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 Night of the Living Dead! (1990)

 

It’s Burl once again with the shambling and the moaning and the munching – yes, it’s zombies all right, and not only that but it’s the same zombies, almost! Yes, last time I reviewed Night of the Living Dead, and now here I am with a review of Night of the Living Dead! Ha ha!

This is the one directed by trick effects makeup man Tom Savini, who did his gory necromancy in pictures from The Burning to The Prowler! Here he’s behind the megaphone and leaving the rubber wrangling to others, and ha ha, did you know what – he did a decent job of it! Like Stan Winston with Pumpkinhead and Tom Burman when he made Meet the Hollowheads, Savini seems to have picked up mostly the right things from being on so many movie sets before taking up the megaphone himself!

Well, it’s the same old story: Barbara and her ever-complaining brother Johnny pull up to the graveyard, a zombie man jumps them, Johnny gets a klonking, and Barbara finds a farmhouse! But this time it’s in color, and Barbara is played by Patricia Tallman from Road House and Army of Darkness, and Johnny is good old Bill Moseley from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2! And when Ben pulls up to the farmhouse, knocking over a zombie along the way and clutching a mighty hayer’s hook like he’s auditioning for Candyman, he’s played by Tony Todd from Enemy Territory!

Again we find cowering in the basement an objectionable slaphead, this time played by Tom Towles from Mad Dog and Glory, and even meaner, barkier and more crazed than the 1968 version! Ha ha, I thought this was a setup for when Ben shoots Cooper, as he did in the original – you know, make Cooper dangerously insane so we don’t consider Ben's action egregious! But that’s not where the movie goes with this particular relationship! And along with Cooper we again have the wife, the ailing daughter, and the young hayseed couple! The lad in this latter duo is played by William Butler from Friday the 13^th part VII: The New Blood, and he has about the same luck in both movies!

Aside from being in colour (though Savini’s idea, nixed by unimaginative moneymen I assume, was to start it in monochrome and gradually bring in the colour), the most remarked-upon change from the original is to reconfigure Barbara from a shock-paralyzed nobody to an actual character with agency! This is of course an improvement – one imagines that for Romero, who wrote the screenplay, offering the more badass Barbara was a sort of mea culpa for the wimpy old Barbara in his movie, ha ha! There are other small misdirects for those familiar with the 1968 version, and other welcome changes here and there, especially in the third act! But one thing they’ve kept: the incessant hammering of boards across windows! Ha ha, this update has even more hammering, I think, and it makes the middle act awfully monotonous! I also have to say that the inky, eerie, spookshow atmosphere of the original is almost entirely missing!

Most of the changes are improvements, however, even if they feel fairly strategic! Equally strategic are the things kept pointedly the same, like an appearance by Chilly Billy Cardille as a TV interviewer once again, and the return of the sheriff who says “They’re dead, they’re… all messed up!” (Ha ha, and that new sheriff is played by Russell Streiner, who was Johnny in the original, and was one of the producers of the old one too!) And of course the new movie is gorier than the original, but not as much as you'd think a movie directed by beloved goremeister Savini might be!

Altogether it turned out better than anyone could have expected it would! There’s nothing very organic or sincere about it, and I think it was at least in part a reaction to Return of the Living Dead (or maybe to Return of the Living Dead part II, which had just come out a year or two before), and generally designed to reclaim ownership of the Living Dead brand; but at least it was made by people connected to the original, who were willing and able to put some effort into it! It’s no 1968 Night of the Living Dead, but I’m going to give 1990 Night of the Living Dead two pairs of old man pants!

Burl reviews Night of the Living Dead! (1968)

 

Ha ha, they’re coming to get you Burlbra! Yes, it’s Burl here, reviewing an influential classic of independent horror cinema! Before The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, before Halloween, along came the cheap little horror movie that could, and did, give the world a new idea about where smash-hit movies might come from and what they might be like! So, in glorious black and white, here comes that all-timer Night of the Living Dead!

It’s a movie I’ve seen many times, but I showed it to my son the other day as a part of his general horror education, and was very pleased myself to watch it again! It’s a really solid piece of work, being as it is a low-budget first feature from a little Pittsburgh gang of twentysomethings whose usual line of country was commercials and industrial pictures! They went out into the rural areas on weekends, or into their jerry-built Pittsburgh studio, and made a movie that resembled almost nothing that had come before it! It was gruesome and boundary-pushing and eerie and dark, and entirely of a piece with the times into which it was released: the tail end of a decade of war, assassination, racial unrest, and riot!

Of course the lead beard on the picture (ha ha, before he even had a beard) was George Romero, “creator of the living dead,” as the mall PA system tells us in Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home! Romero later brought us pictures like Creepshow, and of course many further zombie stomps, including Land of the Dead! There’d been zombie pictures before, naturally, but so far as the whole modern walking dead cycle goes, ha ha, this is the wellspring!

We all know the situation and the characters! Barbara and her jerky hip-nerd brother Johnny have driven out to a remote graveyard to visit their father, and Johnny’s complaining and joking around is interrupted by a zombie man, with the net result being Johnny’s head klonked on a tombstone! Well, Barbara is immediately reduced to a shocked jelly, but, shrieking and falling down the whole way, she makes it to a nearby farmhouse, where she sees scary things and meets up with capable Ben, played by Duane Jones! They start boarding up the windows against the gathering ghouls outside - well, Ben mostly, with a little help from the near-catatonic Barbara - and after a lot of banging and nailing it transpires that there are people hiding in the basement: angry, frightened slaphead Cooper, his wife and injured daughter; and a young hayseed couple, Tom and Judy!

