Burl reviews City in Panic! (1987)

 

Ha ha, speak up everybody, you’re on the air - it’s Burl here to review a fairly obscure little Canadian mystery-slasher picture! It’s one of those grimy, vaguely giallo-inspired movies that came along regularly through the early and mid-80s – pictures like American Nightmare and Evil Judgment are close cousins, it seems to me! The movie we’re talking about today goes by several titles – among them, reportedly, The AIDS Murders – but I’m going to refer to it by the name on the VHS tape I watched: City in Panic!

The city in question is Toronto, and though they don’t name it, it’s pretty identifiable! Ha ha, there are plenty of recognizable cityscape shots, and the piles of dirty snow seen everywhere identify the climate and the season for us as well! It looks like it was a cold shoot - ha ha, as someone who has worked on movies in Toronto in the wintertime, I had real sympathy for the cast of this picture, and even more for the crew!

The panic has already begun as the story begins: enough people, maybe two or three, have been murdered for the police and the public to realize it’s a serial maniac! Because the victims are mainly gay men, the action starts outside the Oak Leaf Steam Baths on Bathurst Street, which I cheered when I saw because, even though I never went to the steam baths, they were in the same building as Mimi’s, a great restaurant at which I used to frequently eat my breakfast! Ha ha, they made a terrific French toast! Mimi’s was a marvelous place, always full of famous, semi-famous, and non-famous musicians, and Mimi herself was a real character!

Anyway, the man comes out of the steam baths looking chagrined and heads home for a shower! The killer is on his tail, and what follows is the most slavish recreation of the Psycho shower scene outside of Gus Van Sant’s weird 1998 remake! Then we’re introduced to the competent but unremarkable actors who will essay our main characters: firstly Dave Miller, impersonated by David Anderson, an anodyne talk radio host who plays with toys as he broadcasts and whose catch phrase is “Speak up, you’re on the air!” The topic du jour on Dave’s radio show is of course the murders, and his position on the matter is tough to define, but it’s apparently at odds with that of the town’s other media giant, a Truman Capote-ish columnist called Alex Ramsey!

Although these two constantly reiterate their respective opinions on the killings and on the approach the police are taking to solve the crimes, I was never quite sure what those positions were! As near as I can tell, Dave is asking the public for patience, opining that the cops have a tough job so let them do it; while Alex Ramsey just wants someone to declare martial law and do whatever they have to do to get this murderous scoundrel off the streets! Meanwhile we meet other characters: Dave’s radio producer Louise, played by Bonnie Beck from Wild Thing; Ramsay’s assistant (and, I think, Dave’s ex?) Elizabeth Price, played by Leeann Nestegard; and Dave’s best friend, who’s also the detective on the case, Barry McKee! We also get to know Barry’s partner, who is the world’s angriest cop!

But the killer seems unstoppable! Kitted out in giallo-wear (black hat, cloak, gloves and glasses), the fiend takes out He-Man, a ponky male stripper who prances about to the screams of the ladies! Ha ha, even the cops, even his best friend, even He-Man’s own physician refers to him only as He-Man! And there’s more! Every so often the killer will roll up in a sweet boogie van right out of Prom Night and put the knife to, oh, let’s say a fellow hanging upside down in the gym, or else a security guard who takes advantage of a glory hole and by garr pays the price! Arghhh, ha ha! A letter M is always carved into the victims, and later on a poster for Fritz Lang’s M provides an important if belated clue to Detective Barry McKee!

I guess I shouldn’t give away the killer or the motive, but despite the fact that the victims are almost all gay men and are afflicted with AIDS (which, in keeping with the mid-80s provenance of the picture, it assumes is an automatic death sentence for anyone who’s got it), it’s not a simple case of murderous homophobia! I suppose the movie is pretty progressive for its day, in that none of the gay folk are simple caricatures; but it’s nevertheless very much of its day, so keep that in mind and be warned if you’re thinking of watching it!

I can’t say the solution to the mystery surprised me, and, ha ha, I’m pretty easily surprised! Also, the movie is simply not terribly well made, even if it could have been worse! Some of the acting is not bad, and some of it is; and it’s not a movie with much of a sense of humour – by the end, I must say, it gets pretty grim! But then suddenly, with a bonk on the head, it’s all done, and the only thing left is to wait for the AIDS to inevitably claim any still-living infected characters, as far as the movie's medical understanding goes! As movies go it’s a bit unusual and it’s a bit Toronto, and those are its main virtues, so I’ll give City in Panic one set of gravity boots!

Burl reviews Cold Pursuit! (2019)

 

By krim-kram and by the flurries of winters past, it’s Burl, here to review yet another picture featuring an aging Liam Neeson carrying vengeance in his heart! He’s done this oh so many times before – look at movies like Next of Kin and Darkman and Taken 2, and there you’ll see that old familiar figure of Liam Neeson with vengeance reliably lodged in his heart! And the picture under discussion today is more of the same, and it’s called Cold Pursuit!

This is not just a vengeance picture but also belongs to that subset of movies which are remakes of movies made a year or two earlier by the same European director who made the original, and usually the remake is the filmmaker’s entrée into Hollywood studio picturemaking! Think of The Vanishing, (and, ha ha, then forget it – the remake, anyway), or Funny Games! Cold Pursuit is a remake of the Danish-Norwegian comedeo-vengeance film In Order of Disappearance, which I’m pretty sure I’ve seen! And like all these remakes, bar, I think, none, the original is the better one!

