Burl reviews Breathless! (1960)

Bonjour, c’est Burl ici! Ha ha, aujourd’hui je vais revué le film À bout de souffle, par le grand réalisateur Suisse-Français, Jean-Luc Godard! But no, this whole review won’t be in French! I would make too many mistakes in my grammar, I think, and would thereby annoy my French readership, if I even have a French readership!

À bout de souffle is of course known as Breathless in English, and was Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature! I’ve been a big Godard fan for a long time, and until I watched this picture again the other night, I hadn’t seen it in years! Ha ha, it’s a great picture! I knew that of course, but I had a fine time reacquainting myself with this Gallic classic and realizing just how much it managed to change the motion picture arts as we know them!

Of course this wasn’t the very first movie to take the camera off the tripod and ignore the established rules of editing and mise en scéne, but it was among the first, and certainly was among the most popular! On top of that it’s a lustily entertaining picture, a movie about movies that’s a more effective tribute to the medium than a thousand of those stultifying “Aren’t Movies Great” Oscar night montages could ever hope to be!

Maybe you’ve heard of the movie but haven’t seen it, thinking to yourself “Ha ha, it’s just another boring, impenetrable avant-garde art picture!” No way! It’s a racy and thrilling crime romance that’s of much more than historical interest to anyone who appreciates a good genre exercise! The hero, Michel Poiccard, is played by the incomparable Belmondo, and is a Bogart-worshiping small-time Parisian crook who steals a car and then, cornered, commits a casual copicide! All the flics of France are after him then, but before he can flee the country, Michel needs to do two important things: get his hands on the money that’s owed him for past thieveries, and woo his tentative, impossibly cute American girlfriend Patricia into a dedicated, Bonnie-and-Clyde state of love! Then the two of them can run to Italy, and to freedom!

I won’t repeat the encomiums so many others have lavished on this picture! Ha ha, you’ll just have to see it for yourself and invent some of your own! You’ll be captivated by Belmondo and his habit of running his thumb over his upper lip in imitation of Bogie; with Jean Seberg and her fantastic pixie cut and New York Herald-Tribune t-shirt; and with Paris itself, just for being Paris!

One last note: I’ve often wondered if there was any connection between the character Laszlo Kovacs who is so often mentioned in the film, and the real-life Hungarian cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, who shot Easy Rider, Ghostbusters and of course Butch and Sundance: The Early Days! Ha ha!

I give Breathless four enthusiastic Gauloises, and encourage you to check it out with all haste!

Burl reviews Hospital Massacre! (1981)

Out of the corner of your eye, a flash of movement – and then suddenly by your side it’s Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to review another slasher picture for you, Hospital Massacre!

Back in 1981 there were a couple of hospital slasher movies released, Visiting Hours and Halloween II, and also a notable Valentine’s Day slasher, the renowned My Bloody Valentine! And then, as though trying to trump them all in a single stroke, along came a hospital slasher on a Valentine’s Day theme, Hospital Massacre! I’ll give you a quick sketch of where this one sits in the classification system: it’s a semi-mystery maniac picture with a touch of the Past History bit and a few splashes of actual Makeup Effects here and there! (There isn’t a credit for Special Makeup Effects per se, it should be noted, but a quick eye may spot a credit for “Makeup Master” in the closing crawl! The name beside it is Allan Apone, who also did some of the trick effects for Silent Madness and The Sword and the Sorcerer!)

Ha ha, the mayhem in this one starts on Valentine’s Day 1961 at Susan’s house! Harold, an awkward boy, loves Susan and leaves a card stating as much! But she and her little buddy laugh and stomp on the card, and this makes Harold so mad he goes instantly and untreatably insane, and hangs the little buddy from a coat hook! Ha ha, that’s the motive? Class Reunion had a more reality-based kickoff to murder than this one!

Well, almost twenty years later, Susan is going to the hospital to get the results of her tests! Wouldn’t you know it, Harold is there, wearing a surgical mask and breathing heavily! He does a little subterfuge with Susan’s X-rays, making it seem like she’s got a bellyful of worms! You’d think worms would be pretty easy to test for by simple use of the stethoscope or maybe a poo sample, but this hospital is not exactly the Mayo Clinic!

