Burl reviews No Time to Die! (2021)

 

With a creak of ancient bones, it’s Burl, here to review the newest James Bond adventure featuring an actor nearly as old as Roger Moore was in his last 007 show, A View To A Kill! Of course the actor I’m talking about is Daniel Craig, well-known for providing the villain’s voice in The Adventures of Tintin, and though he is getting a bit long in the tooth - ha ha, he’s older than me, for gosh sakes! - he’s still a formidable presence and looks decent in formal wear! But it’s probably a good thing that this picture, No Time to Die, is his last outing as the double-naught spy!

In fact he’s already there as the picture begins - happily retired from the spy game, or so he thinks! Ha ha, he’s on perpetual vacation with Dr. Madeline Swann from the previous picture, Spectre, again played by Léa Seydoux from Midnight in Paris and The Grand Budapest Hotel! But an apparent betrayal ends in a car chase and a melancholy parting by train, and will Bond ever learn to love and trust again? Ha ha, persistent musical and dialogue quotes from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service strewn throughout the picture would seem to make this a doomed prospect!

Various events transpire (the picture run 163 minutes, so there’s plenty of time for events to transpire!) which lead to Bond taking up his old job again! There’s a new 007 in MI6’s employ though, a lady in fact, who might be present as a paving of the way for an all-new iteration of the superspy, but they don’t give her all that much to do, nor is she provided with the kind of charisma and hard focus that would have left us with the impression that she was taking up the mantle for future Eon productions! Oh well!

Anyway, the usual gang is still there: M, played by Ralph Fiennes from Spider and Strange Days; Ben Whishaw, the voice of Paddington, as a now less pimply Q; Jeffrey Wright from Only Lovers Left Alive as Felix Leiter; and there’s even a scene for Blofeld, still essayed by Christoph Waltz from Django Unchained! Altogether there’s the feel of a classic rock band at work, reformed in 2021 to play the old hits with some new compositions salted in for the audience to fidget to! But of course it’s the old hits everyone wants to hear, ha ha!

We get a nice scene set in Cuba with a delightful, high-kicking junior agent played by Ana de Armas from Knives Out, and also a scene at a S.P.E.C.T.R.E. party that seems borrowed from toxin-based pictures like Getting Even! Ha ha! Of course there was no end to the borrowing from Bond pictures by Getting Even, so I guess that’s fair enough! And then the whole thing wraps up on the bad guy’s private island, which is nice because we haven’t seen a bad guy with his own private island since maybe The Man with the Golden Gun! (Oh, ha ha, I’m wrong - I think the glooper-faced fellow in Skyfall had his own island, but the climax of the picture wasn’t set there!)

One distinct improvement over Spectre is that, when we get an establishing shot featuring the Tower Bridge, the River Thames, the London Eye, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, they no longer feel it necessary to superimpose the label “London!” Ha ha, thanks for trusting us to recognize the city on our own, filmmakers! Your faith in us is simply awe-inspiring!

The picture looks terrific, as most of the recent Bond outings have, and the action scenes, when they come, are of a reasonably thrilling calibre! There’s a good bit set at a snowy cabin at the beginning of the picture, but later, as the movie enters its third hour, there’s a feeling that the whole thing might be going on a bit too long! Then there’s an ending that I won’t get into, but that isn’t what you might call the traditional Bond ending! It does give us Louis Armstrong warble-croaking “We Have All the Time in the World,” so it’s far from a complete loss!

It tries mightily to be something more than a routine spy adventure and it halfway succeeds! The bad guy’s plan is very rote and not explained very well, and he himself is something of a wet sandwich! The tormented romance between Bond and Swann didn’t affect me in the way the filmmakers clearly hoped it would - maybe I just don’t recall the ins and outs of Spectre clearly enough for that! I went through half the picture thinking she was Blofeld’s daughter, only to realize that she was actually his psychiatrist, which, as the sometime girlfriend of her patient’s arch-enemy, must violate some little-invoked clause in the Book of Headshrinker’s Ethics! Ha ha! In any case, it was a night out at the movies, and no mistake! Since I don’t seem to have picked up any covid in the course of going to see it, I give No Time to Die two slinkys!

