Burl reviews Return to Horror High! (1987)

Hello friends and good neighbours! It’s Burl, here to review a tricky little picture, Return to Horror High! Ha ha, it’s another movie about the business of illusion and the fuzzy line between appearance and reality, just like its model, The Stunt Man! Somehow they forgot to cast Steve Railsback as the maniacal director, ha ha, but they did get Alex Rocco, who of course was in The Stunt Man, as well as Herbie Goes Bananas, Stick and Gotcha, to play the role of the crude and mercenary producer!

Rocco and his crew are making a movie about the true events surrounding a high school massacre from five years earlier, and doing so on the actual location in which the killings happened! (This, of course, is the same premise of The House of Seven Corpses!) Naturally the killer returns, or seems to have returned: in fact, anything that happens in the movie must be said only to seem to have happened, because frequently, what we assume to either flashbacks to the original carnage or else a new on-set murder, turns out instead to be a scene being filmed for Rocco’s movie!

Ha ha, so there are plenty of fake-outs, enough so that, even having just watched the picture, I can’t remember what the upshot was! I do know there’s a scene that recalls the end of Sweet Movie, in which sheet-covered bodies sit up en masse, and also a rubber mask is involved at some point, just like in Hell Squad! And there are plenty of scenes involving confusions between real body parts and the work of the movie-within-the-movie trick makeup effects man! Ha ha, he’s played by Marvin J. McIntyre, who was the parachute instructor in Fandango, and who should have had a much bigger character comedy actor career than he did!

In fact, across the board there’s a decent cast of familiar and half-familiar faces! Lori Lethin from The Prey plays the main actress recreating the murders, and Scott Jacoby from The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane and The Supernaturals is in there too, and there are old ringers like Andy Romano from Beach Blanket Bingo and Drop Zone as the principal; Vince Edwards from Murder By Contract, now on the other side of the law as the investigating detective; Richard Brestoff from Fastbreak playing somebody or other; Al Fann from Parasite playing a janitor with a secret or two, ha ha, and Marcia from The Brady Bunch as a chowhound cop who seems to enjoy the carnage at the curiously underpopulated crime scene! And, ha ha, we get George Clooney, well known from The Descendants, as a big-headed actor who is the first victim!

Even if it steals most of its tricks from another movie, it’s nice to see a horror picture that attempts something a little headier, a little different! (That’s my feeling about Wes Craven’s New Nightmare as well, ha ha!) It’s competently made, with decent 80s horror cinematography from Roy H. Wagner, who brought the same to A Nightmare on Elm Street 3! It could be a bit peppier, a bit scarier, a bit more sharply directed, but it’s got some clever lines and funny performances, and at least it tries! I give Return to Horror High two unsafe industrial fans!

Burl reviews Dead Ringers! (1988)

Ha ha, I’m seein’ double: four Jeremy Ironses! Yes, it’s Burl, stealing a joke for you to open a review of a picture made by one of my favourite directors, David Cronenberg, who also made Fast Company, of course, and Stereo too! The movie I’m talking about today is Dead Ringers, which might have been better off called Gemini, as I believe was the original plan! Then they were going to call it Twins, but Ivan Reitman put in the call and took that title for himself! They settled for borrowing the title of an old Bette Davis Batty-Old-Dame picture and adding an S to the end! Ha ha!

Now, I used to be a regular attendee of the Toronto Film Festival! Ha ha, every year I would fly in, take a hotel room with some equally movie-mad pals, and see as many movies as we could! Back in those days the grand premieres were held in Ryerson Hall, and, quite by chance, my friends and I discovered a side door and a passageway that led into the basement under the theater, from which we could emerge and take seats without ever buying a ticket! Ha ha, it was great, and very sneaky! And the first movie we did this for was Dead Ringers!

Yes, le tout Toronto was there, cheering on the hometown boy in all their furs and finery! Unfortunately there was a technical issue in which the sound went off for approximately five minutes! Ha ha, I really felt for Cronenberg during this time - it’s got to be no fun when the grand premiere of your newest picture goes wrong! But the problem was soon corrected, and no great harm was done!