Old Liam plays Nels, which seems like, but isn’t, an anagram for “Liam!” Nels is a solid citizen in a little Colorado mountain town: he’s the man who keeps the roads clear with his big shed full of plowing equipment, and for this he’s being recognized as Local Man of the Year, for which his wife, Laura Dern from Blue Velvet, is proud! But then we see how their son, played by Neeson’s real-life son I believe, has, through his airport baggage job and the shabby offices of a disreputable pal, become mixed up with a drugs gang, and thanks to a misunderstanding, is kidnapped and given a fatal overdose by the gang!

Neeson and Dern each react to this in their own way: Dern takes off for parts unknown and is never seen again, while Neeson becomes vengeance-crazed, turning to his retired-gangster brother, played by William Forsythe from Smokey Bites the Dust and Extreme Prejudice, for information and advice! The tone turns blackly comic as Neeson kills his way up the Denver crime hierarchy, and with each new notch on the belt comes an intertitle memorializing the dead party and listing his gangster nickname! Ha ha, this is a bit on the cutesy side – I recall it working better in the original, where the humour was allowed to be as dry as it needed to be and the little titles didn’t stand out as much as they do in this more studio-tooled, focus-grouped remake!

The nicknames are another running gag, with a puzzled Neeson quizzing his brother about them! But, like the obituary intertitles, this aspect seems nothing more than ornamentation added later to purfle the border of an otherwise ordinary crime thriller! Ha ha, but there are a few details which seem a bit more organically integrated, like the rival gang of Indigenous mobsters! And there’s a subplot involving the son of the main bad guy, a boy-faced mob boss called The Viking, who lacks any evident Viking qualities beyond a general ruthlessness; this subplot has a mild wackiness to it, and lends the picture a bit of dualism which, for the movie’s running time at least, serves as an acceptable substitute for complexity!

The revenge part works well enough, familiar as it is, though I was disappointed that Nels didn’t use his snowplow more! It figures into the last act a little bit, but not enough to make this picture anything more than a mildly eccentric and otherwise unmemorable crime picture, more notable for casting a shadow over the original foreign iteration than for any qualities of its own! Neeson does this stuff with an appealing stolidity, but he could pull that off in his sleep, and in several scenes seems to be doing so here! I say stick with the original version, or maybe Fargo, which did snowbound crime eccentricity better than any other picture I can think of; but I’ll give Cold Pursuit two Fruity Pebbles anyway!

Burl reviews He Knows You're Alone! (1980)

 

Sweet gumchewers, hello! It’s Burl, here to review another old school slasher picture, one of the many that came along in the direct wake of Halloween! Of course only one of these pretenders could reign supreme and that’s Friday the 13^th, but that doesn’t mean the others didn’t have something to offer the undiscerning horror viewer! Take, for instance, the picture under close observation today: an east coast stalk-n-slash entitled He Knows You’re Alone!

It all gets going with a pretty decent fake-out – a cliché-filled stalking scene featuring a couple played by Russell Todd, who would later fall victim to Jason in Friday the 13^th part 2 and to robots in Chopping Mall, and Debbie Novak, who had earlier appeared in jiggle comedies Team-Mates and Incoming Freshmen; but this scene turns out to be from a movie on a theatre screen being watched by two young ladies! Ha ha, just like Scream 2! Of course one of these ladies catches a dorsal poking through the seatback, and it turns out she was a bride-to-be, and very likely, according to an obsessed but incompetent moustache cop, the latest victim of a known bride-to-be killer! The killer is a jilted groom whose own abandonment at the altar sent him totally sneebarr, and ever since he’s been killing brides-to-be wherever he may find them, including the obsessed moustache cop’s fiancée!

This of course is, alongside the inciting incident in Hospital Massacre, among the weakest motivations ever tried on in a slasher movie, but never mind that – the actor playing the killer tries to compensate for this nonsense by opening his eyes as wide as possible in every close-up! He actually does convince as a madman, and you certainly buy him as a threatening one, even as you wonder what he does in his spare time and how he earns a living when not stalking brides-to-be!

Our central bride-to-be is called Amy, and she’s played by Caitlin O’Heaney, who appeared in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy and was the beautiful English teacher in Three O’Clock High! She’s marrying an obvious jerk named Phil, but at the same time her old boyfriend Marvin is trying in his ginger-headed way to win her back! Marvin has his own charms, being as how he’s played by Don Scardino from Homer and Rip-Off, but he’s also a morgue assistant, so tends to joke about dead bodies! Ha ha, if this had been more of a whodunit, I’m sure Marvin’s job would have made him a suspect, as it does Bill Paxton’s character in Mortuary!

Amy’s pals include Nancy, a goofy gal played by Elizabeth Kemp from Eating, and Diana the goodtime gal played by Dana Barron of Vacation and Heaven Help Us fame! Midway through the picture, Nancy hooks up with a friendly but pompous jogger played by none other than Tom Hanks from Dragnet and Apollo 13! The whole gang enjoys a midwinter carnival, where, on hearing that Amy has been feeling herself stalked by a tall man in black, Hanks casually dismisses her fears with some psych-babble, exits frame while asking “Ya wanna goober?” and is gone from the film for the duration! Ha ha, he doesn’t even reappear to get slaughtered, as, I will admit, I’d hoped he might!

Of course most of Amy’s friends, and some of the friends of their friends, and even a poor friendly dressmaker played by Joseph Leon from Brewster’s Millions, fall to the bug-eyed maniac’s cutlery one by one! There’s only a bit of blood in most of these sequences and no Special Makeup Effects (as the credits usually put it), the exception being when a rather goofy-looking severed head is discovered in a fishtank! Ha ha, having once made an equally goofy special effects head for a movie myself, I was pretty tickled to see it!

