Burl reviews The Howling! (1981)

 

Ah-roo and graw-graw, it’s Burl, here to walk on two legs with a movie I’m surprised I haven’t already reviewed! Yes, it’s a werewolf picture – you’ve already guessed that, I’m sure, from my introductory noises – and it stars the finest of actors, Dick Miller, and it’s a key film of my youth! Ha ha, my pals and I just loved it, along with An American Werewolf in London, which is sort of its compadre and rival in the werewolf world! It was one of the gems of 1981, which was designated by Cinefantastique magazine as the Year of the Wolf! Of course, in my usual long-winded way, I’m talking about Joe Dante’s fine picture The Howling!

And as noted it’s a werewolf picture, but it starts out like a crime show, with TV newslady Karen White, played by the ever fragile-seeming Dee Wallace from Secret Admirer, hot on the trail of the notorious Smiley Face Killer, who's known for leaving a smiley face sticker at the scene of each brutal slaughter! But when Karen comes face to face with the maniac in a dark and scary pornoo booth, something so oddball happens that she’s traumatized! The cops shoot the killer dead, but Karen can hardly remember the weird thing she witnessed! Her husband, played by Christopher Stone from The Annihilators, her station manager, in the person of Dennis Dugan from Smile, and her best friend, Belinda Balaski from Cannonball, are all sympathetic, but nobody can stop her nightmares or recover her memory!

Patrick Macnee from Sweet Sixteen plays the sort of pop therapist whose field of study happens to be exactly what the movie’s about, and his advice to Karen is to get out of it for a while and go up to his therapeutic compound on the coast! This woodsy and rustic place proves to be, among other things, a hotbed of great character actors like John Carradine from The Boogey Man, Slim Pickens from Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and Noble Willingham from City Slickers! Of course I don’t think I’m giving away a confidence by telling you that in addition to providing a satirical look at the sort of self-actualization pocus that the 70s was known for, the therapeutic compound is also a breeding ground for werewolves, and so things get pretty hairy for Karen!

But meanwhile her friends Dugan and Belaski are doing some investigating back in the city, and they find that the Smiley Face Killer, played here by Robert Picardo from Explorers, has turned up missing even though he was dead, and that’s because he’s a werewolf of course! Some silver bullets are provided by none other than Dick Miller, and then the stage is set for a battle of fang and tooth! It does take a little long to get there by modern standards – ha ha, there are long werewolf-free passages in the first two thirds of the picture, and a surprising dearth of ah-roo overall – but the journey is one of absolute enjoyment! The Pino Donaggio score is a big help, and the script is a gangbuster!

And oh frankenstein, what a supporting cast! In addition to the many champs already named we get veterans like Kevin McCarthy from Invasion of the Body Snatchers in the role of the grumpy owner of Karen’s TV station, Ken Tobey from It Came From Beneath the Sea as a cop, and best of all the fabulous Miller from A Bucket of Blood, here again playing Walter Paisley, this time in the guise of the mercenary occult bookstore owner who calls werewolves “worse than cock-a-roaches!” Ha ha! We also get cameos from Roger Corman and Forrest Ackerman and screenwriter John Sayles, who also turned up in Dante’s Matinee!

Of course there were many sequels to this picture, beginning with Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, then moving on to the one with the were-marsupials, and only getting worse from there! Ha ha, I’ve seen a few of them, but all I recall is that they were stank! This one is the real deal, though – a terrific follow-up to Dante’s previous picture Piranha! My friends and I watched it plenty back in the old VHS days, and I can tell you it holds up! The standing-up werewolves look cool and the transformation trick effects are tasty! There’s even a touch of stop motion, as you'll find in most Dante pictures! Yes, it’s a solid entertainment, very hairy, and so I give The Howling three and a half frying hamburgers!

Burl reviews Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf! (1984)

 

Ha ha and hairballs, it’s Burl, suffering from a case of sequelitis! You know, most of the time there’s a drop-off in quality between the first movie in a series and the subsequent entries! Ha ha, look at Jaws, an excellent movie with a mediocre sequel and then, ultimately, Jaws: The Revenge! Pew! Nearly as steep is the plunge from the heights of Joe Dante’s wonderful The Howling directly to the sewage pipe known as Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf! Ha ha, can you feature it!