So for the whole middle part of the picture, the horror comes not from Harold’s slicing and dicing, but from Susan’s tribulations with the hospital staff! She’s also cursed with the dumbest, most ineffectual boyfriend ever! If two lady nurses, even tall ones, tried to bundle my girlfriend off down the hall as she screamed “Let go of me!,” I like to think I’d help her out! Ha ha, this guy sort of deserved to get his head cut off with a bone saw, I think, and that’s exactly what happens to him!

This is not a particularly gory picture, just to let you know! There are Special Makeup Effects, as I’ve mentioned, but they’re fairly minimal! A guy gets an acid facewash and ends up with a visage of foam! A snooty doctor gets a chop to the head and another is poked through the throat! There’s a hypodermic needle murder, which I suppose has to happen in every medical horror movie, although they always manage to simultaneously disgust and bore me somehow! Most of the killings are pretty dry, it has to be said!

More notable are the touches of weirdness with which the movie is graced, and I suppose that since this comes from the director of Hot Bubblegum and The Last American Virgin, bizarre flourishes such as the room full of squirmy bandage patients, the troika of witchy old ladies, or the scene with Harold holding up a bedsheet as he runs down the hall, are to be expected!

Well, it’s a little dry, a little boring in spots, a little sleazy here and there with the breast exams and so forth, a bit silly and a bit stupid, but Harold gets as good as he gives in the end (stabbed, splashed with flammable liquid, bopped several times with a metal pipe, lit on fire and sent over the edge of a building to plummet screaming ten stories to his death), so I give Hospital Massacre one and a half weirdo fumigators, half as many as are in the film itself! Ha ha!  

Burl reviews The Errand Boy! (1961)

Hi, Burl stumbling at you from out of the darkness! Today I thought I’d review a comedy from that exciter of the French funnybone, Jerry Lewis! This one, The Errand Boy, has particular significance to me because it bears an uncanny resemblance to a script idea titled The Clapper-Loader which I myself had thought up almost twenty years ago! Of course, Jerry still gets the credit, but I swear to biscuits that I’d not seen The Errand Boy prior to thinking up The Clapper-Loader!

Like The Clapper-Loader, The Errand Boy is about a clumsy nebbish who comes to work at a Hollywood movie studio and causes chaos! Unlike The Clapper-Loader however, The Errand Boy lacks a compelling narrative and witty, sparkling dialogue to go with the physical comedy! But not every movie can be The Clapper-Loader, and in fact not even The Clapper-Loader can be The Clapper-Loader, since I have yet to even finish the script!

But let’s concentrate on The Errand Boy! Jerry plays Morty S. Tashman (so named in tribute to Frank Tashlin I’m sure), a hapless goof who gets recruited by the Paramutual Studios to find out where money is being wasted on the lot and then report back to the Paramutual executives! The executives are all named Paramutual – it’s a family business, and I guess this is a jab at the Brothers Warner – and are led by blustery Brian Donlevy in the role of T.P. Paramutual!

This is the plot, and the spy business is forgotten about as quickly as the film can manage it! It becomes a series of self-contained gag sequences set on the film lot and often pointing out the artifice involved in filmmaking, which perhaps was novel at the time! Morty’s base is the mail room, which is presided over by a master of the slow burn, Stanley Baker! His performance was great, ha ha, and the scene where he lays down the law to Morty and the rest of the peons has a classic climax involving Morty’s jump onto the desk!

The skits are pretty hit and miss! The best ones don’t end up as you assume they will, and often take a turn into surreality! The worst ones tend to rely on verbal rather than physical or metaphysical comedy, and aren’t much better than something you’d see on a third-rate variety show or cornpone Vaudeville circuit! The presence of the character Mr. Sneak, a man literally driven insane by his own sycophancy, is a warning sign that the scene will be a little less than stellar!

Of course, Morty himself is a bit frustrating! You wonder how someone so incompetent, so dimwitted, so blissfully un-self-aware, could even get dressed in the morning much less make his way down to the studio without getting killed! But that’s always the point with these Jerry Lewis guys, who aren’t really supposed to be human beings at all; until the inevitable sensitive ending in which Jerry tries to convince you, by the sudden appearance of strings on the soundtrack and the liberal spreading of saccharine, that indeed yes, contrary to all heretofore provided evidence, this clown prince of goofballs is meant to be someone with whom we the audience are meant to empathize and even identify! Ha ha!

