Burl reviews Rumours! (2024)

 

Ha ha and holyoake, it’s Burl, here making a brief return to reviewing, and who knows for how long! I’m here to review a picture I saw recently: the latest project from Guy Maddin, who brought us Careful and several others, working here in concert with two brothers named Johnson! The picture is a bosky little number called Rumours!

 

That bosky quality, along with the limited cast populated with a few well-known ringers, a generally oneiric quality to the goings-on, and a formal approach that, for Maddin, is strikingly mainstream, all reminded me powerfully of one of the filmmaker’s most misbegotten projects, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs! Ha ha, the more I think about it, the more similar the two pictures seem, although Rumours is clearly the more successful!

 

The story has a late-period Buñuelian quality to it: that dreamlike feeling of never being able to eat your dinner! The setting is a G7 meeting somewhere in rural Germany, where world leaders have gathered to hash out an obviously meaningless statement in response to “the present crisis,” which of course remains undefined! The host leader is the German Chancellor, Hilda, played by Cate Blanchett, well known from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou; also in attendance are the Canadian prime minister, Maxime, essayed by swarthy Roy Dupuis, who has played such Canadian icons as General Romeo Dallaire and Maurice “Rocket” Richard, but whom I myself know best from movies like Jesus of Montreal and Screamers; the dozy American president played by the world’s most British man, Charles Dance from Alien 3 and For Your Eyes Only; the British prime minister, Cardosa, played by Nikki Amuka-Bird, who was in that crazy Jupiter Ascending as well as two of the more recent M. Night Shamalyan pictures; and the leaders of France, Japan, and Italy, played respectively by Denis Ménochet, Takehiro Hira, and Rolando Ravello! Alicia Vikander from Jason Bourne and The Green Knight and Zlatko Buric from 2012 also show up in extended cameo roles late in the picture!

 

The situation is this: they’re supposed to write, or rather “craft,” some kind of crisis-addressing statement, but can’t really get started with it, distracted as they are with romances, reminiscences, and the local jagoff mudmen! Ha ha! Every now and again someone will have a little brainstorm and jot a few things down, but nothing ever makes much sense and there’s no indication that it would be any help even if they could finish it off and present it to the world! Meanwhile the rest of the world seems to disappear and the leaders realize they’re on their own! A giant brain is discovered out in the woods, along with Alicia Vikander, who speaks in what is at first taken to be gibberish, but turns out to merely be Swedish! Unaccountably, the French President’s leg bones dissolve and he must be carried, or pushed in a wheelbarrow; meanwhile the Italian prime minister carries an inexhaustible supply of pocket meats! Their progress through the woods is as maddeningly slow, as pointless and seemingly circular as their efforts to write the statement; but in the end it all comes together in a glorious ejaculation of ineffectual nonsense!

 

Almost all of this takes place in dark woods punctuated with rock video lighting, and there is much gabbing and wry hilarity! One triumphant moment involving a rope ferry is scored to an Enya song, ha ha, and somehow the use of that song makes it one of the most amusing sequences in the whole picture! But of course there’s always a danger in trying to depict entropy and cyclical pointlessness in a movie: that the movie itself will become infected with these qualities; and it must be said that this is the case here, but, thank heavens, only occasionally! In the main it feels a bit like Maddin had the chance to remake Twilight of the Ice Nymphs but this time to make it more entertaining, and he, along with his Johnson brothers, made the most of this rare chance!

 

The analogies on offer are perhaps a bit broad, and the picture occasionally spins its wheels and could stand to dig in more deeply here and there, but it’s altogether a merry jape, well-acted by everybody, and is on balance a good deal of politically relevant fun! It’s not like much else you’ll see at the movies this year, and so I recommend it! I give Rumours three streams of two-century old urine! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Ernest Goes to Camp! (1987)

Ha ha, hello and howdy everybody, do you know what I mean? Yes, it’s Burl, here to review a strange star vehicle from days gone by: a feature film presenting a character who wormed his way into the public consciousness by appearing in a string of commercials in which he speaks to his invisible pal Vern! Ha ha, yes, I’m talking about Ernest, and more specifically about his feature film debut, Ernest Goes to Camp!

Strangely enough I saw this movie in the theatre, and I’ll take a brief digression to tell you why! Ha ha, it was June of 1987, and I was excited to see a new movie that was coming out that summer! I heard about a sneak preview one night, and so my pal Doug and I hurried down to the mall multiplex! In their wisdom, the theatre chain decided to pair this new movie with something they figured would go well with it, Ernest Goes to Camp! When the Ernest picture ended and the sneak preview began, you could hardly hear the sound of the movie over the din of parents rushing their children out of the theatre: for the movie was Full Metal Jacket! (Ha ha, one intrepid dad stuck it out to the end with his two young kids, though!)

