Burl reviews L'Avventura! (1960)

Ciao bella, it’s Burl, here to review on of the grand Italian pictures of the 20^th century! Ha ha, this one is L’Avventura, by Michelangelo Antonioni, a director I’m very fond of! Ha ha, I still remember his Oscar speech, when he got one of those special achievement statuettes at the age of about a million and two, and he shuffled up to the microphone and leaned in, and the crowd hushed reverently to hear what the Maestro would say, and, in a gravelly old-man voice that had somehow lost none of its fortissimo, he uttered but a single word: “Grazie!”

Ha ha, it was then that I understood: this man spoke through his films! And he made some good ones, ha ha - I’m particularly fond of Red Desert, and like everybody I’m a fan of Blow-Up! And I even like Zabriskie Point! I went to see that picture he made with Wim Wenders, Beyond the Clouds, but aside from it being the very definition of an Old Man Movie, with plenty of ladies in the nude, I don’t recall much about it, except that it was not so great!

L’Avventura, however, is great, ha ha! As it opens we find ourselves among the Italian leisure class, with a bunch of stylish folk planning a boating excursion around the islands off of Sicily! There’s Anna, who seems a sad and troubled and dissatisfied young woman, and no wonder, because her boyfriend is Sandro, who seems strangely middle-aged and who reveals himself through the picture as a perfidious, inconstant, manipulative jerk! Ha ha, I really hated him! But he’s played very well by Gabriele Ferzetti from Lucio Fulci’s The Psychic!

The main character in all this is Claudia, played by the gorgeous Monica Vitti, the ScarJo of her day, ha ha! Claudia is Anna’s friend, but after Anna mysteriously disappears, and after a scene in which she and Sandro experience coincident revelations that, while they each loved Anna in their way, she, being incapable of love, never returned the feeling, romance begins to brew! Slowly, as the search for Anna continues and then peters out, Claudia and Sandro embark on the adventure, or fling, of the title!

Along the way there are other characters to concern ourselves with, of course, like Anna’s father, and her other friends, who don’t necessarily seem concerned about her disappearance, and the old goatherder! Ha ha, I assume he’s a goatherder anyway, because there always seems to be one on these islands! (And most of the first half of the picture is set on the island, and we briefly get reminded of The Lighthouse, a much more recent picture!) We also have the young painter, with his emo cut and pouty lips and hilariously bad breast paintings! And Gloria Perkins, ha ha - who is she, but an object stared at and lusted after by an entire town of creepy men? And this incident repeats itself with Claudia now the object of the creepy men’s gaze - I’ve never seen the discomfort women feel under the male gaze better or more repellently represented in a picture!

The ending of this picture is, not to put too fine a point on it, quite horrific! I won’t give the details, but if you feel anything like I do about Sandro, and if you’re pulling for Claudia because she’s beautiful, or because she grew up in modest circumstances and so really isn’t one of these indolent rich, or just because you like her, then you’ll feel as despondent as I did, ha ha! But you’ll probably also recognize the plain human truths this movie has to offer, and feel the power of the images and the sheer craft that went into its making! I could go on, but I won’t - I’ll just give L’ Avventura four spilled ink bottles!

Burl reviews Hell Squad! (1984)

Budda-budda-budda it’s Burl, here to review one of the many commando girl movies they made in the 70s and 80s! You’ve got The Muthers, Commando Girls, Cover Girl Models, your Andy Sidaris epics, and then this one, among the liveliest and most goofy of the bunch, Hell Squad! (It’s commonly referred to as a 1986 picture, but the copyright date on it is 1984, which makes more sense! Ha ha, it looks like it came from 1974, frankly!)

It begins, of course, with a nuclear explosion, and then we see two scientists in hazmat suits looking over a bunch of empty animal shackles and marveling at the horses, cows and elephants that have been atomized with their special new Super-Neutron bomb! Somewhere in the Middle East, the son of a mustachioed American diplomat complains about the shaky ethics of a bomb that will dissolve livestock and people, but leave buildings standing and papers un-singed!