Well, it never really worked with me! But that aside, as a joke delivery system The Errand Boy does pretty well, and if The Clapper-Loader never gets made Jerry’s picture will stand as a pretty fair replacement! I award it two and a half enormous jars of jellybeans!

Burl reviews Summer Night Fever! (1978)

Burl’s here again! Ha ha, it’ll make you HAPPY! So says the copy on the video box of Summer Night Fever, and that kind of come-on is well nigh irresistible to a fellow like ol’ Burl! So I made no attempt whatever to resist it, and the result is the review you’re reading right now!

Here’s a grand teen sex romp in the great European tradition! Like The Wild Life, this one has never made the leap from VHS to DVD, at least not in North America, and the reason is probably the presence of the dreadful and expensive hit song “Baker Street” on the soundtrack, and also the fact that one of the leads wears a Mickey Mouse shirt for the first few scenes of the movie! Ha ha, those copyright issues will get you every time, particularly where irritating softrock saxophone riffs or good old Uncle Walt’s animation corporation are concerned!

Summer Night Fever begins in Munich with two buddies, Peter and Freddy, hanging out at a groovy Teutonic disco and the next morning hopping into Freddy’s yellow convertible VW Bug to begin a summer road trip to Ibiza! Ha ha, I’m already happy! But Freddy has a sister named Vicky, a glasses nerd, whom he is being forced to take along! This bums Peter out, and for the first time but not the last he declares that “This trip is ruined!”

But Vicky, while nerdly, is pleasant enough, and the film sets to documenting their misadventures as they drive through late-70s Europe with the same five or so songs recurring in alternating scenes! Their car, every bit the lemon its appearance would suggest, gives them nothing but trouble! Peter, a goodtime ladies’ man, can’t score to save his life because all the freuleins, femmes, señioritas and niña bonitas assume that Vicky is his girlfriend! In the meanwhile, shy, myopic Freddy is going to bed with every one of the more elderly ladies in the cast! And along the way, plenty of ladies take off all their clothes!

Well, if you thought driving across the continent was fun, wait till this little group reaches the Mediterranean coast! Yes, they hit hotspots like Monte Carlo, where they tangle with an incredibly louche Eurotrash yachtsman, and St. Tropez, where Freddy has a quick affair with his math teacher! Eventually their car is stolen by a melonman and his cohorts, but that doesn’t concern our heroes overmuch since it was always breaking down and stranding them anyway! A romantic misunderstanding separates Peter and Vicky, who were becoming closer along the way, and the whole thing wraps up on the legendary partyisland of Ibiza!

Ha ha, I have to say that, despite some irritating characters and the brain-melting repetition of some very strange quasi-disco songs, some of which sound like children’s music and bear titles like “You’re A Person Of Importance,” Summer Night Fever is a terrific treasure of yesteryear! I personally would have loved to go on a trip like this at that time in history, and since I was much too young and not European, this is truly the next best thing! I have to admit that the picture lived up to the letter of its video-box boast! It’s well-paced, nicely photographed and it delivers the goods! And of course it makes you HAPPY! Ha ha! And as a bonus, I was lucky enough to find the soundtrack album on vinyl, so now I have all those crazy songs to play at top volume in my home!

I give Summer Night Fever three narrowly (and thankfully) avoided date rapes!

Burl reviews The Wild Life! (1984)

Ha ha! Ha HA! It’s Burl! I’m here to review another movie for you! This is one of those pictures that for some reason seems not to have ever been released on DVD, which perhaps means it’ll never make it to any future format either! I’m sure you can find it to watch somewhere on the Internet, but me, I’ll stick with my VHS copy, which is what I watched the other night!

I’d never actually seen this picture before, which is odd considering that I’m something of an 80s movie scholar, and am fond of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, with which this movie shares a few key elements! Both The Wild Life and Fast Times were written by Cameron Crowe before he got a little too interested in making bland pictures ol’ Burl has no interest in seeing! That happened pretty much right after Say Anything, to tell you the truth! As well, both pictures feature at least one member of the Penn family! Fast Times has Sean as the notorious, pizza-loving stoner Spicoli, and The Wild Life has Chris as a dreadful bozo named Tommy Drake, and also a brief appearance by their dad Leo Penn in the role of Tommy’s dad!