So ever since then, those two movies have been inextricably connected in my mind! Watching it again, I realized there were other connections too! Both pictures have predominantly male casts, feature an incompetent who’s bad at everything but shapes up in the end, are set largely in barracks-like environments, employ actors who later participated in the Toy Story series, and climax in scenes of frenzied battle! After a preview setting up the Indigenous legend that’s the backdrop for the titular camp (and which the picture treats with surprising restraint and, by its lights, respect), we meet the halfwit camp handyman, Ernest, played as ever by Jim Varney! Varney of course is also known as the voice of the slinky dog in Toy Story!

Victoria Racimo from Prophecy is the camp’s serious-minded nurse, whom the picture never successfully turns into an object of the neutered Ernest’s romantic interest! Her grandfather is played by famous Italian actor Iron Eyes Cody, well known for his redface roles in Son of Paleface and hundreds of other movies and TV shows; his character, it seems, owns the land the camp is on! Ernest, whose dream it is to one day become a real camp councilor, is put in charge of minding a group of alleged delinquents after these scrubbed-clean teens manage to shatter the leg of their original councilor! Scenes of Ernest trying to make friends with the delinquents are intercut with vignettes involving camp chef Gailard Sartain (whom we know from All of Me and many an Alan Rudolph picture) and his gross food-flinging machine, and scenes of bad guy John Vernon, well known from Sweet Movie, Curtains, Crunch, and Herbie Goes Bananas, doing his bad guy thing without putting too much effort into it!

Vernon’s character owns a strip-mining company that wants to take over and destroy the land, and of course Ernest moronically manages to help Vernon bamboozle the camp away from its rightful caretaker, Iron Eyes Cody! In a showdown punchup with a beefy mining foreman played by Lyle Alzado from Tapeheads, Ernest is brutally beaten and ends up face down in the dirt, bleeding, and is scorned and abandoned by his charges, except of course the little boy who always liked him! This savage pounding, along with a dim awareness of the profound ramifications of his idiocy cause Ernest’s canoe smile to finally fade, and that night he sings a heart-rending ballad of infinite sadness to his turtle in which he expresses gratitude for the falling rain, as it will hide the tears streaming down his bruised and battered face! Ha ha, pretty grim!

The picture has a few bright moments, and Ernest is not wholly without good-natured charm; and the climax involves a sudden turn into the supernatural, which is a trope I usually like! The picture was a little better than I remembered it (actually, I didn’t remember it at all, other than as a way of marking time before the start of the Kubrick movie), but not much, and I was expecting it to be absolutely bottom-of-the-barrel! It wasn’t that, but it hovered not too far above, and so I give Ernest Goes to Camp one and a half turtle parachutes!

Burl reviews Firestorm! (1998)

 

With a snap, a crackle, and a pop, Burl is here to review you a movie about fierce forest fires and the folk who fight them! It’s 90s Hollywood action yet again, and this picture, along with Eraser, got me thinking about that particular category of motion picture! You’ve got your minor classics, like Speed and Face-Off and The Fugitive, and then your successful-but-middling works, like Point Break, The Rock, Con Air, The Last Boy Scout, Cliffhanger, Air Force One, Under Siege, Passenger 57, so forth! And then again you have a whole different category: movies that some studio or other (usually Fox) made in imitation of either Speed or Die Hard or some combination of the two, but that ended up as anonymous video-store fodder, remembered by few and cherished by none! These titles include buntonics like Chain Reaction, Mercury Rising, Hard Rain, Chill Factor, Striking Distance, and today’s picture, Firestorm, which I’m forced by circumstance to report might be the worst of them!

Our hero in this endeavour is not a cop but a fighter of forest fires, and the fellow playing him is not an actor but instead famed pigskinsman Howie Long, wearing a perpetually blurred and startled look in the role of Jessie the smokejumper! Ha ha, the picture opens with its most professionally-directed scene, in which Jessie and his mentor Wynt, played by Scott Glenn from The Keep and The Right Stuff, must rescue a little girl from a house in the burning forest! Wynt is injured, which leads to his part in the drama becoming strangely similar to the one Glenn undertook in another flame-based actiondrama, Backdraft!

Meanwhile a slightly clever but also completely goofy jailbreak is enacted by a fancy-talkin’ robber-killer played by William Forsythe from Cloak & Dagger and Extreme Prejudice! As a purposefully-started forest fire rages on the mountain, he and a band of confrères escape from the ridiculously low-security work detail they’re on, and in their new guise as a group of Alberta-based firefighters, adopt ridiculous Canookian accents straight out of Canadian Bacon! Ha ha!

Suzy Amis from Fandango turns up as an ornithologist who’s not just an ornithologist but has been relentlessly trained by her father in the art of being a Marine, and that ridiculous confluence of characteristics is typical of this picture! Once the perennially baffled Jessie figures out that the constant litany of “eh?” from the would-be Canadian firefighters is counterfeit, he and Amis are on the run! Fortunately for him, but unfortunately for the thrill ratio of the movie, Forsythe’s baddie is killing off all his buddies himself, leaving Jessie nothing to do except run away! Ha ha, he does fight one of the henchmen, but is left prone and defeated beneath a pile of camping equipment while the henchman is finished off by Forsythe!