I certainly enjoyed the picture, though it was the start of a new, sui generis period for a director whose horror and science fiction works I had thoroughly enjoyed for years! Dead Ringers tells the story of the Mantle brothers, twin gynecologists both played by Jeremy Irons from Die Hard With A Vengeance! Ha ha, the trick effects used to double up on Irons are pretty well flawless, and the unfussy, dare I say clinical style that comes so naturally to Cronenberg greatly helps the illusion! Ha ha!

The brothers regularly impersonate one another, with Elliot the more outgoing and playboy-ish, and Beverly the shy-boy! But when they get mixed up with a famous actress played by the great Geneviève Bujold, well known from Tightrope and The Moderns, their carefully crafted, deliberately symbiotic lives get churned up like a roughly-poured pousse-café!

Of course things go badly for the Mantle boys, helped along as they are by the excellent performances of the actor playing them, and by an exceptionally effective Howard Shore score, and by truly fine direction from Cronenberg! People, including myself, tend to remember this as a thoroughgoing drama-movie, and a particularly squirmy one given the main characters’ profession; but what I noticed this time around was how funny the picture is! Ha ha, Cronenberg has even said that all of his movies are fundamentally comedies, and I see now that this is true!

It’s very clever, devious comedy, and there’s a lot to think about once the movie comes to a close! “She’s an actress,” Elliot tells Beverly in discussing the Bujold character. “You never know who she really is!” And the great irony with which this complaint is buttered is foundational to this fine picture! Oh sure, it’s got flaws - like, who is that redheaded lady anyway? - but it still impresses me on multiple levels, and I give Dead Ringers three and a half surprise cameos from non-actor Stephen Lack!

Burl reviews Band of Outsiders! (1964)

Et tu, c’est Burl! Hé hé! Yes, I have a French picture for you today: a small delight from Jean-Luc Godard entitled Bande à part, or, for the Englishers, Band of Outsiders! Of course we know Godard from his first picture Breathless and the many other great films that came after, and the confounding ones too, ha ha! I’ve never met the man myself, but I did sit directly behind him once at a cinema as the movie played, and I count that an appropriate encounter!

I suppose Quentin Tarantino must have taken his company name from this picture, and that computes because it’s a crime drama more or less, like the marvelous Breathless was, but even more Godarded up, and with characters who love gangster movies, and plenty of discursive scenes! Here we have two buddies, Franz and Arthur, adrift and disreputable, who meet the winsome Odile in an English language course, and, while both angling for her favours, try to convince her to help them pull a robbery on the rich old man who boards in her aunt’s house, where Odile also lives!

Odile is played by Anna Karina from Justine; Sami Frey from Sweet Movie and Black Widow is Franz; and playing Arthur with an ever-increasing sense of potential violence is Claude Brasseur from Eyes Without a Face! This trio crack against one another like multiballs, with the two fellows putting increasing pressure on Odile to help facilitate the robbery, and the fellows getting increasingly fractious with each other over Odile! For some reason Odile falls for Arthur, who, ha ha, is a real jerk, and one is afeared of another ending like that in L’Avventura! (I’d seen this movie before my recent viewing, but not for years, so I couldn’t remember how it resolved!)

Narration from Godard himself occasionally gives us insight into the characters’ thoughts and feelings, and this is an ingratiating feature indeed! On the debit side is how they treat their nifty little car, ha ha! Of course the centerpiece of the picture, the scene everybody remembers, which, notably, has nothing to do with either the romantic conflict nor the supposed heist plot, is the spontaneous dance scene in the café! Ha ha, they must have practiced that one a couple of times, and that’s the great charm of the scene! Somehow, having nothing to do with anything, it increases the emotional stakes and sets our characters on their way into the second half of the movie!

Well, it’s all very Godardian and beautifully styled, even if it takes place in a rather bleak Parisian winterscape! Ha ha, it’s still Paris after all! It’s got more thrills in it than I remembered - in my memory it was a movie about people who wanted to do a crime, but were simply too lazy to go about it! But no! The heist happens, but of course it doesn’t go exactly as planned! And that’s to be expected with Godard, ha ha! I suppose this is one of his minor works, but it’s a solid little piece of New Wavery, and the cast is terrific, particularly the lovely Karina! I’m extremely fond of Band of Outsiders, and I give it three and a half high speed runs through the Louvre!

Burl reviews Lunch Wagon! (1981)

Vroom vroom, it’s Burl pulling up in a big pink Lunch Wagon! Yes, that’s the title of today’s motion picture experience, and let me tell you: if there’s a better movie made on the subject of construction site lunch wagons, I’ve yet to see it!