The story is thus: in the aftermath of the first movie, which ended with a newslady transforming into a werewolf while on a live telecast, then being killed with a silver bullet, the newslady’s lunkhead brother Ben, played by Reb Brown from Fastbreak and The Sword and the Sorcerer, and his girlfriend Jenny, essayed by Annie McEnroe from Snowbeast, are approached by none other than Scaramanga himself, Christopher Lee, known to us from such diverse fare as The Man With the Golden Gun, Desperate Moves, and The Gorgon! Lee’s character, Stefan, explains to them that the sister was a werewolf and that they must travel to Transylvania or somewhere so they can kill the queen werewolf, Stirba!

Of course this is a little hard to swallow for the lunkhead couple, but a visit to a punk club called the Slammer, with the names of top acts like GBH, Black Flag, and The Cramps scrawled all over the walls, and where the house band, Babel, sings a song of lycanthropy, soon sorts that out! Then it’s off to central Europe, just in time for a village festival featuring some of the gooniest dancing you’ll ever see! Here they meet an oddment of characters, including a helpful but ill-fated dwarf, and some nefarious fur-sprouters played by the likes of Marsha A. Hunt from Dracula A.D. 1972 and The Sender, Ferdinand Mayne from Frightmare, and Judd Omen from Seems Like Old Times! Ultimately the goal is to kill the werewolf queen Stirba, played in a series of brain-melting outfits by Sybil Danning from Talking Walls!

It’s no easy task to destroy all these monsters! Thanks to a mumbled curse, the poor dwarf has the worst day ever, one so bad that his eyeballs exploding is not the worst thing that happens to him! Stefan assembles a little anti-werewolf brigade and arms them with titanium weapons (the only thing that can kill a werewolf, according to this movie’s hastily extemporized mythology), and then werewolves start popping out of the bushes, spoiling for a fight! At the end of one typically incoherent action scene, in which werewolves are blasted, chopped, poked, and hacked, the lunkhead lets loose with a hysterically triumphant scream, “I told you we’d get these fuzzballs!”

But there’s still Stirba, werewolf bitch, to contend with, and since Stefan is her brother he’ll take care of that! And none too soon, because, ha ha, it’s a true croque-en-boeuf, this picture! Unbelievably poor editing and direction gives it a distinctly ESL feel, as though it was a three-hour foreign film cut down to ninety minutes for North American blockheads with no attention span! The script is monumentally dumb, and it all seems a concerted plot to make Christopher Lee look goofier than he has on screen since donning the reservoir-tipped hat in Starship Invasions! However, the man’s boundless reserves of dignity keep his honour intact, though the other performers are not so lucky, ha ha!

It’s a bad movie and the people who made it should feel bad! How could the director, Philippe Mora, have gone from the entertaining transformational antics of The Beast Within to this? It’s a puzzlement, as it always is when someone’s sense of craft completely deserts them! However, some of the trick effects are entertaining, and Christopher Lee is always a pleasure to watch, so it’s not completely without worth! I give Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf one pair of new wave fancy-glasses!

Burl reviews Night of the Howling Beast! (1975)

 

With a Spanish aroooo, it’s Burl, here to review some Iberian lycanthropy! Yes, ha ha, it’s our good and great friend Paul Naschy again, and here’s he’s playing his most beloved character, Waldemar Daninsky, just as he did in The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman, but didn’t in House of Psychotic Women! Poor Waldemar just can’t catch a break, and such is the case again in this picture, Night of the Howling Beast!

After an opening in which a gang of explorers in the Himalayas is attacked by a yeti who looks, sounds, and acts just like a werewolf, Waldemar is called in by The Professor to lead a follow-up expedition! He’s happy to do it, and happier still that The Professor’s comely daughter, and another beautiful science lady as well, will be participating! There are a few others in the party, including one fellow whose name is Lawrence Talbot, but who never comes close to becoming a werewolf himself, ha ha! No, he has to settle for merely being vertically impaled by Tatars midway through the picture!

