a young James Earl Jones from The Hunt for Red October! It’s really a pretty incredible cast, ha ha!

And there’s not much else I can say that you folks don’t already know! It’s a precision satire machine that scores strategic hits on an array of targets! It’s a beautifully shot, designed, directed and acted picture that might lean a little heavily on shticky gags here and there, but doesn’t ever stray from its noble, hilarious course! I love the picture and so should you, and I have to give a special mention to Sterling Hayden and his marvelous performance! Ha ha, I give Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb four deviated preverts!

Burl reviews The Train! (1964)

Ha ha and rolling stock, it’s Burl, here to review a fantastic movie about a train - and guess what, it’s called The Train! That’s right, it’s the wartime action drama from John Frankenheimer, who also brought us such winners as Prophecy and The Manchurian Candidate! The picture is laid in France as the Liberation approaches, and the Nazis, at the behest of a German colonel called Von Waldheim, played by the terrific performer Paul Scofield, are collecting great artworks from the Paris museums and shipping them to Berlin by puff-puff!

Burt Lancaster, whom we know so well from The Osterman Weekend and Local Hero, plays Labiche, a railway yardmaster who’s also part of the Resistance! When he’s asked to use his rail-based sabotage network to stop the art train, he initially scoffs! Ha ha, he says, a bunch of paintings aren’t worth the lives of several fellows! But others in his group feel more strongly about it, and when they start acting to slow or stop the train, Labiche has no choice but to join in and do his best to foil the Nazis! Quickly he becomes the number-one enemy to the increasingly art-obsessed Von Waldheim!

Ha ha, I became a big fan of this picture the moment I first saw it, which was actually at an art gallery as part of some kind of film series they were doing! The movie clearly respects, even cherishes, the crucial role of art in human society, but as more and more partisans are killed in the effort to save the Picassos, Cézannes, Braques, Renoirs, Mìros etc. etc. from the Nazis, the tough questions are asked: how many lives are a trainload of paintings worth? Ha ha, or, is that even a fair equation?

Of course the picture has a fantastic French cast: Jeanne Moreau is in there as a wan war widow; Suzanne Flon and Albert Rémy both make appearances, and the great Michel Simon plays the dyspeptic Papa Boule! And there are Germans too of course, most notably Wolfgang Preiss, who was always playing German officers in pictures like Von Ryan’s Express (another wartime train picture, ha ha!), and who plays another one here! He does a particularly good job of it, and is a good foil for Scofield, particularly near the end!

But the puff-puff itself might be the real star! Well, ha ha, I’d give it and Lancaster equal billing I suppose, because both turn in the most extraordinarily physical performances! Lancaster is forever sliding down ladders, leaping on and falling off moving trains, rolling down hills and leaping over gullies, often while in real life suffering from a leg injured when he stepped into a gopher hole while golfing on his day off! Meanwhile the train steams grimly ahead, slipping off sabotaged rails or charging ahead like black lighting, a scream of warning issuing from its whistle!

There’s a great train collision that has to be seen to be believed, and this was accomplished not with models or other trickery, but by simply smashing one real train into another, at speed! Ha ha, my hat is tipped to Frankenheimer, his great camera crew, and all the stunt and trick effects folk who worked so hard to make this spectacle! And we should pour one out to all the cameras that obviously got mangled while capturing, in their last moments, these titanic clashes of steam, wood and metal! Ha ha, this is a fine war picture, and I give The Train three and a half one-franc pieces!

Burl reviews McBain! (1991)

With a blast of action, it’s Burl, reviewing for you a movie that was apparently made within the exceedingly narrow window in which Christopher Walken was considered a potential action hero! (I don’t really count The Dogs of War as an action movie; more a drama with some action in it!) Ha ha, this one is called McBain, and it comes to us from action-uncle James Glickenhaus, the fellow who made that seamy picture The Exterminator and slightly less seamy efforts like The Protector and Shakedown!

Now of course I hear you saying “Ha ha! McBain! How does Ranier Wolfcastle do in the picture? Is he a good actor?” Well, not so fast! This is a different McBain entirely, with, as mentioned, Christopher Walken as the titular star! And the assumption that he’s not really action-hero material is borne up in the picture’s opening moments, which find McBain in a thunderdome in Vietnam having the tar beaten out of him! The timely arrival of some other soldiers saves McBain from his fate, and, when McBain asks Santos, the leader of the patrol that saved him, how he can ever properly thank him, Santos rips a hundred dollar bill in half, gives it to McB, and says “Ha ha, if the other half of this bill ever finds its way to you, then you will know it is time to repay me!”

Well, nineteen years later, McBain is working the same job Edward James Olmos did in Wolfen: welding at the top of the Brooklyn Bridge! Santos, meanwhile, is the leader of a group of Columbian rebels seeking to take down corrupt El Presidente, and when the revolution fails and Santos is killed, his girlfriend Maria Conchita Alonso comes climbing up to hand McBain the other half of the C note! McBain doesn’t hesitate: he rounds up the old gang from ‘Nam and, after some marvelous business in New York, they head down and take over Columbia! Ha ha!

The marvelous stuff in New York involves their attempts to raise money for the trip! First they break into a low-level drugs den and kill people left and right! Luis Guzman, well known from Innocent Blood, is in charge, and when he sees the mercenaries have shot most of his men, he delivers a righteously shame-inducing speech to an abashed McBain and his gang! They find a much richer gangster, hang him off a building and pretend to be rogue Mossad agents until he agrees to give them money! Ha ha, Walken playing a steelworker-turned-mercenary playing a tough Israeli is a thing to behold, all right!