Burl reviews Lady in White! (1988)

 

Hello and a happy post-Halloween to you all! Just a few days ago, and for the very first time, I watched a movie I’ve been aware of for years and years, something I saw on the shelves of the video store I worked at and the ones I patronized! I never did pick it up, because although it was a spooky picture and I like those, it seemed a bit too much like a kiddieshow! Ha ha, it was the same with The Monster Squad! But having a kid myself now, who's the same age as this film's protagonist as it happens, it seemed the perfect time to finally sit back and take in The Lady in White!

The opportunity to see the picture came from the director himself, Frank LaLoggia, who posted a link to his director’s cut on a social media! I downloaded it toot sweet and watched it with my family, it being a family-type movie more or less! It’s a flashback sort of a story, a childhood memory caper like Stand By Me, and so it’s appropriate that it begins in the present day with the main character as an adult, a Stephen King-type horror writer played by LaLoggia himself, being ferried to his old stomping grounds by a cab driver played by Bruce Kirby from, yes, Stand By Me! Ha ha!

The young version of this character, Frankie Scarlatti, is played by Lukas Haas from Witness, Mars Attacks! and Who Loves the Sun! He dwells in a small upstate-New York town with his dad, Alex Rocco from Gotcha, Stick, and Herbie Goes Bananas, his brother Geno, played by the talented Jason Presson from Explorers, and his old country bickerson grandparents! Life is good for jug-eared Frankie except for the fact that his mom has recently died, and he must occasionally suffer some older-brother ribbing from Geno!

Also there’s a pair of mean kids in his classroom, and one evening close to Halloween they lock him in the cloakroom at his school! There he sees the ghost of a little girl who was murdered a decade earlier, and then a rather more substantial presence: a man with a hooded face who comes into the cloakroom to find something, and, realizing he's not alone, starts to strangle poor Frankie! Yes, it seems the town has been suffering a series of child murders, and Frankie, having survived his encounter, realizes he’s got access to clues that might help him find the killer, and that another ghost, the legendary Lady in White, might be a further key to the mystery!

But he only comes upon these realizations gradually, for Frankie is no precocious boy detective but a refreshingly real kid who gets scared and doesn’t always do the right thing! And the movie itself is not a fast-paced, Goonies-style kids’ adventure, but a more meditative memory piece that moves at its own tempo, bringing on characters like a family friend played by Len Cariou from One Man, The Four Seasons, and Executive Decision; the local crazylady, Katherine Helmond from Time Bandits and Brazil; a storytelling postie well played by Sydney Lassick from Alligator and Silent Madness; and Lucy Lee Flippen from Summer School as Frankie’s teacher! And then of course there’s the poor school janitor, blamed for the killings mostly because he’s black; and his poor wife, left alone with her children to suffer the wrath and scorn of the town; and the grief-stricken racist lady, mother to one of the dead children, who gets a mad look in her eye and plots revenge against the wrongly-accused janitor!

Between the child murders and the racism it gets kind of murky for a family film, but some tonal equilibrium is maintained thanks to the heavy filter of nostalgia, the antics of the grandparents, and, since the story unfolds over a period of months, the inclusion of both Halloween and Christmas scenes! The narration, delivered by LaLoggia, is pretty ropey and is probably best ignored, which the poor sound mix on the director’s cut I watched made easy to do; and some of the optical trick effects are silly in both conception and execution! Also, at 122 minutes, the movie, or at least the director’s cut, might be a tad overlong, ha ha! The cliffside climax does tend to linger like the last guest at a Halloween party!

But it all comes straight from the heart, and that’s a virtue not to be airily discounted! LaLoggia took his own history - that of a horror-loving kid named Frank growing up in an Italian family in upstate New York - and married it to an established local lady-in-white legend and an invented serial killer story, and the result is a heartfelt if minor spookshow! I should also mention Rocco, who so often played a hard case but here is warm and kind as the anti-racist father! It was nice to finally catch up with this little movie, and I give Lady in White two and a half squirrel hunting jackets!

Burl reviews The Invisible Man (1933)

 

Mwa-ha-ha-ha and hello, it’s Burl! Am I here? Or am I over here! Ha ha, there’s no way of knowing, for I am completely invisible to you! Yes gumchewers, I’m here to review a classic of the cinema, the Universal Pictures production of The Invisible Man, directed by that giant mammal of cinema James Whale! And of course it features Claude Rains, well known as Nutsy from Moontide, in one of the most unusual debut roles any actor ever had - ha ha, his face is never seen until the last minute of the picture!

