Burl reviews Eye of the Tiger! (1986)

Hi, Burl here to review an action movie from the 80s about a Vietnam vet who’s been pushed too far! Ha ha, doesn’t really narrow it down, does it? This one’s called Eye of the Tiger, and the Ramboo in question is Buck, played by none other than Gary Busey! (No, that’s not a typo – inspired by a fellow film reviewer, Mr. Bleeding Skull, I call these sorts of characters Ramboos!)

Buck has just been released from prison, where he had apparently been sent without justification by crooked Sheriff Seymour Cassel! He wants only to live his life in peace with his wife and daughter, and to occasionally drink a beer with his pal Yaphet Kotto, but a nasty group of crack-dealing bikers led by William Smith interfere with that plan! (Ha ha, the whole movie I thought the leader of the crack bikers was Vernon Wells from The Road Warrior! But no, it was longtime biker toughguy William Smith!)

Well, before you know it, poor Buck is burying his wife, visiting his daughter in the hospital, and recuperating from his own injuries, all thanks to these nasty bikers! But Buck calls on a favor from an old prison acquaintance, and he’s soon got his hands on a supertruck and a bunch of weapons! Ha ha, it’s vengeance time! For most of the movie Yaphet Kotto stands on the sidelines, unwilling to help his pal (and frankly, I expected that he would be a turncoat before the end of the picture), but by the end he’s dressed up like a WWI flying ace and is dropping grenades on the bikers’ giant Road Warrior-esque crack-camp!

The success of this kind of movie largely depends on one factor: how hateful are the bad guys? Well, here they’re a fairly nasty bunch, so watching Gary Busey get very busy on them is pretty satisfying! And there’s no shortage of bikers to get revenge on – so many, in fact, that at the end there’s still a bunch of them left, but they just put their visors down and putter off to start a new crack-camp in some other burg!

But before that, Buck has decapitated a few of them with wires, blown some others up with grenades, and scared one to death by putting a dynamite up his bum! There’s some pretty good scenes, all right! And the evil sheriff gets his too! It’s always nice to see Seymour Cassel show up in a movie, and that’s the case here! In fact, I’d say that the cast across the board is strong!

It’s not really a memorable movie, though! Maybe that’s why you don’t hear too much about it these days! It’s got all the faults of the typically reactionary Reagan-era revenge picture, but the strong cast and inventive moments of vengeance help it to stand out a bit! And of course, as is also the case in Rolling Vengeance, a supertruck is always a welcome sight! But I have to take some points away for overusing the theme song, which was stolen from Rocky III anyway! I give Eye of the Tiger one and a half spinning helmet-heads!

Burl reviews Butch and Sundance: The Early Days! (1979)

Friends, you know it’s me, Burl! I’ve always liked a good Western, with the horses and the gunfights and the wide-open spaces! I guess Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a Western, though I’ve always thought of it more as an adventure-comedy with bromantic overtones; and in the end I've always been more of a Wild Bunch kind of fellow anyhow!

But the prequel to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which came out ten years later and is called Butch and Sundance: The Early Days, is more of a traditional Western by my own special reckoning! Of course it tries to have many of the same elements as its famous and beloved predecessor as it can pack in, or else lightly disguise – it replaces bicycle riding with skiing, for instance – but it has more one-on-one gunfights and horse ridership than I recall being in the original!

The story follows Butch, played by Tom Berenger from Someone To Watch Over Me, as he’s released from jail and meets up with the initially hostile Harry Longabaugh, a young sharpshootin’ bandit later to be renamed Harry the Skunk, and then finally The Sundance Kid! Ha ha, and guess who plays Sundance? That’s right, the Greatest American Hero!

I sometimes wonder about The Greatest American Hero’s career! He had a good role in Carrie, and then another one in Big Wednesday, and then this – it seemed like he was poised on the precipice of becoming a real live movie star! But maybe the TV show where he got his lasting identity as The Greatest American Hero kind of sidelined that for him, I don’t know!

Anyway, back to this weirdly diaphanous film! It’s a little hard to concentrate on it, actually, in the same way it’s hard to concentrate on a scrap of sheer gauze blowing in the wind against a bright white sky! I don’t like to cite other movie reviewers here, but I’ll make an exception for Roger Ebert’s review of this picture, which hits the nail on the head! He admits it’s reasonably well produced, which is true, but asks, in essence, “Ha ha, why was this movie even made? There seems to be no good reason for it!”