The climax of the picture takes place in the strangely vast town morgue, simply because that’s the building Amy happens across as she’s blindly running from the killer! I guess Marvin is there and she might have picked it because of that, but he’s not a lot of help, and nor is the exquisitely stupid moustache cop once he finally happens upon the scene! But there are some tense sequences in that morgue, as well as some that should be tense but weren’t given enough care and skill to be as scary as they should be! That there’s any real suspense at all still puts the picture ahead of most of its slasher brethren, though! In this way it reminded me of Eyes of a Stranger, right down to the head in the fishtank, ha ha, except that instead of Florida, this one is set in midwinter Staten Island! At least, it was shot there – it’s probably meant to be set in a Haddonfield-like small town!

It was the first directorial effort from Armand Mastroianni, who later brought us such laxomorphs as The Supernaturals and Cameron’s Closet, and while he’s no John Carpenter, he did a fair job here! There’s also some nice photography from Gerald Feil, one of those guys who had a strangely broad-based career in film, and also happened to shoot 3-D slasher spectaculars like Friday the 13^th part III and Silent Madness! The cast includes stalwarts like James Rebhorn from If Lucy Fell and Shadows and Fog in the role of a horny professor, and Paul Gleason from Die Hard and Night Game playing, of course, a cop! We even get a touch of Steve James, whom we know from Avenging Force and so many other action pictures, and who should have been a star!

It’ll always be remembered as Tom Hanks’s debut movie, but it has a little extra going for it, like the generally strong cast and the appealing midwinter atmosphere! It’s no classic: the script is highly mediocre, the concept ridiculous, the ending extremely weak (the killer is trapped in a room and presumably arrested by local cops), and the last twist even more so, and the whole thing is fairly pointless, but, ha ha, we’ve all seen much worse, I’d guess! I’ll give He Knows You’re Alone two mildly ribald Boy Scout singalongs!

Burl reviews 12 Monkeys! (1995)

 

Chee-chee-chee, it’s Burl here with sweet monkey madness! Ha ha, when you think of Terry Gilliam, you think of big fantasy films that were made under circumstances so impossible it’s a miracle they were ever finished! The Adventures of Baron Munchausen fits into this category of course, and we all know Gilliam has faced an uncommon number of hurdles in his filmmaking: from studio heads who didn’t get or like what he was doing, to catastrophes like the death of his lead actor! Though they’re usually the bigger hits on first release, I think these days we tend to forget his relatively smaller, scandal-free, and less fantastical films – The Fisher King, for instance, or the picture under review today, 12 Monkeys!

Of course, seeing as it involves time travel, 12 Monkeys is hardly free of fantastical elements, and there certainly is imagery that evokes fantasy, like the marvelous shots of zoo animals loose in the city! But the picture mostly aspires to ground-level (or below) grittiness, especially in its future segments, which take place after a terrible airborne plague has killed most of Earth’s human population and forced the survivors to take up a subterranean lifestyle! Our hero is a prisoner in this benighted time, meaning his lifestyle is worse yet; but he is volunteered by a very Gilliam-esque panel of scientist-grotesques to travel back in time, find out how the plague started, and hopefully help find a cure!

This grim slaphead, Cole, is played by Bruce Willis from Die Hard and Last Man Standing, and on his first time-travel attempt he overshoots his mark and lands in 1990! There he’s immediately arrested and confined as a looney in a local hospital for the mentally insane! Here he meets two crucial characters: Jeffrey, a hyper-verbal jumpabout played by Brad Pitt from Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood, and sympathetic Dr. Kathryn Railly, essayed by Madeline Stowe from Stakeout and Short Cuts! Ha ha, he also meets The Riddler himself, Frank Gorshin from Hot Resort and Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, a mean doctor who wants to keep Cole locked up! But with the help of future people the time traveller escapes his solitary cell, and the next thing you know he’s been bumped forward to 1996, the first year of the plague!

His adventures in that year comprise the bulk of the picture and provide clarification on his mission! Believing that Jeffrey, whose father is a world-renowned specialist in infectious viruses played by Christopher Plummer from The Silent Partner and Murder By Decree, and who is involved with an animal rights group called 12 Monkeys, will be responsible for loosing the virus upon the world, Cole tracks him to a dinner party; but only later does he realize that a marble-eyed lab assistant played by David Morse from Max Dugan Returns may also have something to do with the terrible events to come!

 

Cole is not a very talkative person, having had his mind scrambled by catastrophe, incarceration, and time travel, and it seems no matter what period he’s in, people want to give him Silkwood showers! In other words he’s a tough character to enjoy, even if he’s easy to understand, and he sure isn’t a lot of laughs! But he loosens up as the picture progresses, and after he kidnaps Dr. Railly becomes a slightly more conventional hero, and the movie threatens to become commensurately less interesting!  Ha ha! But it rallies with some marvelous plotting in the last act, though there’s also a crude bit of misdirection involving Dr. Railly that the movie doesn’t need! It’s all based on Chris Marker’s La Jetée, a movie I enjoy, and which is most evoked in the airport scene that concludes Gilliam’s version!

It's a good, intelligent bit of speculative fiction, and I remember it really stood out in the mid-90s as something thrillingly different! Yes, it’s a bit of a downer in our pandemic-ridden times, but it has plenty to make up for it! Pitt’s performance is highly entertaining, and it’s nice to see Gilliam’s excesses presented in such a controlled manner! It’s no Brazil (a movie I love, ha ha), but it has plenty of its own charms! I give 12 Monkeys three ropes of saliva!