Both movies also have California locales, a general shambolic quality, and a bunch of characters who know one another but have separate stories and problems of their own! But there’s no actual narrative crossover or shared characters, so if you ever were under the impression this is some sort of Fast Times II, think again, young cowpoke!

Our characters include Eric Stoltz as Bill, a straight arrow of a fellow who has recently broken up with his girlfriend Lea Thompson and taken his first apartment at a high-life rental complex in his quest to become a single successful guy! Lea Thompson meanwhile is having a donut-shop affair with a bootblack handlebar mustache attached to a cop! Her pal Jenny Wright works at a crazy clothing store managed by Rick Moranis, whose hair and outfits here are crazier even than they were in Streets of Fire! She’s fending off both his advances and those of her sometime boyfriend, the odious wrestler Tommy! And Tommy decides to move in with Bill so that he can start a non-stop party parade! And of course we can’t forget Bill’s little brother, who is obsessed with Vietnam and practices nun-chuk-as in his room like the killer from Fear City! Ha ha!

The character of Tommy has got to be one of the more loathsome would-be charmers in movie history! I don’t know why, but I really hated him! He’s meant to be oafish but charming, clueless but big-hearted, and with his Made In California catch phrase, “It’s casual,” I suppose he’s meant to be cool and hip also! Ha ha, well, “It’s casual” made its way to the Great Dumping Ground Of Failed Catch Phrases pretty quickly, to lay beside gems like “Bau bau bau” from Surf II and “Be Scottitfitous, buddy” from Hardbodies! Tommy is just one of the most objectionable characters I’ve ever encountered in my long movie watching career! I don’t know why he rubbed me so very wrongly, but there was just something about him!

But I enjoyed the movie on the whole, since I do tend to like these laid-back, directionless teen comedies of yesteryear! I liked its loose ends, its supporting cast (Randy Quaid appears as a depressed, smack-addict Vietnam vet, and of course a Moranis appearance always brings a picture up a notch or two) and the random rock stars that showed up throughout! It’s not in the same class as Fast Times, but I rate The Wild Life a respectable two Ron Wood cameos nevertheless!

Burl reviews Killer's Kiss! (1955)

The door opens to reveal… Burl! Yes, I’m here to review another Stanley Kubrick movie, this time not a late-period movie like Full Metal Jacket, but one of his earliest productions, Killer’s Kiss! He made this one for a pittance way back when, after he’d only done a few other pictures, mostly short documentaries!

But he’d already had lots of experience behind the camera – the still camera that is, as a photographer for Look magazine! That’s probably why Killer’s Kiss looks so darn good! The fellow was just born with a good eye, I guess!

The tale is a pretty basic one! It seems there’s a boxer, Davy, who is cursed with an eternal glass chin! He fights Kid Rodriguez for the title and loses, falling to the canvas like a stumblebum! No matter how many times he shakes his head to clear it, he can never quite get his mojo back! Ha ha, in the world of the sweet science, he’s naught but a clumsy lab assistant!

But he lives in a dingy apartment with a view of the other dingy apartment across the courtyard, the tenant of which is a beautiful lady named Gloria who turns out to be a taxi dancer at a hall owned by a greasy mustachioed gangster-ish fellow, Rapallo! Well, Rapallo, who has feelings, is in love with his employee and visits her one night anxious to make l*ve! But Davy hears her screams, rushes to the rescue, and though Rapallo has gone, he manages to provide some comfort for the weepy Gloria! The next morning they put on the day, exchange tales of woe (Gloria’s involves a lot of ballet dancing) and begin very tentatively to fall in love!  

Of course love never runs smoothly in a noir caper like this, and when Gloria tries to quit her dime-a-dance career to join Davy on a trip to Oregon, Rapallo’s thugs are waiting! In a case of mistaken identity they put a fatal punching on Davey’s fight manager, and then they kidnap Gloria! Davy tracks her down and then there are some ferocious fights – brittle-chinned Davy is of course knocked out easily in the course of one of them – and a nifty rooftop chase! The grand finale is famous for taking place in a mannequin warehouse, and it ends with a gruesome transfixion and a pitiful dying scream!