Jessie himself has a gang of pals, including familiar faces like Christiane Hirt from Malone and Michael Greyeyes from Blood Quantum, but they all mostly stay put at headquarters and never become a part of the action! Meanwhile the movie degenerates into a display floor of blundered potential and missed opportunity! A situation involving a group of people trapped on a bus might have had plenty of suspense wrung from it, but instead it turns out to be merely the setup for a weakly-executed gag! Jessie talks about trees and rocks exploding, but we never see that happen; and the climactic firestorm is just a digital mess that looks like some kind of 90s-era screen saver! Ha ha, we do get a moment involving somebody’s head igniting like a match, but that’s small recompense!

The picture was directed by talented cinematographer Dean Semler, who shot City Slickers and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and this hire was clearly part of the studio’s attempt to recapture the magic of Speed or The Fugitive, also directed by cameramen! But like other photographer-directed 90s actioners, Chill Factor or Hard Rain for instance, it was in the end a failed gambit - it’s hard to know whether the actors or the action were more poorly served by Semler’s inexperience behind the megaphone! The storytelling is a mess, thanks to the lousy script as well as the confused direction; the dialogue is laughably lousy; and the hero is virtually indistinguishable from the trees he’s trying to save! It’s the lowest ebb of 90s studio action, so I give Firestorm one groundpounder!

Burl reviews Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown! (1977)

 

Good grief, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m here to review an animated picture: one of the few I actually saw in the theatre! Growing up I had a neighbourhood theatre, what Variety used to call a “nabe” before all the nabes closed down! That's a very sad loss to me, and I expect it is to you too! Anyway, I used to go down to my nabe every wek and see whatever was playing, and if it wasn’t some weird Sunn Classics pseudodocumentary, or a genuine motion picture like The Bad News Bears or The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, it was a children’s animation just like today’s picture, Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown!

I remember enjoying it at the time, ha ha, but then I was just a wee tyke and my critical faculties had not yet been fully honed! I’ve watched it again several times over the past five years or so because my son had fallen under the Peanuts spell and so I went and hunted down a VHS copy of it! The Peanuts spell is a perfectly healthy spell so far as I’m concerned, and it was a pleasure to watch the movie again when I initially found the VHS, and an undiminished pleasure to watch it once more the other day!

We were at a wilderness cabin for the screening, and it was a very hot and summery evening, and these are the second most ideal circumstances under which to see this picture, the first most, naturally, being to see it at the nabe when you’re six years old! Ha ha! But however you watch it, the movie remains the story of the Peanuts gang, or selected members thereof, attending a summer camp and engaging in a raft race through an endless variety of landscapes such as you find described in books like Blood Meridian!

Charlie Brown proves himself a blockhead right from the opening moments, after the credits and their bad-but-catchy theme song that is, when he fails to step back on the bus after a rest stop and must travel the rest of the way riding pillion on Snoopy’s chopper, in constant screaming terror for his life! Once there, a group of camp bullies take Charlie Brown to task straight away for his round head, his bizarre name (?), and his pathetically evident need to prove himself! Only Linus cracking his blanket like a whip rescues the hydrocephalic hero from his trouble!

After some camp gags and a few competitive activities which the bullies win by rank underhandedness, the race is under way! Our hero gang divide themselves by gender: Charlie Brown, Linus, Franklin, and Schroeder in one boat; Lucy, Sally, Peppermint Patty and Marcie in another; and of course Snoopy and Woodstock participate in the race too, using their own jury-rigged watercraft! The bullies have a powerboat equipped with radar and sonar and all manner of technology, and they, along with their spike-collared cat, engage in never-ending shenanigans in their monomaniacal effort to win!

Ha ha, I always thought the Peanuts gang were supposed to be six or seven years old, but this race, which takes multiple days and shunts them through an array of biospheres and climates, landscapes of desolation and abundance, through blasting sites, fishing villages, and over waterfalls, would test the mettle of the most cunning raftsman! On top of these hardships, the gang must not only contend with the bullies and their fiendish plots, but Peppermint Patty’s deluded, fascistic idea of how democracy works, and how it must be constantly applied by secret ballot to every decision made by the group!

The movie’s own politics are equally confused, as, after a series of highly annoying episodes in which Patty’s balloting madness results in, for example, the boys being forced to sleep outside in a (highly incongruous) snowstorm, some cohesion is only reached when she appoints Charlie Brown as Supreme Leader, singularly responsible for all decision-making! And while this doesn’t lead to triumph in the race, it at least helps prevent the bullies from winning, so there’s some semblance of a happy ending; at least, as much of one as a depressive like Charles M. Schultz could manage!

It’s a nice-looking picture, adhering to the patented simplicity of the Peanuts world, but mustering a bountiful supply of landscape and flora to spruce it up; and of course it wins points for using real children as the kids’ voices! One big debit, though, is the treatment of poor Franklin, who is given virtually nothing to say or do! I’ve always liked Franklin, so would that it were otherwise - and, I mean, just look at that poster! He doesn't even get his own little name-box! Shameful, says I! I give Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown two and a half corned willies!