You’ve got to admire how this one gets going - not with a bunch of boring experiments that fail and must be tried again and again until success is achieved, but with the invisible man already invisible, already well on the way to homicidal madness, and seeking a place to set up his new lab and discover a way to un-invisibleize himself! After a wonderful set of edits showing the uncommonly translucent man arriving at the door of a pub, swathed in bandages and sporting overcoat, gloves, hat and glasses, he takes a room from landlady and professional screecher Una O’Conner, whom we know so well from The Bride of Frankenstein, and her husband, Forrester Harvey from Kongo, who later gets knocked down the stairs!

Naturally the invisible man, Jack Griffin by name, can’t get a lick of work done thanks to the constant botheration he suffers from the reluctant landlady and the nosy townsfolk, who are intrigued by his dark glasses and creepy bandages and haughty, demanding manner! Word of his unusualness spreads, and he must do a few jumpabouts and shock the simple country folk with his floating shirt routine! And then he must repair to the home of a colleague, Kemp, whom he terrifies into helping him with his experiments! Kemp is played by William Harrigan from Flying Leathernecks and Francis Covers the Big Town, and when he can take it no more and reports there’s an invisible man in his home, Griffin threatens to kill him at pre-cisely ten o’ clock the following night! And you know he means it, ha ha!

Gloria Stuart from The Old Dark House and Wildcats plays Flora, who had a love connection with Griffin back when he was visible and of more pleasant disposition! Her father, old Doc Cranley, is Griffin’s mentor, played by Henry Travers from Ball of Fire and Shadow of a Doubt, and of course he wants to help, but there’s no helping this transparency because he’s become a big jerk, a homicidal one at that, pushing people off cliffs and whatnot! He also likes to kick people in the bum! Clearly (ha ha!) he must be stopped, but even with a police force made up of ringers like Holmes Herbert from Tower of London, E.E. Clive from Mr. Moto’s Last Warning, Dudley Digs from The Hatchet Man, Harry Stubbs from Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, and Donald Stuart from Suspicion, it all comes down to a farmer who hears disembodied breathing in his barn!

Well, this one is a real crackerjack if you ask me! James Whale sure knew what he was doing, the trick effects are absolutely top-notch, the script and the performances are witty, and Rains has just the voice to play this part! He’s not just a voice of course - he does plenty of physical stuff when he’s in his bandages, and he’s good at that too! And most of the actors or even day players who have to react to being touched, jostled, or attacked by him also do pretty fine work! So it’s all very well done, and on top of that an invisible man is in some ways a much scarier entity than a vampire or a werewolf or even a Frankenstein monster! At least he is to me! My only regret in watching it was that I didn’t wait a few weeks, because it’s a pretty good winter movie! But it’s also a pretty great movie any time of year, and so I give The Invisible Man three and a half footprints in the snow!

Burl reviews Halloween Kills! (2021)

 

Boo to you and boo to you too, it’s Burl, here with some slasher sequel action! Ha ha, yes, it’s true - after my experience with Malignant, I returned to the cinema for more horror! This time I was the only guy in there, thanks to my clever policy of seeing matinees if possible! As a fellow who more or less enjoys the Halloween series, it was a real treat to see this pumpkin-flavoured madness on the big screen, though I wished there was no pandemic and I could comfortably watch it in a crowd!

Of course we know from my recent review of the 2018 Halloween that this cycle of films makes a point of ignoring all the other Halloween pictures except the 1978 Carpenter original! But, like the 1981 Halloween II, this newest picture, Halloween Kills, takes up right at the moment its predecessor ends, though with the addition of an extended flashback to that terrible night in late October of 1978! Eventually we get another flashback which rewrites the end of the original film, or at least rewrites the beginning of (and obviates the entirety of) its sequel!

Jamie Lee Curtis, famed from her appearances in Prom Night and Trading Places, returns in the role of Laurie Strode, former donkey girlscout, now vengeance granny! But she’s too injured from her encounter with Michael to do much beyond lie in her hospital bed and soliloquize about the terror and the evil, and occasionally to reminisce with her roommate, Will Patton, who got grievously injured in the previous picture by a rogue Turk, but somehow survived!  

