Burl reviews The Demon Lover! (1977)

Heh-heh-heh, it’s Burl! I’m here to review another movie for you, this time a regional obscurity of some small infamy entitled The Demon Lover! It’s known also as The Devil Master, but Demon Lover is the title it was made under, and the title under which I first saw it years ago, and so that’s what I’ll call it!

I remember having a little mini film festival with my friends when we were in junior high school! The unintentional theme was “funny main character names!” That night we watched Don Dohler’s Night Beast, with its main character Sheriff Jack Cinder; Taxi Driver, featuring of course Travis Bickle, alias Henry Krinkle; another movie I’ve forgotten; and, finally, The Demon Lover, with its fearsome blonde bad guy Laval Blessing, played by Christmas Robbins, aka co-director Jerry Younkins! Ha ha, enough funny names for everyone!

It was many years before I got a chance to see this picture again! I was encouraged to because I’d heard about Demon Lover Diary, a marvelous documentary made about the production of this low-budget picture; and also I read the compelling rave review of the movie itself from my pal Bleeding Skull! Well, I’m glad I tracked it down, because in many ways The Demon Lover is, alongside the best of Dohler and Rebane, the ideal Midwestern regional horror picture!

Like every good example of same, this was shot in the autumn months, so it has that grim, bleak, über-70s atmosphere that brings me back to my early childhood! Ha ha, if ever there was a decade that actually was shot on grainy 16mm colour stock, the 1970s was it! And this movie is such a product of its time that, watching it today, it almost feels like the incantations Laval Blessing intones are not so much going to raise any demons as open a vortex to fly back forty years into a land of plaid pants and walnut siding!

Laval is a burly guy with long blond locks and a big beard, and he runs an ad-hoc little devil cult out of his so-called castle in deepest Michigan! Ha ha, his mistake is in recruiting bored seventies people for his coven, and pretty soon they get fed up with Laval’s horndogmatic ways and split the scene! But, between bouts at his karate dojo (at which the diabolist gets his bum kicked) and a random bar brawl (at which he kicks the bums of others), Laval conjures up a shaggy, resentful demon creature to help get revenge against his ex-acolytes for their lack of devotion!

Things get pretty bloody, I have to say! And, in fact, the violence is so raggedy and drawn-out and painful-looking that it’s rather unsettling! In its sporadic moments of completely unexpected effectiveness, the picture reminded me of Satan’s Black Wedding; in the strangely disturbing resonance of its violence, it echoes (or rather, is echoed by) the loopy Bigfoot picture Night of the Demon!

It’s a picture that was made by more or less talentless amateurs (talented amateurs in the same region, using similar resources, made The Evil Dead, just as a point of comparison), whose sheer commitment to the project resulted in a movie that is almost accidentally good! But you can’t really call it good: the script, acting and direction are uniformly terrible, and the trick effects, by future trick effect heavyweights the Skotak brothers, are pretty lousy!

But it’s got a certain something! Ha ha, I’m not going to deny that! It also has some very groovy fashions, a Frank Zappa lookalike, a midget man doing the boogaloo, a nude lady, lines of dialogue like “If it’s no hassle, let’s go into the castle,” a Gunnar Hansen cameo, an indoor lovemaking tent, and a scene where a man is shot in the croscharea by a crossbow and spends the next ten minutes writhing on the floor, screaming in pain! Ha ha, yikes!

For all this and its rough regional atmosphere, I’m going to give The Demon Lover two and a half whipping cream fights, and recommend that you try to get your hands on a copy this Halloween season!

Burl reviews Vamp! (1986)

Bluh bluh, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m here to review a vampire picture today, Vamp, and it’s one that doesn’t get talked about all that much! I discovered the movie on video, and it was one of those pictures that I considered at the time to be incredibly stylish, and the (considerable) entertainment value of which arose directly from that style! But just to give you some perspective, other movies I felt that way about included Fandango and Three O’ Clock High!