Quite right, Roger! It’s okay, but not particularly great, and never very exciting as an adventure movie; and it expects our knowledge of Butch and Sundance’s later adventures, of their great gentlemen’s bond and of their eventual fate, to do all the heavy lifting! There’s fine photography from Laszlo "Ghostbusters" Kovacs and a good supporting cast – Brian Dennehy, Peter Weller, Christopher Lloyd, John Schuck, and even Vincent Schiavelli – but to no particularly wondrous purpose!

Ha ha, I give this wisp of a motion picture one single spraying skunk!

Burl reviews The Devonsville Terror! (1983)

Good day everyone, Burl here! Today I thought I’d catch up on an Ulli Lommel movie I’ve never seen! Actually there are plenty of Ulli Lommel movies I’ve never seen, and most of them I’m pretty sure I never will see! He’s just that prolific, ha ha!

The man’s most famous movie is probably The Boogey Man, which I just might review here for you sometime soon! That one was a minor horror hit back in 1980 or so, and popular enough that he was able to follow it up with a couple of other horror pictures featuring some famous actors! There was Brainwaves, which was some kind of mad scientist movie starring Tony Curtis, Vera Miles and Keir Dullea, and then there was this one, The Devonsville Terror, a witch picture featuring the always-welcome presence of Donald Pleasance, the star of the Halloween pictures and of course Blofeld from the middling Bond adventure You Only Live Twice!

Like any good witch movie, this one starts in the past, with some innocent women being tormented and executed as sorceresses! Well, the foolish townspeople have thereby opened a parcel-package of cursed whoop-ass on themselves, since their witch problem has now become self-fulfilling! (Some reviews of this movie claim the curse proves the townspeople were right all along that the ladies were witches, but I say they were innocent until wrongly convicted, like any other vengeful spirit you might see in a movie!)

Three hundred years later, the people of Devonsville, or at least the men of the town, are no less foolish! When a trio of new ladies – a schoolteacher, an environmentalist and a radio host – move to town, the good burghers of Devonsville are immediately suspicious of their modern, secular ways and extremely mild feminist tendencies! Ha ha, these guys would probably be members of that crazy “tea party” they have in the United States these days, if it existed in Devonsville in 1983!

Prominent among the townspeople is a shopkeeper, who looks a little like an even pudgier Phillip Seymour Hoffman and who favors vests as his fashion statement of choice! He smothers his wife with a pillow and then sees a pizza face flying at him in the bathroom! This incident, while alarming, doesn’t interrupt his weekly dinners with the local priest, the local hothead, a local little girl and a local stone-faced Claude Akins lookalike!

Meanwhile, Dr. Worley, the local sawbones, is busy sitting in his office pulling worms out of his arm, or else getting people to strip to the waist so he can hypnotize them! Donald Pleasance is Dr. Worley, and they must have filmed all his scenes in one day, because I don’t think he ever leaves his doctor’s office! But he’s great in the role anyway, as Pleasance always was! And he’s a good guy too, not one of the reactionary townsfolk!

There’s almost nothing actually good about The Devonsville Terror though, at least in conventional movie terms! Except for Pleasance and the shopkeeper guy, the acting is terrible! The story is told in a very abstract way, which I have to put down to incompetence rather than avant-garde narrative technique! The pacing is leaden and the movie seems at times to be all talk!

But guess what: I really enjoyed it! There aren’t a lot of movies that can muster a truly effective autumn atmosphere – even Halloween doesn’t get it quite right, since it was shot in an L.A. neighborhood in the summer, using bags of leaves and painted gourds to make it seem like fall! But this one has an excellent overcast look, with skeletal branches etched against a grey cloudy sky and dead leaves skittering down lonely gravel roads! There’s something almost cozy about this weird, boring little movie, and watching it is sort of like putting on a comfy sweater! Also there’s a pretty good ending, with laser eyes and melting heads, which will remind you of the climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark as recreated on a $1.95 budget!

The movie was shot in Rebane Country, which is to say Wisconsin, and indeed Bill Rebane was some kind of associate producer on it! I’ll have to review a few Bill Rebane movies for you here, in case you’re unfamiliar with this unique regional auteur! But for now we’re talking Lommel, and for its cozy fall atmosphere and its determination to stay on the side of the modern, progressive ladies rather than the cruel, conservative townsfolk, I give this movie two burning wagon wheels!

