Burl reviews Cheerleaders Beach Party! (1978)

 

Hi, it’s Burl here with a review of another cheerleader picture, 1978’s Cheerleaders Beach Party, which offered something altogether new in cheerleader pictures: a cheerleaders' beach party! In previous cheerleader pictures, like The Cheerleaders or Revenge of the Cheerleaders or The Pom Pom Girls, the young ladies had been relegated mostly to the campus or their bedrooms, but Cheerleaders Beach Party promised some exotic seaside cheering, with the trappings I – a landlocked prairie boy – had romanticized beyond all reason since first enjoying the beach party scene at the beginning of Jaws! But as the movie began, it quickly became apparent that this beach party was not taking place in sunny California – the traditional spawning ground and home precinct of the cheerleader –  but, like Jaws, somewhere on the northern east coast, in and around the chilly waters of the Atlantic Ocean! Ha ha!

The movie concerns the misadventures of four well-meaning cheerleaders, Monica, Toni, Sissy and Sheryl, the spiriteers of Rambling U., who discover that an overcoat-wearing stranger is attempting to poach their school’s three star football players! They conceive of a plan: follow the boys to their seaside recruitment camp and somehow prevent them from choosing generous but unscrupulous State U.! A beach appears almost straight away, though of a cold-looking Atlantic variety, and the scheme goes on to involve a night club, references to Billy Carter, several romantic conversations about Fleetwood Mac, and a scientific research boat investigating ways to control crab lice! The girls shift their strategy, deciding instead to poach State players back to Rambling by means of seductive entrapment techniques!

Later, there’s a pool party held by the stuffy State dean, for which the Rambling girls disguise themselves as waitresses to spike the punch and distribute hash brownies! It soon descends into chaos, ha ha! An elderly dowager dances wildly and the dean tumbles into the pool, ker-sploosh! The goal, to turn the Rambling homeboys off of State by sabotaging the shindig, is not met; instead, the moustachioed lads declare it “The greatest kick-ass motherfuckin’ party we’ve ever been to!”

Further adventures involve the girls posing as ghosts; finally and with little ceremony holding the titular beach party; and later infecting the Rambling players with pubic lice! This last improbable gambit proves the one that brings the players back to Rambling, setting the stage for a montage of the newly invigorated Rambling team beating State as the chagrined dean watches from the sidelines and the cheerleaders do what cheerleaders do!

  

Cheerleaders Beach Party is in many ways a grim little article: the photography is murky and dull, the cheerleaders themselves are dour and snaggletoothed, and their frumpy, maroon-coloured outfits might have been sewed by Betsy Ross in a particularly Puritanical mood! But the good-natured Plain Janes on view here – not adverse to taking off their clothes, but somehow not making a big deal of it – were kind of endearing! Cheerleaders Beach Party is disconcertingly plot-heavy at the beginning, but allows its narrative to dissolve into the roiling Eastern seaboard mist in which it is suffused by the end of the first couple of reels! I give it two marvelous boogie vans!

Burl reviews A Return to 'Salem's Lot! (1987)

Ha ha, bluh bluh! It’s Burl here with a review of a vampire picture! This one is A Return to ‘Salem’s Lot, Larry Cohen’s name-only sequel to the Tobe Hooper adaptation of the Stephen King book! You probably recall that TV movie – it was spooky, especially when the kid shows up at the window! So it’s pretty strange that Larry Cohen got the job of making the sequel, because his movies are a lot of things, but they’re not spooky!

He makes idea movies, I guess you might say! There’s always one or two ideas in there that make you go “Ha ha, that’s pretty cool!” But then he usually forgets about the meat and potatoes of making a genre movie, which is to say the actual writing and directing parts! He does those things, technically speaking, but he just doesn’t do them very well!

But perhaps I’m being unfair! A better way to say it is that he doesn’t make movies the way we’re all used to movies being made! That’s just his way, and it’s not intrinsically bad – it’s just that the decisions he makes usually don’t work as well as if he’d gone a more conventional route, or if, better yet, he’d chosen another, better iconoclastic direction!