Burl reviews Evil Dead II! (1987)

Hi, groovy friends, and happy June - it’s Burl! Yes, I’m here to review an old favourite, a movie as comfy and familiar as an old worn hoodie! It’s Evil Dead II, and for me it was a story of triumph, because in my neck of the woods, an R rating meant no one under 18 allowed in, whether with a parent or not! The trade-off was that movies were not often rated R, but when Evil Dead II showed up in my town, it did carry that restrictive rating! It played a huge, venerable old downtown moviehouse, just about the best venue possible, and so on opening night I showed up, aged maybe sixteen but determined not to be stopped! By sheer persuasive force of will, I and my friends all got in, employing the same deep, commanding growl as the teen wolf in Teen Wolf (which, by the way, I was once forced to see instead of Return of the Living Dead because I did not yet know the trick Teen Wolf was about to teach me), and entered the cinema to find a big crowd just as pumped as we were to see it!

I’ve gone and immersed myself in nostalgia now, and I’m rambling; but the point is that seeing Evil Dead II on a huge screen on opening night with a large responsive crowd can be, and was, a formative experience for a young man! And I’ll admit this without hesitation: my review of it will probably not entirely be able to escape that cherished memory!

Of course it’s one of those half-remakes, half-sequels, as was the case with Phantasm II: intended equally to please fans of the original Evil Dead as well as people who’ve barely heard of it! Those of us who’d seen the first one knew the story of Ash and his friends and their holiday weekend at the old cabin in the woods, and the Book of the Dead and its demon-bothering passages! At the beginning of the new one Ash arrives at the cabin again, this time with just his girlfriend, and some audiences were confused as to how he could be stupid enough to return to the same cabin and play the same tape recording all over again! Ha ha!

But of course even Ash isn’t that dumb - it’s just a retelling of a similar story with the same character! Ash awakens the demons by playing the old professor’s tape recordings, his girlfriend is possessed, then he is, and he flies through the forest and bangs into trees, and later there’s a remarkable comedio-horror scene involving his hand! New characters arrive, a hideous bloblike basement dweller plagues them all, and many Three Stooges gags are cleverly retooled in shock-horror settings! Ash’s hand causes many problems, as does an overalls-clad hillbilly; but eventually a vortex is opened in the fabric of time-space and by the end of the movie we are left with the setup for the third film in the series, Army of Darkness!

You’ll notice I haven’t said much about the plot, and that’s because everyone knows the plot, and anyway there is no plot! Ha ha! It’s all about the gags and the trick effects (which are plentiful and impressive) and Sam Raimi’s living camera, which prowls around and spins and pushes in aggressively at just the right moments, and the performance of Bruce Campbell as the punishment-absorbing Ash! Ha ha, you can tell that Campbell himself absorbed no small amount of punishment in the shooting of this picture, and that just makes the whole thing that much more enjoyable! Sorry, Bruce! Hopefully he had it easier in later pictures like Maniac Cop, The Hudsucker Proxy, Escape From L.A., and Congo!

I find it all highly entertaining, and I think I always will! Evil Dead II may come off to some as just an exercise in trick effects and camera style and silly gaggery, and I can’t call that position unreasonable, but to me that’s a formula for success, at least in this specific case! Ha ha, I’m as fond as can be of Evil Dead II and I give it three and a half work sheds!

Burl reviews The Town that Dreaded Sundown! (2014)

 

A shivery sunset to you, it’s Burl here with remake terror to review! Ha ha, and among the least likely horror works to be remade might be the films of Don Dohler or Bill Rebane or Larry Buchanan, but close behind that in the unlikelihood stakes are the films of Charles B. Pierce! Wait a minute, you say - did somebody remake Boggy Creek II… and the Legend Continues? Ha ha, nope! In fact it’s an all-new take on The Town that Dreaded Sundown!

The original picture, released in 1976, is probably remembered more for its poster, or at least the image on the Warner clamshell video release, than for anything else! But it was also an effective exploitation of a local spook-story, in a low-budget, regional sort of a way! The creepy headbag went a long mile to securing its place in the grindhouse pantheon, though, and in my childhood, thanks to that movie, I found even the name “Texarkana” to be inherently eerie! Ha ha, I still sort of do!

The original picture told the story of maniac who terrorized Texarkana in 1946, using a gun or a knife to kill habitués of the local Lovers’ Lane! This new version begins at the annual screening of the Charles B. Pierce picture in Texarkana, during which it is revealed that the killer, now presumably elderly, has returned to his old habits! And judging from his filthy jacket and workpant combo, and of course his headbag, he shops at the same outlet store Jason does! Ha ha! But is it really the same killer, who would now be so impossibly old he could barely wield a buck knife, let alone chase screaming teenagers through the woods with it; or is it someone related to the killer; or someone simply inspired by the movie itself; or, in a possibility brought up several times, some kind of blood-crazed supernatural boogeyman!