Ha ha, this is a picture very much in the tradition of the Roger Corman “three girls” pictures he was making in the 70s, in which you have three nurses, or three teachers, or three stewardesses, and they would have comic, romantic and dramatic, or even political, adventures! Here we have two young ladies, Marcy and Shannon, who pump gas at a garage owned by big George Memmoli, the size-large from Mean Streets and Phantom of the Paradise! But he’s a nasty boss, and a peeping tom, so when they inherit a food truck from Dick Van Patten, the girls waste no time! They recruit a third partner, a musclewoman called Dierdre, paint their truck pink because they are ladies, and start up their own business serving comestibles out of their new conveyance!

Movies of this type are frequently loose, shambling and free from the burdens of narrative, but Lunch Wagon by contrast suffers from a surfeit of plot! Whereas one gang of bumbling, comedy-relief criminals is plenty for a picture like this, Lunch Wagon offers two such groups! In fact the whole thing seems to be comic relief rather than simple comedy; that is, comedy that doesn’t feel it has to try too hard, as it’s just meant to be lighter than the dark material around it! But there is no dark material here, nothing to be relieved from, and so the gags on offer give no relief, nor no laffs, ha ha!

In addition to the criminal groups (one, a loose collective of nogoodniks using their own lunch truck as cover to steal gold fillings from a gold filling factory; the other a pair of hefty, mustachioed jewel thieves who look like the Mario Bros., and especially so when they happen to be dressed as janitors), the girls face romantic travails! Marcy has her ups and downs with shirtless construction worker Biff, played by another Van Patten, this one called James, whom we know from Roller Boogie and Nightforce; Shannon makes time with a musician in a traveling band with whom the girls get acquainted; and Dierdre falls for a glasses nerd!

The movie reportedly clocks in at 88 minutes, but seems to go on much longer! There’s a stand-up comedy routine that rivals the one in Hack-O-Lantern for cringeability! Rose Marie, last seen sweeping up after the action in Witchboard, turns up as a tough old bat in the tradition of the one played by Anne Ramsey in The Goonies! And a friendly cop regularly motors up to drink coffee or arrest people! So you can see there’s no shortage of character or incident, ha ha! The characters are mostly agreeable enough, but there’s little of substance going on and none of it is funny! I give Lunch Wagon one motor oil in the overalls!

Burl reviews Sweet Movie! (1974)

By Trotsky’s beard it’s Burl, here to review a movie about the death of revolution! That’s right, I’m talking about Sweet Movie! Ha ha, have you seen this picture? It’s a wild and weird one, but nothing in it will come as any great shock to those who’ve seen WR: Mysteries of the Organism, the previous film from director Dušan Makavejev!

Well, a few things might be a little shocking, ha ha! Like WR, Sweet Movie is a sort of pastiche or collage film, with revolution as its general subject and the naturally, if regrettably, ephemeral nature of same!

But much of the movie demonstrates the need for it, too: revolution is not futile; in fact is necessary, so long as there are people like Mr. Dollars, the world’s richest man, a Howard Hughes-style clean freak who assumes he can buy and sell people as he pleases! This entity is played by none other than John Vernon, well known from Herbie Goes Bananas, Fraternity Vacation, and Curtains! Ha ha, Herbie fans in particular will be taken aback when Vernon gets his kit off to reveal that he has a solid gold willis! (Vernon too was reportedly taken aback when he saw this at the film’s premiere screening!)

Another person taken aback by this is Miss Canada, played by the comely Carole Laure, whom we of course know from Get Out Your Handkerchiefs and Naked Massacre! She, who had won the Crazy Daisy Show contest to marry Mr. Dollars, is packed away in a suitcase by a big bodybuilder and sent to the Eiffel Tower, where she makes sweet love with El Macho, played by Sami Frey from Band of Outsiders and Black Widow, and emergency attention is soon required, ha ha!

Meanwhile a boat, the Survival, with the head of Marx on the prow, captained by the homicidally revolutionary Anna Planeta, glides down the canals of Amsterdam! It picks up a sailor called Potemkin played by Pierre Clémenti from The Conformist, and pretty soon, after affixing a single tear to the giant Marx head, Anna and Potemkin are rolling around in the big box of sugar, making sweet love, ha ha, but a couple of gory bites and a knife-poking later, the sugar is bubbling with blood! There’s also a very queasy scene in the ship’s sweet shoppe, in which a group of young boys are “seduced” by the lingerie-wearing Planeta!