These were not my favourite movies or anything, but I enjoyed them! And when I watched Vamp again very recently, I still enjoyed it, and once again wondered why it didn’t become a bigger sensation! The style is pretty sophomoric, with red and green gels, canted angles and overhead shots getting plenty of play! But it still has a genuinely cinematic energy that I find compelling! Plus it has a decent soundtrack, including a song by Concrete Blonde, whose music was all over the place in those days, livening up pictures like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and The Hidden!

The story is pretty simple: three college fellows are tasked by the fraternity they hope to join to procure a stripper for a big frat party! It’s a similar starting point to that fine fellow 80s horror-comedy, Night of the Creeps! The lads are played by Chris Makepeace from Meatballs, Robert Rusler from A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 and Weird Science (he plays pretty much the same character in all three of these pictures, ha ha!) and Gedde Watanabe from Sixteen Candles and Gremlins 2: The New Batch! They end up at a peeler bar run by none other than Grace Jones, and from there it’s vampire antics all the night long!

I recall Vamp getting compared to Fright Night a lot at the time, and I guess that’s fair! But it’s also quite a bit like After Hours, the fine Scorsese picture about one man’s scary night in the big city – in other words, it’s an example of what Roger Ebert (I think!) calls the One-Damn-Thing-After-Another movie! Poor old Makepeace is nearly eaten by an elevator, chomps on a cock-a-roach, has his lifestyle shirt assaulted, faces down a nefarious albino, and his best pal is turned into a vampire! Also, he’s involved in an incredible car spinout, which is one of the best parts of the picture!

The acting is pretty good all around, and Grace Jones is a particular standout, even though she doesn’t have a lot to do! But she does a (ha ha) BURL-esque dance in paint-makeup designed by Keith Haring himself (who also made a chair for the scene), and also has a pretty sexy scene with the smarmy, oft-doomed Rusler! There’s a little bit of blood and gore in this scene, and one or two others, which livens the movie up still further! Her vampire meltdown at the end is a little on the budget side of things, especially when compared to something like Fright Night, but it serves the purpose pretty well!

Vamp is not a movie I can defend with logical arguments or eloquent verbiage! It’s just a little, neglected movie that I used to enjoy most heartily, and which I’m glad I now own the DVD of! I was happy to watch it again, and I’m going to give it two and a half flying little girl vampires!

Burl reviews Friday the 13th part 2! (1981)

Chuff-chuff-chuff, pah-pah-pah, it’s Burl here again with yet another Friday the 13^th movie review, part 2 this time! Ha ha, it just seems like the season for these things, though I have to admit, whenever I watch one, I do tend to think to myself “Ha ha, why on earth am I wasting precious time watching this silly movie?” I watch much worse pictures and don’t have thoughts like that, but there’s just something so calculated and disposable about these movies, which, when you add the fact that they’re pretty terrible, engenders these soul-crushing bafflements!

But I’m still drawn to the things for some reason, as are many others – you perhaps included – so we must accept our lot and make what we can of it! As I’ve mentioned in previous reviews, for parts 4 and 6 for instance, as with the Star Trek pictures, I tend to prefer the even numbered installments of this particular series! The first Friday the 13^th has never done much for me, anyway! So what’s to prefer about part 2? Ha ha, it’s exactly the same story, except instead of Silly Steve Christie trying to reopen Camp Crystal Lake, it’s Upstanding Paul trying to open some sort of councilor training center at another abandoned camp right next door, and also on Crystal Lake!

It makes no sense, but it’s a clever way of skirting the issue that dogs these summer camp maniac movies, which is to say, how do you deal with all the kids running around? Anyway, of course the main difference between the two pictures, and the only difference required, many would say, is that it’s no longer Jason’s mother doing the poking, but Jason himself! He ties up a little unfinished personal business by jabbing the lady from the last one with an ice pick, and then it’s off to the councilor training center!

His first victim once he arrives is none other than Crazy Ralph, which I think is unfortunate! And I’m not the only one! I saw this movie on a midnight double feature with the first one sometime in the 1990s, and a fellow stood up after Ralph’s demise and said, and I quote precisely, “I love Crazy Ralph and will miss him like a brother!” Ha ha, there was respectful, empathetic applause from the whole rest of the audience, including myself!