On arriving in Nepal (played here by the Pyrénées), the party is split up, with Waldemar and the sketchy, perennially frightened local guide Joel heading off to find a pass through the snowy mountains! Joel runs off and Waldemar ends up in a cave inhabited by ladies who might be vampires or might be werewolves, but in any case they can’t keep their hands off the refrigerator physique of our hero, and this occasions much bum-wiggling sex! Once Waldemar realizes they’re flesh-eating creatures from beyond reality, he goes on an impaling jag; but before he can dispatch both ladies, one of them puts a chomping on his left tit! Ha ha, uh oh!

Now of course he’s a werewolf, and meanwhile the rest of the expedition is beset by the above-mentioned Tatars, who kill or kidnap everybody! Their leader, the Khan, has a skin condition on his back, and the witch in his employ is trying to remedy the ailment by peeling off other people’s backs and sticking it on the Khan’s! Yowch! Meanwhile there’s still a yeti, or yetis, running around, and Waldemar is periodically wolfing out, and what to do about these darn Tatars and their evil witch?

There’s a bit of a lull in the action around the middle of the picture while Waldemar and The Professor’s daughter hang out with a monk and his pal, but it’s nothing serious! There’s plenty going on at the Khan’s castle once Waldemar and the daughter arrive there, though! And the long-heralded battle between the yeti and the werewolf finally happens at the end, and it’s sometimes hard to tell one from the other!

As well, there’s time taken to give a happy ending in which the mystical flower is discovered by The Professor’s daughter right after the monster fight! Once she pushes a magic flower-blood combo into the werewolf’s toothy mouth, carefully, as you would, he reverse-pixilates into his Waldemar form and what’s more his wound seems to have healed! The last we see is the pair of them tromping off through the Himalayas in their leisurewear! Ha ha!

It’s pretty gnashy Naschy when all is said and done, and I enjoyed the picture, even if it gets a little sadistic here and there! Naschy didn’t himself direct this one, the better perhaps to direct his thespian attentions to the various ladies that want to “go ‘pon his bones for a touch of bohankie,” as they say! Yes, it’s solid Naschy, as solid as his own chest appears to be, and there's no doubt he knew just what his audience wanted to see, and gave it to them! Night of the Howling Beast is also known as The Werewolf and the Yeti, and by the end it earns that title, so I’ll give the picture two chomp marks!

Burl reviews Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man! (1943)

 

Ha ha and arooo, by the light of the full moon it’s Burl, here to review some Universal monster horror! This isn’t the best of the run, but it’s far from the worst, and like any of them it makes for some fine October viewing! The name of this picture is, and could only be, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man!

It serves more as a sequel to The Wolf Man than anything else, though by the end it plays as a standard Frankenstein picture! Our man Lon Chaney Jr., known from My Favorite Brunette, is the constantly anguished Larry Talbot, who, as the picture begins, reposes peacefully in his grave, not bothering anyone! In a striking sequence marvelously directed by Roy William Neill, who also brought us the delights of The Scarlet Claw, two foolish grave robbers decide to pilfer the Talbot family crypt, and on the night of the full moon no less! Ha ha, these two miscreants are soon weeping copious tears as the hirsute terror revives himself and goes full wolfman! (An interesting trivia is that one of the robbers is played by Cyril Delevanti, who later appeared in pictures like Son of Dracula, The Night of the Iguana, and Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad, played Johnnycake Jones in the Hudson’s Bay teleseries, and ended his career in Jack Arnold’s blaxploitation picture Black Eye, playing a character called Talbot! Ha ha!)

A hapless Welsh constable catches a fatal wolfmanning as well, and then Larry is found dazed and confused and human again, and having no idea how he ended up sleeping rough on the streets of Cardiff! He tracks down Maria Ouspenskaya, the old Gypsy woman whose son Bela put a biting on Larry in the first picture and turned him into a werewolf, but all she can do is point him in the direction of a certain science doctor she knows of! Well, of course this is Dr. Frankenstein, but when Larry arrives at the castle, he discovers two astonishing things: one, the doctor is dead; and two, the Gypsy woman’s son Bela, thought dead, has somehow been transformed into a Frankenstein Monster, and is reposing in an ice cave beneath the ground!