All this is by way of saying that I’m a Larry Cohen fan, but am heavily prejudiced against his movies! I guess that’s why I never bothered seeing this particular movie until the other day! It’s strange – I’ve seen most of his pictures, and have even seen It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive more than once, but I always steered clear of this one! Turns out it’s a pretty enjoyable little snapparoo!

Michael Moriarty (of course!) plays some kind of anthropologist, or what Larry Cohen imagines an anthropologist to be, and through subterfuge he is lured to the vampire-ridden down of ‘Salem’s Lot and enlisted by the local hemogobblers to write the history of their race! Therein lies the notion that is the true heart of the picture: the idea that the vampires have their own history in parallel to that of humans, and that they see themselves as essentially harmless (they feed off cows, ha ha!) and unfairly maligned!

But Moriarty’s incredibly foul-mouthed son, who’s along for the ride, becomes enamored of bloodsucking ways, and he starts looking a little pale and swearing more than usual when the sun hits his eyes! Ha ha, he truly lays a salty tongue on everyone! In the meantime a gobblety-faced creature is lurking in the woods and munching on stray teenagers! Pretty soon none other than Sam Fuller shows up to help battle the fiends!

Sam Fuller turns out to be exactly what the picture needs, and he helps shore up Michael Moriarty’s typically fine performance! Andrew Duggan is really good as the lead vampire, Judge Axel, who is also, I believe, meant to be the gobblety-faced vampire who lurks in the woods; and there are a number of other veterans performers who do a fine job! But all the under-thirty thespians are just wretched, ha ha, and it really hurts the picture!

This is the sort of thing that gives Larry Cohen movies their amateurish, community-theater reputation! It’s too bad! I sure wish old Lar would take a little extra time casting his pictures and working with the actors! It’s like he said, okay, I’ve got Moriarty, no need to bother with actors any more! Well, I could go on, but there comes a point when, as a Larry Cohen fan, you just go okay, God Told Me To, okay, The Stuff, okay, It Lives Again, okay Q, okay fine! And you leave it at that! In the meantime, I give A Return to ‘Salem’s Lot two and a half vanloads of punk rock victims!

Burl reviews The Thing! (1982)

It’s Burl here with a review of a movie I saw five times in the theater alone, and countless times on home video since! Ha ha, it’s John Carpenter’s The Thing, one of the all-time great examples of how a remake can better its predecessor, even if the predecessor is already pretty good!

There are a few other examples of this – Cronenberg’s The Fly, even Chuck Russell’s remake of The Blob – but  The Thing is the king of them all! You already know the story of course: alien life-form invades Antarctic research camp, paranoia and gruesome special effects ensue! The great idea behind this production was to go back to the original John W. Campbell story in which the alien was a mutative beast who could hide within its victims, rather than a tall humanoid with rosethorn knuckles and vegetable flesh! Ha ha, if they’d tried that, they might have ended up with something like that legendary turkeybird The Dark!

This movie’s got it all, except ladies! You have a wonderful, chilly score from Ennio Morricone – I guess the suits wouldn’t let Carpenter do his own, ha ha, but I think I’m glad for that in this case! – and uniformly solid performances from all the gentlemen involved! Kurt Russell is marvelous as MacReady, A. Wilford Brimley (who is also the Wilford Brimley) makes an excellent Dr. Copper, and David “Matinee” Clennon is perfect as the stonerman Palmer! Of course Keith David gives his usual mackerel of a performance, and Charles Hallahan is good too! They’re all good, dagnabbit! And many of them wear beards!

The dog who brings the infection into camp is really fine too – one of the best dog actors I’ve ever seen, right up there with the one from The Boogens! I hope he got some extra kibble the day they shot his “wandering through the base” scene, ha ha! Other virtues to be found in this picture include the icy cinematography from the portly cinematographer, Dean Cundey, and the tightening sense of dread as we realize first how unlikely is a happy ending for these men, and what the stakes are if – or when, ha ha! – the alien reaches a populated area!

There isn’t a whole else left to say about the picture, except that it’s one of Burl’s all-time favourites and has been since June of 1982! Sure, it’s hardly a perfect movie, but it’s pretty close! It’s the best movie Carpenter has ever made, and he’s made some doozies! Halloween is great, and so is Dark Star, and so are The Fog and Big Trouble in Little China and They Live and Prince of Darkness (though Christine, the movie he made right after this one, is only sort of solid), but none of them touch this cool cucumber of a picture! He out-Hawksed Hawks with this one, ha ha! I give The Thing a solid four crabheads, my highest rating! If you haven’t seen it, ha ha, give it a chance!