I like the hero lady in this one – maybe that’s why I like the picture more than I should! There’s nothing special about her really, but she’s pretty, and I think I probably had, and have, a bit of a crush on her! I also like that you get to see the inside of Jason’s house! He’s thrown together some corrugated metal and plywood, installed a few windows and a door, and furnished the inside with filthy rugs, several chairs and a little table, as though he expects one day to receive guests for tea! Ha ha! I l appreciate that little detail – it does more to humanize this mad killer than the psychological rationalizations for his murderous behaviour which are delivered by the drunken hero girl later on in a bar!

Of course most of the gore effects have to exist simply in your mind, since they were cut out by de facto censors before its original run! Consequently the picture is a little dry, but not entirely! There’s a pretty good machete-in-the-face gag, and some throat slittings and so forth! But the picture looks a lot better than the first one, which is a bit of a cheapie – this one has nice photography from a fellow named Peter Stein, who also of course shot C.H.U.D.!

Altogether it’s not terribly good, but it has a comfy-cozy attractiveness and a few funny details, and of course a very pretty lady! The ending is somewhat abstract, but I don’t mind that! When all is said and done, I give Friday the 13^th part 2 two untubby jokesters!

Burl reviews A Dangerous Method! (2011)

Hi, Burl here to review a movie about the early days of psychoanalysis! It’s a funny subject for a director like David "Fast Company" Cronenberg to tackle, but then again maybe not, for it seems these days that Cronenberg is willing to tackle just about anything! He always sort of has, I think, and that’s one of the reasons I rate him so highly as a director!

A Dangerous Method has two main, frequently intersecting stories: the building and subsequent dissolution of the personal and professional friendship between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud; and the love affair between Jung and his spitfire patient, Sabina Spielrein! Ha ha, she enjoys nothing more than a sound spanking, and for this reason, in early 20^th Century Switzerland, she is considered quite loony!

Jung, as played by the robot from Prometheus, Michael Fassbinder, is a chilly character indeed, perfectly suited to a David Cronenberg picture! Freud is played by Cronen-stalwart Viggo Mortensen, and I have to say I really liked his performance! All the acting was quite good, but old Viggo stood out, with the possible exception of his third-act pratfall! Ha ha, whoa, whoa, boom! And Kiera Knightly indulges in an awful lot of gurning as Spielrein, which may or may not be an accurate portrayal of mental annoyance, but sometimes threatens to jump the cliff into silly!

Ha ha, at times the movie seems a bit like a dumbed-down pop history lecture, and Cronenberg’s typically unflashy style doesn’t meld well with that! But in spite of this clash, or maybe because of it, the movie whips up a mighty strange atmosphere all its own, and any movie that can manage that gets a light shoulder punch from old Burl!

That’s something Cronenberg very often manages to do in his pictures, and another reason I’m such a big fan of his! Another nice thing about the picture is the shift in partisanship the viewer might experience! Entirely notwithstanding your loyalty to their respective psycho-philosophies, at the beginning of the picture Jung seems a reasonable chap, earnest and well-intentioned, and Freud something of a stodgy and self-congratulatory fuddy-duddy! By the end Jung is a crackpot and a jerk, and Freud a gentle, avuncular smoker of cigars! Ha ha, and by the time the curtain comes down, Sabina Spielrein, especially given the tragic end to her life, which is revealed to us by postscript titles, is entirely sympathetic, even if at the beginning of the picture she reminds you of an old girlfriend you’re well rid of! Ha ha!

It’s a bit of a Masterpiece Theatre slog here and there, but this is undercut by all sorts of sly Cronenbergianisms, more and more as the picture progresses, until it comes to seem quite subversive! It’s also decidedly uncommercial, another point in it’s favour! I give this potato three vicious cuts to the face!

Burl reviews Friday the 13th! (1980)

Ch-ch-ch, ha-ha-ha, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m here to review one of the granddaddiest movies of modern horror, the original Friday the 13^th! Ha ha, I’ll tell you right off the bat that this has never been my favourite horror series, and even within that series this particular picture sits maybe third or fourth for me! I certainly prefer both part 4 and part 6 to this inaugural entry!