Of course Bela, the new Frankenstein Monster, is played by the great Bela Lugosi from Island of Lost  Souls! Replacing the departed doctor is a new doctor, Dr. Mannering, played by Patric Knowles from Another Thin Man! He quickly becomes obsessed with the secrets of life and death, which alarms Frankenstein’s daughter, Baroness Elsa, while down in the town the mayor, Lionel Atwill from Night Monster, tries to keep the increasingly anxious townspeople from lighting up their torches for a mob run up to the castle!

Ha ha, this mob is headed by the local malcontent, a large gentleman with a fulsome walrus moustache and a delightfully modern taste in shirts, who’s played by Rex Evans from Midnight Lace! And his gang includes the great Dwight Frye of Dracula fame! It all comes to a head just as Frankenstein Monster and the Wolf Man are finally throwing down for their climactic monstero-a-monstero, and while I won’t tell you who wins, I will say that the results are inconclusive thanks to a great wall of water unleashed by the constantly grousing Evans!

The bald fact is that if you like Universal monster movies, you’ll like this one, because it’s got just about everything you could hope for from the form! It’s a bit scary, a bit silly, and suffused with backlot atmosphere, and the tone does get a bit grim with Larry Talbot's constant hankering for the sweet release of death! This was the first of the monster-mash pictures, but not the last, and of course eventually the comedians would get involved and we’d have such works as Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff! But at this point they were still trying to be scary, and they halfway succeeded! I give Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man two and a half ice windows!

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 She-Wolf of London! (1946)

Ralston-Purina, it’s Burl, ha ha, here to review you a she-wolf picture; and right off the top I want to let you know that I’m going to tell the ending! Ha ha, yes, the ending of today’s picture, She-Wolf of London, features a twist! It’s one that I didn’t bother trying to guess, because I never really try to guess, but when it came along after sixty-one chatty minutes, I couldn’t say I was surprised!

Well, dateline London! A fragile young heiress lives in a big house with an aunt who isn’t an aunt, a cousin who isn’t a cousin, and a jolly but slow-on-the-uptake maid! I can’t recall why they all live together or what the relative relationships are, but all these things are explained, I believe! The ersatz aunt is a real old sobersides, and boy howdy, the cousin is pretty!

Our heiress, played by June Lockhart from Strange Invaders and Curse of the Black Widow, is troubled, because the house is next to what must be a really enormous park, and within that park something unnatural is prowling, putting a fatal scritchscratch on anyone foolish enough to be wandering this Yellowstone-sized park at night!

Because of The Allenby Curse, the heiress – who bears the distinctly un-heiressy name of Phyllis – assumes she herself is the culprit! Circumstantial evidence – blood on her hands, mud on her slippers – confirms the suspicion, and Phyllis isolates herself in her chambers and refuses to see her young lawyer fiancée! Ha ha, the fiancée, Barry, is played by Don Porter from White Line Fever, and here he is, young!

I hope you’ve realized what’s going on! It was a real disappointment for me, I can tell you! Because there’s no she-wolf! No, of course it’s the maniacally status-seeking aunt, donning Phyllis’s shawl and putting the chop to police and civilian alike! Even Martin Kosleck, whom you might know from The Flesh Eaters, gets roughed up by the old gal!

It’s too bad about The Allenby Curse, or Phyllis wouldn’t have fallen for it! Ha ha, I wonder if my old high school chum Bruce Allenby suffered from The Allenby Curse? He never mentioned anything about it! Anyway, I really think they should have done a double twist, where Phyllis really is a werewolf, but it required a shock so great as Aunt Martha has delivered to set off the transformation! Ha ha, that would have been a great ending!

I found the movie similar to Crimson Peak in some ways! As with that picture, it all comes down to a womano-a-womano fight and a climactic bonking! Although here, ha ha, the day is saved not by the heroine’s shovelsmanship, but by a clumsy accident! Ha ha, the pursuing Aunt Martha, waving her knife, simply trips and falls, and it’s altogether less like the climax of a horror-mystery and more like a scene from an educational film on the importance of safety in the home!