Well, soon enough the ambassador’s son is kidnapped by the sort of Arabs you used to see on the Carol Burnett show! Ha ha! But the ambassador’s assistant (“And I’m also your friend,” says he) comes up with a plan: take a Las Vegas kickline, spend ten days training them them as commandos, then simply have them rescue the ambassador’s son! Ha ha, it’s a devilishly elegant scheme! The boss of the showgirl army, Jan, accepts the assignment, but warns her girls that to successfully complete the job “it’ll take more than some T&A - it’ll be tough and dangerous!”

After some training, in which the girls scoot through a tunnel, jump a little pond and climb a plywood wall, the movie then settles into a series of scenes in which they alternate between taking group baths and slaughtering random gangs of Arabic peoples, based on anonymous phone calls they receive in their luxurious hotel room! They themselves get kidnapped, but escape and make it back to their room for another bubble bath!

Ha ha, this picture is full of crazy stuff, just enough to qualify it as a Ridiculous Action movie! We see the generic Arabs at leisure, speaking to each other in all-caps subtitles: HERE IS A NEW JOKE: WHAT DID THE ELEPHANT SAY TO THE NAKED MAN? Ha ha! The diplomat loses his mustache halfway through, but this is never acknowledged! The ambassador’s son’s only company in his dungeon is a dead Ponk-boy chained to the wall - a Ponk-boy who also appeared in Hide and Go Shriek! And the Scooby-Doo twist at the end involves a rubberized mask and a lot of retroactive questions vis-à-vis the never-ending stream of bubble baths all the girls took together!

It’s a cheerfully goofy picture, with the girls untroubled by all the human lives they take, and only mildly troubled when they learn that most of the people they killed were perfectly innocent! Ha ha, why worry when there are bubble baths to take! It’s a dumb movie, dumb as a box of dead crabs, and could maybe use a little more pep here and there, but for the most part it’ll entertain you while it’s on! Ha ha, I give Hell Squad two atomized horses!

Burl reviews Logan's Run! (1976)

All for the love of renewal, it’s Burl, here to review a movie that epitomized the state of studio sci-fi in the years leading up to Star Wars! That picture is of course Logan’s Run, and with its big budget yielding dinky-toy trick effects and a costume design composed mainly of pajamas, we must nowadays regard it as more of a curio than anything else! Ha ha, it’s hard to believe that Blade Runner came along only six years after this!

The big hook of this picture, as we all know, is the concept: it’s two hundred years into the future, the world has been irrevocably changed by nuclear war or some environmental catastrophe, everyone lives a life of pleasure in a big shopping mall, but, once you turn thirty and the little jewel in your hand starts blinking red, it’s time for Carousel, where you put on tights and a hockey mask, fly around the room for a bit, then explode in sparks! Ha ha!

Michael York, whom we know from Phantom of Death and the remake of Not Of This Earth, and Richard Jordan from Dune, The Mean Season and The Hunt for Red October, play two sandmen, the police in charge of finding and killing anyone who may run from this sparky fate! They make a habit of toying with their victims, which makes them seem very nasty I must say! But when Michael York’s Logan meets Jessica, played by the comely Jenny Agutter from An American Werewolf in London, and gets an assignment he can’t refuse from the unfair city computer, he finds himself on the run, blinking red before his time, dodging his ex-friend Francis, and the laser beams of the demented cosmetician Doc (who reminded me a bit of the Surgeon-General of Beverly Hills from Escape From L.A.); scampering through the Love Shop and avoiding the depredations of the towering, silver, fearsome lunch robot Box! Ha ha!

Waiting for Logan and Jessica outside the city dome is not the Sanctuary they’d been led to expect, but a dotty old cat-loving jasper played by the great Peter Ustinov from Spartacus! Francis shows up, unable to comprehend that everything he’d learned in the dome was a lie, and he has a freakout, but a quick flagpoling settles his hash, ha ha! Later, when Logan and Jessica bring the old duck back to the dome, Logan brings these truths to the city computer as he had to Francis, and it has a freakout too, and simply blows up!