Burl reviews Marwencol! (2010)

Hi, Burl here with a movie review for you! It’s a documentary I’m reviewing for you today, ha ha, called Marwencol! It’s all about a fellow named Mark who lives in a small upstate New York town who, after a night out at the local p*b, is set upon by ruffians and bootstomped into practically another dimension! It’s pretty awful!

But Mark survives the attack, and pretty soon he has a new way of looking at the world! He creates a whole world of his own, a little town called Marwencol, made of miniature houses and populated by Ken and Barbie and GI Joe dolls that are named after people he knows, and who are enacting a perpetual Occupied Europe scenario! He, of course, is the hero!

But of course he still suffers in myriad ways from his attack! His mind seems to move a little more slowly, and he finds it hard to rom*nce ladies! But on the other hand, where he was a big drinker before, now he has no taste for alc*hol at all! The dramas of Marwencol have completely possessed him, and he takes picture after picture, dramatizing and documenting the goings-on there!

Of course, his project finally gets some notice when a photo-artist meets him and decides that Mark’s work must be seen! And he’s right, and Mark doesn’t disagree, even though his project was really only intended for himself! Eventually Mark, wearing his prettiest pair of shoes, is on the way to Greenwich Village, the very hub of the artistic world in America, for his first big show!

Marwencol is a grand documentary! The best kinds of course are those which continually surprise you with revelations, but never feel like they’re keeping revelations from you just so they can parse them out that way! This one is mostly – mostly! – like that! It’s best not to read too much about a movie like this before you watch it, and even in reading this review, you have probably read too much! It’s not a case of so-called “spoilers,” or anything, just that some movies – perhaps many movies – are more enjoyable when you can just let them unravel in their own way and on their own time!

I’ll leave you with that, I guess! Marwencol has a great central character and is entertaining, and while the stakes are relatively low it’s nevertheless engaging and compelling the whole way through, and has a few things to impart about the human condition in the bargain! It indulges in many of the same sort of quirky small-town clichés as many fictional indie comedy-dramas, but that’s not its fault! I’m going to give Marwencol three bloodstained Barbies!

Burl reviews Twentieth Century! (1934)

By jimbus and by goo, it’s Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to look at a classic picture made long ago by one of cinema’s grand innovators, Howard Hawks! I’m tempted to say that Twentieth Century is an atypical Hawks picture, but the man was so incredibly versatile – he took successful stabs at action, screwball comedy, horror/sci-fi, war movies, films noir and westerns, after all – that I’m not so sure there is any such thing as an atypical Hawks picture!

This one is a comedy, though not particularly screwball! It’s a pretty good satire of showbiz personalities, though, and a train picture on top of that! Ha ha, I sure do love a good train picture! It starts with the great and gorgeous Carole Lombard playing Plotka, a would-be actress working on her first Broadway play! The director is the moody and tyrannical Oscar Jaffe, played by le grand jambon John Barrymore; Jaffe is in a Svengaliish frame of mind, and changes Plotka’s name to Lily Garland before first seducing her and then making her a big star!

Ha ha, cut to three years later when Jaffe and Lily are still an item, and have done three hit plays together, but are at each other’s throats! Jaffe is a terrible control freak and manipulator, and poor Lily is tired of it! So off she goes to Hollywood and becomes a big movie star there! We move forward in time again, and now Jaffe’s star has fallen, and he has to escape creditors in Chicago by donning whiskers and talking like Colonel Sanders! Ha ha, it’s great!

The rest of the movie takes place on the titular train, and I do admit that I’d assumed the whole picture took place on the train! So for a while there, through the first half, as much as I was enjoying it all, I was sort of wondering “Ha ha, where’s the train?” But don’t worry, because there’s plenty of train action! It’s packed with characters too, like the nutty evangelist, the goofy acting troupe and so forth! And of course there’s a Bellamy, which is to say a milquetoast pretender to the leading lady’s affections, who doesn’t stand a chance when set against the outrageous antics of the male star! Ha ha, he’s not actually played by Ralph Bellamy here, but close enough!