Burl reviews We Dive At Dawn! (1943)

Hi friends! Yes, it’s Burl here to review a movie! I guess if I’m well-known for anything, it’s for my love of very specific movie genres! (Ha ha, remember this?: http://www.avclub.com/articles/favorite-microgenres,33330/) Well, another genre I’m partial to is the submarine picture, and today I’ve got a doozy for you! It’s called We Dive At Dawn, and it’s a dilly of a sub story!

A while back I read a book called One Of Our Submarines, by Commander Edward Young, D.S.O., D.S.C., R.N.V.(S.)R.! It’s a terrific book, covering Young’s submarine commands during WWII as well as the lead-up to it! There’s lots of detail for the submarine enthusiast, as well as plenty of what-ho and pip-pip! It’s kind of like the anti-Das Boot in a way – there’s danger and discomfort, but nothing a cuppa or maybe a tot of the good can’t cure!

We Dive At Dawn is very much in the same spirit! It’s a fictional story, but much concerned with the realistic, minute-to-minute details of running a submarine! Plenty of levers pulled and courses plotted and periscopes raised and hatchways opened! It’s pretty clear they had the enthusiastic participation of the Royal Navy in the making of this picture, and considering its Boys’ Own adventure spirit, no wonder! Ha ha, anyone would want to join this submarine of jolly lads!

The movie is pretty neatly divided into three parts! In the beginning, we meet the seamen on land, as they return from an uneventful mission and disperse for what they expect to be nearly a fortnight of leave! The skipper is planning to date quite a few ladies, ha ha; the torpedosman is reluctantly planning to get married; the coxswain, his brother-in-law to be, is planning to make sure he goes through with it; and the hydrophonesman, a grumpy drunkard, wants to reconcile with his div*rce-minded wife!

All of these vignettes are interrupted by a sudden mission which cuts their shore leave short! It seems the German ship Brandenburg is making her way into the North Sea en route to the Baltic, and the boys of the submarine Sea Tiger are being sent to sink her before she gets there! The second part of the movie is the chase and attempted sinking of the Brandenburg, which indeed makes it to the Baltic, but, despite not having enough fuel for the trip, Skipper John Mills decides to maintain the chase! They send off their fish – the torpedoes, that is – and only by clever subterfuge, ha ha, do they manage to escape the retributive depth charges!

They’re practically dead in the water though, low on juice! The last part of the movie is a daring raid on an occupied Danish island to secure more fuel, and there the movie becomes a proper action picture with lots of machine gun fire and explosions and ululating Jerries! Great stuff!

It’s a rousing wartime picture, and anyone who likes a submarine movie will find plenty to enjoy here! The acting is excellent, with great performers like John Mills, Eric Portman and Niall MacGinnis giving their all for Queen and Country, the sets and special effects are marvelous, and the photography is gritty and realistic! I give this stirring adventure three friendly Danish captains!

Burl reviews Voyage in Time! (1983)

Hi, Burl here with a new review! This one is of Voyage in Time, a documentary made for Italian TV by none other than Andrei Tarkovsky! Ha ha, I love Tarkovsky’s movies! I was hooked when I saw Andrei Rublev, and then later I watched Mirror again and again! I might have to watch that one again soon, actually!

Voyage in Time shows us Tarkovsky hanging out in Italy with the screenwriter Tonino Guerra, who wrote a bunch of Michelangelo Antonioni movies, as they work on the screenplay for Nostalghia, a movie I’ve never seen! Well I’m going to have to catch up with it now! They travel around Italy, and their voyage is captured on film by the great cameraman Luciano Tovoli, who shot Dario Argento’s fine witch picture Suspiria and his gore-mystery Tenebrae! He also shot Antonioni’s The Passenger, and, of course, Single White Female!

The dynamic between Guerra and Tarkovsky is pretty funny! Guerra keeps taking Tarkovsky to all these beautiful tourist spots along Italy’s southern coast, and with each gorgeous, historic spot the Russian helmer gets more and more grumpy, complaining that he feels like he’s on holiday instead of working! Ha ha! He doesn’t want to see all these tourist spots, and doesn’t think their as-yet unnamed character from their as-yet unnamed movie would be in such places either!

