Burl reviews A Nightmare on Elm Street! (1984)

Ha ha and hello! It’s Burl with an olde-tyme favourite, which I watched the night before Halloween, thinking “It’s time to revisit this old bean, now that Wes “Deadly Friend” Craven has departed us! Too early, it seems!” Of course the picture I’m talking about is the original, home-grown A Nightmare on Elm Street!

Now I was never a big huge fan of the Fredster, though I certainly enjoyed seeing A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 at the cinema, and  I guess A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 had some laughs sprinkled like cheap birdseed throughout! A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 is another picture I saw in the cinema, though now I can’t remember the first thing about it, except that it was pretty silly! Ha ha, and I always thought this one, the original, was a pretty good movie!

And I still think so, though one of its lapses in logic seemed to me now such a cromite that I found myself puzzling over it for a while! Now, I’m not here to pick apart the film’s logic, it’s only this one thing I’m going to mention! But really, a maniacal janitor killed twenty kids in the neighbourhood within fairly recent memory, and none of these teens has ever heard about it? I call faddle!

Anyway, the rest of it is perfectly logical, ha ha! The murderer in question, Fred Krueger, was released on a technicality, and the neighbourhood parents tracked him down and had a little fry-party! Then, some years later, Fred gets up the mojo to start appearing in the dreams of the neighbourhood’s surviving kids, and proves himself able to administer fatal pokings from beyond the veil of Phobetor! Yikes! Watch out, kids!

Well, poor Nancy is the hero of the piece, and I say poor Nancy not only because she’s run through the wringer in the course of the photoplay, but because she’s played by Heather Langenkamp from Star Trek Into Darkness, who, I’m sorry to say, has never struck me as a very good actress! Luckily her dad is an iron-nosed cop played by John Saxon from Fast Company and Blood Beach and Welcome to Spring Break and Black Christmas, and that makes up for a lot! Ha ha! And her mom is Ronee Blakely from A Return to Salem’s Lot, which is kind of an odd casting choice if you ask me, but it works out reasonably well!

Nancy’s pals are Tina, played by Amanda Wyss from This House Possessed, Rod, essayed by Nick Corri from Gotcha, and Johnny Depp from Private Resort! They’re all fairly doomed, and it’s up to Nancy to take the fight to Fred, and to make a series of elaborate booby traps in about two minutes! Ha ha, she has exploding lightbulbs and swinging sledgehammers – the works! And it all seems to do the trick, except for the producer-mandated nonsense-shock ending! Ha ha, you can almost hear that producer whispering "Remember Carrie?" in poor Wes's ear!

I like to watch these things as though I’m just seeing them for the first time, and Fred Krueger was not the Catskills boogeyman he later became, and it’s just another low-budget 80s horror picture! That’s easier said than done of course, but the upshot this time around is that I was impressed with the movie, and found it imaginative and effective! It’s still goofy and not really that scary, but beneath all that the movie has a seriousness of purpose that endeared me to it! There are some fine moments throughout, like Nancy’s schoolroom dream and the death of her pal Tina! The trick effects are superb, and it’s altogether very well put together! Ha ha, I give A Nightmare on Elm Street three telephone tongues!

Burl reviews She-Wolf of London! (1946)

Ralston-Purina, it’s Burl, ha ha, here to review you a she-wolf picture; and right off the top I want to let you know that I’m going to tell the ending! Ha ha, yes, the ending of today’s picture, She-Wolf of London, features a twist! It’s one that I didn’t bother trying to guess, because I never really try to guess, but when it came along after sixty-one chatty minutes, I couldn’t say I was surprised!

Well, dateline London! A fragile young heiress lives in a big house with an aunt who isn’t an aunt, a cousin who isn’t a cousin, and a jolly but slow-on-the-uptake maid! I can’t recall why they all live together or what the relative relationships are, but all these things are explained, I believe! The ersatz aunt is a real old sobersides, and boy howdy, the cousin is pretty!

Our heiress, played by June Lockhart from Strange Invaders and Curse of the Black Widow, is troubled, because the house is next to what must be a really enormous park, and within that park something unnatural is prowling, putting a fatal scritchscratch on anyone foolish enough to be wandering this Yellowstone-sized park at night!