However, with that said, this certainly has a few virtues scattered here and there in its running time, and I try to be a positive person, so I’ll mention as many of them as occur to me! It’s tempting, too, to want to give the picture extra credit for being the first in the series, but even the people who made it won’t make any great claims to originality! All they did was go see Halloween a bunch of times and try to copy it as closely as possible, with the addition of some Special Makeup Effects!

Ah yes, Special Makeup Effects! This movie has that glorious credit prominently displayed in its opening titles, which is right where it should be! You know what perplexes me? Well, the fact is that if you do Special Makeup Effects for a movie, you really have to fight to get your name in those opening titles! But the credit being there serves as a statement of purpose to the savvy horror fan: they know firstly that the movie contains said Effects, and secondly that their presence is recognized by the filmmakers as a virtue! It’s win-win all around, and silly are the producers who try to save a buck, or retain a bargaining chip, by denying the Special Makeup Effects man or woman their rightful head credit!

And so to the picture itself: It starts in the most unconvincing 1958 since the Sha-Na-Na revival concert, and a pair of lustful Crystal Lake camp councilors are taught a harsh lesson at the point of a knife! Then, years later, that earnest gadabout Steve Christie has decided to spend twenty-five large to get the old camp up and running again! The camp’s history of violence seems to mean nothing to him, ha ha! He’s hired some attractive young folks (including Kevin Bacon) to help him fix it up, but then he and his moustache drive off in the unreliable camp jeep, leaving the kids he’s just barely even met in charge of the renovations!

Well, you know what happens next! Pot smoking, drinking, strip Monopoly, an annoying jokester character (why must there always be one of these!) and even making love! Oh, and there’s a mad killer on the loose, stabbing, hacking, chopping, firing arrows this way and that, taking final care of Steve Christie’s work force one by one, and eventually of Steve Christie too!

Well some of these killings are cheat jobs, but others employ the Special Makeup Effects wizardry of Tom Savini, and he did a fine job of it! Everything else about the movie is pretty mediocre, and I don’t recall ever actually being scared by it, even when I first saw it and didn’t know the killer was an old lady in a fishing sweater! It was wise of them to replace her with a hulking, deformed maniac in future episodes (which they pretty much had to do anyway, because, you know, DECAPITATION), but this first installment will always be the odd man, or should I say odd woman-of-advancing-years, out! Ha ha!

But that leaves me with one important question: Steve Christie! What was his story, really! What was that guy all about? And maybe he wasn’t even killed, because we don’t see it happen! He just doubles over with a surprised look on his face! You know, they should have brought him and his ponky moustache back in one of the later sequels and given him some prominent role to play in the larger narrative! Ha ha, maybe they still can! Anyway, I give Friday the 13^th two unusual looking Final Girls!   

Burl reviews Enemy Territory! (1987)

Burl talking! You know, I’ve noticed a bit of a trend in the movies recently: action pictures taking place in one single apartment building! Attack the Block, The Raid: Redemption and the new Judge Dredd movie, Dredd 3-D, all qualify! But this concept isn’t new, of course, and today I’m here to give you an example of this microgenre from the year 1987! It’s called Enemy Territory, and co-stars none other than Ray Parker Jr.! Ha ha, who ya gonna call!

It’s a tightly constructed little movie! It starts with an insurance guy at the end of his rope, who, like Harry Potter in The Woman in Black, is ordered by his boss to undertake an apparently simple but very difficult mission in order to save his job! The insurance guy is played by an actor I was unfamiliar with called Gary Frank, and he turned out to be really quite a capable performer! Gary’s character was named either Barry or Larry, and his mission was to collect a signature and fee from an old policy-buying lady in a notoriously gang-ridden area of town!

The building turns out to be controlled by a particularly nasty gang called The Vampires! While they aren’t literally vampires, their leader is played by Candyman himself, Tony Todd, and he calls himself The Count! (And he turns out to actually believe he is a vampire, ha ha!) The supernatural theme extends to our hero, who is referred to as “The Ghost” by the gang members!