Miss Canada has by now hooked up with Otto Muehl’s Vienna Aktionists, who are doing their thing in a warehouse somewhere! Ha ha, these bits of the movie might cause viewers some little disquiet: there is all manner of gross foodeating, rank upchuckery, regression to babyhood, and of course a notorious scene of platform pooping! Miss Canada, and indeed Carole Laure, doesn't seem to be enjoying her experience very much! Even worse than all of this, for me, was the German documentary footage of unearthing corpses in the Katyin Forest, which I wish Makavejev had resisted putting in his movie! It’s really awful, gruesome stuff! I didn’t care much for the baby gymnastics either, ha ha!

However, after a friendly reappearance from Mrs. Alplanalpe, played by Jane Mallett from Nothing Personal, the old painted lady whom we’d seen earlier on the Crazy Daisy Show, the sugary theme of the picture reasserts itself! Miss Canada immerses herself in a vat of chocolate and rolls around in it nude for a while, and that’s a pretty good scene! But it’s a sad scene, too - it seems to represent a surrender of some kind, a drowning of ideals in crass, confectionary-excreta!

But the final image offers hope: a row of apparently murdered children, wrapped in plastic, who slowly shuffle out of their wrappings and reveal themselves as an alive, alert new generation, ready, we hope, to continue the struggle! Workers unite, ha ha, you have nothing to lose but your plastic wrap! Anyway, Sweet Movie is an intriguing blumpkin, a relic of a sadly bygone age, and beyond all question an earnestly felt combunction! I give it two and a half strips of yellow suckers!

Burl reviews Simon, King of the Witches! (1971)

Ha ha and zim-zam-zoom, it’s Burl, here to review a story of witchery and hippery and rainstorms! Yes, it’s Simon, King of the Witches today, a tale of supernatural doings in the streets of the fictional town of West Side!

The picture begins by showing off its greatest asset: Andrew Prine, well-known from his appearances in Grizzly and The Evil, in the role of Simon! He emerges from his storm drain on a rainy night and tells us a little about himself, namely that he lives in the storm drain and is a practicing warlock! Quickly he’s hassled by cops and tossed in the clink for an overnight stay! In the pokey he meets Turk, a ginger-haired shorty played by George Paulsin from The Bat People! This young hustler quickly befriends Simon and facilitates his entrée into society!

The next thing you know, some pompous git passes Simon a bad cheque! Well, ha ha, it’s clearly time for black magic vengeance! The bearded warlock conjures up a swirling red optical effect, and this entity proceeds to first hypnotize the cheque kiter and then fatally dump a flowerpot on his head! In the meantime, Simon has met and, in his way, attempted to romance Linda, the D.A.’s daughter, played by Brenda Scott! Of course the D.A. himself, called Willard Rackum and played by Norman Burton from Mausoleum, is fairly unhappy about this, and makes more trouble for Simon!

All Simon wants is to complete the erotic ritual that will ensure his apotheosis and eventual godhead! It’s not much to ask, ha ha, and after Simon calculates the precise time of day - 1:33 - that he needs to enter the next realm, and after he talks endlessly about what’s he's going to do exactly at that time, and makes many careful preparations for it, he misses his moment by carelessly shooting the breeze with his moronic doper buddies Shay and Troy! Ha ha! At this point Simon bugs out and calls down curses upon the whole of West Side; and, in the spirit of curses doubling back upon their casters, this proves Simon’s undoing, at least temporarily!

Ha ha, the sort of person who spells “magic” with a K on the end of it tends to like this picture because it apparently treats warlockery with a seriousness missing in many other pictures! I myself am not so sure that it does - witness the sound effect they put in whenever the red optical effect is on the prowl, for example, not to mention the Bill Rebane quality of the optical itself - but Prine’s committed performance does indicate a fierce advocacy from at least the thespian quarter! Simon is at turns grumpy, insane, warm and friendly, homicidal, wry, and sad! His friendship with Turk, a central feature in the picture, comes to a melancholy conclusion when Simon reluctantly casts a spell to sever the friendship forever!