It’s a funny movie with that rip-roaring Hawksian verve and a hee-larious central performance from Barrymore! And it’s a train movie, like Human Desire, and you know how much I love those! There are some great supporting actors too, like Edgar Kennedy who was in Cosmo Jones, Crime Smasher, George Reed, who was in Strange Illusion, and Charles Lane, who had a long career and was in everything! Ha ha!

It’s a terrific picture, and I recommend you have a look at it when you get a chance! I’m going to give Twentieth Century three and a half iron doors!

Burl reviews Invasion From Inner Earth! (1976)

BURL HERE. WHAT IS YOUR LOCATION. Ha ha, yes, it’s me, Burl, and that was me doing my impersonation of the alien voice heard over the ham radio in the picture I’m reviewing for you today, Invasion From Inner Earth! It’s not likely that you’ve seen this one, but it’s my hope that this review will be read by a certain sort of person, that special sort of person, the kind of person who’ll be drawn to tracking the picture down, and, upon watching it, declare it “really something remarkable,” and themselves better for having seen it!

It’s a Bill Rebane picture, and for some folk that will be all they need to know! (Ha ha, I know the opening credits say it was directed by “Ito,” but trust me, this is a Rebane movie!) It was the first Rebane movie I ever saw, and it really made a mark! I saw it way back when VCRs were expensive and rare, and my pal Dave’s family had one, but nobody else in my circle did! So it was Dave’s job to tape all the interesting-sounding movies that played late at night, and then we would watch them the next day!

Invasion From Inner Earth was such a title, ha ha! We watched the whole thing, waiting for the part where the actual invasion would take place, but instead what we got was a crushing disappointment! It was just a bunch of people stuck in the woods of Northern Manitoba (though of course the picture was filmed in Wisconsin), talking about their predicament! We thought it was the most boring thing ever filmed, and the ending baffled us!

Recently I thought I ought to give the movie another chance! I’d seen several Rebane pictures in the interim, movies like The Demons of Ludlow, The Alpha Incident, and of course The Capture of Bigfoot! (I’ve still never made it all the way through The Cold, ha ha!) I was especially looking forward to the moment I remember where a drunken bearded fellow (played by Paul Bentzen from The Devonsville Terror) talks about “All the furry forest creatures” and then does a crazy “thpthpthpthp” thing with his lips!

Well, that moment was certainly there! And the movie was just as chat-heavy as I remember, but here’s the crucial difference: I wasn’t bored! At least, not very! The plot goes like this: a sister and brother who live way out in the snowy woods and run some sort of fishing lodge are hosting three scientific type guys who are conducting some sort of research! Meanwhile, panic has broken out in town, and drifts of red smoke are menacing the population! We also see two UFOs, one which looks like it’s been sculpted out of clay by Walter Paisley and another which appears to be two paper plates stapled together!

Well, pretty quickly our characters are cut off from civilization! They get warned away from landing their small plane by a lurching individual who’s got some kind of alien sickness, ha ha! They fly back to the lodge and talk about what might be going on, and occasionally a disaffected voice will come on over the radio and ask them their location! Ha ha, it’s clearly aliens! The aliens have some sort of red spotlight which can appear and do anything from travel across the walls to blow up model planes! Eventually the last two surviving people are transformed into loincloth-wearing children, who scamper off across a field!

I’ll wrap this review up, as it’s already as long as the movie itself! Invasion From Inner Earth is occasionally tedious, poorly conceived and suffers from all the usual low-budget pitfalls! On the other hand the snowy locations are great, some of the acting is not bad, and the movie is generously sprinkled with touches of the bizarre! I’m going to give Invasion From Inner Earth two radio DJs driven mad from loneliness – even though there’s only one in the movie, which is why he’s so lonely! Ha ha! And I give an extra ha ha to the VHS cover, which makes it look as though the U.S.S. Enterprise is behind it all!