Sara Haden from Mad Love plays Aunt Martha, and she does a pretty good job! Everyone else is adequate, with Kosleck’s Lorre-like performance a bit of a bright spot! The movie looks pretty good; not as nice as the top-drawer Universal horror pictures, but better than the PRC stuff, like The Devil Bat, made by the same director, Jean Yarborough! There are a couple of effective moments (the inspector’s death-shuffle, for instance), but it’s mostly disappointing and lacklustre! Altogether, and factoring in the disappointment, I’ll give She-Wolf of London one and a half lanterns hung at the window!

Burl reviews Silver Bullet! (1985)

Aroooo, it’s Burl with another werewolf picture for you! This one’s not quite up to the standard set by An American Werewolf in London, but it’s no Howling II either, ha ha!

In fact, it’s Silver Bullet, a movie I’ve been a little fond of, but not very fond of really, for years, ever since I saw it in the theater as a young lad! It is of course a Stephen King picture, made around the same time as, and with much the same crew as, Maximum Overdrive! Except that King didn’t direct this one – it was directed by a guy with a fairly TV style, who, immediately after this picture, went into TV directing and never came back!

For some reason the picture is set in the mid-70s, in Tarker's Mills, which I suppose must be one of those little Maine towns so dear to the author! James Gammon, the hard-assed coach from The Pom Pom Girls, appears as a comic drunk who gets his melon removed with one swipe of a paw that might have been borrowed from Grizzly! “Ha ha, thus was the beginning of our little town’s long nightmare,” intones posh-sounding lady narrator Tovah “Brewster’s Millions” Feldshuh!

Then we meet little wheelchair-bound Marty, played by Corey “Watchers” Haim, and his sister Megan Follows, who have a thorny relationship! The murders continue on a menstrual cycle, and pretty soon boozy old Uncle Red, which is to say Gary “Eye of the Tiger” Busey, gets involved! Uncle Red is the sort of fellow who’ll sit around telling obnoxious jokes and swigging from a bottle of Wild Turkey on the one hand, and construct fabulously unlikely mechanized conveyances for his disabled nephew on the other!

But who is the townsperson with the hirsute double life? Ha ha, could it be Uncle Red, who, we are told, visits Tarker's Mills on a monthly basis? Could it be mom or dad, or the touque-wearing bartender played by Lawrence “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” Tierney? Or the gas station guy who looks halfway like a werewolf already? Or could it be Reverend ‘Bout Town, the district’s brooding holy man, played by Everett McGill from Dune? Well, it’s one of them, that’s for sure! The kids’ suspicions settle on Reverend ‘Bout Town, and with Uncle Red’s help they decide to set a werewolf trap!

It’s a watchable enough picture, though not a very scary one! King’s script is full of his grotesque small-town caricatures and clunky dialogue! “Ha ha, you gonna make lemonade in your pants?” demands one character of another! But occasionally the dialogue works: “Ha ha, I’m too old to play The Hardy Boys Meet Reverend Werewolf,” grouses Uncle Red! But for all its faults – including, but not limited to, a baggy structure, unconvincing nighttime cinematography, a general silliness – the worst of them all is the rubbery werewolves themselves, which look a little like the one in WolfCop crossed with a honey bear!

Altogether the picture could use a bit more pep – there’s some gore and some suspense, but a certain liveliness is sadly absent! It still occupies a place in my heart, but I’m going to give Silver Bullet one and a half de-occulations by bottle rocket!

Burl reviews WolfCop! (2014)

Arooo, it’s Burl, here to review a new werewolf picture for you – a low-budget lycanthropic tale called WolfCop that I just now saw in a big, if largely empty, movie theatre! Ha ha, I have to say up front that it’s always a pleasure to see a low-budget horror movie in the theatre, no matter the quality of the actual film!

I’ll tell you, I didn’t know what to expect, but I was hoping for something good, and if not good, then fun and gory! And to an extent I got what I hoped for! The picture begins with an alcoholic cop named, ahhh-ha-ha-ha, wait for it, Lou Garou, who is not just a bad cop, but probably the worst cop I’ve ever seen portrayed on film! I don’t mean he hits people with truncheons or anything, ha ha; he’s just remarkably terrible at his job!