Gary-Barry-Larry pretty quickly runs afoul of the gang and is targeted for extermination! He’s trapped in the building, the semi-friendly security guard who was escorting him is knifed, and there seems nowhere to turn – but luckily, Ray Parker Jr. is visiting the building too! He plays a telephone repairman who happens to be in the tower for one reason: bustin’ quite simply makes him feel good! But he has a code of helping out anyone who needs it, so soon it’s him and Gary-Barry-Larry against the Vampires, who number in the dozens!

The hapless insurance agent and his telephone repairman friend (who’s almost as out of place as the tie-sporting white man, given that the building apparently has no telephones in it) battle their way from apartment to apartment, occasionally swinging down a floor or two on bedsheets, or sneaking down the stairs, or climbing down the elevator shaft! They get help from an adorable moppet, an elderly grandma, a tough teenage girl and a grizzled, paranoid, wheelchair-bound Vietnam veteran played by Jan Michael Vincent from Damnation Alley!

It’s a lean picture all right: the pursuit starts early and keeps going right through to the end! Unfortunately there’s not actually that much action in it, and a few dull stretches here and there! But it never gets outright boring, thankfully! The performances are better than you’d think all around; and the movie was shot by the very talented Ernest Dickerson, so it looks a lot better than this sort of thing typically does! There’s perfectly functional direction from a guy named Peter Manoogian, who directed Seedpeople but was also an assistant director on movies like Fear City and Lies! It’s nothing tremendously special, but I enjoyed the movie and I think you might too! I give Enemy Territory two spray-painted titles just like in They Live!

Burl reviews The Descendants! (2011)

Aloha, it’s Burl! Ha ha, would you like to spend time in Hawaii? I bet just about anyone would! It’s always nice to see a movie that takes you there for a couple of hours, and the picture I’m reviewing today, whatever else it may or may not do, does that! It’s called The Descendants, and it stars none other than the handsome man of renown, George Clooney from Return to Horror High!

He plays a guy whose family owns a big patch of land on one of the islands, which he has to decide whether or not to sell off to one hotelsman or another! Meanwhile his wife has just suffered a boating accident, and he’s found out a few unsavoury things about her pre-accident conduct – turns out she was having an affair on him! Ha ha! So while his wife languishes in a comatose state in a Honolulu hospital, he goes about trying to corral his wayward daughters and find the fellow his wife was sleeping with!

That’s the plot, more or less! The movie’s all about families and relationships and unfinished business and shots at redemption so obvious as to be recognized for what they are, and even what they represent, by the characters themselves! It’s about Hawaii too, in a semi-sneaky way; that is, it seeks to demythologize the experience of living there, while also providing evidence that living there when you have enough money to keep a fancy house and go island hopping whenever you take a notion to, can be a lot of fun! The picture’s main argument vis-à-vis Hawaii is that tragedy and dysfunction can strike island denizens as frequently and as hard as it can mainlanders, but I don’t think anyone ever asserted otherwise!

The picture was directed by Alexander Payne, and as with his other works, there’s comedy in here and drama too, and tonal shifts that are meant to catch viewers by surprise! Unlike some of his other movies, and here I’m thinking Election mainly, and Sideways too, there’s a dearth of satiric energy and bite; this appears to have been replaced by a sincerity of purpose that feels at times like a hug from an over-affectionate oaf!

But at least the loving oaf in my analogy would be wearing a Hawaiian shirt! A little tropical atmosphere goes a long way with ol’ Burl, I have to confess, and it’s no different here! The relaxed slack key guitar score is a real plus too! I thought Clooney was pretty good, and that the older daughter was pretty, and I liked that every now and again a beloved familiar face would appear on screen, like Robert "Alligator" Forster or Beau "The Wizard" Bridges or Michael "Slap Shot" Ontkean!

So while the picture didn’t really work perfectly for me in the dramatic comedy realm it means to inhabit – though it has its moments, sure sure – it was the ostensible incidentals, which were by design more central than they pretended to be, that kept me interested! I don’t rush out to see these middlebrow pictures as much as I used to, but I enjoyed this one well enough! I’ll give The Descendants two and a half punches in the eye from Grandpa!