But Guerra’s answer to this is a good one, I think! He tells of an old master artist who lived nearby, and how the artist was teaching some students, and gave them each an iron ball to hold in their hand! With their other hand he asked them to draw a circle, and they did; but these were not simply circles! They had slight spherical qualities to them, or the ghost of a sphere, as though drawn from the balls held in the other hands! Guerra agrees that they will not be shooting their film at any beautiful historic locations, but that this Italy, the Italy of song and story that he himself loves so well and considers essential to the story, will appear subtly in the film nevertheless, now that, having visited them, Tarkovsky can hold them in his brainpan like the master's balls were held in the art students’ hands! Ha ha!

There are several scenes in the movie where Guerra reads letters sent by film enthusiasts, asking questions of Tarkovsky, like what advice he would give young filmmakers and what directors he himself admires and has learned from! I loved those scenes! Just hearing one master director talk about other ones that he likes gave had me feeling pretty good! He makes reference to Dovzshenko, Bresson, Vigo, Antonioni and Fellini, and another Russian director I was unfamiliar with!

On top of all this are some beautiful shots of Italy, both of the picture-postcard variety and of details, such as the courtyard of a monk’s cloister filled with purple hydrangeas or steam rising off a pool at sunrise! But these delicate moments are a part of the film’s largely unintentional elegiac atmosphere, as of course we now know that Tarkovsky had only two films left in him at that point, including the marvelous The Sacrifice, before he would die of lung cancer in 1986!

It doesn’t come up in the film itself, but it was only with great difficulty that the Soviets could be persuaded to let the director, whose movies they didn’t even like that much, out of the country to do this trip at all! No wonder he didn’t want to waste time doing tourist stuff! And of course he was missing his family terribly! It’s a melancholy tale, but very much worth watching, and I give this pastoral little journey three and a half poems in dialect!

Burl reviews Blue City! (1985)

Ha ha, now here’s a movie nobody ever thinks about too much! I’ll bet most people don’t even remember it exists, and since I don't think it's on DVD or anything, it practically doesn’t! It was one of those movies where the so-called Brat Pack started trying to play adult-ish roles, and in most cases came off like those homburg-wearing kids in Bugsy Malone! Another good example is Anthony Michael Hall in Out of Bounds, and maybe I'll review that one soon! I have dubbed this sub-sub-genre "homburg movies!"

Blue City is a real homburg movie, that's for sure! Judd Nelson, who was in The Breakfast Club, teams up with Ally Sheedy, who was also in The Breakfast Club, to find out who has killed his father, who was the mayor of a small Florida town and from whom Nelson has been estranged for five years! David "Without Warning" Caruso helps out, and there’s a fine supporting role for Paul Winfield, from The Horror at 37,000 Feet, as the chowhound police chief! Nelson runs afoul of a lot of people in this movie, and most of them are beefy football players who rough him up pretty vigorously! Eventually the murderer is identified, but not because of Nelson’s clever detective work! No, it’s because the killer just outright confesses, saying “Ha ha, I killed your father! I killed everybody!” before Nelson blows him away!

Well, this movie has a pretty bad reputation! Nobody liked it when it first came out, and I think even fewer people went to see it, if that’s possible! Judd Nelson is kind of annoying for most of it, and Ally Sheedy is weird in the wrong kind of way! It’s true that, like so many of the movies I review, it was shot by the talented, fog-filter happy Steven Poster, but that doesn’t help much! Also there’s a musical score by Ry Cooder, which usually is a good thing! And indeed, the end credits theme is really good, but for the rest of the movie he seems to be trying too hard and not getting anywhere much!

And the movie is really choppy and poorly put together, with scenes sometimes  ending abruptly with a dumb fade to black! This is what you call poor mise en scene, and likely explains why the director, who normally worked as a producer, never made another movie! She just wasn’t too good at it, but hopefully at least she got to understand what producers sometimes don’t: that it’s pretty hard to make a good movie! Ha ha!

I’m glad I finally saw the movie though! I can’t really explain why this is so, but the fact is that I’ve been curious about it for years, in the same way I was curious about Out of Bounds before seeing that particular homburg picture recently! I finally bought myself a VHS copy of this pensacola just the other day, and it wasn’t cheap I can tell you; but although I may never watch the darn thing again, I consider it a sound investment! It would probably make a good double feature with Out of Bounds, or else a strange one with Violets Are Blue, the Sissy Spacek/Kevin Kline love story picture! I have that one on VHS also, so I may just review it here! In the meantime, I give Blue City one single irritating prop basketball!