There’s a lot of arguing about whether they should stay upstairs or go hide in the basement, and then, during an attempt to gas up a pickup truck as a prelude to fleeing the scene, everything starts to go terribly wrong! Frankly, nobody comes out of the situation in very good shape, and the final, cruel irony of the finale feels monumentally unfair, but also consistent with the mood of both the film and the era! It’s still a real gutpunch, however, and reading Roger Ebert’s account of the weeping and crying children at the 1968 screening he attended – children who’d been dropped off by their parents on the assumption this was another silly childish horror movie – one wonders if it was the flesh-munching and other shocks that so upset them, or the atmosphere and downer ending!

As you’ve surely gleaned, I admire this movie greatly! It’s not perfect: there’s not much respect given to the character of Barbara, who’s just dead weight to the other characters and to the film itself, really! The characterizations in general can’t be called nuanced or profound, although I found the acting to be of a very high quality! Duane Jones in particular is good, and it’s interesting, given the times, that he’s black: this easily could have been a purposeful thing, a political statement from the progressive Romero, but in fact he says that Jones was simply the best actor they knew! This is borne up by his performance, and everyone else is pretty good too, or at least acceptable! This goes a long mile in a low-budget production!

It's rough in spots (which I don’t personally regard as a debit), and the characters occasionally do dumb things, and it probably all seems quaint and silly and overly familiar to today’s zombie-soaked audiences! But it still works for me, and I have every respect for its place in horror history, so I give Night of the Living Dead three and a half keys to the gas pump!

Burl reviews Frankenhooker! (1990)

 

Ha ha, wanna date? No, just kidding, it’s Burl here to review another movie for you, and if you ever had “Wanna date?” shouted at you by a VHS box, you’ll know which one it is! Now, here’s an interesting case: as of the other night, I’ve now seen this movie twice, and both times it was in the theatre! The first time was a midnight show in Montreal the summer it came out, which as you can imagine was a lot of fun, and then it was playing here in my town on a double bill with its soul mate, Re-Animator! Ha ha, this is the sort of picture it’s unlikely to have even seen once on the big screen if you don’t live somewhere like New York, and since I don’t, I call that an accomplishment! The movie I’m talking about is Frank Henenlotter’s third picture as a director, Frankenhooker!

Henenlotter is a funny case: studied from a distance he seems an inevitable product of New York City, and in particular of Times Square before they tidied it up! He’s made a little industry out of exploring the psychopathologies of young New Yawk men who find themselves in tragic and monster-related situations, and there’s a grimy collegiality to his movies that usually leavens the less-pleasant aspects of his stories! Basket Case, the first and grimiest of his movies, doesn’t always manage this of course, but there’s still an underlying jollity to it, and the monster certainly has his rough-hewn charms!

Frankenhooker is a picture that could have gone wrong, but Henenlotter made several deft choices along the way! As much as I appreciate well-done gore, I think he was correct to keep this movie on the dry and more cartoonish side – instead of guts and blood, the hookers in this movie explode in sparks and what appear to be mannequin parts! It doesn’t quite go the “green streamers” way of Evil Dead II, but almost! (And, like that movie, it was forced to go the unrated route anyway!)

The story has Jeffrey Franken, a coverall-wearing amateur mad scientist played by James Lorinz from Street Trash and Last Exit to Brooklyn, suffer a terrible bereavement in the opening moments of the picture: his fiancée Elizabeth, played by Patty Mullen from Doom Asylum and nothing else, is run over by a remote control lawnmower! Well, Jeffrey manages to save her head, and, after he has an impassioned chat with his mother, played in a cameo appearance by Louise Lasser from Bananas and Crimewave (the Raimi one), we discover that he’s keeping the noggin in a freezer in his garage laboratory! He’s got to find some replacement body parts if he’s going to reassemble his lady love, so of course his next course of action is to head across the bridge to Times Square and find some hookers to explode with his lab-created super-crack!

It’s when Jeffrey gets to New York that the picture really comes to life, ha ha! He meets some lively whores and a fearsome bemuscled pimp named Zorro, and also encounters a portly bartender named Spike played by the mighty Shirley Stoler from Klute and Splitz and Three O’Clock High and Grumpier Old Men! And after Jeffrey has exploded a roomful of working girls (accidentally, because he’s had a change of heart and decided not to go through with it after all), he collects their bits in plastic bags and constructs a new body for Elizabeth! But when she’s brought to life by lightning, she’s no longer Elizabeth, but rather a sort of hooker automaton, and she immediately shambles back to Times Square to ply her ancient trade!

 

By the end of the picture Zorro has become involved, and has suffered a nasty encounter with a freezer-full of mutated bits – poetic justice for his cruel practice of addicting his ladies to mind drugs! Jeffrey himself comes to the sticky but apposite conclusion befitting one who would pervert science and meddle with nature and reconstruct his lawn-mown girlfriend without her consent! Ha ha!