Ha ha, this is a great little movie, if probably not the one Kubrick was most proud of! It would certainly make a terrific double bill with Blast of Silence, which is just as good and even grittier and rougher, but unlike Killer’s Kiss was not the start of a legendary directing career! Kubrick’s picture has got some flaws, sure, like the weak story, the narrated flashbacks that are obvious narrative bandages, the rushed and improbable denouement and the fairly obvious techniques used to cover the fact that there is no audience and no auditorium in the boxing scene; but on the other hand almost every shot has some visual treat in it!

On balance, and though I admit my opinion is coloured somewhat by the film’s pedigree and the fact that I just like looking at shots of New York in the 50s, I’m going to give this little noir three soon-to-be-neglected fish!  

Burl reviews Terror of Tiny Town! (1938)

Hi, Burl here to review a very short movie! Ha ha, it runs barely more than an hour! I’m talking of course about Terror of Tiny Town, a Western made with an all-little people cast! As you can see from the poster, it is “rated comedy,” but in fact it’s a fairly straight-ahead Western action-drama!

Of course the movie is notorious in the exploitation field, more so even than the Werner Herzog movie Even Dwarves Started Small, in which I believe the cast was not only small-sized but hypnotized! But the movie doesn’t do much with the height-deficiencies of its actors, and in fact it’s easy to forget, or at least not fixate on, the shortness of the cowpokes and just get caught up in the wainscoting-high drama!

Ha ha, it seems that there’s a goodly amount of rustlin’ going on around Tiny Town, and two ranching families are each convinced the other is behind it! Buck Lawson, who wears a brilliantly white hat and a dust-repellant ice cream suit, is the good guy, and his dad owns the ranch; Nancy Preston is the young lady newcomer to town whose uncle Tex runs another big ranch! Well, that nasty Bat Haines is behind it all, rustling the cattle and setting the two families against one another!

Buck and Nancy carry on a Romeo/Juliet relationship for a while before Bat opts to raise the stakes by shooting Tex and pinning the crime on Buck! Ha ha! But of course everything eventually gets sorted with the help of a few well-placed sticks of dynamite!

Sure, there are a few midget gags in this movie, like the comedy relief cook who is terrorized by a cunning duck, and who walks in and out of his cupboards like they were closets! And there’s a fellow who guzzles down snifters of beer as big as his head! And the midget who sings basso profundo! (There’s a lot of singing in this movie – the whole town gets to warbling at the drop of a ten-gallon hat!) And, yes, one guy does walk into a saloon by trundling under the swinging doors! But the movie isn’t really a comedy unless you’re one of those people who simply point and laugh whenever you see a little person, and if so, ha ha, you’re a jerk!

The wee folks ride and shoot and fight just fine, though they’re not very good actors! A few of the action scenes are surprisingly exciting, and at one point a penguin shows up! On the whole, this is not much different than the typical Monogram-type Westerns of the period, and if you like those, you should enjoy this one too! And if the look of the film is familiar to you, it’s because it was shot by the same cinematographer as Cosmo Jones: Crime Smasher! Ha ha, I give Terror of Tiny Town two bricks and a short refrigerator!

Burl reviews Silent Madness! (1984)

Burl! It’s Burl! Ha ha, another slasher movie to review for you today! I know that many of my readers enjoy these pictures above all! And this one, Silent Madness, appears to be especially loved by a small but dedicated contingent of motion picture admirers!

Some of you may recollect that one of my ongoing projects on this blog is to create a proper, if loosely organized, taxonomy of these slasher pictures! Mystery killers, faceless killers, deformed killers and motive-driven killers all ought to have their own comfortable categories in which to loll and plot their mayhem; movies which use the science and art of gore should be segregated from those which for some reason refuse to do so; and good movies must be separated from bad!

Where does Silent Madness sit in all this? Ha ha, well, let’s have a closer look! The plot in its broadest outlines is fairly scrupulously recycled from Halloween, actually: we have an escaped lunatic, a dedicated mind-doctor on his trail and a group of unwary goodtime gals directly in his path! There are a few victims along the way and a sheriff who refuses to believe the threat is real! From there, however, the two movies diverge pretty completely!