And then there are the minor characters who met Michael that first time he came home! Ha ha, it’s quite a gallery! Anthony Michael Hall from Out of Bounds plays Tommy Doyle, the kid being babysat by Laurie in the old picture, grown into a big solid man whose hobbies include bird whistling and mob inciting, and another fellow plays Lonnie, the kid who was kind of a bully in grade school and gets scared away from the Myers house by an uncharacteristically playful Dr. Loomis, but in this picture he seems to be the object of bullying, which I suppose is part of the film’s “what goes around comes around” theme!

But many of the original actors return from the Carpenter picture: the original Lindsey, played then and now by Kyle Richards from The Car; the psychiatric nurse played by Nancy Stephens, whose character was killed in Halloween H2O, but of course that never happened as far as this movie is concerned; and Charles Cyphers from Truck Turner and The Fog, whose Sheriff Brackett is no longer the police chief but has become a very grampy-looking hospital security guard! Many of these people either become involved in or else try to stop a homicidal mob on the trail of Michael, or else become involved in it and then try to stop it! The mob sets great store in their catch phrase, “Evil Dies Tonight,” but frankly their follow-through is lousy!

The mob provides plenty of victims, but other victims are just minding their own business! People in their homes are poked, bonked, neckbroke, and gouged! Of them all, I’d most like to hang out with Big John and Little John, the affectionate couple who have moved into Michael’s old house, where they smoke pot and watch John Cassavetes movies - and Little John is played by none other than the fellow who directed Anthony Michael Hall as Walter Paisley in that A Bucket of Blood remake! Ha ha!

They really tossed a lot of mackerels in the pot for this one! There are some gross murders with plenty of marinara; an effective score from Carpenter, his son, and a buddy; a confused ideology; a sad scene involving another escaped patient who is mistaken for Michael by the mob despite the two-foot height difference in the men; not a whole lot in the way of affrights or basic common sense; and lots of references to the other Halloween pictures, even to Halloween III! (Ha ha, I think the movie’s reality should have included the events of both Part I and Part III, with some somber references in the dialogue to the great mask massacre of ’82!)

And yet for all the silly behavior and bloodthirstiness, Halloween Kills is what David Lynch refers to as a “neighbourhood film!” I think the fact that Haddonfield is supposed to be a small town yet runs on for endless streets is a sort of tip-off to this picture’s alternative universe: as though it exists in a Tardis and everything is magnified and under which magnification a simple local madman may be catapulted to mythical status and motivate half the town into forming a violence gang, and the stairwells of the Haddonfield hospital seem to be twenty stories high! From almost any aspect - rational, narrative, geographical - it makes little to no sense, but nevertheless I give Halloween Kills two smoking pumpkins!

Burl reviews It! (1967)

 

Addressing you from the Heights, it’s Burl, here with a tale of wild golemnry! Ha ha, surely you all know of the golem, that man of clay created to defend the Jewish peoples in the village! You’ve heard the legend, seen his adventures in that old cinema classic by Paul Wegener, The Golem, How He Came In To the World, probably even heard him referred to as “the Jewish Frankenstein!” Well sirs and madams, here we have a golem picture that has nothing to do with any of that, and it’s simply called It!

Ha ha, we begin with a warehouse fire in London, and this particular warehouse is filled with the overflow items from the local antiquities museum! The curator and his assistant, Pimm, played by Roddy McDowell from Fright Night and Heads, don’t seem too upset by it, but they’re fascinated to find one statue standing unscathed in the midst of the smoking rubble! It’s a humanoid thing that looks like a twisted old root with arms and legs, and Pimm and his boss identify it as a golem statue! But when Pimm turns his back for just a moment, the curator is fatally bonked by objet or objets d’art unknown! Did the statue perpetrate this senseless murder?

 

Ha ha, yes, of course he did! But Pimm so far has only suspicions, so the golem is trucked back to the museum, where, for the fussy little assistant curator, there is intrigue both of the workplace and romantic varieties! Pimm’s ambition is to become the head curator, of course, and he also has (rather unlikely) designs on Ellen, the dollybird daughter of the former curator! Ellen is played by Jill Haworth from Tower of Evil, and of course Pimm’s interest in her is not reciprocated - ha ha, that she addresses him only as “Pimm” the whole time ought to make this obvious!