Burl reviews The Pom Pom Girls! (1976)

Hi, ha ha, it’s Burl here to review a cheerleader picture! There were lots of them through the 1970s, beginning in 1972 with The Cheerleaders, and in 1976 Crown International Pictures produced one called The Pom Pom Girls! This made four consecutive years in which major cheerleader pictures had been released – long enough for audiences to start taking the phenomenon for granted, ha ha! There was no reason to believe in those heady times that every year hence would not feature such benchmarks as birthdays, Christmas, Thanksgiving and a fabulous new cheerleader movie!

The Pom Pom Girls begins with the titular girls practicing their routines while clad in tiny 1976 bikinis! This opening promises much, but for a more accurate preview of what is to come, study the inter-cut shots of the foot-ball team practicing their own moves under the direction of a dictatorial coach! (The coach is an aggressive, sexually repressed, mean-spirited bible boy, and he’s a dead ringer for George Bush Jr. physically as well, ha ha!) The two key jocks are handsome Jesse, the class stickman, and crazed, goony Johnnie, well-known as the school maniac: a reckless daredevil prone to bursts of hysterical rage or childish petulance! Johnnie is played with great physical bravado by Robert Carradine, the youngest of the three Carradine brothers, Berzak himself from Number One With A Bullet, and who donned taped glasses in Revenge of the Nerds! In The Pom Pom Girls, he pulls off stunts which no doubt make him shudder when and if he recalls them today: climbing on the roof of a moving car, taking a garbage can to the head, motorcycle daredeviltry, being hit by a car and rolling painfully down some bleachers while wrestling Bill Adler from Malibu Beach! Jesse, meanwhile, is subjected to the sadistic, homoerotic whims of the deeply closeted coach, and makes time to mount a mutually antagonistic courtship with the gorgeous but straight-laced pom pom girl Laurie!

There are plenty of other terrific scenes of delightful insouciance in the film! A wordless food fight between Johnnie and his rival in romance Duane is punctuated by shots of the other students firing their straw wrappers into the ceiling! The four main characters run, roll and somersault down a vast sandy seaside slope as breezy So-Cal pop plays on the soundtrack! Tugs o’ war, dirt bike races, pep rallies and fun at the beach are scattered throughout the film for no better reason than to show these activities happening, ha ha!

But where in all this is the cheerleading, you might well ask? We don’t get to see the girls in uniform until almost an hour in, a sad state of affairs for a cheerleader movie! Instead of the big climactic football game, the movie’s wafer-thin dramatic spine leads to a game of “suicide chicken” between Johnnie and Duane! This brand of duello involves speeding towards a cliff edge, and the first guy to brake is the loser; Johnny, having been refreshed on the rules, remarks “Oh yeah, ha ha – I saw that in a movie!” But Rebel Without A Cause this film is not, and its goodtime vibe would hardly countenance a death, even that of a sourpuss bully dressed in full Wild One Brando kit!

If there is a single movie that Dazed and Confused is emulating, right down to the beer-swilling jock heroes and their hard-bottomed coach, The Pom Pom Girls is it! The PPG universe has its jerks, its monsters, its angst and pain, but like all these movies it somehow remains appealing and desirable nonetheless! Even Jesse, the duplicitous, monstrously immature and self-centred “hero,” fails to harsh the buzz! Pleasantries abound: the one football game we see – or almost see – turns into a violent donnybrook before the game is ten seconds old; one which is scored with jaunty lounge music and serenely observed by a pair of beatifically smiling stoner benchwarmers! Deep sadness, when it intrudes, is expressed by jogging along the beach at sunset to the sound of a drippy ballad! One can hardly fault Linklater for wanting to recreate this consequence-free world in his native Austin seventeen years later, nor for successfully imitating its basic plotlessness!

The Pom Pom Girls was a fitting close to the golden years of the cheerleader film, providing as it did a more or less seamless transition to the broader high school pictures of the late 70s! Post-Watergate cynicism was no longer as evident: antics ruled the day! Ha ha, I give The Pom Pom Girls two stolen fire trucks!

Burl reviews Dead Heat! (1988)

Ha ha, let me be the first to say welcome! It’s Burl, here with a movie review for you, and today’s review is of a picture called Dead Heat! This was a movie that got a lot of coverage in the genre magazines when it was made, and then seemed to take forever to come out! And when it finally did, everyone realized that it wasn’t actually very good! Ha ha!