Chick Vennera, who had been involved in this kind of thing before in High Risk, does a good job as Santos! It’s a shame when he’s shot in the head by El Presidente, who, by the by, is played by Victor Argo from Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai! None other than the always-likeable Steve James from Avenging Force, and the less-likable but no less fantastic Michael Ironside from Watchers and Total Recall, are members of the buddy gang, along with Thomas G. Waites from The Thing; and Jay Patterson from D.O.A. plays the one who’s a doctor, and who miraculously saves a gravely injured girl in the third act! And we know female lead Maria Conchita Alonso from her work in Extreme Prejudice!

But after all this, is McBain a good movie! Ha ha, no, not really, but, against the odds and in contrast to most of Glickenhaus’s other pictures, it’s a strangely good-natured one! Ha ha, you’ve got the child being saved, and the fact that, though hundreds of people are killed, all of the mercenaries make it through happy and unscathed!

On the other hand, the movie’s politics are so demented as to be unreadable; and it's replete with the sort of stupidity that takes you out of the drama and leaves you scratching your head! Take, for example, the scene when McBain and his crew are buzzing down to Columbia in a twin-engine prop plane and are suddenly joined by a Columbian fighter jet! After the old “Sorry, our radio's busted” trick, McBain, in the co-pilot’s seat, pulls a gun, shoots it past his pilot’s head, through the window without breaking it, across to the fighter jet, through that cowling without breaking it, and into the pilot’s head! Ha ha, talk about a magic bullet!

I think by now I’ve said enough about McBain! It’s got lots of explosions but it’s rarely exciting, and somehow, though it’s called McBain, Walken’s character barely seems to be the lead! I give McBain one and a half bamboo thunderdomes!

Burl reviews Francis the Talking Mule! (1949)

Hee haw, it’s Burl, here to review a movie about the most famous talking mule there is, Francis! Now, fame-wise I’m not sure how he stacks up against Mr. Ed, his greatest competitor, but I’m pretty sure these days, seventy years after his cinematic debut, he’s still better known than Don, the horse that was voiced by John Candy in Hot to Trot!

Of course there was only one Hot to Trot, and there must have been a half-dozen Francis movies! The picture I’m reviewing for you today was the first of them, and while it doesn’t explain how the irascible mule gained the power of speech, it does detail the initial meeting between Francis and the human who would become his closest chum, 2^nd lieutenant Peter Stirling, played by the amiable hoofmeister Donald O’Connor! Ha ha!

Now, O’Connor is of course best known for his spectacular work in Singin’ In the Rain, but a little-known fact is that he can also be seen in The Big Fix, palling around with Francis in footage from Francis Joins the Navy! He’s really the perfect guy for this role - halfway between Mickey Rooney (who got his own horse movie later, The Black Stallion) and Eddie Bracken! Of course Rooney and Bracken were both fine comedians capable of playing exactly the sort of gormless milquetoast Stirling is meant to be, but somehow O’Connor hits those notes while still projecting a sort of protean competence that leads you to believe he actually might have risen to the rank of Lieutenant during wartime without being either fragged or simply killed in combat! Even Don Knotts couldn’t have pulled that one off!

We first meet Stirling in his post-war occupation as a bank teller, but there is a whisper campaign being conducted against him, and his boss threatens to fire him! The boss gives Stirling a chance to tell his tale, which occurred when he was stationed in Burma during the war! On getting separated from his patrol, and under heavy enemy fire, Stirling comes across a placid army mule who gives him advice on how to survive, and then, when Stirling receives a minor shrapnel wound to the leg, carts him to an aid station!

From there the picture adopts a structure of repetition, in which Stirling tries to persuade his colonel that a talking mule saved his life; Francis refuses to talk to the colonel; Stirling is thrown into the psychiatric ward and made to weave baskets by jolly nurse Zasu Pitts; Francis gives Stirling some crucial bit of information about a Japanese observation post, or a hidden patrol, or a sneak air attack; Stirling becomes a hero but is pressured to tell the colonel where he got his information; rinse and repeat! Ha ha, with its host of eccentric characters, its focus on the impenetrable logic of rear-echelon army brass, its dazed hero caught in the machinations of illogic imposed by war, it almost reminded me of Catch-22! Eventually, Francis, to prevent his new friend being tossed in the booby hatch for life, deigns to talk for someone other than Stirling - a three-star general, in fact , played by John McIntire from Psycho, Cloak &Dagger, and Herbie Rides Again - but it only causes more trouble!

The perpetually irascible Francis speaks in the voice of Chill Wills from Fireball 500, and his attitude is essentially that of the dogfaces in a Bill Mauldin cartoon: grousing about army brass in general, and 2^nd lieutenants in particular, for whom he seems to have a particular hate-on! But at the same time he’s a hyper-patriotic equine and wants to do his bit to win the war! Eventually the picture concludes with what seems like a tragic denouement, but director Arthur Lubin (who would later go on to direct a hundred and fifty episodes of Mr. Ed - ha ha, talk about a niche!) and novelist/screenwriter David Stern have one last trick up their sleeves! After all, if Francis died in a plane crash, how could he ever join the WACS? Ha ha!

The picture is done in the Universal low-budget house style, which is a comforting style to ol’ Burl! Those Burmese jungles are probably the same palm fronds later prowled through by the Creature from the Black Lagoon, ha ha! Though there’s a lot of unfortunate talk about “Japs,” and that same casual racism you find in many pictures of the period, particularly war pictures, it wasn’t ladled on quite as heavily as I’d feared! The picture is a bit slow and talky for a children’s comedy, and anyway the intended audience seems more to be men for whom wartime service was still a recent memory, who can chuckle and nod along with Francis’s jabs at army life and the officer class! I give Francis the Talking Mule two tails standing at attention!