Well, the movie has an answer, though not one that will satisfy all viewers! It has other things to offer, of course: a highly stylized shooting approach that will impress some and put off others; some wince-inducing gore; and a game cast! The younger contingent of the cast all acquit themselves well as they try to evade the shootings and pokings, but there’s also a gallery of oldenbones, or relative oldenbones, that includes some surprisingly familiar faces! Veronica Cartwright from The Birds and Invasion of the Body Snatchers plays the lead girl’s granny, who decides that now is finally the time to up stakes and leave Texas, which she claims never to have done before despite living less than a kilometer from its border, ha ha; Edward Herrmann from The Lost Boys is a priest who’s strangely supportive of the murders; Anthony Anderson from The Departed, playing the Texas Ranger in charge of investigating the murders, gets a great blustery entrance but is given disappointingly little to do after that; Gary Cole from In the Line of Fire is a deputy, and Ed Lauter from Lassiter is the sheriff!

The picture works hard to be stylish, clever, and scary, and is successful only some of the time! I did like that they included Charles B. Pierece Jr., noted for his constant shirtlessness in Boggy Creek II, as a character who provides the leads with his own theories on the case! The long take that opens the movie is impressive in a mechanical sort of a way, and some of the lighting has a pleasingly Bava-esque quality, but too often the pointlessly canted angles distract from the atmosphere, ha ha! And the concluding reel of the picture is very familiar, and therefore lacks the impact found in earlier spook-scenes! Still, a noble effort made with enough verve and intelligence to make it worthwhile and not just another sequel/remake/reboot that wastes everybody’s time! I give The Town that Dreaded Sundown two death-recliners!

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 Friday the 13th part 7: The New Blood! (1988)

Chay Chay Chay Paa Paa Paa! Yes, you’ve got it right: it’s time for another Friday the 13^th movie review! You know, just an aside before beginning: why, in any of his adventures, has Jason not visited a spa or some kind of health retreat? The closest he’s come to that is the halfway house or whatever in Part 5, and that’s not very close at all! Ha ha, imagine the damage Jason could do with a roomful of weightlifting equipment, or how he could blend in with the field hockey masks hanging on the wall!

Anyway, enough of my geeky film proposals! This installment is Friday the 13^th part 7: The New Blood, and it came to us from the director of Cellar Dweller, the late John Carl Buechler! Of course he was better known as a trick effects makeup man, and indeed, even if much of the trick effects work in this picture was cut out by overenthusiastic censors, there are still a number of gory treats briefly on view, a few of them pretty tasty!

As is well known, the concept here is Jason meets Carrie! There’s a cousinage already in evidence, since the first Friday borrowed its sting from the Brian De Palma picture! But yes, our heroine is a telekinetic teen girl, one who’s troubled by the guilt of having used her powers to accidentally kill her father by knocking him into Crystal Lake and then dropping a pier on him! She evidently has a broader remit, psychically speaking, than Carrie White though, because when she concentrates hard, she can resurrect long-dead corpses! When one evening she tries to will her dad back to life (ha ha, why? He was a jerk!), she accidentally revives Jason instead, who, to be fair, would have figured out how to return one way or another anyway, by the powers vested in him by the Paramount Pictures Corporation and Mr. Frank Mancuso Jr.!

Part 7's closest model seems to be Part 4, which also features two houses on Crystal Lake close to each other, but remote from everything else; and in both films one house has a mother and a daughter, and the other a group of party-hearty youths! By this point though, Jason has lost any pretense to humanity and is a fully supernatural zomboid creature! And the other novelty in this picture, aside from the psychic girl, is the presence of her evil psychiatrist: a genuine antagonist who is not the killer! Before this the only human antagonists in these films (Part 5 aside) were the bikers in Part 3, and then just a wide array of jerks here and there, like the morgue attendant in Part 4 or that sheriff in Part 6!

But while this one has its moments, I can’t pretend to prefer it to any of the other episodes I’ve mentioned! (Ha ha, it’s still a lot more fun than that 2009 remake, though!) It’s a fairly miserable series of films when you examine them critically, but people, even intelligent people, find themselves returning to these movies over and over! I guess there’s something about the simplicity of the concept and the inherent scariness of dark, lonely woods! Friday the 13^th part 7: The New Blood psychokinetically messes with that simplicity a bit, and the results frankly don’t seem worth it! I give the picture one chay and only half a paa!

Burl reviews Quiet Cool! (1986)

By gum it’s Burl with 80s action! Here we have something called Quiet Cool, the bite-size picture that attempted to turn James Remar, whom we know from 48 Hours and Django Unchained, and who had a solid career in the “pretty-boy bad guy” genre of movie acting, into an action hero! I guess they thought they’d start him out slow, because instead of giving him heroin dealers or cocaine lords to fight, they put him up against some pot growers!