Yes, it was a part of the Mismatched Buddy-Cop subgenre of the 1980s – written, in fact, by the brother of the fellow who kicked it all off with his Lethal Weapon script! So in theory the picture has the right pedigree for this genre, and on top of that a fine wrinkle on the buddy cop formula! There had already been Black Cop/White Cop (Lethal Weapon, Number One With A Bullet, many more); and Human Cop/Alien Cop (Alien Nation, The Hidden); and of course Human Cop/Gnome Cop (A Gnome Gnamed Gnorm); and Dead Heat gives us Live Cop/Dead Cop!

“Treat” Williams plays a slick city cop called Roger Mortis, and his intolerable lout of a partner, whose name I forget, is played by none other than Joe Piscopo from Wise Guys! Certainly this muscled comedian puts a truly Piscopian spin on his character, resulting in one of the most grating and unpleasant cops ever seen on screen! Ha ha, he’s the one you wish would be dead, but in this movie that would only mean he’d become even more annoying! (The proof of this comes at the end of the picture, when Piscopo does die!)

But it’s “Treat” Williams who dies and is resurrected for twelve hours of investigation before he will disintegrate into goo! Together “Treat” and Joe uncover the mystery behind the series of jewel robberies by burglars who don’t fall down when they get shot! This leads them into a Chinese butcher shop run by a machine gun-toting Keye Luke (of Gremlins and Gremlins 2 fame), where all the foodstuffs come to life and attack the cops (who each get a sound beaking from angry duck heads); and then to a resurrection clinic for the rich run by super-elitist Vincent Price! Ha ha, and along the way, just about everyone bites the biscuit!

There are really two main virtues to this picture: the trick effects, which are generally quite good (there’s a three-faced mega-oaf that’s particularly effective!) and the supporting cast! Besides the great Price and Luke, we get Kolchak himself, Darren McGavin, and Robert “Matinee” Picardo, and of course Professor Toru Tanaka! Unfortunately we almost get the magnificent Dick Miller, well known from his role in The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood, but, as was the case for poor Dick in Pulp Fiction, his scenes hit the cutting room floor!

Apparently quite a lot of stuff was cut out of this movie, and I suppose it moves along at a pretty good pace, but it really seems to be missing some crucial animating spark! The script, frankly, is terrible, and many things make no sense at all! There’s plenty of gunfire and zombiefights (so much so that they become rather boring), and one or two bon mots, but Piscopo is so irritating, and the absence of a compensating Dick Miller so keenly felt, that I can’t in good conscience recommend the picture! I’m going to give Dead Heat one and a half Peking Duck heads!

Burl reviews The Ward! (2010)

By crackee, it’s Burl here! Yes, I’m reviewing yet another movie for you today, and this time it’s John Carpenter’s long-awaited return to feature filmmaking, The Ward! Ha ha, I’ve taken my sweet time in catching up with this one, mainly because I’d read some reviews of it! But I believe firmly that Carpenter is one of the twentieth century’s fundamental cinematic intelligences, so the bottom line is that I’ll happily watch anything he makes! The Thing is one of my all-time favourite movies ever made, I’m a big supporter of Prince of Darkness, and you already know what I think of Christine and Halloween and The Fog!

I was excited to hear about The Ward, but then everybody was kind of ho-hum about it, and it came around at the same time as Wes Craven’s horror comeback, My Soul To Take, which also was considered ho-hum! Worse than ho-hum, actually – more like po-pum or even bo-bum, ha ha! But I finally decided to give it a look, and yes, I must report that this is not one of John Carpenter’s better movies! It’s not his worst either, though – it’s no Escape From L.A.!

For perhaps no better reason than to obviate the cell phone question and keep certain superannuated psychotherapies in play, the movie is set in 1966! You have to keep reminding yourself that it’s 1966 though, as the period detail is rather slipshod, or so it seemed to ol’ Burl! A young lady, Kristin, is burning down a house, and the next thing you know she’s been popped into a psych ward overseen by Jared Harris, who makes a sinister presence indeed, as he played Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows!