Burl reviews McCabe and Mrs. Miller! (1971)

 

Oh sweet wingalls, it’s Burl! Ha ha, I’m sorry I’ve been so sporadic with my reviews lately - I’m hoping to ramp it back up a bit, or at least avoid a Great Interruption such as we experienced in 2016-19! In the meantime, here’s a review of a movie I’ve long enjoyed, from a director who has brought us many fine films! I’m talking about Robert Altman, whose marvelous The Long Goodbye we all adore; and this picture is his stab at an oater (well, his first one anyway), McCabe & Mrs. Miller!

Warren Beatty from The Parallax View plays McCabe, a wandering cardsharp who strolls into the nascent town of Presbyterian Church one day and espies an opportunity! He’s got a completely unearned reputation as a fearsome gunfighter, which he promotes so as to avoid conflict, and a businessman with an eye for the main chance, but he’s otherwise a fairly small-minded and dim fellow! Nevertheless, he sets up shop as the town pimp, and is soon doing a steady if small-scale business!

The town is populated by Altman regulars like Rene Auberjonois from the 1976 King Kong, John Schuck from Butch and Sundance: The Early Days, Bert Remsen from Fastbreak and Lies, and of course Shelley Duvall from The Shining! Ha ha, and the Iron Buffalo himself, Don Francks from Fast Company and My Bloody Valentine, is in there too! But now along comes Julie Christie, well known from Demon Seed, in the role of Mrs. Miller, and she’s a much savvier cabuncas than McCabe could ever be! She persuades the bearded chancer that when it comes to brothels, bigger (and cleaner, and nicer) is better!

That’s all well and good until some big-business reps, played by Michael Murphy from Phase IV and Shocker and Antony Holland from Housekeeping, come to town with an offer to buy out McCabe and Mrs. Miller’s business! McCabe, being a dimwit, makes fun of them, offers outrageous counteroffers, and then just ignores them, and in one of the moments that crystalizes this picture’s themes, the pair casually decide to leave future negotiations to another group - ha ha, a group of hired killers! Thus is the soulless ruthlessness of big business robber baronry expressed!

Well, the rest of the picture has McCabe slowly realizing the pickle he’s got himself into, and we realize it too once the killers have arrived in town and, just for sport, plug a friendly, innocent, horned-up young cowpoke played by Keith Carradine from Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle! McCabe visits a lawyer played by William Devane from Rolling Thunder and The Dark, but he’s no help at all, and finally, in a shoot ‘em up climax it’s just the lone would-be businessmen against the rapier’s edge of the business world!

Ha ha, with its snowy oater vibe and Leonard Cohen songs and its fantastic dirty verisimilitude, this picture is a true pip! It’s quite funny too, as movies with dopey main characters often are, and, being a movie about a man who turns out to be dumber than we thought, it makes a nice contrast with The Long Goodbye, a movie about a man much smarter than he first appears! Boy, Robert Altman sure made a lot of good movies in the 70s! McCabe and Mrs. Miller is surely one of them, and I give it three and a half wisps of opium smoke!

Burl reviews Krampus! (2015)

 

Ha ha ha, merry Christmas! Yes, it’s Burl, and of course we’re well into the Christmas movie season, and I’ve already watched a number of the usual suspects this month: Gremlins, Christmas Vacation, A Christmas Story, Die Hard, so forth! But I also watched one that was new to me: a little PG-13 horror dingle-dangle called Krampus! Now, I know there’s a little cottage industry of direct-to-video Krampus pictures out there, but the one I’m talking about is the relatively big-budget one that came from the director of Trick ‘r Treat! As mentioned, it’s a PG-13, so rather than having the Krampus rip people’s heads off or stick them with icicles, the picture features a family besieged by an army of demonic toys like some kind of unimaginably slick Full Moon movie! Ha ha!

Charles Band could only dream of a cast of mildly recognizable faces such as Krampus has on offer! Adam Scott from Our Idiot Brother and Who Loves the Sun is Tom, the dad, and Toni Collette from Fright Night and The Way Way Back is Sarah, the mom; they have two kids, a younger boy called Max and a teenage girl named Beth, and Tom’s German-speaking mother is there to make traditional Bavarian treats! As in Christmas Vacation, the homestyle holiday is interrupted by the arrival of a gang of downmarket relations, including David Koechner from Dirty Work as Howard, the gun-crazed über-American slaphead, plus his wife and three kids (a pair of tomboy bullies, a baby, and a pre-teen dunderklumpen who never says a word), and the grouchy lush Aunt Dorothy, played by Conchata Ferrell from For Keeps?

Young Max is so upset by these goofs that he rips up his letter to Santa and sends it flying to the four winds! This act alone is sufficient to conjure up the Krampus, a horned and hoofed demon who leaps from rooftop to rooftop and employs random tactics to harass the un-festive! Homicidal gingerbread men, humongous toothy jack-in-the-boxes, dirty elves borrowed from Icelandic mythology: all this and more eventually shows up to bedevil this extended family! Ha ha! Omi knows what’s going on, because as a girl, back in the old country, she had a run-in with the Krampus! Kids start disappearing, either into the uncanny blizzard that has the family trapped, or up the chimney, or in the cavernous attic!