But, as the revelation that he keeps his dead mother’s body in his flat, Psycho-style, makes abundantly clear, Pimm is no ordinary chap! The revelation not presented as much of a shocker though, and the dead mum has no bearing on the plot, so I suppose it's less a revelation than a quirky character note! Pimm’s twin ambitions are thwarted: career-wise by a nasty new curator played by Aubrey Richards from Endless Night, and romantically, not so much by Ellen’s indifference, which Pimm is too thick to register, but by the arrival of a manly American museumsman called Perkins, played by Paul Maxwell from The Haunting and Aliens and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade!

In the midst of all this, Pimm discovers that the conehead of clay can be made operational by the simple application of a certain scroll, and that it will do his bidding! He has the golem put a bonking on the new curator and gets it to destroy a bridge to impress Ellen! Eventually, after some inner struggles with the ethics of it all, Pimm has the statue kidnap the object of his affections and take her to a country manor house! Perkins and two or three army guys camp themselves outside and shoot at the golem a few times, but, as the poster says and also a rabbi who pops in as the only actual Hebrew representative in the picture, nothing can destroy this crazy thing! The officials settle on the only sensible solution: drop a nuclear bomb on the manor house! Ha ha!

The picture seems like something Hammer put in the oven at the Bray Studios commissary and baked only halfway, and in this it reminded me very much of The Vulture! The script is an empty thing, providing no interesting backstory or cultural detail to the golem, and no dimension at all to the characters! McDowall, an actor I like, is in full fussbudget mode here, which I must say is not my favourite mode! The picture manages no affrights and is pretty silly overall, but it's a curio, and a curio has value to a reviewer like ol’ Burl! Plus the golem suit is good! So, ha ha, I give It! one and a half uneven umbrellas!

Burl reviews Dortoir des grandes! (1984)

 

Eh bien, bonjour les gars et les gamines, c’est Burl! Ha ha, today I’m reviewing a French picture for you, and how very French it is! Way back in the mid-80s, when this movie was new, my friend Doug somehow managed to tape most of it onto a VHS cassette, which we then watched over and over again! But the beginning of the movie was missing, and we didn’t know the title, so we referred to the picture as Dormitory F!

Of course the movie was packed to the brim with naked ladies, which accounted for the bulk of its appeal, but it also featured a scene in which the ladies visit a punk club and listen to a catchy song we called “Ansari Anse!” For years since then, I sought out both Dormitory F and that catchy punk song, but being as how I didn’t know the proper titles for either of them, this proved difficult! But once again Doug came to the rescue: once again by mysterious means he found the movie, put it on a little flash drive instead of a VHS tape this time, and gave it to me, and now it’s my pleasure to reveal the proper title of the picture: Dortoir des grandes!

That translates most directly to Senior Dormitory, but I believe the standard English title for it is College Dormitory! In any case, I was excited to see this movie again after so many years of it living (and growing and mutating) in my imagination! It turns out to be the tale of a girl called Adeline, who, her father being dead and her mother who knows where, lives with her stepmother and the stepmother’s creepy doughboy sweetheart! When these two start getting cozier with her than she would like (pulling her into the bathtub, spiking her drinks, double-teaming her in her bed, that sort of thing), Adeline’s superhuman equanimity finally fails her and she demands to be sent to a private school for girls!

The bulk of the picture plays out at this academy! The other girls are reasonably welcoming, with the only holdout being Juliette, the bad girl, who becomes jealous! Good-natured Mowgli, who I guess is called that because she’s black, becomes Adeline’s good pal, and all the girls are pretty cuddly with one another when you get right down to it! Fanette, the dean, is a very pretty lady, but a grouchy and insecure one who is prone to having affairs with her students! Her current objet d’amour is Juliette, and boy does Juliette get steamed when Fanette’s interest shifts to Adeline!

Instead of a plot, the movie simply features scenes of the girls doing stuff! They take group showers of course, and massage one another, and play little pranks on their teachers, and at one point they lock the dean in her room and have a dorm party with some invited boys and a poster of Rocky watching over them! Of course the highlight is the visit to the grungy basement punk club, where a band called Les Porte Mentaux play a song not called “Ansari Anse,” but rather “Ah ca ira!” Ha ha, I can’t tell you what a pleasure it was to finally see this scene again after all those years, and hear that catchy song! And the scene is just terrific all around, and brought back memories of my own visits to grungy basement punk clubs! Though I don’t recall the punk ladies taking their tops off and dancing around as happens in this picture, and also the bathroom seen here is the nicest punk club bathroom anyone ever heard of, ha ha! Normally you feared for your life in those bathrooms, and if you were smart you stayed out of them altogether! (It was the germs you feared, mind you, not your fellow punks, who by and large were a pacific bunch off the pogo floor!)