Burl reviews The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood! (1980)

Here’s Burl! Yes, it’s me, here to review an odd picture from many years ago! This one is called The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood, and it was the third and last in a series of Happy Hooker movies that were based on the autobiographical book by Xaviera Hollander! Ha ha, she was apparently a jolly pros'tute herself, but just what her specific adventures were I do not know, as I’ve never read the book and this is the only Happy Hooker picture I’ve seen!

But based on the plot synopses I’ve read, it sounds like the most interesting of them! The first one tells of her arrival in New York and the setting up of her first brothel; in the second she travels to Washington and testifies before a Senate subcommittee (ha ha, yaw-w-wn!); and in this one she descends upon Hollywood and supervises the filming of what I guess is meant to be the first movie in the series! Ha ha, the snake eats its tail yet again! And another interesting thing is that she’s played by different actresses in each movie: Lynn Redgrave in the first one, Joey Heatherton in the second, and Sister Hyde herself, Martine Beswick, in the third! Martine is my favourite of the three, so again, I’m glad this is the one I watched!

After a tender scene at the beginning of the movie between Xaviera and a New York cop played by none other than super-thespian Dick "Sorority Girl" Miller, Martine hies to Hollywood and gets mixed up with a movie studio run by mogul Phil Silvers, well-known from The Chicken Chronicles! And guess who works for Phil? A guy who looks just like him except a bit younger, plus the best of the Bat-Men, Adam West! Adam plays the sleaziest guy seen on cinema screens since the yachtsman from Summer Night Fever, or maybe the songwriter guy from Goin’ All the Way! Anyway, he’s pretty sleazy!

Once Xaviera has been disappointed in love by Adam West and in business by Phil Silvers (or maybe it was the other way around!), she hooks up with Phil’s grandson, played by Jack Lemmon’s son Chris, and goes the independent route to get her film produced! Her stable of prostitutes lie down and get to work raising the budget for the picture, and it all looks promising until Phil Silvers pulls a dirty trick and gets them all busted! But Xaviera gets her revenge, working it so that Adam West and the guy who looks like a younger Phil Silvers end up making sweet love with one another by mistake in the dark, and then dressing up as ladies! Ha ha! Then she makes a bet with Phil that she can finish her movie in time to meet an arbitrary deadline!

The climax involves a car chase and lots of goofy humour, and while most of it is pretty dumb, believe it or not there are a couple of funny parts! At least one of them is thanks to Adam West and his fine performance! There are also quite a few naked ladies, and of course the tender surprise appearance by Dick Miller! Altogether, when you take into account its cast, its severely late-70s atmosphere, its clever satirizing of the movie business (on a par with Hollywood Boulevard, I’d say!) and its general entertainment value, The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood is good for at least two and a half special appearances by Army Archerd!

Burl reviews The Woman in Black! (2012)

Bo-o-o-o-url here to review a spookhouse picture of quite recent vintage, The Woman in Black! Like Witchtrap, it’s a haunted house movie, but in all other respects the two movies are not really very much alike! No nak*d ladies get impaled in the throat by shower heads, so I guess you might say this is more in the tradition of a picture like The Haunting!

It was the first non Harry Potter movie featuring the guy who played Harry Potter, and so, since I’ve never seen any of those Potter pictures, it was my first exposure to this frequently morose and bespectacled thespian! He seems to be a fine enough actor, what with his British training and all, though he doesn’t have all that much to do in this movie except to look a little frightened in those brief moments when he’s not being morose!

He plays a mighty young lawyer in Edwardian London, and though he seems at about the age where most Edwardians lose their v*rginity to a S*ho lady and join a sportsmen’s club, he’s already a widower with a four year old son! He’s tasked by his stern barrister boss to settle the affairs of a haunted house, and so up he travels to some barren and remote seaside area, where the townsfolk make the pub denizens from An American Werewolf in London look like the hospitality staff at Disn*yland!