It seems that a pasty-faced individual named Howard Johns is released by mistake from a New York bughouse! He makes his way without delay to the small college town where, almost twenty years before, he’d been driven haywire by a brutal spanking inflicted on him by some sorority sisters! He’s never forgotten that bum paddling, nosirree, and he’s back to inflict revenge on all the current-day sisters of Delta Pi or whatever! (Ha ha, it’s all Greek to me!)

Feisty Dr. Lady is on his trail, and she in turn is pursued by a couple of incredibly sleazy and horrible orderlies from the hospital, who have been mandated by bughouse officials to kill Howard Johns and turn the doctor into a mental vegetable! Other characters mixed up in the action include the aforementioned sheriff played by skeevy Sidney Lassick from Carrie, Alligator and The Unseen; a soap-star type newspaper editor whose heroics consist of getting bonked on the head, tied up and locked in the back of a van; and the house mother played by the great Viveca Lindfors from Creepshow! Ha ha, it’s a pretty good cast actually!

Meanwhile Howard Johns has gone murder-happy, using a variety of relatively imaginative methods for his killing! He does a head-crushing in a vice, steams someone to death, tosses an animated hatchet and inventively uses a barbell, a rope and a window at one point as well! Some of the killings are fairly (almost uncomfortably) gruesome, and there’s a bit of actual gore here and there as well, and that treat for any slasher viewer, a credit for Special Makeup Effects! Ha ha, there’s also a special appearance by that great video game of days gone by, Dragon’s Lair!

Well, I won’t say too much more about this picture, except that it was made in 3D, so there are some things tossed, pointed and otherwise aimed at the camera lens! (The light-hungry 3D process also ensures that this is the rare slasher movie which takes place entirely in the daytime!) Also worth noting is the East Coast atmosphere, so different to the discerning viewer from the California or Midwest ambiances so often found in these things! And I must say it again: Viveca Lindfors! This is far from her greatest role, but I’ve always liked her, and her presence put me in mind of a picture called Last Summer in the Hamptons which I remember enjoying at a film festival once! Maybe I’ll watch it again and review it here sometime!

Silent Madness more or less delivers what anyone watching it deliberately might hope for, and though there’s an excess of plot and it gets a little chatty here and there, I’ll still give it two sudden nailgunnings!

Burl reviews Fear City! (1984)

Hey and hah-trayah, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m here with another review of a motion picture, once again plucked almost at random from my basement VHS collection! This one is an Abel Ferrara movie I’ve never seen before, and it’s called Fear City! It maybe should have been called Sleazeball City, but I guess Fear City works pretty well too! It's part of that micro-genre of movies that are partially about psycho killers but are also part of some other genre too, just like Delirium!

It’s also part of that category of movies whose raison d’etre seems to be making New York look like the most horrible, gritty, dangerous and generally unsavoury place ever! There are mainstream movies that work on this theme, like Cruising, and there are low-budget pictures that do it even more persuasively precisely because of their low budgets (Maniac and Basket Case would be good examples of these); but Fear City, with its cast of recognizable faces and reasonable budget, fits somewhere in the middle!

It seems that Tom Berenger, whom we know from such Hollywood bumkins as Someone To Watch Over Me and Last Rites, is an ex-boxer who once boxed his opponent into the grave, and so he quit pugilizing – though his flashbacks won’t let him forget the incident – and started up a stripper management business with his pal Jack Scalia! Well, wouldn’t you know it, as our story proper begins, one of those self-righteous maniacs on a morality crusade decides to clean up the streets by practicing his various martial arts techniques on random exotic dancers, at first just mutilating them with scissors and knives, but soon working his way up to brutal murders!

Since the first two victims work for the Berenger/Scalia Agency, an incredibly angry cop played by Billy Dee Williams from Number One with a Bullet decides these fellows must know something about the tragedies! Soon a mobster played by Rossano Brazzi from South Pacific gets involved for some reason; and there are lots of ladies about too, like Melanie Griffith as the exotic dancer Tom Berenger loves, and Rae Dawn Chong as the exotic dancer Melanie Griffith loves, and Janet Julian from Humongous as the exotic dancer everyone loves!

Of course we all know that even with all these characters and plot strands and flashbacks, it’s all going to come down to the killer boxer vs. the chopsocky maniac, and indeed that’s what occurs! Ha ha, the fight is pretty good, and it’s always satisfying to see one of these extreme social conservatives – and he’s a brutal murderer too, don’t forget – receive the harsh and painful pummeling they deserve!