Because of The Allenby Curse, the heiress – who bears the distinctly un-heiressy name of Phyllis – assumes she herself is the culprit! Circumstantial evidence – blood on her hands, mud on her slippers – confirms the suspicion, and Phyllis isolates herself in her chambers and refuses to see her young lawyer fiancée! Ha ha, the fiancée, Barry, is played by Don Porter from White Line Fever, and here he is, young!

I hope you’ve realized what’s going on! It was a real disappointment for me, I can tell you! Because there’s no she-wolf! No, of course it’s the maniacally status-seeking aunt, donning Phyllis’s shawl and putting the chop to police and civilian alike! Even Martin Kosleck, whom you might know from The Flesh Eaters, gets roughed up by the old gal!

It’s too bad about The Allenby Curse, or Phyllis wouldn’t have fallen for it! Ha ha, I wonder if my old high school chum Bruce Allenby suffered from The Allenby Curse? He never mentioned anything about it! Anyway, I really think they should have done a double twist, where Phyllis really is a werewolf, but it required a shock so great as Aunt Martha has delivered to set off the transformation! Ha ha, that would have been a great ending!

I found the movie similar to Crimson Peak in some ways! As with that picture, it all comes down to a womano-a-womano fight and a climactic bonking! Although here, ha ha, the day is saved not by the heroine’s shovelsmanship, but by a clumsy accident! Ha ha, the pursuing Aunt Martha, waving her knife, simply trips and falls, and it’s altogether less like the climax of a horror-mystery and more like a scene from an educational film on the importance of safety in the home!

Sara Haden from Mad Love plays Aunt Martha, and she does a pretty good job! Everyone else is adequate, with Kosleck’s Lorre-like performance a bit of a bright spot! The movie looks pretty good; not as nice as the top-drawer Universal horror pictures, but better than the PRC stuff, like The Devil Bat, made by the same director, Jean Yarborough! There are a couple of effective moments (the inspector’s death-shuffle, for instance), but it’s mostly disappointing and lacklustre! Altogether, and factoring in the disappointment, I’ll give She-Wolf of London one and a half lanterns hung at the window!

Burl reviews Crimson Peak! (2015)

Booga-booga, it’s Burl, here to review the latest work from that portly master of the McBare, Guillermo Del Toro! We last heard from him with the battling robots and beasts of Pacific Rim, and now here he is down in the spookhouse, showing us some ghosts, but, ha ha, not too many ghosts!

Because, you see, this is not really a ghost picture, we are told, but a Gothic romance in the vein of Jane Eyre or Rebecca! Fair bananas says I, but I can tell you what it really is, ha ha: an updated, much overextended version of one of Roger Corman’s old Poe pictures! Shortened by half an hour, and with the insertion of Vincent Price, or even Ray “Premature Burial” Milland, into the part of the plummy Cumbrian baronet here played by Tom “Only Lovers Left Alive” Hiddleston, this would be virtually indistinguishable from one of those crushed-velvet-and-ground-fog epics! Ha ha!

Mia Wasikowska, well-known from Stoker, plays a young lady novelist from Buffalo who meets and subsequently marries the aforementioned baronet, who, with his grumpy sister, is abroad searching for investors in his clay-digging machine! The sister is played by Jessica Chastain from The Tree of Life, and her performance is the best in the picture, or at least the most in tune with its demands! Ha ha, it’s funny that del Toro hired an Englishwoman to play an Americaness, and an Americaness to play an Englishwoman! And it was all shot in Canada, which I suppose makes sense too!

Anyway, the young American, named Miss Cushing of course, has met ghosts before, so when some turn up at her ludicrously dilapidated new abode, she exhibits about as much alarm as others would on espying a doodle bug scurrying across the floor! Ha ha, I’d sure be a little more alarmed than she is! Eventually just about everything you suspect is happening proves to indeed be happening, while no further plot wrinkles are explored! The only thing that really is explored is the old mansion itself, which has an open roof through which snow gently falls, and floorboards which ooze the red muck for which the crumbling old pile, and the picture itself, is named!