Max, who started it all with his Santa-ripping shenanigans, is more or less our hero, but the ending leaves the efficacy of his heroics in question! Ha ha, the whole last act seems kind of piecemeal, and this stands in contrast to the first part of the movie, which concentrates on being a sort of family Christmas comedy, almost entirely sans horreur! I thought this was a good decision, ha ha, and it would have been an even better decision had the affrights, when they do come, been more effective! But they’re not, particularly, and nor are the comedic parts particularly uproarious!

There are some rewarding moments, though, and the performances are good, and I liked the opening scene with the slow-motion shopping frenzy, even if that has very little to do with anything! It’s no seasonal classic, but it was enjoyable enough counter-Christmas programming to watch with the family by the fire! An R rated version might have been more fun, but this was perfectly fine as it was! I give Krampus two and a half vinartertas!

Burl reviews The End of the Tour! (2015)

 

With a bookish hello it’s Burl, here to review a literary two-hander that came out a while back, and I’ve just now caught up with! It’s a tale of fellers who write books, and shows what can happen when two of them spend a few days in close company with one another! Yes, the movie is The End of the Tour, the tale of the meeting between a Rolling Stone reporter named David Lipsky and the bandanna-clad wordsmith David Foster Wallace!

Jason Segel from SLC Punk dons the doo-rag in order to play the celebrated author, and I’ll say right up front that I though his performance was terrific! I’m not familiar enough with the real DFW’s voice, look, and mannerisms to do a detailed comparison, but, ha ha, in any case impersonation is beside the point! Segel does an excellent job of creating the character of a shy, friendly, humble, prideful, whip-smart, uncertain, spiky, obliging, bewildered and ambitious man, no matter what his initials are!

Jesse Eisenberg from Adventureland and Zombieland enters Wallaceland in the character of Lipsky, assigned by Rolling Stone to accompany Wallace on the last stop of his Infinite Jest book tour! This last stop turns out to be Minneapolis, which is a city I’m pretty familiar with, so that was nice! The requisite Fargo-ness comes in the person of Joan Cusack from Grandville U.S.A., their perky tour guide and driver, but the city is otherwise portrayed as the bastion of NPR-level mainstream sophistication that it is, for the white, college-educated set anyway!

The bulk of the picture involves these two Davids getting to know one another, mostly in a mellow way but interrupted on occasion by neuroses and jealousies! It’s a pretty male movie, but there are ladies: Anna Chlumsky from Uncle Buck appears in a nothing, mostly phoned-in part as Lipsky’s girlfriend; while in Minneapolis Mickey Sumner from Frances Ha and Mamie Gummer from The Ward show up as Betsy and Julie, two DFW pals with whom the Davids hang out and, in a delightful sequence, go to Mall of America and catch a screening of John Woo’s Broken Arrow!

At several points in the picture, when Lipsky gets upset, Eisenberg pulls out one of his acting staples: a hurt, about-to-cry face that makes me want to jump up and run away whenever I see it! I didn’t care for that, nor for his amateur-hour smoking (it looks practiced, but fake), but on balance I think Eisenberg did a good job in his role! It’s a real pleasure sometimes to watch a movie about intelligent people having intelligent conversations, and this one hit me at just such a moment; and on top of that it’s solidly directed and features unexpected treats on the soundtrack! Ha ha, there are some 80s tunes and some Alanis to shore up Wallace’s contention that he has the musical tastes of a thirteen year-old girl, but R.E.M., Pavement, and Brian Eno all get a look in too, plus there are a couple of Tindersticks tunes, and most unexpectedly, a Tindersticks cover of a Pavement song! Ha ha, weird!

It’s necessarily limited in what it can do, but the movie is smart enough to know that, and so it just cruises along in its pleasant and competent way through appealingly familiar territory! I enjoyed it, though of course the ultimate fate of DFW made me sad! Still, this was a supposedly fun thing that I might very well do again, and I give The End of the Tour three pop tarts!

Burl reviews Isabel! (1968)

 

Eh bien, c’est Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to talk about a picture I saw on TV long ago, back when the Canadian TV stations were playing any and all Canadian movies they could find, over and over again! That’s how I first saw pictures like Rituals, Prom Night, and Meatballs! But this movie is another thing entirely: it’s the moody exercise in Gaspé-Gothic known to all as Isabel!

Ha ha! The star of Isabel is of course Isabel herself, played by Geneviève Bujold from Earthquake and Dead Ringers, who was married at the time to this film's writer-director, Paul Almond! Bujold plays a young Montreal-dwelling woman who, as the story begins, is on a train back to her little hometown on the Gaspé coast to see her dying mother! But she arrives in her curiously Anglo community a little too late, and is left to bumble around in a big dark farmhouse with her uncle, who continually issues thunderingly obvious hints that he would like her to stay and cook his meals and help out on the farm! The uncle, played by Gerard Parkes from The Pyx and Spasms, is plagued by troubles of the heart - physical, not emotional ones, ha ha - but like many old rural types, is not taking his encroaching decrepitude with quite as much grace as he might!

Isabel, meanwhile, resists his entreaties, claiming she needs to get back to her job and life in the big city! But she keeps receiving, or not receiving, letters that one by one remove her reasons for leaving the Gaspé: her roommate, who may or may not also be her girlfriend (we are reminded of Theodora’s unseen roommate in The Haunting), is ghosting her, and her employer lets her go! Stewing in this death-cursed place, thinking about the drowning demises of her father and brother, and about the shell-shocked grandfather who went mad, ran around the town in his gas mask and eventually jumped into the spinning blade of a sawmill, or the young cousin who was evidently eaten by a pig, it's not surprising that she begins to have odd, troubling, ghostly visions! She has encounters with people such as the rugged Jason, played by Marc Strange from Run and Tommy Boy, who buys some of the uncle’s livestock and proves pleasant company to Isabel; a needy local called Herb, essayed by Al Waxman from Tulips, who exudes a date-rapey vibe he makes good on before the story's end; Isabel’s much older sister, who is also a sister in that she's a nun, but not a particularly sweet or friendly one; and, in my very favourite performance in the whole entire picture, a storekeeper played by J. Donald Dow! It broke my heart a bit when a voiceover flashback made him sound a bit creepy!