So all that was great, and it’s nice that in the last quarter of the film, after a suicide attempt that nobody seems to worry overmuch about, the location shifts to the Caribbean, where Adeline accompanies Mowgli for an erotic holiday, and then the arrival of Fanette complicates matters slightly, and the whole thing takes on a Melody in Love sort of a vibe! But otherwise I must admit that the movie is fairly desultory, with no art and precious little craft in evidence! The script is very piecemeal and the characterizations extremely confused! It’s mainly a series of scenes in which people grope and snog one another for a while before they invariably cut abruptly to a new scene! I’m not sure if more explicit stuff was snipped out, but I don’t really care either because, naked ladies notwithstanding, the bohankie scenes get boring and repetitive as always seems to be the case with pornoo, or near-pornoo! Still, I enjoyed it because it brought me back to those days when movies like this were a big deal! Ha ha! I give Dortoir des grandes, the former Dormitory F, two posters of Ator the Fighting Eagle!

Burl reviews Night of the Creeps! (1986)

 

This is Burl - ha ha, thrill me! If you’ve seen the movie I’m discussing today, you’ll know what I mean by that, and if you haven’t, well, you should! I myself saw it in the theatre, though I had to sneak in because I was several years too young according to the rules in my neck of the woods; but, as with Evil Dead II, Day of the Dead, Creepshow 2, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, and several others, I successfully broke these rules, and therefore hold some extra fondness for the picture I might not otherwise have! Though I’d probably be pretty fond of it in any case, ha ha! And the picture? None other than Night of the Creeps!

Sure, I saw it on the big screen, but I had some friends who managed to catch it at the drive-in, and I was a bit jealous because that would be the absolute perfect venue for a movie like this! And, ha ha, the movie knows it, which is part of its charm for the horror fan! It was the first effort of Fred Dekker, who later made The Monster Squad, and he’s the sort of guy who, having been struck by the idea of naming all his characters after horror directors, commits to it one hundred and fifty percent!

The picture opens in a spacecraft populated by naked munchkins, then continues with a sequence set in the late 50s and shot in luminous black-and-white! Ha ha, this part involves Sorority Row, Lover’s Lane, and an escaped axe maniac, and features a marvelously sinister use of The Stroll, that old song by The Diamonds! And then, finally, we segue into the present day on the campus of good old Corman University! We meet our protagonists: a pair of misfits named Chris Romero, played by Jason Lively from Brainstorm and European Vacation, and James Carpenter-Hooper, or J.C., played by Steve Marshall from… well, ha ha, I don’t know what he’s from!

As they walk around the campus Chris spies Cynthia Cronenberg, essayed by Jill Whitlow from Porky’s and Weird Science, and falls instantly in love! This leads to a prank attempt at the behest of some frat bros led by Allan Kayser from Hot Chili in the role of Brad, and this in turn results in the release of the space slugs that had been accidentally created by the munchkins! And of course here is where Detective Ray Cameron, played by the unstoppable Tom Atkins from The Fog, Halloween III and Creepshow, takes center stage!

From here things swiftly go magoo as a busload of frat bros become slug zombies, innocent pets are possessed by the otherworldly leeches, the axe murderer returns from the grave, the two gomers who started the whole thing, along with their sorority sister friend, make themselves variously martyrs or heroes, and Atkins repeatedly places demands on people to "Thrill me!" But the important thing to note is that while we get some familiar faces in the cast, like David Paymer from City Slickers and Robert Kerman from Cannibal Holocaust and many a pornoo, we also are blessed with a cameo appearance from the terrific, the one-and-only Dick Miller, well known from pictures like Apache Woman and Explorers! Yes, it’s a gratifying appearance too, with Miller as a police armorer coerced into giving Atkins and Lively a flamethrower with which to battle the space slugs! Ha ha, how marvelous! How truly Miller!