The picture is a bit ramshackle, but it’s amusing! There are no affrights to speak of, but that’s not the goal! Nor is it a gross-out picture, though it has its moments, as any movie featuring a cooler full of disembodied breasts must! It’s a real artifact at this point in history, which gives it some additional interest; and the special effects are janky but appropriate and the performances unexpectedly strong! I particularly liked Mullen’s twisty-mouthed work as the jigsaw zombie! Ha ha, it’s kind of a shame she didn’t stay in the acting game, because I thought she was really solid! Anyway, the whole movie has a likeable backyard quality that mostly overwhelms the conceptually unsavory aspects, and so I give Frankenhooker two and a half Visible Women!

Burl reviews I Walked With A Zombie! (1943)

 

By a gust of the tropical winds it’s Burl, here with a film I’ve long loved! Ha ha, if you’re a fan of zombie pictures you’ll know there’s no shortage of such movies which predate the one commonly thought of as the great-grandpappy of the genre, Night of the Living Dead! Of course there are plenty that came before! Naturally there’s White Zombie, and Revolt of the Zombies, and King of the Zombies, and of course Zombies of Mora-Tau! But my favourite of them all is this wonderful Val Lewton production, I Walked With A Zombie!

As is often mentioned in reviews and notices, the story cribs a little from Jane Eyre: in this version, a Canadian nurse, Betsy, played by Frances Dee from Mister Scoutmaster, is engaged to care for the wife of a Rochester-esque sugar planter on a West Indies island, as the wife has gone cataleptic! The planter, Paul Holland, is played by Tom Conway from Bride of the Gorilla, here very much in “George Sanders’s older brother” mode, and when Betsy arrives in the fictional land of San Sebastian she finds not just a cataleptic woman but a whole hotbed of family dynamics, some dynamite calypso music, and an island nation founded on the blood and sweat and tears of slaves! It’s a colonialist tale for sure, but, for the time, an uncommonly sensitive one!

Paul Holland has a younger half-brother called Wesley Rand, played by James Ellison from Sorority House, and there’s bad blood between the semi-siblings – something to do with the mute and mindless Mrs. Holland, who nightly glides around the island in her flowing white gown, a puppet of the voodoo houngans! There’s also Paul and Wesley’s mother, Mrs. Rand, who seems helpful enough, and a doctor, played by James Bell from A Lawless Street, who doesn’t believe in voodoo powers! But the locals know better, ha ha – these personages include Theresa Harris from Strange Illusion as Alma, the maid; and Sir Lancelot, who was also in Curse of the Cat People and The Ghost Ship, here performing some marvelous calypsos, through which he supplies some background on the Holland-Rand family and their tribulations!

The walk of the title is one of the picture’s highlights! Betsy takes Mrs. Holland to the voodoo hounfour in a bid to cure her, pushing through jungle and reed, past a skull and a dead pariah dog hanging from a tree, and meeting big tall Darby Jones playing the zombie guardian Carrefour! Ha ha, I love that walk! It’s beautifully photographed by J. Roy Hunt, whom I think of as the guy who shot Mighty Joe Young rather than as a master of sinister light, but here he even gives regular Lewton cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca (who shot The 7th Victim and whose very name conjures up velvet-black shadow) a decent run for his money!

And of course it’s all nicely directed by Jacques Tourneur, responsible also for such marvels as Lewton’s The Leopard Man and the great noir Out of the Past! The conclusion is dark and tragic, but not hopeless – it’s all a sort of tropical poem haunted by death and by the clacking of dried palm fronds, the moan of the wind, and the crash of the surf at night! It’s a picture I hold close to my heart, and I recommend it highly! I give I Walked With A Zombie three and a half carafes!

Burl reviews Plan 9 from Outer Space! (1957)

 

Greetings, friends! I am Burl! We are all interested in movies - that is why you are here! And now, for the first time, based only on a recent VHS viewing experience and many previous viewings at home and at the cinema, I present to you a picture thought by many to be the worst film of all time! Ha ha, can your hearts stand the shocking facts about Plan 9 From Outer Space?

 

We’ve all seen it, and if you’re anything like me, you’ve probably attended a midnight screening or two of it, complete with the hooting and the howling and the sweet drifts of herbal smoke! But is this really the worst movie ever made? Of course not, and anyone who thinks it is simply hasn’t seen very many movies! It may have been made without skill or craft or art or resources, but it was made with heart and passion, and that alone puts it out in front of its deadly-dull compatriots like Manos: The Hands of Fate, or soulless and mercenary stinkers like, say, Jaws: The Revenge!

 

The heart and passion in the picture came from Writer-Producer-Director Edward D. Wood Jr., who, though it might be thought impossible, declined still further from pictures like this into worse ones – by the end, he was doing oddball pornoo of which The Young Marrieds is the ultimate example! But, if the biographical picture Ed Wood and the terrific book it’s based on, Nightmare of Ecstasy, are to be believed, Wood insisted Plan 9 was his masterpiece: his final statement on the human condition and the alien and zombie problems that occasionally beset it!

 

Bela Lugosi, of whom we all are very fond from his appearances in pictures like Island of Lost Souls and the wonderful The Black Cat, appears in a few scraps of near home-movie footage Wood shot a short while before the drug-addled boogey-actor’s death! The main story features a stolid pilot, Jeff Trent, who, based on the set dressing, is flying around not in an airplane but in a shower stall! He’s played by Gregory Walcott from Jet Attack and The Sugarland Express, and he can hardly believe his eyes when a paper-plate saucer dips and bobs in the sky beside his flying shower stall!