I’ll admit, these are some pretty mean pot growers, while all the weediculturalists I’ve ever met have been pretty mellow folks! Not this gang, made up as it is of a gallery of stock-looking heavies! In Quiet Cool, right at the top, the dealers execute a potential tattletale, then chase down a teenager who’s witnessed the murder, shoot both his back-to-the-land hippie parents in the head, rope him and drag him behind a dirt bike, then dangle him off a cliff, drop the corpses of his parents down past him, laugh as he swings around screaming mindlessly at the utter horror of the moment, then drop him to his supposed doom!

Meanwhile the slain father’s sister, Daphne Ashbrook from Gimme an ‘F’, worried about the disappearance of her brother and his family, calls up her old boyfriend James Remar, a leatherjacket cop in New York City! But Remar is busy chasing down rollerskate bandits, and only once he’s done with that task is he ready to fly across the country to investigate the disappearance! But the nefarious wig-tightener merchants are on him like stink, ha ha, and soon enough, after a few fights, Remar blunders his way into a bag full of razor blades and fish hooks! Yowch! Luckily the teenager, who survived his fall down the cliff and has transformed into a vengeance-driven mountain man, saves him, and the two team up to take out the couple-of-dozen strong electric lettuce gang!

One of the gang members sports an enormous walrus moustache, which Remar mutilates with a scissors! Another, a husky cross between Wings Hauser and Mandy Patinkin, is the local sheriff! Still another, perhaps the least-respected member, is called Toker, he being the one who smokes enough of his own product that he’s essentially useless, but because he looks like the runt sibling in the Barbarian Brothers’ family, they keep him on! And there’s a Nasty White-Haired Guy, a little like the Dar Robinson character in Stick or Billy Drago in Vamp; and we even have the Nasty Glasses Guy, which I think there’s one of in Die Hard, though of course Die Hard came later! Ha ha, a lot of guys, but there’s only one Mr. Big, the true identity of whom is something the picture saves for its Big Twist Ending! Ha ha, not to give anything away, but once you’ve experienced this ending, the words “You’re soaking in it!” will never sound quite the same!

At 80 minutes in length, it’s a speedy little babatoudnik! The action scenes are not particularly brilliant, though there are some good stunts! But, speaking frankly, Remar is something of a charisma void here, and not especially good at the action business either, so it’s easy to see why he didn’t get many more action leads! It’s a New Line Cinema production, so the characters always seem to be watching A Nightmare on Elm Street on their television sets, so at least we get that! It has scrappy action and plentiful bad guys, and an earnest, blank-eyed hero and a goofy 80s theme song, so in the end I’ll have to give Quiet Cool two slices of overnight bed pizza!

Burl reviews The Prey! (1984)

Ha ha, it’s Burl, friends! It was not so very long ago that I sat down to watch a little film, by name The Prey! This was the tale of a group of youngsters from California, or maybe Utah, who decided to make a hike into the mountains, with their ultimate plan being to climb down, not up, a cliff! Ha ha, but the viewer is presented with information denied the characters until it is too late: namely, that a very tall man with a monkeyface is stalking the woods, ready to mete out a dire punishment! This he does to a middle-aged couple near the beginning of the film!

There are six youngsters, with each sex equally represented! As the picture progresses, and amid much footage of woodland creatures, they are punished by the very tall man in a variety of ways! One man is whipped with a brutal face rake, and a lady is put in her sleeping bag the wrong way around!

Later, a man’s head is twisted around so that he looks the other way! Ha ha, a fake buttocks was used to achieve this effect! Another man is dropped down the cliff he had so lately yearned to climb, and a lady is bumped into a tree by one of the hideous lunatic’s forest traps! A helpful park ranger is also among the fatally injured, crosseyed and gurgling tomato paste with a pair of huge monkeyhands around his neck! In the final minute of the film, the madman’s plan is revealed to the last remaining lady: he would like to start a family of his own in the woods!

But it was not the heartwarming narrative of The Prey which so held my attention! It was, rather, the many sequences showing birds, animals and insects in their natural habitat! From the fearsome hoot owl to the lowly centipede (who makes marching sounds like a North Korean military parade!), all of the forest fauna are represented! Ha ha, are they ever – it’s like a slasher movie directed by Terence Malick!

Many odd things happen in the picture! The forest ranger tells a joke to his friend the deer, and this is a scene you will not soon forget! As for where this film fits in my loose slasher taxonomy, I will note that, as in The Burning, we have a heavily disfigured manic; like Madman and The Prowler, the photography can at times look a little blue; and there are on occasion one or two Special Makeup Effects!

The cast is fairly lackluster, but they do okay! Steve Bond from Massacre at Central High is in there, and Lori Lehin from Bloody Birthday; we have Jackson Bostwick from Tron and The Outing as the park ranger, and none other than Uncle Fester himself, Jackie Coogan, from The Kid and Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype, as the park ranger’s other friend! No, ha ha, the manic does not get Jackie, but this was his final film role after a long and storied career! Finally, big tall Carel Struycken, well-known from The Witches of Eastwick, plays the gooper-faced manic himself!