So there’s some interesting stuff going on in the picture, and the scenes with the malevolent red optical effect are entertaining! Ha ha, there’s a scene where Simon and Turk (who is dressed as a chauffeur for some reason) visit a Wiccan gathering, at which witches of all ages disrobe and chant and shake bums while a goat watches impassively from his altar; and the broom-breaking conflict depicted here is pretty good at demonstrating the internecine scorn to be found in the supernatural community! In fact it’s the feeling of community, both within the witchy world and among the down-and-outers, heads and hangers-on of West Side, that proves perhaps the movie’s most interesting aspect!

But the movie is also frequently dull, and it can be a bit silly too! Even so, it strikes a good tone, not too self-serious, but not willfully goofy! Warhol superstar Ultra Violet shows up at one point, playing the Wiccan priestess, and then there’s the memorable line “Don’t touch me - I’m a religious object!” Ha ha! In the end, while I can’t say I like this picture as much as many people do, and while I wish they’d gone the Night of the Demon route and included a scary monster instead of the optical effect, I’d still say it’s a solid curio that’s well worth a look! I give Simon, King of the Witches two flash floods!

Burl reviews Strange Brew! (1983)

Ha ha hosers, it’s Burl, here with beer and back bacon and ready to take off to the great white north with a review of the Mackenzie Brothers’ big-screen adventure Strange Brew! Ha ha, for those who don’t know, these two canuckleheads, Bob and Doug McKenzie, were mainstays on the great show SCTV, which I watched religiously in my youth! Apparently the time slot in Canada was a couple of minutes longer than it was in the US, so to fill those extra two minutes they made little segments called Great White North, in which Bob and Doug, played by Rick Moranis from Ghostbusters and Dave Thomas from Stripes, would sit on a couch, swill beer and ruminate drunkenly on some topic or another!

Ha ha, I loved those segments! But somehow, even if they were just designed for Canadians, the magic of Bob & Doug made its way south of the border, and they became popular enough for MGM to greenlight a movie about these loveable, bickering oafs! They directed it themselves, too, ha ha, and got the fog filter-loving cinematographer Steve Poster, who’d done Blood Beach and Dead & Buried, to shoot it! And they set it explicitly in Toronto, with more shots of the CN tower than there are in Highpoint, ha ha!

Craziest of all, for this picture they decided to adapt Hamlet! It’s a pretty loose adaptation, to be sure, but they play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern types who get involved in family intrigue at Elsinore Brewery, where the paterfamilias has recently been killed under mysterious circumstances, and the prodigal daughter, Pam, returns to sort out affairs! But her perfidious uncle Claude has married her mother Gertrude, and is plotting with the nefarious Brewmeister Smith to take control of the brewery and do something involving insane hockey players, tainted beer, and the rapidly-approaching Oktoberfest!

Ha ha, modeling the story roughly on Hamlet is really the only thing that gives the picture a story at all, because the narrative is otherwise pretty sketchy and improvisational! It helps that the cast is a strange and intoxicating mix of foreign ringers - Max von Sydow whom we know from The Magician and Dreamscape, is the Brewmeister; Paul Dooley, well known from Last Rites, plays Claude - and familiar Canadian faces, like Lynne Griffin from Curtains and Black Christmas, and of course Mr. Patman, who essays the role of Pam, and Angus MacInnes, from Bells and Spasms, who is the Ophelia figure, Jean LaRose! Plus we get the hilarious National Lampoon writer Brian McConnachie as Brewmeister Smith’s passive assistant Ted, and who has a small part as a lawyer? That’s right, none other than Thick Wilson from Sex With the Stars! Ha ha!

Now I’ll say this: I love this movie and find it very funny, but I have every sympathy for anyone who might find it puerile, dumb, not funny, poorly directed, and narratively nonsensical! It’s subjectively hilarious, strictly, but if you like Bob & Doug and want to see a movie about them, this will fit the bill nicely! It’s necessary to have some beers to drink while watching it, I firmly believe, or perhaps some gingered ale if you happen to be a teetotaler! You’ll enjoy the dogbowl full of beer, the kung-fu lawyer with the delightfully ingratiating smile, the portrait of Pierre Trudeau, the van jump into Lake Ontario, the unexpected vocal cameo from Mel Blanc, and much more! I give Strange Brew two and a half Canadian Institutes for the Mentally Insane!

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!