 

Yes, ha ha, saucers, seen over Hollywood! Trent and his wife, who live beside a cemetery, are puzzling over the sighting when some new problems raise their heads – right out of their graves, ha ha! It seems the saucer aliens are using revivication guns to animate corpses, like the old man played unwittingly by Lugosi, and his buxom wife, essayed by the proto-Elvira known as Vampira! Soon enough these two attack and kill a giant policeman, Inspector Daniel Clay, who is of course played by the mighty Tor Johnson, and the next thing you know he’s been zombified too! A full-bird colonel played by Tom Keene from Dick Tracy’s Dilemma gets involved, and soon there are repeated visits to the old cemetery, where the alien spacecraft somehow hides in a spinney and looks like a round pie plate in long shots and like a concrete bunker when seen in close-up sitting on the ground!

 

It all comes down to a gang of fey extraterrestrials with a crazy plan that’s evidently supposed to save the Earth from the dastardly power of the solemenite bomb! Ha ha, you say solemenite, but just what is it? Well, it hardly matters! Nothing the aliens do or say makes any sense at all, and the human characters are all boneheads who use handguns to gesture with and to scratch their foreheads! The filmmaking incompetence is bone-deep in this picture – even routine accomplishments like framing an image properly are beyond Wood’s abilities!

 

But I guess that’s the fun of it! Some people no doubt watch the picture to feel superior, or to exercise their insecurity-based desire to snark and scoff, but there’s also a terrible fascination and a great deal of entertainment to be had from the experience! Wood, of course, gets kicked around a lot, but he made movies at least, and for that he’s got my admiration! Ha ha! While it really exists outside of any possible rating system, even one as abstract as my own, I’m going to give Plan 9 From Outer Space two battle-axe jerkins!

Burl reviews Land of the Dead! (2005)

 

Urrgh, groww, gnarr, it’s Burl shuffling at you with a zombie movie to review! And not just any old zombie movie, but one from the acknowledged grandmaster, George A. Romero, who of course brought us Creepshow and many other horror entertainments! And Creepshow had zombies – three of them, to be precise – but it’s the …of the Dead series for which this beardsman is most thoroughly celebrated! The one under review today is the biggest-budgeted of them all: Land of the Dead!

I’m a very big fan of Night of the Living Dead and especially Dawn of the Dead – ha ha, a great favourite, that one! Then, when Day of the Dead came out, and played at the grandest movie theatre in town when I was but fourteen years old, I managed to sneak in to see it opening night, and even got myself one of the promotional badges they were handing out! It was a night of great triumph: the first time I successfully sneaked in to an R rated movie; and so Day of the Dead stands as a sentimental favourite and always will! And so, as you can imagine, when Land of the Dead came along twenty years later I was pretty excited to see it too!

So I rushed out to the movie theatre, and what I beheld there was this: a slick, enjoyably meaty zombie picture with a nicely Romeroesque political dimension to it – ha ha, in other words, almost exactly what I was hoping for! Still, it’s never ascended to the pantheon occupied by the first two in the series! It’s a lot more lighthearted than Day of the Dead, though, which, with all its yelling, is a movie that can really harsh your mellow! On the other hand, I quite enjoy the picture! But we’re here to talk about Land of the Dead, aren’t we! Yes, ha ha!

Our story once again begins some unspecified amount of time after the zombie apocalypse, and society in Pittsburgh is bifurcated between the regular folk, who live in dirty slums where they indulge in every vice and yet keep it together enough to provide the children with puppet shows, and the rich, who dwell in comfort, as though nothing had ever changed, in a big tower called Fiddler’s Green! This edifice is run by Kaufman, who’s played by an unusually reserved Dennis Hopper, an actor we recall from My Science Project and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre part 2!

Pittsburgh gets its supplies by means of night raids on nearby towns that have been overrun by zombies but still have shops full of canned goods and booze! Simon Baker from Red Planet plays Riley, the good guy who designed and is in charge of the main raiding vehicle, which they call Dead Reckoning! This conveyance, an armored truck thing reminiscent of the Landmaster from Damnation Alley, can shoot fireworks, machine guns, and mortars, and becomes the central item of interest as the movie progresses!

John Leguizamo from Die Hard 2 and Collateral Damage plays Cholo, the second-in-command who first works for Kaufman, then is snubbed by him, and so in his resentment becomes compelled to steal Dead Reckoning and threaten to shell the city with it! Riley, in the company of his old buddy Charlie, a puttyface played by Robert Joy from Amityville 3-D (and looking very much like he did in the final moments of that film), and his new friend Slack, a lady played by Asia Argento from The Church, form a repo gang who intend to get it back: not for Kaufman, whom they all dislike, but to save innocent lives in the slum zone! Meanwhile the zombies are being organized, after a fashion, by zombie liberation activist Big Daddy, a gaspumping zombie played by Eugene Clark from Trial & Error! As Riley and his bunch close in on Chulo, the zombies cross the river simply by walking across it under water, and the final battle for life, freedom, and Fiddler’s Green is under way!

The movie was released in the heart of the Bush years, in the midst of the war in Iraq, and serves pretty well as a political parable in the old Romero style! Hopper’s character is the Bush analogue of course, with Fiddler’s Green and Pittsburgh in general standing in for North America; while the zombies are the foreign hordes supposedly clamoring to destroy it or at least take it over! As political parables go it’s not subtle, and it lacks the lively cleverness of Dawn, but it’s still nice to see horror movies with subtext, even if that subtext isn’t very sub! Ha ha! And is it gory? Ha ha, you bet it is, especially in the unrated edition I just watched! You get face pullings, head stompings, all manner of grue!