He gets bopped on the head and ritualized in the woods somehow, and the next thing you know he’s not getting five o’clock shadow, but five-second-later shadow! And, as in other werewolf pictures, such as An American Werewolf in London just to cite one example, small dogs take a strange interest in him! But the town is meanwhile beset by many travails, including missing pets, a drugs gang, a robbery gang, mysterious occurrences of all kinds, and a mayoral election, so the newly minted wolf cop is kept very busy! All of this is very fuzzily sketched out, with some things left, or made, much more confusing than they ought to be, usually by the omission of some basic information! Frankly, it was almost as bad as Bad Meat, ha ha – but not quite, because nothing could be!

This brings us to the picture’s most pressing and dire problem: poor storytelling! Some of the character confusion is explained near the end by the introduction of shapeshifting frog people to the brew, but in general everything the movie attempts, whether it be the main narrative, the perplexing back story (something about Lou’s father, who was a cop, and the lady cop’s father, who was a bartender, and something something mysterious deaths?) or the attempt to mint a unique mythology, is scuppered by the writer-director’s dearth of storytelling skill!

There are other problems too: the lead actor, with his Danny Huston hair, is weak (though considerably better in wolf form); the staging is often inept, particularly in the action scenes; and there are too many bad lite-metal songs on the soundtrack! Ha ha! But this is not to say the picture doesn’t have its charms, because it most certainly does! The other performances range from competent to good, with a cracker moustacheman played by Jonathan Cherry a particular highlight! The trick effects by Emersen Ziffle are, in general, excellent (though the wolfcop makeup looks a little raggedy in some scenes, ha ha), and there are touches of cleverness scattered throughout the film!

But the resolution makes so little sense that even the wolfcop questions it! Ha ha! I mean, how could someone lead a drugs gang and be a police chief at the same time? Or tend bar and be a mayor? And where did the frog people come from originally, and why do some of them burst into flames when shot, and others do not?

There’s no point in asking these questions, I realize! For me there was much sublime pleasure simply in going to the movie theatre to see what Joe Bob always called the three essential Bs: blood, breasts and beasts! This picture has them all, and if the werewolf looks a little more like the one in Death Moon than the one in American Werewolf, well, no matter! I’m impressed with this picture for even existing! I’m going to give WolfCop two Liquor Donuts and urge you to check it out at your earliest convenience!

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 reviews An American Werewolf in London! (1981)

Aroooo, it’s Burl! Ha ha, yes, I have a review of a werewolf movie today, and it’s one of the best: An American Werewolf in London! 1981, by many reckonings, was The Year of the Werewolf, since this picture, The Howling, Full Moon High and Wolfen all came out that same twelvemonth! (Wolfen, it should be noted, isn’t really a werewolf picture, but in many ways it might as well have been!) And there was a lot of debate at the time, and there is still for all I know, about which was the better picture: this or The Howling!

Well, ol’ Burl is here to tell you that they’re both great, and choosing the better one is like choosing your favourite child! You might think you have a preference, but then you find it’s changed, and in any case most of the time you love them both pretty much equally! And, most importantly, you just don't have to choose!

Anyway, I’ve always enjoyed this movie most robustly! It’s the story of Jack and David, two students on a trip to Northern England, which I thought was a strange choice of destination until I traveled as a young man myself, and guess where I ended up! The lads get attacked by a werewolf of course! Jack dies, David is scratched up a bit and ends up in a London hospital, having a love romance with a nurse played by the gorgeous Jenny “Logan’s Run” Agutter! In the meantime his dead pal shows up and tries to persuade him that he’s a werewolf himself now, and that suicide is the only answer!

Of course David thinks this all hooey, and there follows a famous transformation scene! It’s very impressive, the more so today with all the weightless CGI they put on us! I don’t mean to fly my fogey flag too energetically, but give me those old fashioned Special Makeup Effects any day! Ha ha, and then there’s some killing, a policeman who appears to be auditioning for John Cleese’s part in Monty Python, further visits from Jack, the dawning of the truth, See You Next Wednesday, the freakout in Piccadilly Circus, and the final alleyway encounter!