While the ghostly elements are a bit lacking and the scares few and far between, the romantic material is pushed as far as it can go! That’s not terribly far, but still, del Toro does weave an atmosphere of genuine tragedy, present and past! It’s just too bad it plays out in such a narritavely dull, if pictorially attractive, manner! A little bit of gore spices up the brew, ha ha, though this could easily have been elided for that important PG-13 rating, I suppose! I’m impressed with del Toro for sticking to his guns on that one, as I’m sure there was considerable pressure on him to stay in the tween-safe zone - the demographic for which the picture is ostensibly intended, remember! - and the disappointing box office is probably being held against him now!

I’m always rooting for the success of original horror projects, even ones so imperfect as this, so I was hoping it would be a hit! Ha ha, I want more R-rated big-screen scare pictures! It’s a pretty perennial genre though, so I’m not too worried! In the meantime, I guess I’ll give Crimson Peak two big vats of tomato paste and urge young Mr. del Toro to go full-throttle horror next time! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Lifeforce! (1985)

Ha ha! Burl here, returning to the Tobe Hooper well so soon after The Texas Chainsaw Massacre part 2! In fact I’m staying within the Cannon Years, that period in which Hooper made films for the Golan-Globus boys! Today’s picture, Lifeforce, was the first and surely the most expensive of the three!

Now, I’ll say up front that I don’t have what you might call a fetish for this picture, exactly, but I find myself hugely tickled by its weird, self-serious craziness! In other words, ha ha, I like it! Nobody else does, but I do! You’ve found the one person! And what’s more, I like all the acting in the picture! And boy, is there a lot of acting in this picture!

Now some of you may not have seen Lifeforce, so I’ll give you an idea of the story! Ha ha, it actually hews pretty closely to Dracula! There’s a multinational space mission to go check out Halley’s Comet, and the captain is probably the last person who would be put in charge of a spacecraft in real life, none other than Steve Railsback from Armed and Dangerous! Near the comet is a behoimeth of an alien ship, and inside that are some dead giant bats and three naked people - two fellows and a pretty lady - reposing in crystal coffins!

Commander Railsback falls for the lady instantly, and who can blame him; but on the way back to Earth, everybody else on the ship dies of energy depletion! Earth people find the derelict floating in orbit, and the space people, and then, back at Space Headquarters in London, there are incidents involving naked ladies rising, blue swirling lights, an extreme case of wrinkleface, and running through doors, oh so many, many doors! Ha ha!

The escape pod lands and Commander Railsback joins the brain trust: A thanatologist played by Frank Finlay; SAS man Peter “The Hunt For Red October” Firth; and ever-sleepy Michael “For Your Eyes Only” Gothard in the role of some kind of doctor who catches a half-suck from the space lady! And the chase is on before the space vampire plague destroys the city and the very planet itself!

Ha ha, this is one nutty movie! It all seems to stem from one decision: casting buggy Steve Railsback in the lead! That’s a very strange decision, and seems to me it could have easily gone another way, if, for example, Golan and Globus had decided “Ha ha, we’re spending so much on this picture, let’s get a star! Let’s get Steve Guttenberg!” I see you shiver, but it could have happened! Anyway, I think Railsback gets it completely right! He’s totally bonkers, but when you discover what his character’s been going through for almost the whole film, you realize there was no other way he could have played it!

The other actors all do their own thing, which normally might be considered a criticism, but here somehow works just fine, like a crazy orchestra that plays random notes off tempo and out of tune but comes up with a mad, atonal masterpiece! I particularly like Frank Finlay’s performance, the pleasures of which for me are best exemplified in the moment he says “I seem to… sense it!” If you notice that moment, you’ll know what I’m talking about! Firth, with his authority and clipped delivery, makes a terrific policeman, and Gothard, who was always effective and is again here, really sells the idea that he’s ready to barf and fall fast asleep, in that order!

There are yet more fine actors to enjoy! Patrick Stewart from Dune shows up as a possessed asylum keeper who gets first sat on and then kissed by Railsback; and the creepy headmaster from A Clockwork Orange plays Britain’s foreign minister! (It seems like a questionable bit of casting until you recall the sordid tales from the ‘70s that are now coming up in UK media!) And behind the scenes we have such heavyweights as Alan Hume, the cinematographer who was shooting the Bond pictures and Return of the Jedi around this time; and Henry Mancini, who provides a score of ludicrous but I think admirable bombast!