The picture was shot in Toronto, not Pittsburgh, so the margins are filled with familiar Canadian actors like Earl Pastko from Roadkill, Robin Ward from Flick (supplying a mellifluous voiceover extolling the bourgeois virtues of Fiddler’s Green), Heidi von Palleske from Dead Ringers, and Boyd Banks from Crash! Of course Tom Savini, whose moustache-acting we’ll recall from movies like Creepshow 2 (where his moustache is prosthetically obscured, ha ha) and Innocent Blood, turns up in zombie form as the same biker, Mr. Machete, that he played in Dawn of the Dead!

It’s an entertaining and slick picture that suffers from thin characterizations (the hero’s defining personality trait is that he’s the hero, ha ha, and a pretty bland one at that) and is narratively underbaked! It doesn’t offer all the satisfactions I might have hoped for, but it still ticks plenty of boxes, and in spite of occasional moments of profound dumnitude, I think of the picture with fondness! I give Land of the Dead two and a half skyflowers!

Burl reviews Night of the Creeps! (1986)

 

This is Burl - ha ha, thrill me! If you’ve seen the movie I’m discussing today, you’ll know what I mean by that, and if you haven’t, well, you should! I myself saw it in the theatre, though I had to sneak in because I was several years too young according to the rules in my neck of the woods; but, as with Evil Dead II, Day of the Dead, Creepshow 2, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, and several others, I successfully broke these rules, and therefore hold some extra fondness for the picture I might not otherwise have! Though I’d probably be pretty fond of it in any case, ha ha! And the picture? None other than Night of the Creeps!

Sure, I saw it on the big screen, but I had some friends who managed to catch it at the drive-in, and I was a bit jealous because that would be the absolute perfect venue for a movie like this! And, ha ha, the movie knows it, which is part of its charm for the horror fan! It was the first effort of Fred Dekker, who later made The Monster Squad, and he’s the sort of guy who, having been struck by the idea of naming all his characters after horror directors, commits to it one hundred and fifty percent!

The picture opens in a spacecraft populated by naked munchkins, then continues with a sequence set in the late 50s and shot in luminous black-and-white! Ha ha, this part involves Sorority Row, Lover’s Lane, and an escaped axe maniac, and features a marvelously sinister use of The Stroll, that old song by The Diamonds! And then, finally, we segue into the present day on the campus of good old Corman University! We meet our protagonists: a pair of misfits named Chris Romero, played by Jason Lively from Brainstorm and European Vacation, and James Carpenter-Hooper, or J.C., played by Steve Marshall from… well, ha ha, I don’t know what he’s from!

As they walk around the campus Chris spies Cynthia Cronenberg, essayed by Jill Whitlow from Porky’s and Weird Science, and falls instantly in love! This leads to a prank attempt at the behest of some frat bros led by Allan Kayser from Hot Chili in the role of Brad, and this in turn results in the release of the space slugs that had been accidentally created by the munchkins! And of course here is where Detective Ray Cameron, played by the unstoppable Tom Atkins from The Fog, Halloween III and Creepshow, takes center stage!

From here things swiftly go magoo as a busload of frat bros become slug zombies, innocent pets are possessed by the otherworldly leeches, the axe murderer returns from the grave, the two gomers who started the whole thing, along with their sorority sister friend, make themselves variously martyrs or heroes, and Atkins repeatedly places demands on people to "Thrill me!" But the important thing to note is that while we get some familiar faces in the cast, like David Paymer from City Slickers and Robert Kerman from Cannibal Holocaust and many a pornoo, we also are blessed with a cameo appearance from the terrific, the one-and-only Dick Miller, well known from pictures like Apache Woman and Explorers! Yes, it’s a gratifying appearance too, with Miller as a police armorer coerced into giving Atkins and Lively a flamethrower with which to battle the space slugs! Ha ha, how marvelous! How truly Miller!

I’m well aware of this picture’s flaws: the lapses of logic, the dog’s breakfast narrative, the weak characterizations, the my-first-movie directing, the sometimes dicey acting, the sophomoric though not inapt move of naming all the characters after horror directors! But, ha ha, very little of that bothers me, because even today, after all these years, I find the movie tremendously enjoyable! The humour is generally well-judged, the trick effects look good, the central friendship is heartwarming, and Atkins and Miller provide all the thespian firepower you could want! It was great fun to see in the theatre when I was fifteen, and it thrills me to this day! I give Night of the Creeps three monobrows!

Burl reviews Pet Sematary! (1989)

 

Ha ha and housecats, it’s Burl! Yes, I thought I’d review the first filmed version of Stephen King’s book Pet Sematary, which, as I recall, I saw at the theatre on a date with my first real girlfriend, Ingra! I don’t think Ingra liked it very much, as she was not what you would call a horror movie aficionado! She did turn me on to all sorts of great books though, so I have plenty to thank her for! And we also once checked into a motel under the names “Mr. and Mrs. Buster Hideaway,” and you can say what you like about this younger generation, but I don’t think the kids are doing that sort of thing any more! Ha ha! And I suppose motel clerks are more scrupulous about checking identifications than they used to be!