There are quite a few points of mild interest scattered throughout, and the ending is effectively horrific. but it’s ultimately a picture seriously lacking in the sort of pep such stories require! I give The Prey one and a half wide-mouthed frogs!

Burl reviews Avenging Force! (1986)

Oh-ho-ho, it’s Burl, here with a little 80s action for you! Ha ha, you really do come across some little gems while trolling that particular pond, and Avenging Force, while hardly perfect, qualifies as one of them!

Scuttlebutt tells us this was originally meant to be a sequel to Invasion U.S.A., that picture about Chuck Norris taking on all the bad guys with his blazing twin Uzis! Ha ha, a ridiculous movie, really, but charming in its own brutal, blockheaded way! But old Chuck declined to take part in this one, either because his schedule didn’t permit it or because its politics weren’t to his taste!

Because, like Malone and Day of the Survivalist, the bad guys are right-wing, racist, popgun-loving survivalists! I’m not suggesting Chuck is a racist, ha ha, but these are otherwise guys he’d probably rather have a beer with than a battle! So Norris was out but Michael Dudikoff, known for his roles in Tron and Olympus Has Fallen, was in, though the character name, Matt Hunter, stayed the same!

I’m glad they changed the actor and not the script, because frankly I always like pictures in which quasi-fascist buffoons are punched, chopped, impaled and shot! It’s pretty darn satisfying, ha ha, and timely too, for as I write this, just such a group of nincompoops is in the news for taking over a wildlife refuge! Ha ha, terrific plan, fellows!

Anyway, the gang from Avenging Force is called The Pentangle, and they like to play dress up and hunt humans through the swamp! The leader, Professor Elliott Glastonbury, is played by John P. Ryan from Fatal Beauty, and you have to see his performance to believe it! Ha ha, suffice it to say that Ryan put a lot of mustard on this one! There are three other fellows in the gang, making the identity of the presumed fifth (since they’re called The Pentangle) a mystery, but not a very tough one! Even Dudikoff figures it out by the end!

Being loathsome racists, The Pentangle’s other favourite activity is attempting to assassinate black politicians, and the one here, played by Steve James from Mask and Weird Science, happens to be Matt Hunter’s best pal! James survives the attempt, but his family is not so lucky, and so the revenge battle is on! Nobody is safe in this picture, not kids or ladies or grandpas or just plain passers-by, and eventually it’s just Matt Hunter running through the swamps and doing battle with the loathsome Pentangle one by one!

Ha ha, let me tell you, it’s no easy task for young Hunter! He gets a sound punching from almost every member of The Pentangle, and that’s not even mentioning the crossbow bolt they put through his leg, which makes him, and a small rag dummy he’s carrying, fall off a roof! Yowch! But the upshot is this: if you like swamp fights, particularly ones involving people dressed as leather daddies, off-brand movie slashers, or sporting mime and fish masks, this is surely your picture!

It’s a bit overlong for a little action picture, but it’s feisty and, for its time, pretty progressive! Dudikoff is a bit wooden and the young girl who plays his sister is – well, “not a very good actor” is probably the best way to describe her; but Steve James is certainly an appealing presence, and the bad guys are as hateful and as deserving of comeuppance as bad guys get! Ha ha, have a look at this forgotten mini-gem if you get the chance! I give Avenging Force two fish masks!

Burl reviews Pumpkinhead! (1988)

In an Octobery frame of mind, it’s Burl, here to review you a corn-pone backwoods Gothic tale of curses and hullabaloo! Yes, of course it’s Pumpkinhead I’m talking about, the original one I mean, the one that opened exactly twenty-seven years ago today! Ha ha, I’ve yet to see any of the others they made, the blood wings or what have you!

But this one I saw at the picturehouse, the same cinema in which I saw Child’s Play just a few weeks later! But, ha ha, when they were screening this one, the theatre was in the midst of some kind of renovation; they had taken out the entire huge middle section of seats, leaving only a thin strip of seats, rows of six or eight perhaps, up each side! The floor was clean, so naturally my friends and I, the only ones in the theatre, sat on the deep grade and watched from there! We had our big coats to recline on, so it was very comfortable!

And I was excited to see the movie, for I had been primed by the stills in Fangoria magazine and by the mere fact that the picture was directed by famed trick effects man Stan Winston! Ha ha! And indeed the trick effects were very fine, and the backwoods atmosphere with its big fake pumpkins was artificial but thick, and although it wasn’t a case of discovering my new favourite movie, I did not come away disappointed!

That, however, was in 1988; how does the movie stack up these days? Ha ha, glad you asked! The story of course has quite purposefully the feel of a rural fairy tale, of the sort meant to ward off bad behavior! It seems that in some unnamed but remote region of the United States, a pumpkinhead is running around! Or at least, he’s running around once someone commissions him to commit some vengeance!