Then there are the trick effects, which are splendid! There are lovely green spacescapes, bubbly ship interiors, and I’ve always liked the twinkly blue slit-scan light effect that is so frequently used in the picture, though I associate it more with Douglas Trumbull than John Dykstra! Plenty of Special Makeup Effects too, which for me were again mainlined through Fangoria, creating an instant vampire-like hunger to see the film! Ha ha!

It’s a demented and stupid movie in so many ways, but the simple unlikelihood of such a thing ever being made draws me to it! I surely do recognize its weaknesses, but uniqueness is a quality to be valued and I know of no other movie quite like Lifeforce! It’s at once a sci-fi adventure, a psycho-sex thriller, a zombie apocalypse and a totally crazy goofshow, and I’m going to give it three handy-dandy leaded-iron swords!

Burl reviews Pumpkinhead! (1988)

In an Octobery frame of mind, it’s Burl, here to review you a corn-pone backwoods Gothic tale of curses and hullabaloo! Yes, of course it’s Pumpkinhead I’m talking about, the original one I mean, the one that opened exactly twenty-seven years ago today! Ha ha, I’ve yet to see any of the others they made, the blood wings or what have you!

But this one I saw at the picturehouse, the same cinema in which I saw Child’s Play just a few weeks later! But, ha ha, when they were screening this one, the theatre was in the midst of some kind of renovation; they had taken out the entire huge middle section of seats, leaving only a thin strip of seats, rows of six or eight perhaps, up each side! The floor was clean, so naturally my friends and I, the only ones in the theatre, sat on the deep grade and watched from there! We had our big coats to recline on, so it was very comfortable!

And I was excited to see the movie, for I had been primed by the stills in Fangoria magazine and by the mere fact that the picture was directed by famed trick effects man Stan Winston! Ha ha! And indeed the trick effects were very fine, and the backwoods atmosphere with its big fake pumpkins was artificial but thick, and although it wasn’t a case of discovering my new favourite movie, I did not come away disappointed!

That, however, was in 1988; how does the movie stack up these days? Ha ha, glad you asked! The story of course has quite purposefully the feel of a rural fairy tale, of the sort meant to ward off bad behavior! It seems that in some unnamed but remote region of the United States, a pumpkinhead is running around! Or at least, he’s running around once someone commissions him to commit some vengeance!

That someone is Wally Schirra himself, Lance Henrikson, well-known from The Quick and the Dead, Nightmares, Aliens, The Horror Show and of course The Visitor! Some citified young folks happen by and go dirtbiking, and before you know it, Henrikson’s beloved little son, who looks a lot like the kid from Death Valley, has been run down! This part of the picture made me sad! Anyway, most of the city folk aren’t bad sorts, but Lance doesn’t know that, so he visits an old crone and gets that gosh darn pumpkinhead on their tails! Ha ha! Watch out, kids, it's a pumpkinhead!

From there it hews closely to the structure of a slasher picture, with the pumpkinhead taking out the city kids one by one! Lance has a change of heart and decides blood vengeance isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and it turns out that he and the pumpkinhead have a closer relationship than either of them would be comfortable admitting, which makes sense because Lance and the pumpkinhead don’t look all that dissimilar! The pumpkinhead has bigger shoulder blades though, that’s for sure! Ha ha!

I like the multiple layers of backwoodsiness in this picture! Ha ha, Henrikson already seems to live in the backwoods, but when he goes looking for vengeance, he has to travel further still into the backwoods to find George Buck Flower, whom we know from The Fog and Teen Lust and who’s always a welcome presence even in all the crazy cornpone sk*n flicks he did; and there he is told he’ll have to go further into the backwoods to find the old crone, who tells him that he’ll have to travel still further into the backwoods to dig up the pumpkinhead!

Anyway, it’s still a pretty charming little picture! It looks nice and moves fairly quickly, and, like its contemporary Scarecrows, it’s reasonably Halloweeny! It could stand to be a bit gorier though, I think – it has a bit of tomato paste, but a couple of Rawhead Rex-style head pullings would have gone a long way! Ha ha, and though I think Stan Winston did a fair job for a neophyte, it never really gets as creepy or scary or hillbilly weird as you want it to! Still, an enjoyable fricassee, and I give Pumpkinhead two and a half extra-big shoulder blades!