But on to the movie! Now, I thought it was a pretty good idea to hire Mary Lambert to direct it, even though it was originally supposed to be George A. Romero at the helm! I don’t know why Romero bowed out, or was taken off it, or what happened, but it seemed like a lady director (sadly novel in those days, and less so now but not by all that much) who’d done Madonna videos and the art-crime picture Siesta would be a pretty bold choice! But you know, though she did a perfectly adequate job, there was nothing special about her approach so far as I could tell!

Dale Midkiff from Nightmare Weekend plays a carved wooden figure representing Louis Creed, the dad who works as a university doctor! Denise Crosby from Miracle Mile, looking comely in a pinched sort of a way, is the mom; and of course there are two sweet kids: preadolescent Ellie and the charming toddler Gage, who is played by Miko Hughes from Apollo 13 and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare! Because they have kids and a housecat too, the parents know the best thing to do would be to move into a house on a road down which massive tanker trucks hurtle constantly like screaming engines of death! Ha ha, the perfect place to raise a family!

Across this road of sorrow lives the elderly neighbor, Jud, played delightfully by Fred Gwynne from The Secret of My Success! Gwynne’s performance is a real high point in the picture, with his delightful Mainer accent and old-duck mannerisms and just plain Gwynne-ness! Of course we know where the story goes from here: Jud tells his new pal Louis all about the secret cemetery back yonder, the one that has the power to resuscitate the dead! Tragedy strikes soon after, and the use of the baneful graveyard brings about a lot more death and despair to the family Creed!

Brad Greenquist from The Bedroom Window and The Chair plays the world’s least-helpful ghost, who manifests in the form of a walking meatloaf much like Jack from An American Werewolf in London, but without the comradeliness! He’s clearly just there to add some affrights, or at least some goriness, to the proceedings while the main story unfolds at the pace and in the progression that it must!

The King book is one of his most emotionally resonant, but the movie comes nowhere close to replicating this! Part of the fault lies with Midkiff, who, I’m sorry to say, just isn’t a very good actor; another part with King himself, who wrote the screenplay! The whole movie seems to have gone through a studio scrubbing process, which I suppose accounts for the blunted edges of Lambert’s style! It’s got a inappropriately-bright 80s look and some goofy optical effects, and so the atmosphere so badly required by this tale is largely, though not entirely, absent!

It all hoves a bit to the mediocre side, and the remake, which I also watched recently, doesn’t improve things much! I’d like to see what Romero might have done with the story, maybe using a script written by someone with more distance from the material, but I guess we’ll never know how that might have turned out! I’m gong to give this iteration of Pet Sematary two frozen cats, and at least half of that, I’ll admit, is for Fred Gwynne! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Dawn of the Mummy! (1981)

 

Grooving to the the beat of the cloth-wrapped feet, it’s Burl, here to review a walking mummy movie! But it’s not a genteel Hammer walking mummy movie like The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb though, nor an old classic from the Universal cycle, though I should get to reviewing those soon! No, this variant is actually a genuinely Egyptian take on the subject, the only one I’m aware of; but if the viewer imagines some extra sheen of verisimilitude typically absent in the genre coming as a result of this, she or he will be disappointed! The picture I’m talking about is that old Thorn/EMI staple Dawn of the Mummy!

You would be forgiven for assuming the movie is not Egyptian at all, but Italian; for indeed several Italian names appear in the credits and the general atmosphere is very like any of the lower-rung zombie gutmunchers churned out by our friends in the boot-shaped pastaland! But it turns out that the director, Frank Agrama, which after all sounds like a pseudonym, is indeed Egyptian, and was merely heavily influenced by the Italian zombie pictures!

Here is the dramatic situation: A group of New York photomodels and their major league jerk of a photographer are on assignment in Egypt! Meanwhile a small gang of treasure seekers, made up of two dim-bulb locals and a gangly blond American called Rick, bust into the tomb of Sefiraman, whom we saw being buried with much pomp and circumstance, as well as with his treasures and his legion of servants, in a prefatory flashback! Rick is experienced enough to know the tomb is full of poison gas to eliminate would-be graverobbers and must be allowed to air out before ingress, but another small gang is not so clever and they end up with a bad case of lumpyface! The photomodels show up and bully their way into the tomb, commandeering it from the hapless Rick for use as a backdrop to their snapshots!

Speaking of Rick, he’s quite a character! He starts out a pretty keyed-up fellow, and seems to be driven freshly insane by every new thing that happens to him, though one must give him points for his undimmable optimism! If the treasure doesn’t turn up in the place he and his pals had hoped it would, nary a flicker of disappointment shows on Rick's face: he’s already roaring with gleeful laughter because he’s certain it’ll turn up in the very next place they look! He’s driven not by greed so much as by relentless hope!

Eventually Sefiraman and his entourage wake up, but it takes quite a while, ha ha! In the meantime, the photomodels keep discovering bodies, or parts of bodies, or else they get injured by oozing slime; indeed, even before the walking mummy becomes a problem at least a half dozen horrible things happen to this group, any one of which would in real life send any supermodels scampering back to New York! But these stalwarts stick around, and are murderized by a walking mummy and his zombie pals for their trouble!