I’m well aware of this picture’s flaws: the lapses of logic, the dog’s breakfast narrative, the weak characterizations, the my-first-movie directing, the sometimes dicey acting, the sophomoric though not inapt move of naming all the characters after horror directors! But, ha ha, very little of that bothers me, because even today, after all these years, I find the movie tremendously enjoyable! The humour is generally well-judged, the trick effects look good, the central friendship is heartwarming, and Atkins and Miller provide all the thespian firepower you could want! It was great fun to see in the theatre when I was fifteen, and it thrills me to this day! I give Night of the Creeps three monobrows!

Burl reviews The Secret of Roan Inish! (1994)

 

Ay-ti-tai-ti-tai-ti-tai, it’s Burl, here with an Irish tale of seaside blarney! Ha ha, this is a picture I remember writing aboout back in the old movie reviewer days, but fear not, what you're reading right now is all new, all Burl! The enjoyment I derive from this defiantly uncommercial entertainment has remained constant, however, and the movie in question is John Sayles’s The Secret of Roan Inish!

My DVD copy of this picture claims it to be “Sayles’s most popular movie ever!,” which is a bit like saying sour cream & onion is the most popular Old Dutch Flavour Favourite! Ha ha, those in the know are the lucky but the (relative) few! Anyway, I’d have thought Lone Star was his most popular movie ever, but that shows what I know! This one, The Secret of Roan Inish, is very charming and has broad appeal to all ages, so I guess its putative popularity makes sense!

In Donegal, up in the north-west of Ireland, just after the Second World War, a wee lassie of ten, Fiona, played by charming young Jeni Courtney, has just lost her mother, and her father must work in the factories! So she goes to the coast to live with her grandparents, two kindly souls who live on the seaside and stare out at Roan Inish, the island their family used to occupy but had to move away from because the government told them to or something! Mick Lally from The Fantasist plays Hugh, the bearded grandpa, and Eileen Colgan from Quackser Fortune Has A Cousin in the Bronx is moody Grandma Tess!

The family are the Coneelys, and over the course of the film we hear plenty about their family history and the mythical stories around it! Most recent of these is the tale of young Jamie, Fiona’s younger brother, who was in his boat-shaped cradle one day as they were packing up to leave the island, when he shot out to sea and was apparently lost to the waves! And yet in the three years since, he’s been sighted many a time captaining his little ship around the coast, often in the company of the seals who dwell there also! And from Tadgh, a tetched and dark-haired Coneely who cleans fish and is played by John Lynch from Hardware, she hears the back story of how a Coneely man became romantically involved with a selkie woman, which is to say a sort of a were-seal!

Well, this gives little Fiona a lot to think about, and she discuses it and makes plans with a fellow who became one of my favourite characters in the picture, her cousin Eamon, played by Richard Sheridan! He’s a young teen with charming manners who decides to believe Fiona when she reports finding evidence of habitation on Roan Inish and seeing her little brother running around in the altogether! It becomes evident to the two kids that the seals, or the selkie people, simply want the Coneelys to once again take up residence on the island!

Well, ha ha, I’m not usually a fan of magic realism, because it’s mighty hard to pull off! Sayles nails it, however, perhaps because he never tries too hard: the fantastic elements are underplayed as much as possible! It helps, too, that the picture is so earthy, so tethered to the world it creates, so matter-of-fact instead of pushily magical! The musical score is emblematic of this, sticking with Chieftains-like airs rather than, say, doodly-doo synthesizers!  

It may seem far removed from Sayles’s genre screenwriting work, but this picture after all has a strong water-creature angle like Piranha and Alligator, and a transformation scene like in The Howling, if a little less elaborate, ha ha! The cinematography from Mr. Haskell Wexler is unflashy, but works perfectly for the piece, and occasionally a beautiful shot is tossed at you! There’s an especially nice sequence on a cliff-side meadow dotted with yellow and purple flowers!

Whether or not it adds up to much is up to each individual viewer, I think, but by organically creating such a complete world and welcoming audiences into it with seemingly no effort at all, Sayles has really pulled off something special! I give The Secret of Roan Inish three enormous beach bonfires!

Burl reviews Halloween! (2018)

 

Ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-HA-ha, it’s Burl, laughing the famous Halloween theme tune for you! And I know what you’re saying: “Ha ha, Burl, haven’t you already reviewed Halloween?” Yes I have, but now I’m reviewing the recent remake of that picture, or actually more of a belated sequel: the 2018 picture known, like its inspiration, simply as Halloween!