Burl reviews Hot Tub Time Machine 2! (2015)

Howdy howdy, it’s Burl, and today I’ve got a review for you of a picture that, ha ha, I can’t believe I watched all of! It was so bad, I’ve got to tell you, and not just bad, but sort of ugly and desperate! But I’m getting ahead of myself: the picture is Hot Tub Time Machine 2, and you now may feel free in joining me in my bewilderment: ha ha, Burl, just why did you watch it? And why are you reviewing it?

Ha ha, I have no proper answer, but we’ll see if I can find one! Now, I did see the original Hot Tub Time Machine in the moviehouse way back in 2010, and, perhaps because I saw it in optimal conditions, which is to say with a group of pals and under certain, ha ha, herbal influences, I enjoyed myself!

I can’t say the same about the sequel! I can hardly bring myself to describe the nonsense plot, but it has something to do with a reworked present involving the loathsome character Lou (played by Rob Corddry from In A World… and The Way Way Back) who stayed back in the mid-80s and has used his knowledge of the future to become a wealthy tech giant! Nick, the more likeable character, has himself stolen future pop songs from the likes of Lisa Loeb and become a famed pop crooner! The babyfat teen who was in the first one is now a butler for some reason, and John Cusack has, evidently, vaporized into nothingness, or been reduced to a singularity, or caught in a moebius whirl, or some other time travel-related affliction! Anyway, he’s nowhere to be seen!

Lou falls victim to a shotgunning, well-deserved, and the race into time is on so that he may be saved! Ha ha, why? Anyway, they end up in the future, where they meet Adam Scott from Our Idiot Brother, who is some relation to Cusack’s character, and wears a grey skirt! Chevy Chase, well-known from Fletch and Christmas Vacation, shows up briefly to deliver puzzling dialogue! Then there occurs a vast number of pop-culture jokes and a lot of movie references! Ha ha, The Terminator is mentioned of course, and pictures like National Treasure and even The Lawnmower Man, just for no real reason!

But seventy-five percent of the gags revolve around the human wil*is, and injuries to the human w*llis, and places in which the human will*s may be ins*rted! Ha ha, it gets pretty wearing! It would be okay if the gags were funny – after all, ol’ Burl’s got nothing against the human wi*lis, or ribald gaggery in general – but they’re not! And, as I mentioned, there’s a strange air of desperation floating over the whole thing, like when drunks shout jokes they believe to be witty into your face at a party!

The only thing worse that the humour are the sad attempts to jiggle our emotions! Ha ha, it just doesn’t work! Almost nothing works, in fact! I’ll admit that a couple of the future technology ideas were clever, and I liked the vengeful car even though that subplot really went nowhere, and there may have been one wan smile in there somewhere, so all in all I’m going to give Hot Tub Time Machine 2 one half of an electric jumpsuit and then never think about it again! Ha ha!

Burl reviews The Texas Chainsaw Massacre part 2! (1986)

Hi, it’s brrrr-brrrr-Burrrrrrrrrrl here to review a chainsaw picture! Ha ha! Did you like my chainsaw sound effect? Pretty convincing! Anyway, that’s because I’m here to give you a review of a chainsaw picture that isn’t exactly the best of them, but far from the worst either! Ha ha, it’s that odd codfish from ’86, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre part 2!

Now, Dennis Hopper had a long (though not long enough) career in pictures, and he had a few peaks and maybe more than a few valleys, if that combination is geographically possible! But I think it’s fair to say that, between Blue Velvet and his Oscar nomination for his part in the popular hayseed picture Hoosiers, 1986 was among the peakiest of his career peaks! And there, resting comfortably in this Reagan-era aerie, sits his role as Lieutenant ‘Lefty’ Enright, a man on the hunt for the chainsaw killers that, twelve years earlier, had run through his invalid brother Franklin with a Stihl!

Well, he’s about found them, finally! It seems to me it shouldn’t be so hard to track down an entire family of cannibal killers who apparently take care to never leave Texas, which is admittedly a large state, but still! Anyway, the cannibal family’s latest outrage, which is really more of a public service, involves taking down two gun-totin’ bros on their way to the big football game! Their demise, set on the world’s longest truss bridge, is recorded by radio DJ Stretch, a good ol’ gal in unflattering jean shorts; she, powered by the same urge to “do something real” that we find in The Dark’s Cathy Lee Crosby, hooks up with Hopper and tries to team up with him to find the killers!