Now it’s true that I enjoy this picture, that it’s campy and fun; but it’s equally true that it’s silly and unwieldy and poorly-structured and ponderous! Had it been made with dexterity and a thoughtfulness that went beyond the obvious surface-level chase narrative, and with some specific, passionate vision of human nature, it might really have been something! As it is, I give Logan’s Run two fish, sea greens, and plankton from the sea! Ha ha!

Burl reviews The Lighthouse! (2019)

Avast ye dogs and arr-bee-darr, it’s Burl! Ha ha, no, I haven’t turned into an old salt with a pegleg and a parrot on his shoulder and a corncob pipe clenched between my teeth and a sou’wester drenched in sea spray! Ha ha, no, it just feels like I have, for I recently went to see the new motion picture The Lighthouse!

Yes, it’s from the director of The Witch, which I enjoyed, and fits solidly into the niche this fellow is carving out for himself: historical horror-dramas featuring characters far removed from civilization and any hope of rescue! In the case of The Lighthouse, our characters are a scurvy old lighthouse-keeping sea dog called Tom Wick, and his younger helper Ephraim Winslow! Tom is played by Willem Dafoe, that fine actor known from Streets of Fire, and Ephraim by Robert Pattinson, who did yeoman’s work in Good Times!

They’re working, and soon enough are trapped, on a craggy little rock in the Atlantic, manning a lighthouse and foghorn to warn off the ships that never seem to be passing by! At least, ha ha, we never see them! Tension between the two men breaks out almost immediately, with bouts of shouting and acrimony only occasionally interrupted by bouts of dancing and cuddling! Things get stranger and stranger for poor Ephraim, who battles an angry seagull (who, perhaps, is only trying to warn him); who sees, and even makes sweet love to, a laughing mermaid; who has visions of writhing calamari arms out of Dagon and severed heads out of Tough Guys Don’t Dance; and who is buffeted by the elements and the changeable temper of his bearded boss! And why won’t the old man let him up in the top of the lighthouse, anyway!

And as the picture progresses we accumulate many questions, which we thankfully don’t get hard and fast answers to! There’s a climactic moment that hearkens back to movies like Pulp Fiction and Kiss Me Deadly, ha ha, and a salty atmosphere that recalls Curtis Harrington’s early picture Night Tide, or the Ray Bradbury book Death Is A Lonely Business! The picture has a Bergman thing going on, and it made me think of Antonioni’s L’Avventura too, and Coleridge and the Doré engravings, and, like Moby-Dick, with its flensing, and King Frat, with its farts, it’s not afraid to get gross! And it’s got an appearance by a mermaid, which happens sometimes in movies - ha ha, just look at Local Hero or Beach Blanket Bingo!

So you can see there are a lot of influences at work on this picture, but it skillfully avoids the feeling of pastiche! I like the way seafaring myth and legend bubble and boil around the story like foam, but never fully intrude in any direct way, leaving all sorts of interpretation to the viewer! And, ha ha, it’s funny, too! I enjoyed myself and was glad to have seen it, in all its square aspect ratio, on the big screen! I give The Lighthouse three fish vaginas!

Burl reviews The 7th Victim! (1943)

Ha ha and hucklebucks, it’s Burl, here to review one of the greatest of the Val Lewton pictures, and, as you may know, all of them are pretty great, so to be among the greatest of them is really something! I’ll tell you, my favourite is I Walked With a Zombie, but this one, The 7^th Victim, is right up there!

It’s a terrifically literate picture, and marvelous with atmosphere! Ha ha, it tells the story of young Mary, an orphan raised by her older sister Jacqueline, who is informed by the ladies of her boarding school that Jacqueline has turned up missing! Well, there’s only one thing for it so far as Mary is concerned: travel to New York’s storied Greenwich Village and solve the mystery herself! Little does she realize that she’ll be entering a world of uncommon desperation and existential sorrow!