Ha ha, Abel Ferrara is a pretty interesting director! I guess he’s best known for Bad Lieutenant and King of New York, but he’s done lots of other weird pictures as well, like his own (pretty good!) version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, just called Body Snatchers; a movie about Madonna and Harvey Kietel making love; and a movie adaptation of William Gibson’s New Rose Hotel! Fear City is one of his earlier productions, and despite running off madly in all directions plotwise, and presenting maybe too many scenes of exotic dancing, and featuring a lot more harsh, brutal violence against women than ol’ Burl is all that comfortable with, and losing its narrative thread like you would a worm in a bowl of rancid spaghetti, it’s not that bad a movie! I give it two long, wordless nun-chuck-a practices!

Burl reviews Malpertuis! (1973)

Well, it’s that time again! Time for ol’ Burl to grab the cinematic bull by the horns and wrestle it into the dirt – the dirt of critical evaluation! Ha ha, over my many years of movie watching, I’ve identified more than a few micro-genres, and have built up a pretty extensive taxonomy! One category of movies I like is the Expensive Arty Horror Picture, which consists of uniquely oddball, almost experimental genre movies that break some new ground in the field! Matango is a good example, and so are movies like Horrors of Malformed Men or Lisa and the Devil or The House with the Laughing Windows or Zeder! I guess you might toss Videodrome in there as well!

Today’s movie is another picture in the great artsy horror tradition! It’s Malpertuis, which was adapted from a weird surrealistic horror book by the pseudonymous Belgian writer Jean Ray! Ha ha, the movie was made by Harry Kümel, who also made a movie about nude vampire ladies called Daughters of Darkness, and in fact has made several other pictures that you never hear about! Or maybe you do if you’re of the Benelux nations, but not so much outside of that particular socioeconomic region!

Malpertuis is also part of another micro-genre, the House Movie! These are pictures which take place mostly or entirely within the walls of a single house, and the house itself is more or less a character in the film! There are lots of haunted house movies in this micro-genre of course, like The Haunting, House, The Legend of Hell House, This House Possessed, The Evil and The Nesting, just to name a few, but there are also left-field weirdpics like Sunset Boulevard, Demon Seed, Guy Maddin’s Keyhole, and of course the Japanese insanity pepper simply called House!

Well, I guess I ought to tell you a little about Malpertuis, but I’ll keep it sketchy, because it’s one of those movies you might prefer to go in knowing only a little bit about! It seems that a pretty-boy sailor-man is on shore leave and looking for the house in which he grew up! It seems to be missing! He chases his sister and ends up in a nightclub free-for-all where he gets bopped on the head! He wakes up in Malpertuis, the house of his uncle Cassavius, who is played without even getting out of bed by Orson Welles himself! The house is filled with all sorts of other people, mostly petit bourgeoisie or resentful servants or weird hangers-on, who all seem to be waiting around for the bedridden Cassavius to croak!

There’s a strange atmosphere in the house, and an odd reluctance or inability on the part of its denizens to leave! All sorts of things happen, including gruesome murders and illicit sexual acts, and later on some much, much stranger events and revelations, some of these involving the gods of ancient Greece! By the time the young sailor discovers the secret of Malpertuis and those who dwell within its mildewed walls, the movie has mustered up an otherworldly feeling that stays with you well after the credits have rolled and the last strains of the Georges Delerue score have faded!

Many of the movie’s pleasures are visual! It was shot by Gerry Fisher, a British cinematographer whose eclectic credits include lots of Joseph Losey and Tony Richardson pictures, a bunch of late-period John Frankenheimer and Michael Ritchie works, and crazy movies like Billy Wilder’s Fedora, William Peter Blatty’s The Ninth Configuration, John Huston’s Wise Blood, and of course Wolfen and Highlander! Truly an interesting career! And, in concert with the production designer and Kümel he does a great job with Malpertuis, giving the house enough varied life and colour and flaming gas lamps to make it an expansive and multifaceted environment with personality to spare!

This is a picture well worth seeking out! There are a few different versions, and I watched the 119 minute director’s cut, which is what I recommend to you! I give it three and a half swooping eagles!