But events escalate before this can happen, and Stretch’s days of playing The Cramps, Concrete Blonde and Oingo Boingo on some backwoods Texas station are over! (Ha ha, the highly idealized playlist of this station is one of my favourite things about the picture!) Anyway, before all is said and done there will be a good deal of screaming and the sad demise of a great character, LG, played by the marvelous Lou “Last Night at the Alamo” Perryman!

Bill Mosely from The Blob and The First Power, turns in a highly entertaining performance as a plateheaded cannibal brother (“I know what you’re thinking! ‘This is weird, but I can handle it,' right?”), and Bill Johnson from D.O.A. takes on the fairly thankless role of Leatherface! Old Jim Siedow, the only holdover from the original picture, is the cook of the family! All of these actors ham it up very nicely for the movie, and make it better than it otherwise would be for sure! And they live in a seemingly endless rabbit warren of tunnels and bonerooms beneath an abandoned Alamo-themed themepark! Pretty nice!

But is the movie any good? There are differing schools of thought on this, ha ha! Certainly there are some scenes that are staged in a breathtakingly inept manner: the opening truss-bridge slaughter is one such flubup! The script, despite coming from the fellow who wrote Paris, Texas, is full of bananas and bulberries!

However, it’s also full of hilarities and glittertainments! Ha ha, when Hopper invades the family’s lair, screaming “Bring it all down!” and “I am the Lord of the Harvest!,” the cannibals assume he’s from a rival catering business, possibly a vegetarian one! Ha ha! There are plenty of quotable quips all throughout, though few of them make sense out of context! Meanwhile, the picture is full of trick Special Makeup Effects, courtesy of our old pal Tom “The Burning” Savini; these are alternately goofy (the spurting half-head) and impressive (poor old LG)! There are also plateheads, extreme oldman makeups, a big fat grandma corpse and other non-gore trick effects!

Altogether, it’s a weird and unexpectedly fun picture, if not quite a good one! But as you know, weird goes a long mile with ol’ Burl, and I give The Texas Chainsaw Massacre part 2 two and a half little fry houses!

Burl reviews It is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE. (2007)

Well hey-and-hey-howdy, it’s Burl here, reporting on a marvelous art film made by a young actor – well, a young actor and his friend! I’m talking about the second picture in Crispin Glover’s It Trilogy, It is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE. Of course we all know Glover as an actor in pictures like Friday the 13th part 4 and Rubin & Ed! This picture was made by Glover and a fellow called David Brothers, and they shot it in Salt Lake City around about 2001! Ha ha, it wasn’t finished and released until 2007 though, but that’s low-budget filmmaking for you! I, Burl, can relate!

It was directed by Glover and Brothers, but the story comes, according to an opening title, “From the mind of Steven C. Stewart!” Steven C. Stewart is, or was, a man in his early sixties extremely debilitated by cerebral palsy! A terrible illness! So everything was difficult or impossible for Steven, and speaking was an especial bugaboo! But he managed to write a script and act it out, even if his line readings aren’t always intelligible! A singular man, by all accounts!

In the opening scenes, Steven plays himself in the situation he’d been some years earlier: trapped not just within his body, but in an institution he hated! He falls out of his chair and is replaced there by a burly, completely unemotional attendant! But we are then cast into a gaudy crime drama, of which Steven, under the name Paul, is the central character! He embarks on a romance with a Fassbinder actress – one’s first clue that all will not go swimmingly – and displays an especial interest in long, straight hair!

When the lady refuses to marry him, he can take it, so far as we can gather! But when she muses about cutting her long hair, Paul can abide no more! He wraps his suddenly burly arm around the lady’s neck and administers the fatal chokehold that will become his signature move! Next he’s hanging out with the lady’s daughter, and she too is marked for a chokehold!