I will say this in agreement with the picture’s detractors: the ending is a bit weak! There’s a very brutal series of car crashes in the Circus, which was the standard Landis climax of the day, and then an attempt at an emotional climax that the movie almost but has not quite earned! It unfolds with an admirable economy though, and you can’t complain about a good, sudden fade-to-black followed by the Marcels’ version of “Blue Moon!” Ha ha, no you can’t!

And the first chunk of the movie, the beautiful credits sequence right through the pub scene, is purely wonderful stuff! The two leads, David “The Sleeping Car” Naughton and Griffin “After Hours” Dunne, are perfectly cast, especially Dunne! Ha ha, imagine if John “Into the Night” Landis, the director, had cast whoever was big that year, in that age group! Imagine if the movie starred Robby Benson and Christopher Atkins! Ha ha, imagine that for just a moment! As in The Thing, the absence of big stars is of great benefit to the picture!

Some people complain about the wonky tone, but it’s always worked magnificently for me! It’s chock full of great British actors, it’s funny, it’s gory, the photography is nice, the trick effects are glorious! It’s logically challenged at times, certainly (ha ha, where are David’s parents?) but a marvelous picture really, one which, in its design, feels as Important as any Goldcrest production, but in spirit is one of the great 80s latex makeup movies! Chariots of Fire meets The Power! Ha ha, and the tag line on the poster was lifted from Prophecy!

I’m as fond as I can be of this picture, though I recognize its flaws! I’m going to award An American Werewolf in London three and a half walking meatloaves!

Burl reviews The Beast Within! (1982)

Hah trayah, good friends, it’s Burl, here to review a spookshow that takes place in the o-o-o-o-ol’ Sou-u-u-uth! That’s right, Burlmaniacs, the picture is The Beast Within, the famous were-cicada picture!

Along with The Howling, An American Werewolf in London and Cat People, this was a part of the great Transformation Sweepstakes of the early 1980s! It got lost in the shuffle a little bit I think, because nobody was quite sure what the main kid, played in a very strange performance by horror fan Paul Clemens, is supposed to turn into! I call him a were-cicada, but that’s only because cicadas are mentioned several times, and there’s a parallel drawn between their seventeen-year life cycle and the fact that The McCleary Boy, as he’s most frequently called in the movie, has just turned seventeen and is therefore ready to make his transmorphication!

I’ll back up a bit for those who have not seen the picture or who need a refresher on the plot: Ronny Cox and Bibi Besch play newlyweds who run off the road near the little town of Nioba, Mississippi! Well, Ronny goes off for help and of course Bibi is attacked by a mysterious figure who has just escaped from some kind of basement hideaway! Seventeen years later, their son, The McCleary Boy, is sick with “an occult malignancy,” and the two parents travel back to Nioba to see if they can find any clues to the illness!

One thing I like about the picture is that only some of the townsfolk are in on the conspiracy of silence! Amazingly, the sheriff, played by L.Q. Jones from White Line Fever, just tries to be as helpful as he can, and the doctor is played by the great R.G. Armstrong, from The Car, in one of his rare nice-guy roles! Ha ha, and what a cast, as you can tell just from the names Cox, Jones and Armstrong! There’s also Meshach Taylor, who flew the helicopter with Dick Miller in Explorers, as a deputy! (L.Q. Jones, by the way, gets one of the all-time great introductory lines: “Oral sodomy, eh? Well, that’s why it’s a small town!” Ha ha!)

There’s all sorts of quasi-Southern Gothic happenstance, and when The McCleary Boy arrives in town, the strange murders begin! Other excellent character actors like Logan Ramsay and Luke Askew are killed by The McCleary Boy, who is evidently possessed by the spirit of a fellow who’d been reduced to an animal form by maltreatment at the hands of a local Nioban seventeen years earlier! Ha ha, I think you can connect the dots from there!

And then we get the big transformation! Ha ha, it’s one of the craziest ever put to film, I think! Convincing it’s not (which is partially to be blamed on the effects themselves, and partially, I think, on the way they were photographed), but it’s certainly something to look at! The McCleary Boy, wearing his PJs the whole time, expands and puffs out through the use of bladder effects so egregious you can practically read the word “Trojan” on the pulsating goiters! Soon he turns into a large rugby ball with eyes, and thence into a monster that, when you think back on it, you can’t really remember what it looked like! The monster goes on a little rampage, punching through cinderblock walls and pulling heads off, that sort of thing! 