Burl reviews Brewster's Millions! (1985)

Hi, it’s Burl here to review a movie that had a lot of potential! Well, maybe not a lot, but a lot more than was ever realized by the final product! Brewster’s Millions was about the ninety-hundredth adaptation of a 1902 novel of the same name, and I guess it’s the wish-fulfillment storyline that keeps it so perennial! It seems there’s a down-and-out type of guy who turns out to have that eccentric rich uncle we all would like to have; and this uncle croaks it and leaves all his money to the schmoe! But of course there’s a catch: to make him appreciate the money, he must spend a huge chunk of it in thirty days without anything to show for it at the end, just to give him a disinclination for free and easy spending!

So it’s a classic chestnut of a story! Let’s just say it’s the mid-80s, and one of the great comedy talents of the era, Richard Pryor, is chosen to play Brewster the squanderpuss! And let’s say he’s surrounded by a dependable group of comedic players, including the majestic John Candy, and the project is written by some guys who’ve had a recent success with Trading Places, a very similar story, and the whole thing is entrusted to a real left-field choice of director, namely the great punch-‘em-up king Walter Hill! Sounds pretty good, right?

Well, what they came up with after all those fine ingredients was this frou-frou, and I’m sorry to speak in such harsh terms, but it’s not worth a cruickshank! Pryor’s not too bad as the baseball-obsessed simpleton Brewster, but John Candy is both mis- and underused as his rotund best pal Spike! Candy was an excellent comic actor, and played just about every kind of character on SCTV, but in the movies it was always a bit dicey whenever he tried to play a slightly sleazy guy! His character in JFK is a good example!

Brewster’s Millions starts out not too badly, that’s the sad thing! Pryor and Candy are on the Hackensack Bulls, a minor league team so minor that they have freight trains chugging through their outfield! The Bulls manage to win a game though, and we go to a scene in a bar which ends in a wild donnybrook! Ha ha, we get to see John Candy and Richard Pryor kicking bu*t and then ending up in jail together, and at that point it looks like we could be in for a profane action comedy along the lines of Hill’s earlier 48 Hrs.!

However, no such luck! After Brewster learns about his inheritance and the secret clause, and sets about spending his $30 million in thirty days, the movie settles into a repetitive groove! Brewster does something dumb and excessive with money while his associates look puzzled, or he gets downcast when he accidentally makes money, or there’s a montage of him spending money crazily! Eventually the movie doesn’t so much end as peter out in a non-climax that features Brewster throwing one measly punch at the ridiculously ineffectual forces that have arrayed against him over his mensis perditus!

I know free advice is worth exactly what it costs, but here comes some anyway! This movie should have starred Eddie Murphy and should have been rated R with plenty of profanity, maybe some nud*ty and a bunch of generally bad behavior! Richard Pryor, as great as he was, was too old for the role, and had been in too many bad movies! Of course, this came out the year after Beverly Hills Cop, and Eddie would have been pretty hard to get, especially for a project that’s a close carbon copy of a movie he’d already done, Trading Places!

In a movie about squandering, it’s the squandering of John Candy that somehow hurts the most, and there’s an appearance by fellow SCTV veteran Rick Moranis that’s just as bad! He just plays a guy in a blue tuxedo who repeats everything other people say for some reason! And they even waste Yakov Smirnoff, who appears, says “What a country!” and then more or less vanishes! There’s also a Ry Cooder score that’s as impersonal as the one from Blue City, and Hill’s direction is just plain lackadaisical! I give this disappointing picture one single motorized iceberg!

Burl reviews Gorilla At Large! (1954)

Hi, it’s Burl here to get something straight with all of you pals: I love carnival movies! That is to say, pretty much any movie set in a carnival, and the seedier the better, will get my attention! Freaks, Carnival Rock (starring the legendary Dick Miller), Carnival of Blood (starring Burt Young), The Funhouse – they’re all great! Ha ha, I even didn’t mind that recent coming-of-age picture Adventureland! And please, don’t confuse carnival movies with circus pictures! An entirely different genre, ha ha!