That someone is Wally Schirra himself, Lance Henrikson, well-known from The Quick and the Dead, Nightmares, Aliens, The Horror Show and of course The Visitor! Some citified young folks happen by and go dirtbiking, and before you know it, Henrikson’s beloved little son, who looks a lot like the kid from Death Valley, has been run down! This part of the picture made me sad! Anyway, most of the city folk aren’t bad sorts, but Lance doesn’t know that, so he visits an old crone and gets that gosh darn pumpkinhead on their tails! Ha ha! Watch out, kids, it's a pumpkinhead!

From there it hews closely to the structure of a slasher picture, with the pumpkinhead taking out the city kids one by one! Lance has a change of heart and decides blood vengeance isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and it turns out that he and the pumpkinhead have a closer relationship than either of them would be comfortable admitting, which makes sense because Lance and the pumpkinhead don’t look all that dissimilar! The pumpkinhead has bigger shoulder blades though, that’s for sure! Ha ha!

I like the multiple layers of backwoodsiness in this picture! Ha ha, Henrikson already seems to live in the backwoods, but when he goes looking for vengeance, he has to travel further still into the backwoods to find George Buck Flower, whom we know from The Fog and Teen Lust and who’s always a welcome presence even in all the crazy cornpone sk*n flicks he did; and there he is told he’ll have to go further into the backwoods to find the old crone, who tells him that he’ll have to travel still further into the backwoods to dig up the pumpkinhead!

Anyway, it’s still a pretty charming little picture! It looks nice and moves fairly quickly, and, like its contemporary Scarecrows, it’s reasonably Halloweeny! It could stand to be a bit gorier though, I think – it has a bit of tomato paste, but a couple of Rawhead Rex-style head pullings would have gone a long way! Ha ha, and though I think Stan Winston did a fair job for a neophyte, it never really gets as creepy or scary or hillbilly weird as you want it to! Still, an enjoyable fricassee, and I give Pumpkinhead two and a half extra-big shoulder blades!

Burl reviews Grizzly! (1976)

Grawww, it’s Burl! Ha ha, hope I didn’t scare you there – I was just doing my famous bear growl in honour of the movie I’m reviewing for you today, Grizzly! This was one of the very first Jaws rip-offs to appear in cinemas (it predated Attack of the Killer Squirrel by many years, at least) and the most cheerfully shameless of them all – Great White and Jaws 2 included! Ha ha, I’d have loved to see it in the drive-in, which is where, with every silver halide grain of its being, this picture was meant to be viewed!

Like Jaws (a phrase you’ll be reading plenty through this review), the movie concerns an unusually large predator moving through a tourist-heavy area in search of, or at least happy to find, human meat! The threat here is of course ursine rather than carcharadonic; and, though the movie was filmed in Georgia by the late William “The Manitou” Girdler, it’s supposed (I think) to take place in Yellowstone Park instead of Martha's Vinyard! Anyway, the mountains aren’t quite so tall as they should be if so, but certainly it’s implied that this is a particularly vast national park!

The grizzle-bear, which never seems as large as everyone says it is, roams the woods and sends limbs flying with every dubbed roar and swipe of its fur-coat paw! It seems to have a preference for ladies – and buxom twentysomething ladies, in this picture, possess as a cohort a mania for off-season camping that I’ve never seen manifest in real life! Ha ha!

A motley team of three men band together to hunt the grizz, of course! There’s Kelly, the always-grinning Mr. Ranger of the park, played by Christopher George from Mortuary and City of the Living Dead; the Mark Trail-ish Scott, as essayed by Richard Jaeckel from The Dark and Herbie Goes Bananas; and Don, a laconic helicopter pilot played by Andrew Prine from The Evil and Simon, King of the Witches, who apparently once survived a mass grizzly attack on his native village despite not being aboriginal at all! Ha ha!

At least one of these fellows won’t make it of course, but not before Don sets his jaw grimly and delivers his grizzly bear village massacre story! The bear itself, a heavy brown number, delivers his killer hugs with abandon! Finally, after a massive helicopter hunt, the big artillery is hauled out and Commando-style bazooka tactics employed!

Ha ha, even though he clearly must be killed, you feel kind of bad for the bruin! He does cause some damage, I will admit, and the aforementioned limbs and plenty of gouting blood must have pushed the boundaries of the PG rating! (As did Jaws!) But that was the 70s for you, and this is most definitely a movie of the 70s! Ha ha, like wines that only reveal their full spectrum of subtle aromas after time has passed, so many of these pictures (Bug, The Car, The Sentinel, the aforementioned Manitou) seem almost to enjoy the simple fact of their vintage, almost to revel in it!

The tough guy acting is pretty good all around, and other familiar faces, like Joe Dorsey from Club Paradise and the mysterious Kermit Echols, spice the concoction still further! Ha ha! There’s what usually gets called “attractive location photography” too, and an alarmist score that gets kind of jazzy when the mood strikes it! All of these things are credits!

The purloined story you might think would be a debit, but it doesn’t rest completely in that column; nor really in any column! It’s just there! It’s got a reasonable amount of pep and lots of bicentennial flavor, and my natural instincts tell me to give Grizzly two and a half legendary-but-almost-certainly-not-worth-tracking-down sequels!