The big finale is the walking mummy and his buddies running roughshod over a wedding party! It’s the old story: gut munching, eye poking and flesh chomping on a par with Corpse Eaters or Zombie Lake, or other similar pictures! It’s not a very elegant movie, but the walking mummy is at least a bit scarier than the one in Time Walker - the shot of the mummy sitting up for the first time is even a little startling! His killing methods are more varied, too: he strangles, yes, but at one point he busts into a pantry and gives the chop to a poor meatsman with his own cleaver! His servants, who are not walking mummies but only lowly zombies (which establishes a perhaps heretofore unacknowledged hierarchy in the monster world) eat people, as zombies will, but Sefiraman is only interested in plain old killing!

I guess my point is only that the movie is not a complete loss! It is indeed poorly made, and there’s no aspect you can really point to that’s well done, except maybe some of the makeup! It manages to completely ignore all the ways the actual Egyptian locations might have been used to create eeriness and atmosphere, or any feeling of genuineness! It takes a real lack of interest to mess that up, and it’s a hard mistake to forgive! But parts of it are effective, or at least amusing, and it’s sure worth seeing Rick’s crazy performance! I’m going to give Dawn of the Mummy one and a half hookah binges!

Burl reviews Creature with the Atom Brain! (1955)

 

By the atom brains it’s Burl, here to review a tale of nuclear zombie-men! Yes, we’re in the low-budget realm here, the territory of the little genre programmer, talking about an ephemeral movie that was never intended to be watched, spoken of or written about beyond its initial theatrical release, or possibly a television sale later on! Of course the picture I’m talking about is Creature with the Atom Brain, and how could it be any other? Ha ha!

We open with what turns out to be the most atmospheric shot in the entire movie: a bulky, pudding-faced man clumps up the street, looking and acting halfway between Boris Karloff and Tor Johnson! He’s an atomic zombie on a mission, putting a casino baron into a fatal bundabeya, then lumbering back to his car oblivious to the hail of lead being fired into his back by henchmen! Ha ha, turns out he's being radio-controlled by a formerly exiled gangster who, having hooked up with an ex-Nazi scientist and covertly returned to America, is stealing corpses, wiring up their brains, and sending them out to fold, spindle and mutilate the people responsible for his conviction and deportation!

Richard Denning from The Black Scorpion and The Oklahoma Woman, and of course The Creature from the Black Lagoon, plays the police laboratory man who’s puzzled by the strange clues left behind at the murder scenes: splashes of radioactive blood, glow-in-the-dark footprints, victims whose bones have been crushed! And there’s what seems like a separate mystery, but isn’t: the bodies of gangsters gone missing from the morgue! Denning's atomic zombie theories are made fun of by a local television anchor, but the newspaper writers seem to swallow them whole! Why, just look at those headlines!

 

 

The gangster behind it all is named Frank Buchanan, and he’s played by Michael Granger from Murder By Contract! Buchanan and his scientist pal have holed themselves up in a lead-lined mansion within which they and their equipment are undetectable by the boogie-cars roaming the city in search of telltale radioactivities! Meanwhile Denning and his partner/buddy Uncle Dave (as he’s known in the Denning household) try to convince the local newshounds that there really are atomic zombies, and do their darndest to find Granger’s hideout!

There’s lots of pipe smoking in this picture, but also some actual detective work, which, in concert with the goofy premise, gives the picture a unique tone that straddles police noirs like The Big Heat and genre goofs like producer Sam Katzman’s Zombies of Mora Tau! It gets some extra credit from me for using squibs to illustrate bullet hits when the zombies are shot - ha ha, I can’t think of any earlier movies that did that! And it gets more credit still for inspiring a fine Roky Erickson song!

It’s a little poky and repetitive, and the tiny budget hurts it occasionally, but I do tend to go easy on movies that take ridiculous ideas seriously! There’s some good ‘50s domestic stuff, but it bugged me whenever Denning, who blabs freely about the case to everyone else, shooed his wife from the room so he could talk about new developments with Uncle Dave! I think the way the wife is treated must have seemed old-fashioned and cruelly dismissive even at the time! Well, Curt Siodmack, who wrote the picture, was an old-ish guy by the mid 50s, I suppose, and not too hep! All things considered, and with due acknowledgement of its low-track enjoyability, I give Creature with the Atom Brain one and a half emanations!

Burl reviews Corpse Eaters! (1974)

Ha ha, I’m not crazy, I’m no-o-o-ot! No, ha ha, I’m Burl, here with a movie review that might make you think I am crazy! But, just as a character in the movie itself screechily claims at the end of the picture, I’m not! I'm no-o-o-ot! The movie is real, and it is called Corpse Eaters!

This is one of those little regional zombie pictures of the early 1970s, very much in the same category as something like Garden of the Dead or Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things! For that matter, I guess it’s a pretty direct, if badly mutated, offspring of Night of the Living Dead, itself a penny-poor regional zombie picture, but one pulled off with a lot more professionalism and flair than Corpse Eaters! Ha ha! But I certainly don’t mean to imply that Corpse Eaters is entirely lacking in charm and zombie interest - no sir, it most certainly has a measure of that!

The story takes place somewhere near the mining community of Sudbury, Ontario, and features characters with Canadian accents so thick they sound Irish! Initial scenes are set at the Happy Halo Funeral Home, where a scruffy old grump runs the show, but doesn’t think much of his customers! He seems to have a real grudge against dead people in fact, which is bad, because he works with them every day! In any case, a mustachioed corpse comes in who needs some special facial reconstruction work done, and as his mortician gets to work, the Happy Halo owner strolls around his boneyard, musing nasty thoughts in voice-over!