There are a number of other young ladies in the ward, all with their own special problems and personality quirks, and they’re all being stalked by the ghost of yet another young lady, a ghoulish creature named Alice! Alice performs a number of semi-gory murders before a third-act twist makes us tally up the movies we’ve seen before that had more or less the same twist!

Frankly, the whole movie is made up of what I hate to call clichés! I hate to call them that because I think that word is so overused and frequently misapplied as to be meaningless; but frankly this picture is like one of those Scary Movie things, but without the jokes! Everything in it seems to have been imported whole from somewhere else! It’s trying to be one of the classic Asian spookshows I guess, but as with Big Trouble in Little China (a movie I love!), Carpenter really can’t quite get the elements quite right when he tries to ape the Asians! Ha ha!

But the movie is not all bad! There are a few effective sequences, and a couple of the classic Carpenter jumpers! The performances are generally pretty good (these ladies are committed in more ways than one, ha ha!), and I have to admit that the ending, while itself a well-traveled path, undercuts the clichéd nature of some of the earlier clichés! Ha ha, do you see what I mean? I guess you’ll have to watch the picture to know for sure!

It’s not the Carpenter comeback I might have wished for, but it’s not the complete blight some have claimed, either! I’m going to give The Ward a rousing two repetitive escape/recapture scenes!

Burl reviews Django Unchained! (2012)

Yoplait, friends, it’s Burl here again with a movie review! It’s a newer movie: a Quentin Tarant*no picture called Django Unchained! Ha ha, it’s another high-camp genre story, and a bit of revisionist revenge history along the line of his previous picture, Inglourious Basterds!

This one starts with a meeting between Django, a slave in the antebellum South, and a German dentist/bounty hunter, Dr. King Schultz! Dr. King deplores slavery in a very 21^st century manner, and he frees Django post-haste and enlists him to help with his bounty hunting activities, as tooth-pulling and cavity-filling are things of the past for this Teutonic gunman, despite the big bobbling tooth atop his wagon! Pretty soon they’re on their way to Candieland, a plantation run by Leonardo DiCaprio, to rescue Django’s wife! Ha ha, there’s brutality galore, in both the form of horrible violence against the slaves, and cartoonish gunfights in which, as in Robocop, great geysers of blood and steak-sized chunks of meat come fountaining out of every bullet hole!

There are two countervailing impulses motivating this picture, I think! Tar*ntino at once wants to make a picture that nobody’s seen before (at least, not since Mandingo, ha ha): a movie that doesn’t blink when confronting this evil chapter of American history! At the same time he wants to make a movie that everybody’s seen before, which is to say a movie assembled out of bits from the pictures he’s loved over the course of his long and busy history of moviegoing! Mostly in this case he’s cannibalizing from spaghetti Westerns as well as regular Westerns, and from other genres too, like buddy pictures and Blaxp*itation movies!

The strategy mostly works! The tone stumbles here and there, there are a few clunky and unnecessary lines, and Tarantino makes a poor choice in casting himself as an Australian, but the picture is for the most part a well-crafted entertainment machine whose 167 minutes fly by; at least until the final act, where some momentum is lost along with several principal characters! There are also several scenes in which someone is left to squirm in agony on the floor for several minutes, as though T*rantino was tipping his cap to The Demon Lover! Those parts didn't pass quite as quickly, ha ha!

Samuel L. Jackson appears as a scary L’Oncle Tom, and his performance is really quite good! He looks like no Samuel L. Jackson you’ve ever seen before, that much is certain! Christoph Waltz at first seemed simply to be very pleased with himself rather than bothering to give a performance, but this approach grew on me as the movie progressed, and in the end I thought he was pretty good! Everyone else, especially the lady who plays Django’s wife, was good too; though Di Caprio was a little cartoony! But he fit in pretty well anyway!

And of course there are many shout outs, little and big, to movies gone by! I even caught a reference to The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai – and maybe another one simply in Tarantino’s hiring of that film’s production designer, the late and obviously very weird J. Michael Riva! And Franco Nero, famed from his roles in The Visitor and Die Hard 2, shows up as the other Django, and the opening credits trumpet his “friendly participation,” just as we see in so many Euro-pictures of the 60s and 70s! Ha ha, that made me smile!

It’s a flawed but entertaining picture, and I’d like to give Django Unchained three nodding horses!