She also encounters some of the most banal evil ever put on film, and I don’t mean that as a criticism of the film! Ha ha, on the contrary, the devil cult with which it turns out Jacqueline was involved in is one of the most fascinating aspects of the picture! Once Mary’s sister has made herself an apostate so far as the cult is concerned, according to their code she must die! But another codicil to their code is a strict policy of nonviolence, ha ha, so they must figure out some way to reconcile these opposing dictates!

Within the picture’s tight 71 minute running time, Mary meets a wide variety of folks, including a doleful ex-poet called Jason, played by posthumous Silver Star recipient Erford Gage, who died on Iwo Jima; Jacqueline’s secret husband Gregory Ward, played by Hugh Beaumont, who would become famous as a different Ward later on, ha ha, which is to say Ward Cleaver from Leave it to Beaver; stuffy Mrs. Redi, who takes over Jacqueline’s cosmetics company; and the ingratiating, fearful private eye Irving August, played perfectly by Lou Lubin!

Mary herself is played by Kim Hunter from The Kindred in her film debut, and she does very well as the seeming naïf who occasionally demonstrates at once a strength of resolve and a weakness of character, a combination that spells doom for poor Irving August in one superbly staged scene! The picture in fact has several modestly well-mounted setpieces, including a shower scene involving Mrs. Redi which Hitchcock may have seen some time before making Psycho, ha ha! There’s also a quiet stunner of an ending involving a consumptive prostitute out for one last night on the town, and the thump of a falling chair!

This was the film debut not just of Ms. Hunter, but also of Mark Robson, previously the editor of many RKO films, including the first few Lewton productions, and later the director of such big pictures as Von Ryan’s Express and Earthquake! It was an auspicious debut, I must say, because this picture is a real gem: quiet, thoughtful, scary, altogether different from the usual run of low-budget horror! Of course all the Lewton pictures were that, but this one stands out even from them, and to me that makes it a very special movie, and one I encourage you to watch! Ha ha, I give The 7^th Victim four manuscripts of mediocre poetry!

Burl reviews Hell Night! (1981)

Ha ha and H-E-double hockey sticks, it’s Burl, here to review another Halloween-themed slasher picture! Ha ha, this one is called Hell Night, and it was even produced by Irwin Yablans, whose Compass International Pictures helped bring us the original Halloween! But make no mistake, this isn’t Halloween!

No, it’s Hell Night, and that means we start at a frat party with everyone in costume! It’s time to rush the pledges, and this means frat bros Peter and Scotty, and their comely accomplice, are going to send four unwitting students into Garth Manor for the night, but not without telling them that, after old man Garth held a murder party for his family, one of the deformed brothers, or "gorks," per the dialogue, was supposed to have survived, and gorks around the manor to this day! And of course this turns out to be true!

Our frosh quartet includes Linda Blair, perhaps best known from Nightforce and Roller Boogie, in the role of Marti, whose defining characteristic is that she can fix cars! There’s fresh-faced Peter Barton, who also faced a maniac in Friday the 13th part 4, playing Jeff, and who tells a tale of the time he saw a three foot man with a long beard, a green jerkin, curly boots and a tall, pointed cap, and concluded that it must have been an elf! We also get Vincent Van Patten, whom we know from Rock n’ Roll High School, as Seth, who spends most of the movie wearing comical boxer shorts and repeating “My name is Seth!” Then there’s a lady with a British accent: Suki Goodwin as Denise!

Kevin Brophy, who plays Peter the frat bro (he also played Peter in Time Walker; and maybe it’s the same Peter! Ha ha!), does so with enough good humour that he doesn’t come off as repellent as most frat bros do in movies like this! He’s got an assistant jokester, a glasses guy who sports a parrot on his shoulder but otherwise seems to be dressed as a waiter in an Italian restaurant! The glasses guy catches a pretty stiff neck twist, and, as with a similar scene in The Prey, a fake buttocks was used!