Now that we’ve got that settled, let’s talk a little about another fine carnival movie, Gorilla At Large! I first saw this one on TV many, many years ago, when it was the big Television Event of the season! They were broadcasting it in 3-D, and you could get the glasses down at 7-11! Boy, was it exciting! I’m not sure why they picked this particular film, which came along toward the end of the original 50s 3-D boom – I guess it was more easily-licensed than better-known pictures like Creature From the Black Lagoon or Dial M For Murder!

I like gorilla pictures nearly as much as carnival ones, so having them doubled up like this is a real treat! Cameron Mitchell (of Without Warning) plays a barker/aspiring lawyer in Raymond Burr’s circus! Burr’s vampish wife Anne Bancroft is the trapeze artist who swings over the head of the mighty gorilla Goliath, who apparently went bad after somebody fed him a loaded banana! It took me a while to realize that Goliath was supposed to be a real gorilla and not a guy in a suit, but once I figured that out, it was no problem! Anyway, there’s quite a bit of behind-the-scenes intrigue going down at the carnival: a blackmail is in progress, Bancroft’s loutish ex-husband is giving everybody the hairy eyeball, Burr is uptight, and an amiable midget cadges cigars!

When the murders begin, it’s time for rumpled cop Lee J. Cobb, pretty much playing his Lt. Kinderman chracter from The Exorcist, to begin an investigation, aided by that other great Lee of cinema, Lee Marvin! It’s pretty charming to see the two Lees go toe-to-toe, with Cobb shouting “Ha ha, you’re a cop, not a ballet dancer!” at the gangly Marvin! And Marvin is pretty good in his minor role, but frankly you’d never guess from it that he was ever going to become a star!

Everyone assumes it’s the gorilla who’s going around giving people some pretty stiff neck-twists, but Gorilla At Large has a few tricks up its sleeve! I can’t say I didn’t see them coming, though – I’m not usually too proficient at guessing twists, but after they make a big deal of Anne Bancroft’s brute strength, which she’s apparently gained from years of acrobatics, I had it pretty well sewn up!

There’s plenty of weird stuff in this picture, and near the top of the list would have to be Anne Bancroft’s taste in men! He ex-husband is a scowly, slobby apekeeper, her new husband is Raymond Burr (a fine-looking man but frankly no sex symbol) and she puts some heavy moves on ginger-headed Cameron Mitchell, who’s a well-built guy and a lot younger here than we usually see him, but still basically looks like Cameron Mitchell! Ha ha, Mrs. Robinson groping the Toolbox Murders killer makes for a bizarre moment in cinema, I can tell you!

The gorilla is pretty good too! The costume will look familiar to anyone who’s seen Robot Monster, or any of a million other gorilla pictures (White Pongo being an exception, of course!), and it includes what I call the Gorilla Skirt: a strange, furry fringe that hangs down around the monkey’s knees! This particular simian isn't a chest-beater, but he grunts a lot, and at one point he hides in a bathysphere! Naturally he ends up at the top of a roller coaster with a lady slung over his shoulder, and when he’s shot down, he falls like a bag of dirty laundry! The movie doesn’t try to wring any King Kong-style pathos from the moment, but I found it pretty sad anyway! That gorilla didn’t hurt anyone!

I really enjoyed Gorilla At Large, from the carnival setting to the incredible cast, and I think you’ll like it too! I award it three loaded bananas!

Burl reviews Due Date! (2010)

Hi, Burl here with a review of a recent mainstream comedy! This one is called Due Date, and it’s another entry in the “mismatched couple of guys” subgenre! Ha ha, think 48 Hours, but if the guys weren’t cops! And if one of them was an uptight professional and the other one an overweight slob! And if they had to cross the country together and for some reason couldn’t take a plane! I know you’re thinking I must be talking about Planes, Trains and Automobiles, but nope, it’s called Due Date! I checked the box twice to make sure!

I seem to recall that comparison being made a lot when the movie came out, and now I see that it was not without good reason! However, I’ll try to put that aside and review Due Date on its own merits! It seems there’s an architect, Peter, and a hefty stoner called Ethan Tremblay, and for some reason they get kicked off an airplane together, partially because Ethan talks about bombs and terrorists and the like, but mainly because Peter is kind of a hot-tempered jerk! I guess he's a bit on edge because his wife is about to have a baby, but I've been in that position too and I didn't become a jerk! I just stayed pretty much the same old Burl!