It’s a pretty enjoyable movie, even if it could use a little shoring up in the narrative department! Apparently The McCleary Boy transforms because he’s possessed by the spirit of his father, Billy Collins, who was imprisoned in a root cellar and passed the time by practicing Indian Magic he’d learned from his pal Tom Laws, and that magic was something called The Changing Game, which for whatever reason was connected with the cicadas and their lifestyle! But ha ha, you wouldn’t know any of that from the movie – I only learned it from reading an interview with Paul Clemens!

The movie’s a little rapey for ol’ Burl – there are two such incidents in the picture, which is two too many if you ask me – and it could stand to be scarier, but that great cast, the audacious trick effects and the Southern-fried atmosphere make it a personal favourite! I give The Beast Within two and a half Gumphreys!

Burl reviews Death Moon! (1978)

Ha ha, it’s Burl here with another TV movie for you! Boy, I’ve never watched so many TV movies as I have since beginning this movie review blog! I don’t know why, but I’ve really been enjoying the suckers! I suppose it recalls a time in my life when movies like Curse of the Black Widow and Cruise Into Terror and This House Possessed and Snowbeast were about all I could watch, since I was too young to go to the movies by myself and there were no VCRs yet!

Unlike those other movies I just mentioned, Death Moon is not a picture I recall from the heady days of my youth, even though it was apparently broadcast in late May of 1978, which should have placed it right in my prepubescent crosshairs! Perhaps it simply wasn’t broadcast in my region! Or maybe the tumblers of fate weren’t going to click into place until I was good and ready to accept the full, fierce beauty of the movie’s concept: a Hawaiian werewolf!

Ha ha, you read that right! Robert Foxworth, whom we know so well from Prophecy and – well, that’s about all I know him from, besides his small role in Damien: Omen II and maybe his appearance in that other TV movie It Happened at Lakewood Manor, a.k.a. Ants! – plays Jason Palmer, one of those overstressed businessmen who’s always waking up shaking and sweating from accursed dreams involving a fearsome tiki! His sawbones recommends a vacation, and the next thing you know, Jason Palmer is in Kauai, wearing a tiny blue bathing suit and gamely seeking some relaxation!

But as Jason begins his program of relaxation by squiring about a blonde businesslady, and as Rick, a ladies’ man hotel detective, chases a burly room thief, the werewolf attacks begin, and people are being torn apart all over the place, a fresh outrage each night! Ha ha, it goes on for a week or so, and that’s a lot of full moons! The house dick (who with his Ken doll face and receding hairline looks like a perfect telepod cross between Crown International superstars Bill Adler and James Daughton) begs the local cop to be allowed to help solve the murders, but everyone tells him to concentrate on catching the room thief! But when the room thief becomes a werewolf victim, Rick is able to turn the full force of his investigative prowess on the case!

The unfortunate room thief, by the way, is played by Charles Haid, whom we know from Ken Russell’s great Altered States! It’s funny: Haid is so good at playing a bigmouth blowhard, and here he is in a role which gives him no lines at all, until his werewolf encounter anyway, and then he only screams! And he’s the most unsubtle sneakthief ever, too! Ha ha, he wears loud shirts, smokes a stogie and weighs about two hundred and fifty pounds, and you have to consider that Rick might be a bit of an idiot not to have been able to catch him!

He also doesn’t think there might be a werewolf loose despite coming face-to-face with the leisure suit-wearing fiend in the movie’s finest scene! Ha ha, it only lasts a second, but it’s worth a rewind on the ol’ VHS to see Rick’s lycanthrope encounter one more time, I can tell you!

The trouble with Death Moon is it’s nowhere near as good as we all want it to be, given the fantastic concept and the era in which it was made! There’s not much Hawaiian atmosphere, and if I didn’t know better I’d say it might as well have been filmed in Southern California! And Robert Foxworth without a beard is a little strange – his curly hair and weasel face put him in the Marjoe Gortner category, almost! But still, you can’t argue with the idea of a Hawaiian werewolf no matter how direly executed, and I give Death Moon one and a half fake gurning tikis!