Hell Night is long for a slasher picture, somewhere north of 100 minutes; and in all that time you get an awful lot of lurking in tunnels, hallways and gardens! It’s a little disappointing, because they had a back story with lots of potential, and a good, scary house to work with, lots of turrets and wrought iron; but director Tom De Simone, who came to the horror genre after a long career in pornoo, was not up to the challenge of making any of it scary! Although there are a few good moments: a great shock cut from a POV shot to a wide of the gork; a mildly scary walk from the front gate up to the door of the house after the characters have finally become aware that a gork is lurking; and a moment with a gork rising up from under a carpet, where there’s a hidden trap door!

But it’s a pretty cozy, good-natured affair overall, though it’s more gorky than it is gory! It’s pretty reserved as these things go, and, I'm sad to say, offers very little pep! On the other hand, it does have not one but two gorks, and both of them are mildly deformed, so we do indeed get some Special Makeup Effects in the end! Most of the deaths are pokings or defenestrations, or in some cases are not really seen at all! It is in other words a perfect slasher movie for people who don’t like slasher movies, and I give Hell Night one and a half shoulder parrots!

Burl reviews Hack-O-Lantern! (1988)

Ha ha and double boo, it’s Burl! Now, call me crazy, but I like my Halloween pictures to have some Halloween atmosphere, and when this movie, Halloween Night, or is that Hack-O-Lantern, started off with a shot of a pick-up truck full of pumpkins, I was heartened! I’m afraid the picture didn’t have the follow-through that I hoped for, but there were a few compensations for that!

The movie is better known as Hack-O-Lantern, and indeed the Halloween Night title card on my copy is clearly a replacement! The story involves the grandpa driving the pumpkin truck, played by Hy Pike from Hollywood High, Slithis, Blade Runner, and Vamp, who turns out to be a crazy Satanist with plans for, and a powerful hold over, his grandson Tommy! Tommy has a younger brother and sister, and a mother who looks perpetually anxious and careworn!

Thirteen years on, Grandpa has a new pumpkin truck and Tommy has grown into a sullen, fish-lipped guy who wears a vest with no shirt (when he wears anything at all) and who tosses cassette tapes around carelessly, wears sunglasses all the time, and dreams of rock videos in which he plays guitar, is zapped by laser eyebeams, and then is decapitated! Ha ha! He’s played by Gregory Scott Cummings from Action U.S.A., Phantom of the Mall, and Cliffhanger!

Roger, the little brother, has become a rookie cop, and Vera, the sister, is still just Vera, ha ha! It’s the night of the big Halloween party, and somebody in a robe is occasionally poking people with sharp implements! Victims include Tommy’s girlfriend, who is famous for her bum tattoo, and Vera’s boyfriend, who ogles the aforementioned bum tattoo (it’s actually a brand), but doesn’t deserve the shovel through the noggin that he catches!

It’s all about the crazy, leering, handsy grandpa and his desultory coven and their barn-bound activities, which include dancing, chanting, cackling, sacrifice, and the branding of people’s bums! Happenings are random and plot twists arbitrary, and everything in the second half, including a comedy routine so bad I had to pause the movie and cover my eyes, seems to revolve around a Halloween party that’s not nearly a patch on the bash in Primal Rage, ha ha! By the end the grandpa has passed on the family bumbranding tradition, but thankfully not his penchant for wild overacting, to the least likely of his grandchildren!

Well, it’s a terrible movie all right, but just occasionally weird and random enough to warrant some interest from the undiscerning Halloweentime viewer! The script is one of the worst ever written, and the direction is haphazard, and they try so slightly to create a Halloween atmosphere that they might better not have tried at all! Ha ha, without skeletal tree branches, heavy skies and a few dead leaves blowing around, it just doesn’t... quite... make it! I’m going to give Hack-O-Lantern, aka Halloween Night, one Dead End Drive-In poster, which I had on my wall too! Ha ha!