Ha ha, dissolve to the lake, and to a little hard-boating action! A little gang of pals, including Ritchie (whom I didn’t realize until later was the corpse delivered to the Happy Halo in the opening scenes), zoom about in their watercraft, then repair to the shore to guzzle a little Molson Ex and engage in bohankie! Well, one of the couples does at least, which is to say Ritchie and his good-time gal Julie; the other pair, a fiveheaded hoser called Alan and his perpetually grouchy girlfriend Lisa, can only watch this sloppy, beer-soaked bohankie from the sidelines! Before too long, and over the strenuous, and as it turns out, well-justified objections of Lisa, the quartet end up in a remote graveyard, hiding from the rain in a handy crypt!

Ritchie is keen on enacting a satanic ritual he learned from his uncle, and this is where it all goes pear-shaped! Zombies unearth themselves and come to put a biting on the foursome! Julie is quickly overwhelmed and the flaky-skinned cadavers have a good old belly-munch; Ritchie, the fool who caused it all with his hocus-pocus and mumbo-jumbo, catches a heavy biting, and the other two drag him to the car (a Challenger or a Cougar from about 1970 - I couldn’t tell which in the grainy 16mm murk, but it was sure sweet!) and drive him to the hospital! Ha ha! But nothing the medicos do can help Richie, and he ends up at the Happy Halo, as Lisa meanwhile endures terrible zombie nightmares and is consoled in the most jerkish, responsibility-dodging manner possible by the gormless Alan!

The Happy Halo man, deep in his cups, is startled by noises, and when he sees a zombie pulling out a guy’s eyeballs, his mind simply snaps! There’s no real conclusion to the story save the funeral home director being roughed up by orderlies (and, charmingly, you can actually hear one of the actors apologize during this scene - ha ha someone must have accidentally stepped on someone else's foot) and left in a room all strait-jacketed up and howling that he’s not crazy! He’s no-o-o-ot!

Well, after 57 minutes of crude but heartfelt Sudbury moviemaking, the picture ends with the viewer’s goodwill intact! Ha ha, that’s an achievement in itself, and one worth celebrating! Corpse Eaters is not a film for everyone, and the little gimmick of the warning siren and the barfing man, meant to signal an upcoming sequence of grotesque and sickening gore, is not required for those who might be enthusiastic to make its acquaintance! If it’s a diamond in the rough, there’s an awful lot of rough, but those who might appreciate it most definitely will! Ha ha! I give Corpse Eaters two Evinrude outboards!

Burl reviews Blood Quantum! (2019)

Well hello gumchewers, it’s Burl! Ha ha, just as was the case when I brought you reviews of WolfCop and The Editor, I’m here to review a new Canadian horror movie! Ha ha, it’s always my pleasure to watch those! This particular one under discussion today is a zombie picture called Blood Quantum!

The picture takes place on the Red Crow reserve somewhere in Quebec, which is one steel truss bridge away from the whitepeople town on the other side of the river! The story opens at the beginning of the zombie plague, when an elder, Gisugu, catches some salmon, guts them, then watches in horror as the undead fishes flop all around him! Pretty soon the zombie epidemic becomes apparent to the other characters, which include Gisugu’s grown son Traylor, the lawman on the rez; and Traylor’s ex wife, a nurse named Joss; and their own wayward son Joseph; and of course the nefarious Lysol! Ha ha!

We jump to six months later, which is a welcome narrative development! The rez has become an armed, walled encampment, because, ha ha, Indigenous people are immune to the zombie virus, and must keep out the walking dead while grudgingly admitting wandering groups of uninfected refugee white people! This of course is the picture’s allegorical triumph! Subtle it’s not, but it does the job, and one senses agreeably the meeting of theme and moment! And now, in the midst of an epidemic with even heads of state talking about Lysol? Ha ha, put out the catch-barrel, Mama, ‘cause Junior’s gone a-streakin’!

The picture spins its wheels a bit once we’re in the encampment! Joseph, who has been pushed into manhood not just by the crisis but by the pregnancy of his girlfriend (who is white, therefore susceptible to zombiehood), is in favour of allowing the refugees to stay, but Lysol and his boys are violently opposed! This conflict bakes for a while, and the picture seems not to be getting anywhere until a third act that one wishes went to a more interesting place than it does! Many of our characters buy the farm in one way or another, and there’s a fair bit of tomato paste slung about! Ha ha the makeup and effects are fairly abundant and certainly ambitious, something one always likes to see!

The acting is all over the place! The old man, Gisigu, was pretty good, and I liked the performance of Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers as Joss! Gary Farmer, well known from Demon Knight and Ghost Dog:The Way of the Samurai, does a bit as a big teddy bear of a man called Moon, who allies himself with Lysol’s gang and pays the gruesome price! Other performances are either not so hot or are perfectly fine!

It’s a conceptual treat, and it looks good and is slickly made, but it lacks the follow-through I wish it had! The script never really got licked: the salty dialogue is repetitive, and the characters are, for the most part, slimly or confusingly drawn! We’re told over and over that Traylor is a “fuck up,” but he seems a perfectly competent police officer who’s doing his best in a trying situation! With all this tell-don’t-show it seems the movie is setting Traylor up for a big redemptive moment, but it never really comes! Or it sort of does, but lacks much impact! There’s a kind of ad-hoc feeling to the storytelling!

But there’s a lot to recommend it, too! I say Blood Quantum is worth a look, and I give it two out-of-season snowblowers!