For Paul is embarking on a killing spree! He starts out like Walter Paisley from A Bucket of Blood – a picture I was strongly reminded of while watching this one – as a kind of likable nebbish, and progresses quickly to a maniacal slaughter fiend! And, ha ha, Paul sure puts the “sex” in “sexagenarian!” Long-haired ladies are constantly falling in love with him, and frequently having intercourse with him, and then they go and mention their hair and Paul crooks that ol’ murderin’ arm! He’s forced to deal out a few punchings and a brutal wheelchair-over-the-throat murder too! (All of this was extra-oddball for me, because Steven/Paul resembled with remarkable precision my neighbour Fred! Ha ha, dead ringers, really, though Fred hasn't got CP and is not, to my knowledge, a strangle-killer!)

Of course nobody ever suspects Paul, because how could a man with severe cerebral palsy be responsible for this carnage! We’re seeing it and even we don’t quite buy it! Ha ha, I don’t want to tell you the end, but it works very well at providing an emotional arc-completion to the film! In fact the whole movie, as occasionally oddball and pervy as it gets, and as mildly confusing when Paul is sleeping with and killing ladies we’ve only just met but he seems familiar with already, is executed with a strange and compelling charm, and a meaning! For we’re not just watching a story, we’re watching a man’s dark fantasies put on screen, and the man himself being given a most unlikely chance to act them out! It’s really something to see, quite frankly!

The picture was shot on gaudy colour 16mm, one of my favourite formats! Other than the nursing home seen at the beginning and end, all of it was shot on beautifully fakey sets, and the acting is variable and stylized! Glover’s father Bruce Glover, Mr. Wint himself from Diamonds Are Forever, plays a sleazy ex-husband, and he acts in such a way as to imply he took the whole thing as kind of a joke! But it still sort of works!

It’s a truly unusual picture, and possibly not for everyone! But I thought it was a marvelous accomplishment, and I’ve been thinking about it frequently since I saw it! Ha ha, it made me want to see the other two in the trilogy, though the third installment was still pending at this writing! But in the meantime I’d like to give It is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE. three belly-bandages!

Burl reviews Mission Impossible III! (2006)

Burl here, and please take note that this review will not self-destruct in five seconds, or ever, I hope! Ha ha! Anyway, it’s one of the Mission Impossible pictures I’m talking about today, and that’s a series of movies I appreciate, even if I haven’t seen them all (and even if I don’t remember a thing about 2, even though I saw it in the theatre)! They’re very slightly old-fashioned, like the Bond movies; all the globetrotting spy stuff I guess; and even if the difference between them and any other blockhead franchise is slight, it also must be critical! Whatever that fine line is, I’m firmly on one side of it! I’d go see one of these, but, ha ha, you'd never catch me at a Transformers picture! I mean, by garr, I have standards!

With all that out of the way, I’ll tell you that I’m reviewing Mission Impossible III, which I had never seen previously! The name J.J. Abrams didn’t mean anything to me, as I’m not a TV man, and I still get him confused with the other one, Joss Whedon! I know one of them did Super 8 and a new Star Wars and the other does super-hero pictures like The Avengers!

Anyway, it was J.J. Abrams made this one, and as a series of action scenes, it’s not bad! But it’s not very memorable either! Ha ha, I recall that Tom "Jack Reacher" Cruise’s spy character, Ethan Hunt, is now merely a teacher instead of an active agent, and he’s married to a lady he can’t stop grinning broadly at (Michelle Monaghan from Due Date), and hosts parties for guests who also receive his constant thousand-watt grin – and surely some of the extras found it creepy – and all of this he does under the fake identity of a humble traffic-tally man!

I also remember that a lady gets a little bomb in her brain, and that the bad guy behind it all is played pretty effectively by Philip Seymour Hoffman, the fellow who made and appeared in Jack Goes Boating! But g*sh darn it if I can recall what the kerfuffling is about! Hoffman’s character is some kind of international arms dealer, and he wants to do something… was it blow up the world? I can’t recall, ha ha, and remember, I just saw this picture a short while ago!

Anyway, there’s an exciting helicopter chase, and Hoffman is hung out the bottom of a jet plane, and then there’s a great deal of destruction on a bridge when Hoffman is freed from imprisonment by his gangster buddies! Ha ha, that’s a pretty thrilling scene too, I guess! It suffers a bit from that jumpy camerawork and unbalanced fluorescent look we saw so much of in the mid-oughts, and it really works hard to achieve some kind of gravity! But, ha ha, always remember that this is a movie in which people can appear to be completely different and specific human beings by the simple application of a rubber mask!