Burl reviews The Abyss! (1989)

Blub blub it’s Burl! yes, I’m underwater again, and it’s 1989, so I must be reviewing Leviathan! No? Oh, ha ha, then is it Deep Star Six? No? The Rift? Endless Descent? Full Fathom Five? Okay, last guess: The Abyss!

Of course it is the James Cameron picture, famous for its difficult shooting conditions and the subaqueous martinet at its helm, that we’re discussing today! It was partly shot in an abandoned cooling tower owned by Earl Owensby, where a big model undersea base was built, and the actors and crew had to swim around like crappies! Ha ha, it’s funny to think of even the least little touch of Owensby on this big giant Fox production!

Anyway, the tale tells of a gang of roughbusters who man an underwater oil drilling unit; and never mind the environmental sketchiness of this idea, but the blue-collar posse somehow ingratiates where the analogous roughbusters in Armageddon make you hope their oil rig will be hit by advance meteor shards as soon as possible! The guy in charge is Ed “Creepshow” Harris, playing Bud, and he’s just a regular fella, regular as a bowl of prunes! His ex-wife, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, the lady from Scarface and Slamdance, and who happens to have designed the underwater oil drilling base, descends to the rig with a bunch of marines led by a mustachioed Michael Biehn, well-known from Navy Seals and other Cameron pictures, like Aliens! The idea is that they’re all going to cooperate to find the missing submarine!

Biehn, already kind of a jerk, is busy getting worse from some kind of pressure madness! The appearance of underwater aliens hastens this process, and soon (well, not soon: this is a three-hour movie!), he’s sending a recovered nuclear torpedo on a collision course with the alien ship! Along the way there’s plenty of yelling, bubbles, a punchfight or two, miraculous alien water tendrils, a lot of salt-of-the-earth grassroots-folk stuff, and the surprising revelation that salt-of-the-earth grassroots folk, in addition to being good with tools and fond of jargon, are committed pacifists! Ha ha, that’s a message I can get behind!

The aliens themselves look like angelic parameciums and are not completely ungoofy, especially in a shot of one of them taking Ed Harris by the hand and guiding him Peter Pan style toward their big ship, but this almost doesn’t ruin the movie! Ha ha! Most of the picture holds together well, plays with reasonable seriousness, and serves as a solid underwater adventure! All the acting is good - Harris channels Ralph Kramden, Mastrantonio creates a unique "likeable bitch" character, and honestly, I think this is Biehn’s finest hour - and the verisimilitude Cameron was going for is there in spades! Whether Ed Harris, who vowed never to talk about the experience of making this picture, now considers that it was worth the trouble is unknown to me! Probably not! He probably thinks more fondly on something like The Right Stuff, where he was way up high instead of way down low, or Apollo 13, in which he got to wear a snazzy white vest!

I tend to credit the underwater pictures more than they deserve, and maybe that’s true of The Abyss also! But the fact remains that I both enjoy it and am impressed by its determined physicality! For the first two thirds anyway, ha ha! And the death of Biehn, smashed like an egg, is particularly memorable! I give The Abyss two and a half elbows to the tape player!

Burl reviews Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group! (2017)

Ha ha, and ticket stub please! Yes, it’s Burl, here to review a documentary about a regional film club called the Winnipeg Film Group, which I recently happened to catch on the Kroger Channel! I like these local movie and moviemaking tales - the last such picture I reviewed was probably 2014’s Out of Print, the documentary about the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles!

This one is called Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group, which is a riff on the title of the first feature by one of the Group’s most famous acolytes, Guy Maddin! That picture was called Tales from the Gimli Hospital, and if you haven’t seen it, ha ha, I recommend it! In fact I recommend all of Maddin’s work, particularly a picture called Careful!