The spooky old mansion is situated on a property connected to the mainland only by a thin ribbon of road that’s washed right over at high tide! Strangely, however, there’s never any scene where he badly wants to leave the place because of ghosts, but is stranded by the water! Ha ha, that seems odd to me! Anyway, the town near the mansion is plagued by a rash of child suicides, which is pretty horrible! It’s no wonder the townspeople are a little weird! Daniel Radcliffe – that’s the Harry Potter actor’s name – sets about trying to figure out the mystery, which he does quite quickly, because there’s not much to this mystery, I’m afraid!

The haunted house movie this reminded me of the most was The Changeling! Ha ha, do you remember that one? George C. Scott was in it, and also a terrifying wheelchair! I haven’t seen that one for quite a while, so maybe I’ll watch  it again soon and review it for you here! There are also elements of Ghost Story in there too, and I’m going to re-watch that one soon as well!

In any case, The Woman in Black is a fairly solid little picture with a few eerie scenes and a couple of really good scares, but even with its heavy suicide theme and an ending that could fairly be described as downbeat, it’s about as substantial as the wrathful wraith of its title! It looks good, is acted well, and is overall an addition to the haunted house genre that nobody should be embarrassed of! I give this stately picture two and a half self-rocking chairs!   

Burl reviews The Deadly Intruder! (1985)

Hi, it’s Burl here to review a slasher picture that I never thought of as really a slasher picture at all! I saw The Deadly Intruder many years ago, probably at my friend Dave’s house after we’d rented it from the local 7-11! Ha ha! And I remembered it as being a pretty boring picture that never quite delivered whatever it was that Dave and Doug and I and my other horror-loving friends were hoping for!

Well, watching the picture again recently, I’m not sure why I didn’t think of this as a slasher picture! It most definitely is, although of the mystery slasher variety, a bit like a country-fried version of Too Scared To Scream! We never see the face of the killer as he’s doing his deeds, and as the movie progresses we’re presented with two possible candidates: a red herring (bright siren red, in fact) and the guy it probably is instead!

The action takes place in and around Midvale, a great name for a slasher-beset town! I’m surprised they didn’t go with Haddonvale or at least Midfield, as all their other efforts seem directed towards aping Halloween as closely as possible! Midvale is home to Jesse, a young woman who lives alone in a ranch house and likes to give dinner parties! A twitchy, greasy fellow in an army jacket is hanging around asking for sandwiches and chopping wood with the axe Jesse leaves lying around: why, could this be the killer?

Jesse’s dinner guests include none other than Danny Partridge, who runs Midvale’s most exclusive fashion boutique! He brings along his wife and also his newest employee, a handsome fellow who claims to be a Canadian magazine writer (for the "Canadian Star," ha ha) who takes retail jobs as a way to move freely amongst the common people he likes to write articles about!

In the meantime, the population of Midvale is being reduced in a random and rather sadistic fashion! The murders, which are mostly crowded into the first half of the picture (one way at least in which it’s unlike Halloween) aren’t very bloody, and there are next to no Special Makeup Effects to be seen unless they were hiding somewhere in the gloomy photography; but they’re kind of mean-spirited, like when the friendly and trusting garage mechanic is slowly crushed under the car he’s working on! There’s also a guy stabbed in the eye with a screwdriver, a lady whose face is pushed into a running car engine and a sink drowning featuring a loose nightgown; and, in what may or may not have been intended as some sort of meta-reference, Danny Partridge gets his head rammed through a TV screen!

This is not a very good movie! No suspense is generated, the script is terrible, the photography (early work from the same guy who shot Witchtrap), or at least the video transfer, is often very murky, and the second half of the movie, in which Jesse gets kidnapped by the greasy hobo, is boring! Also, though the heroine does survive, the open, cynical ending recalled that of The Dorm That Dripped Blood! Ha ha, I’m going to have to watch a slasher picture where the killer gets his just desserts at the end, just for a little taste of catharsis!

It was nice to see that old veteran Stuart "Crazy Mama" Whitman as the fearsome, bearded sheriff, and I guess there’s some genuine 1980s slasher atmosphere on display here, but there’s not much else I can think of to praise this picture for! I’m going to give The Deadly Intruder one extraordinarily obvious body double!