While there are plenty of details of farm-town society, including the inevitable fiddle dance, the picture is really about Isabel’s interior life and the threat of emotional disintegration as illustrated by horror tropes and spooky atmosphere and intimations of past abuse and trauma! In that respect it’s like a quieter Canadian version of Repulsion or Images, and though it would in all honesty be hard to classify Isabel as a horror picture, it nevertheless contains as many or more genuinely scary scenes than many avowed horror pictures do!

Some have complained that the movie is slow and boring, but I never found it so! Even in the less eventful passages there’s always the gorgeous cinematography of Georges Dufaux to admire, or the coastal early-spring atmosphere, or the strong acting, or the insanely cute Bujold herself, ha ha, whose look in this film very likely instilled my weakness for dark-haired pixie-cut gals! On the debit side there’s a convolutedness to the narrative and to the psychological landscape of the film that is never really worked out; and several scenes near the end are lacking in illumination of any kind! In this darkness it’s not always clear who’s who and what they’re doing, nor what, in the past, they may have done! And where things stand at the end? Ha ha, it’s anybody’s guess! Nevertheless, I enjoyed the picture immensely, and I believe that if you approach it in the right spirit and in the right mood, you will too! I give Isabel three booters!

Burl reviews Iced! (1989)

 

Schuss schuss, it’s Burl, here on the slopes to review a tale of downhill slashing! Of course there are earlier examples of ski lodge horror, most notably Snowbeast, but this picture, Iced, is probably the first time a slasher got to work on the hard pack!

Like many slashers, this one starts with the Traumatic Inciting Incident From Several Years Before! We find ourselves in the midst of a group of ski-happy puffhairs having lifestyle fun at the winter resort! But there’s a conflict, and the tightly-wound Jeff, who suffers first a romantic setback and then a humiliation on the slopes, complains to an unseen person that his so-called pals appear to be questioning his integrity as a skier! Jeff then goes for a nighttime rip and ends up plummeting chest-first onto a rock!

Five years later the surviving friends all get mysterious invitations to a free vacation at Snow Peak, a new and unimaginatively-named mountaintop resort! But the weekend goes decidedly off-piste when a mysterious figure in a powder-blue snowsuit and cracked goggles gets out the old carving ski and goes to work! Although "goes to work" is not quite accurate, ha ha! The killer flattens one of the pals with a snowplow before the unlucky victim has a chance to even arrive at the resort, much less unpack, but after that the maniac waits a very long time to resume his killing spree!

This time is filled with the kind of late-80s horror-soap drama familiar to anyone who’s seen Bloodmoon! The histrionics are enacted by actors of varying levels of talent, several of whom should have known what was coming, as they've had trouble with slashers before! Trina, played by Debra De Liso from The Slumber Party Massacre, is the main lady here, and her husband Cory is Doug Stevenson from The Prowler! Wednesday Addams herself, Lisa Loring from Blood Frenzy, is the resident hot tamale, and Joseph Alan Johnson from Berserker and Hollywood Hot Tubs, who also wrote the script for this confunction, is the guy trying-but-not-trying to sell time shares of the ski resort cabin! And there’s an ill-fated couple played by John C. Cooke from The Puppet Masters and Elizabeth Gorcey from Footloose, Grandview U.S.A. and Teen Wolf!

On paper, the picture delivers the goods one expects from a slasher, with several scenes of both real and imagined bohankie, and a few Special Makeup Effects sprinkled here and there! Ha ha, the ski pole through the neck and the icicle in the eye are highlights (and in this latter effect, the movie beats Renny Harlin to the punch, as his use of icicles as murder weapons in Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger came only later!), and the luring of the rattail-sporting drugs fiend into a garden of bear traps has a certain grisly impact! But for all this it’s not terribly memorable - there’s precious little pep in the filmmaking, and the characters are by and large intolerable!

For a ski resort picture there’s not much skiing, which is fine, and the lodge itself is strangely anodyne! This atmosphere extends to nearly the whole picture, with a few small exceptions! The climax has the main lady running around in a ski jacket, however no pants; and the post-climax codicil is a delightful burst of absurdity involving a snowman! Ha ha! Most of the picture is pretty tiresome though, with a full load of melodrama to endure and not much vim to leaven it! The mystery aspect is underdone as well! It’s all very late-80s, and that will be a draw for some I suppose; and with that in mind I give Iced one Rockadiles shirt!

Burl reviews The Capture of Bigfoot! (1979)

 

Fellow Rebaniacs, ho! It’s Burl here to review one of the Wisconsin auteur’s more polished works! Ha ha, do you know who I’m talking about? Can you name any famous filmmakers from Wisconsin? Well sure, there’s Orson Welles, but today I’m talking about Bill Rebane, who came from Latvia and settled in the snowy wastes of the Upper Midwest, and was never shy about showing off the area in all its wintery goodness in his films! And he does so in spades with this picture, The Capture of Bigfoot!