Just about any plot twist is easily achievable by the application of a completely convincing rubber mask, and so that’s exactly what we get: just about any plot twist! I must admit that Tom Cruise is perfectly good in his role when he's meant to be an actionman, but in those scenes at the beginning of the picture, when he’s supposed to be a normal human hosting a party, he’s just so weird! He goes around spouting traffic statistics, reading people’s lips and grinning like an absolute lunatic! No wonder he’s happy, after some rote protestations, to get back in the action and square off with Hoffman! (Ha ha, to reach any parity, the final fight between the two requires Cruise to become ridiculously impaired by various injuries as well as by the bomb that’s been implanted in his brain now!)

There's an entertaining supporting cast (Simon Pegg from Paul, Laurence Fishburne from Death Wish II, Eddie Marsan from Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, and more) Ha ha, I’ll have to see the two newer entries of this series, because the word is they’re better than this one! Mission Impossible III was acceptable popcorntainment, but nothing more, and I award it one and a half rubber masks!

Burl reviews Rolling Thunder! (1977)

Burl here, presenting a write-up concerning the revenge drama Rolling Thunder! This is a picture beloved by many, and I myself, having seen it before, years ago, remembered it fondly! Five years before John Rambo got himself lost in the B.C. mountains, here is the Vietnam veteran movie that actually drew first blood, ha ha!

William “The Dark” Devane plays Major Charles Rane, who commanded troops in ‘Nam and then ended up a POW for almost ten years! He returns Stateside with his fellow prisoner, a wreck played by Tommy Lee Jones from The Fugitive! Of course everything has changed for The Major: his infant son has grown into a boy, his wife has taken up with another fellow; a cop, a decent enough guy, but one who calls his stepson “runt!” On the upside, The Major attracts the attentions of a local POW groupie (Linda Haynes from Human Experiments) and is gifted, by a local car dealership or chamber of commerce, a golden dollar for every day he was imprisoned! Further on the downside, his cask of gold attracts the attentions of a foul violence gang who kill his family and grind off The Major’s hand in a garbarator!

The leader of this terrible violence gang is none other than James Best, a terrific actor whom we all know from The Killer Shrews and of course, his role as Roscoe P. Coltrane! Q-Q-Q indeed! Luke Askew from The Beast Within is in the gang too, and a couple of other fellows besides! Dabney Coleman from Cloak & Dagger takes on the small role as The Major’s Army shrink, but nothing this braindoctor can say will take away The Major’s thirst for blood vengeance or the silver hook he now sports for a hand! Ha ha! The Major enlists his buddy Tommy Lee Jones to help, and it’s kind of touching: Tommy Lee asks no questions, but simply says “I’ll get my gear!” Of course it’s because he wants to help The Major, but also because he can’t adjust to and just plain hates his Stateside life, ha ha! And one sympathizes with him completely whenever his family is shown!

The picture was directed by John “Best Seller” Flynn, and is probably the movie on which his reputation for no-nonsense action-drama largely is based! Because, ha ha, it’s pretty good! Having a Paul Schrader/Heywood Gould script doesn’t hurt of course, and the photography by Jordan “Blade Runner” Cronenweth is ideal for the picture, and the cast is pretty darn strong! The final scenes, which recall those of Taxi Driver in their “man’s gotta do” brutality, are particularly memorable! (Those expecting wall-to-wall blood action will probably consider the picture too much of a drama for their tastes, but that’s their loss! I think when I saw it as a teenager, I was a little underwhelmed, but I feel differently now!)

It’s a simple picture, and from that comes its strength! It actually fits into a microgenre I like: movies that were given the green light on the basis of their exploitable elements, but are actually artistic works of serious purpose! And yet they fulfill their genre requirements nicely! Ha ha, I can’t think of other examples right off the top of my mind, but there are plenty – maybe Cockfighter is another one!

Anyway, it’s a movie of well-oiled craftsmanship, and it delivers the goods! It’s not brilliant, but it’s a very fine low-budgeter, and William Devane going from this to The Dark in less than two years impresses me with his range! I find him an interesting-looking fellow, like the half-simian Kennedy brother they kept in the White House attic! In any event, I’m going to give Rolling Thunder three pairs of mirrored sunglasses!