Anyway, it’s a bit contrived and somewhat unlikely, but ha ha, whatever! Got to get the movie going somehow, right? Next thing you know, this mismatched pair of oddballs, plus Ethan’s self-pleasuring dog, have hit the road in a rental car and have all sorts of kooky adventures on the way from Atlanta, a city I’ve never visited, to Los Angeles, a city I have!

I won’t detail their entire picaresque, but rest assured that some weed is smoked, some cars are wrecked, and there are fights and hugs galore! The movie at times seems a bit of an homage – and we all know Jean-Luc Godard’s definition of homage, ha ha! – to the great road trip comedies of the past! We get moments lifted from the Chevy Chase movie Vacation; from Planes, Trains and Automobiles of course, and even from the Hope/Crosby Road pictures! Lesser films get their “due” as well – Tommy Boy, Smokey and the Bandit and this same director’s own Road Trip! Ha ha, it’s a cavalcade of tributes!

The actors are pretty good, I suppose, and there are some chuckles and chortles to be had throughout! It’s never what I would call “uproarious,” though, and while uproariousness is not as high as you might think on ol’ Burl’s list of comedy film virtues, that’s clearly what this one was aiming for! And some of the laffs, I think, depend on a familiarity with the TV show Two and a Half Men, which I’ve never seen and probably never will see! (I’m still trying to catch up on all the episodes of Riptide I missed the first time around!)

But I do like a road trip comedy, and since this one has some technical proficiency and some funny clowning around from top comedy performers, I’ll award it one and a half men!

Burl reviews Spasms! (1983)

Hi, it’s Burl here with another animal attack movie review! I don’t have a special love of animal attack movies, despite what you might think, but I suppose it’s pretty clear that I have nothing against them either!

Ha ha, this one is called Spasms, although I’m not sure why! It’s true that when the monster snake in this movie bites you, you start spasming, but you also do many other things at the same time, including but not limited to screaming, crying, flying around, bloating, bubbling, bleeding and bursting! Probably at some point you also poo your pants, but I can’t be completely sure about that! Anyway, I guess they couldn’t have called the movie Poops, probably because of some laws against vulgarity!

The big snake is captured in what is meant to be New Guinea, I believe, but looks more like what it actually was: some cliffs near Toronto, Canada! Ha ha! At the request of big game hunter Oliver "Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype" Reed, who has a psychic link to it, the creature is brought back to what is actually supposed to be Toronto and put into the care of none other than Peter Fonda! Well, Fonda loses it pretty quickly due to the efforts of Al Waxman, a slimeball who is working for a bunch of snake cult people led by a bearded slaphead! Eventually there’s a big cage wrestling match, and ultimately the snake gets machine gunned to death!

Like Blue City, this movie is choppy and badly edited, but less because of poor direction than because they apparently just ran out of money before they could finish filming it! Even if they hadn’t gone broke though, I’m pretty sure it still wouldn’t be one of the all-time great horror movies! Oliver Reed is good in it, in his way, and there are a few times he hisses like a snake – because of his psychical link-up, I guess! The other actors don’t always seem quite sure how to respond to him! Also, there’s a scene between Reed and his fetching adult niece that suggests a bit of an incestual link-up between the two of them, but I’m pretty sure that was just a little touch of improv from old Oliver! Ha ha, it’s pretty hilarious!

The best thing about the movie is the great special effects! Not so much of the snake, which we hardly get to see and which looks kind of stiff and rubbery, but of what happens to his victims, particularly Al Waxman! As soon as the snake puts a biting on him, he bulges up and breaks open, and of course spasms around quite a bit too! Ha ha, it’s pretty gross! But it’s an impressive effect, and goes to show that an old pro like Dick Smith, who also did the makeup in such fine pictures as The Exorcist and Taxi Driver, can really bring something special to even the dangdest of movies!

I’ve been pretty hard on Spasms here, I guess, but you know, it’s not as bad as all that! It’s nicely shot by that portly old pro Mark Irwin; and it has some really entertaining bits, such as when the snake busts out of his box and immediately makes his way to a sorority house and puts a biting on a nude co-ed in the shower! Ha ha, that’s a snake who knows what’s expected of him! I give Spasms two snake point-of-view shots, which is a pretty good number but a lot less than the movie itself gives! Ha ha!