Like Invasion From Inner Earth, The Demons of Ludlow, and several other Rebane movies, this one was shot in the dead of winter with the actors all wearing parkas, issuing plumes of steam with every exhale, and crunching through calf-deep snow! I don’t know why Rebane made so many of his movies in the winter, because it’s really hard to do - believe me, I know! Ha ha, I saw somebody go crazy on a winter night shoot once, just fall down on the ground and run in circles jabbering in tongues like Homer Simpson! I suppose Rebane just likes the look, or perhaps that was simply when people were available!

Anyway, The Capture of Bigfoot is a very snowy picture, and frankly a very enjoyable one as well! First of all it’s a Bigfoot movie, and you know how I like those! Ha ha, I made one myself once! Also, it’s got some pretty good small-town atmosphere and some moments of uproariousness, as when the bad guy, in response to a sasquatch-related setback, punches one of his henchmen right out of a window! You have to see it to properly appreciate it, ha ha! There’s also a terrific dance club scene with some truly wonderfully awful songs and a fire crackling merrily in the hearth! Snowbeast, for all its virtues, would have benefited from such a scene!

It takes quite a while to get to the titular capture, and while some viewers may consider self-administering a dose of strychnine as they wait, they would be wrong to do so! Getting there is half the fun in a Rebane movie, after all! Here we have a town made up of woodsmen in earflap hats, swingin' young folk, humdrum cops, and greedy businessmen, or at least one greedy businessman, who through the course of the narrative is driven mad by his own ambition! Ha ha!

It all begins with some loutish trappers who’ve caught a strange creature and have it in a box on their dogsled! But a big tall snowsquatch pops out of the bushes and tosses these fellows around like rag dolls in an SCTV skit, and it turns out that the creature in the box is a teenage bigfoot with a kindly-old-man face! The local robber baron conceives of a plan: recapture the cryptids, put them on display, and make bank! Ha ha, it’s a misguided scheme as old as Carl Denham, and of course it ends with explosions!

There are a few more recognizable faces than we usually see in a Rebane project! Stafford Morgan, who later appeared in Die Hard 2, plays the local lawman who ends up freeing the captured Bigfoot from the cave cage he's been put in! Richard Kennedy from Holy Wednesday essays the role of nasty Mr. Olsen, who just gets meaner as the picture goes on! Otis Young from Blood Beach and John Goff from The Fog, Alligator, and The Candy Tangerine Man are Olsen’s hapless henchmen, Jason and Burt! And of course the great George “Buck” Flower, well known from pictures like Teen Lust, Cheerleader Camp, and Pumpkinhead, is a sympathetic local oaf! As with so many regional genre pictures, the cast here skews to the older side, and while they’re not quite as elderly as we find in, say, Bog, they’re up there!

It moves at its own pace and to its own logic, but I enjoyed the picture! Maybe it helped that I watched it most recently just a few days ago out in the snowy winter wilderness, in an actual cabin in the woods with the dim outlines of snow-fringed pines receding into a dusky enfilade! Bigfoot might have peeked in the window at any moment, ha ha! But if you’re a Rebaniac, and I assume you are, you’ll enjoy the thing to some degree wherever you watch it! I give The Capture of Bigfoot two red jumpsuits!

Burl reviews A Christmas Story! (1983)

 

Ho ho, it’s Burl, here to review a seasonal classic for you! It’s a Christmas picture from Bob Clark, and I know what you’re thinking: Black Christmas, right? Ha ha, no! I’ve already reviewed that one! This is Bob’s other twinkle-light extravaganza, the well-beloved cornball nostalgia-comedy A Christmas Story!

You all know the story, because, ha ha, there is no story! Well, I suppose there is: a boy in 1940s Cleveland desperately wants a BB rifle for Christmas, but encounters resistance from all the authority figures around him, and even from Santa himself! Purfling the edges of this narrative are all the details of schoolboy life in a mid-century December: weirdly obsessive fathers, annoying little brothers, neighbourhood bullies, triple-dog dares among chums, radio giveaway gimmicks, and so forth!

Our hero is Ralphie, a bespectacled cherubim played by Peter Billingsley from Death Valley! It’s of critical importance that he convince his mom, played by Melinda Dillon from Staying Together, that the Red Ryder repeater is a necessary toy, and that there will be no accidental de-oculation! Dad, or rather The Old Man, is played by Darren McGavin from Raw Deal and Dead Heat, and indeed he is an old man, in fact perhaps a touch too old so to be playing this character; but then he does such a darn good job in the role that any such complaint is moot!

The Christmas season is ever-present, and all the attendant rituals are checked off: the buying of the tree, the visit to Santa and his elves! There’s a freewheeling structure reminiscent of Kenny and Co., and in many cases it’s the non holiday-specific segments which linger longest in the memory! Ha ha, the triple dog dare at the flagpole, for example, or Ralphie’s beatdown of the dreaded Scut Farkus, or his accidental cry of “Fudge!”, or, of course, the whole saga of the leg lamp! Ha ha, I need hardly go into further detail on these or any other episode in the picture, as it will no doubt be playing on a loop this Christmas day on some network or other!

This being in essence a Canadian movie, there are some familiar northland faces in the cast! Ralphie’s teacher, Miss Shields, is played by Tedde Moore whom we may recall from Rip-Off and Rolling Vengeance, and the Christmas tree man is none other than Les Carlson from Videodrome, The Dead Zone, and even some non-Cronenberg pictures! The whole thing has an appropriately fog-filtered Norman Rockwell look courtesy of cinematographer Reg Morris, who shot Bells and all sorts of other pictures!