Maddin is one of many interviewees in this talking-heads doc: he speaks of playing many hours of ping pong at the film club’s offices, and of his creative debt to fellow film club member John Paizs, the camera-cranker who made a very amusing picture called Crime Wave! Paizs himself is not interviewed for some reason, but much footage from his films, Maddin’s films, and the cinematic efforts of many, many others are excerpted! Ha ha!

There is also some footage of many of the moviemakers at work, using all manner of fascinating techniques to produce their films! There are vintage photos from the club’s early days in the mid-70s, so, ha ha, we get some good outfits and facial hair! The fact that it was largely a bastion of white male enterprise is addressed, and we see that the club has lately expanded its membership to include ladies, people of colour, the queer, and even some Indigenous folk! Better late than never, I suppose!

Of course it all takes place in Winnipeg, that famously remote and chilly city on the plains! It seems an interesting place, and in fact I know it is, having spent some time there myself! Their film club is among the most famous and accomplished in the land, ha ha, so on that basis alone, this documentary production is of interest! Those who are fans of the great Canadian films of the 1970s, from Goin’ Down the Road and Black Christmas, to Between Friends and Rip-Off, to Homer and Paperback Hero, will find themselves hooked!

There are plenty of tangents taken and amusing stories told in the course of the movie, but the unfortunate thing is that this film about filmmaking rarely sings as a filmmaking exercise itself! The editing seems too frequently arbitrary - you can see where the filmmakers have inserted shots simply because they need something there! Ha ha, the wallpapering is at times pretty egregious! And there are far too many literal gags: if someone mentions fire, we see a shot of fire! If the floor is mentioned, there’s a shot of the floor! Ha ha, having so many miles of other people’s films to choose from was perhaps not the advantage the makers of this doc supposed it was!

So at times one wishes this was better made, but mostly the subject matter is compelling enough to make you forget that! I’m glad the picture was made, and would hope to see other such histories from other cities! I give Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group two and a half jumping cats!

Burl reviews Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul! (2017)

Ha ha and kidstuff, it’s Burl, here to review the fourth entry in a franchise I’ve barely seen the first of! Yes, it’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul, which is based on one of what seems like a million-book series which my son is currently enamored of!

Now, you’re going to have to bear with me, because I haven’t read the books myself, nor seen the previous movies! What I do know is this: they made three pictures in rapid succession, all featuring the same cast; but then the kids aged out of their parts and now, several years after the initial trilogy, a new cast of kids has been chosen to take up the story!

And what is the story? It’s the misadventures of a family called the Heffleys, and our hero is twelve year-old Greg! He’s got an older brother who seems like sort of a jerk, but a fairly hapless one; a younger brother, whose primary function is to make a mess, and later, to speak Spanish; and a standard-issue pair of parents, here played by Alicia Silverstone and Tom Everett-Scott!

After an unfortunate event in a kiddie restaurant in which Greg becomes a viral star known as Diaper Hands, the family embarks on a road trip which follows in many ways the template set by the original Vacation! Ha ha, along the way Greg makes an enemy of a family headed by the gas station attendant from that new Friday the 13^th picture, and this culminates in a scene which scrupulously recreates the shower scene in Psycho - which, as you’ll remember, is also parodied in the old National Lampoon picture!

Many things go wrong, of course: there are car troubles, a baby pig, lots of screaming and yelling and dangerous driving, and much talk about restricting device use and screen time, which, if that’s your idea of an entertaining family comedy, you will enjoy a great deal of here! Against all the odds the family makes it to some old grandma’s birthday party, nobody is killed or runs off with the circus! Ha ha!

It’s fast-paced I suppose, and they fully commit to the Psycho bit, but there’s not a lot else to recommend this movie! I suspect the earlier ones are a lot better, quite frankly, and I guess I’ll be finding out for myself one of these days! At least, I’m sure they’ll seem better in comparison, so maybe it was good to start with the last movie first! I’m going to give Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul one and a half gruesome, toothy pacifiers!