I could have done without the Chinese restaurant scene at the end, or at least without the singing, but otherwise the movie goes down like a smooth nog! It’s funny here and heartwarming there, and sometimes it’s just there, playing on your TV, but it remains a repeatedly watchable holiday candy cane crunch, and I think, low-key as it is, Bob Clark really pulled something off here, and only a year after he made Porky’s too! I give A Christmas Story three strangled cries of “Notafinga!”

Burl reviews On Her Majesty's Secret Service! (1969)

Ha ha, this never happened to the other fellow indeed! Yes, it’s Burl again and Bond again, only this time the superspy in question played not by Connery, not by Moore, not by Dalton, Brosnan, or Craig, but by the doughty one-offsman George Lazenby! So yes, of course the picture is On Her Majesty’s Secret Service!

Now, I’m not so sure I’d have watched this movie in July had I remembered it was a Christmas picture, but there you are! It’s not one of your more action-packed outings, to be sure, but, ha ha, Lazenby’s not the only novelty here, because the picture tries a bunch of new things! Because it’s the late 1960s, we get some elliptical editing and other New Hollywood movie tricks, particularly in the fight scenes! I enjoyed this, though to contemporary audiences it may well have seemed like the kind of blender-editing which makes Quantum of Solace such a chore to sit through!

He does some garden-variety spy stuff, like when he sneaks into an office to steal some documents! But he doesn’t just snatch the papers, nor photograph them with a little spy camera, no: he has a buddy dress up like a construction worker, then place a large case into a crane bucket so it can be hefted up the side of a building to the fifth floor where Bond is! The case contains a device which proves to be an enormous photocopier, ha ha - state-of-the-art equipment for any spy in 1969, I’m sure!

Of course it all ends up in Blofeld’s mountaintop allergy clinic on Christmas, ha ha! Blofeld even has a tree and gives out neatly-wrapped gifts! And here, the perennial villain is played by Kojack himself, Telly Savalas, whom we know so well from his equally sinister appearance in Mario Bava’s Lisa and the Devil! Ha ha, Blojack! And what’s great about this iteration of the super-villain is that he gets a lot more personally involved in the battle against Bond than we see in other pictures! He’s not just sitting in a chair and stroking his pussy this time, no sir!

The big question is: how’s Lazenby? Well, he’s demonstrably no Connery! He’s matey and cavalier, and seems equally uncomfortable doing the action as he does in the long section at the allergy clinic during which he must wear a kilt and pretend to have no interest in the beautiful ladies who abound there! And in the end he’s not really an actor, nor does he claim to be! But for all that I didn’t mind him - certainly I prefer him to Moore in his smarmier moments! And the movie Lazenby has going on around him is, while not exactly action-packed, interesting and solid enough to raise him up to a quite acceptable level!

And the movie sticks the landing, emotionally speaking! This is perhaps the only Bond picture which ends with the superspy sobbing instead of snogging, and it makes for a genuinely affecting conclusion! Diana Rigg, who plays Mrs. Bond, and whom we know so well from Theatre of Blood, is quite believable as the woman Bond would want to settle down with, and Gabriele Ferzetti, who was Sandro in L’ Avventura, is terrific as her friendly gangster dad! I give On Her Majesty’s Secret Service two and a half purple parcels!

Burl reviews Careful! (1992)

Ha ha, and don’t put too much pepper on it! Yes, it’s Burl, here to review a movie I’ve liked for many years: Guy Maddin’s mountain picture Careful! This was Maddin’s third picture, I believe, and they say it was filmed on the great, flat plains of Manitoba, Canada! But I can’t believe that, because the movie patently takes place in the mountains! Ha ha!

It’s an odd movie, and delightfully so! We’re in the town of Tolzbad, a mountain town whose inhabitants are constantly, morbidly, appropriately, afraid of being swept away by an avalanche! Of course they also fear falling off of cliffs, and so everybody at all times behaves with the greatest restraint and propriety! In a word, they are careful!

Two brothers, Johann and Grigorss, are our heroes, sort of! Johann has a bit of a crush on his mother, sorry to say, and in such a repressed society as this, such feelings can only lead to a mouth-searing and some chocolate-sauce gore! A pair of sisters are also having trouble with incest, and this family too must lose a few members before things can be set aright on the mountain once again! In fact I’m not really sure things ever are set aright, but that’s the upper regions for you, ha ha! The thin air and tendency toward inbreeding makes the people a little bit stupid! Just have a look at Cliffhanger and you’ll see what I mean!

I don’t want to tell you how it ends, but practically everybody dies, ha ha! So it’s a tragedy, but it’s a very funny one, with deliberately crude special effects and wildly coloured cinematography! A few scenes are so overexposed that they hurt the eye, and I’m not one hundred percent sure that was the effect Maddin was going for, but who knows! And a few performances are a little flatter than I’m sure was intended; but on the other hand most of the actors are right on the mark! Vic Cowie, in the role of Herr Trotta, the libidinous papa, was especially strong!

I’ve not seen many of the mountain pictures that inspired this movie - things like Leni Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light, for instance, or the work of Dr. Arnold Fanck - but I can imagine them, and Careful appears to be a sincere and loving tribute to those great eruptions of Teutonic repress-o-passion! It’s packed with imaginative details and vivid sequences of high melodrama! Literally high, ha ha, because it’s mountains, and perhaps the makers of the picture were a little bit high too! It’s a florid work, and one I can cheerfully recommend! I give Careful three and a half condor eggs!