This new picture was directed by David Gordon Green, who brought us Prince Avalanche, and the idea here is that every other sequel, including Halloween II, Halloween 4, Halloween 5, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, and any other sequels there might be, are completely ignored! Halloween III: Season of the Witch, being as it’s a story that has nothing to do with Michael Myers or Haddonfield, is not necessarily being ignored - ha ha, we just don’t know one way or the other! And as for those Zombie ones, well, I haven’t seen them, but I detected no references to them in this picture!

Jamie Lee Curtis, whom we know so well from Prom Night and Grandview U.S.A. and so many others, is of course once again Laurie Strode, and, as in Halloween H20 (the existence of which is, naturally, also ignored), she’s a jumpy, paranoid mess as a result of her terrible experience from her days as a babysitting teen! Now though, instead of channeling her fear and rage into running a private academy for jerks, she has become a doomsday prepper with a house full of guns and alarms and locks and bolts and bars! She has installed such survivalist accouterments as a gun cubby and a swivel counter, and has made sure her house is fitted with louvered closets so she can re-experience the trauma of her babysitting days any time she chooses! Ha ha, she reminded me a bit of Rambo in his final adventure, Last Blood!

Between installing floodlights and target shooting at mannequins, she has found the time to have a daughter, played by Judy Greer from The Descendants and Jurassic World! But her paranoid ways have driven her daughter away, and Laurie’s penchant for wine-guzzling and angry non-sequiturs even have her granddaughter, a teen who calls Laurie “grandmother” as though she were addressing Mrs. Manson Mingott from The Age of Innocence instead of Laurie Strode from Halloween, looking at her a bit askance!

But what about Michael, you ask? Well, he’s been in an institution, standing on a checkerboard floor and attended to by another crazy doctor now that Loomis is long gone! The new headshrinker is Haluk Bilginer from Ishtar, and his idea of therapy is to let a pair of dimbulb podcasters approach Michael on his checkerboard floor and dangle the old Shatner mask in front of him! Ha ha, of course these podcasters are made short work of once Michael escapes his checkerboard and heads back to Haddonfield!

Will Patton from The Puppet Masters plays the local lawman, and there are other assorted victims or potential victims wandering around the town! Michael enjoys a little welcome-home killing spree once he arrives in Haddonfield, which we the audience mainly observe from outside the windows! It’s a pretty effective sequence! Meanwhile, Laurie, her daughter, her granddaughter, and the good-time comedy slaphead dad who seems like a holdover from more lighthearted David Gordon Green projects, are all arguing about whether Laurie is too paranoid or not paranoid enough; and Michael, who is emphatically not related to Laurie this time around (phew!) nevertheless seems to have some kind of Laurie Strode homing beacon implant which has him on a steady course toward the strapped granny’s security castle!

Head-bashing is Michael’s favored killing method this time around, frequently with messy results! Even Laurie catches a bonk, though a non-fatal one! Yes, there’s significantly more grue than in the original picture, which features approximately zero Special Makeup Effects but is a far superior movie nevertheless! I think that should go without saying, but after all, this is a movie review, ha ha, so critical comparisons like that are part of the game! This new one isn’t the worst potato on the block though - it’s entertaining enough, and does a fine job of making Michael a primal force of evil and all that, but it never does manage to bring us that skittering-leaves October atmosphere the original provided so satisfyingly, even though it was shot in the summer and on a much lower budget!

It’s always a pleasure to see Jamie Lee Curtis on screen though, and I appreciated that they kept it reasonably simple and didn’t try to add family connections, cult antics, or supernatural mumbo-de-jumbo! I give this newest Halloween two dollops of peanut butter!

Burl reviews Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle! (1994)

 

With a big bouquet of bon mots, it’s Burl, here to blab about a biopic! Well, a sort of a biopic anyway - it concentrates mainly on one particular chunk of its subject’s life! The subject is Dorothy Parker, the chunk is the Roaring Twenties, mostly, and the movie is Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle!

Jennifer Jason Leigh from Eyes of a Stranger and Grandview U.S.A., using a more languorous variant of the accent she sported that same year in The Hudsucker Proxy, plays the feisty wordsmith, who’ll throw back a drink and toss out a quip faster than you can sing exclavius! As the picture begins, she’s slaving away writing reviews at Vanity Fair alongside her friend Robert Benchley, played with astonishing amiability by Campbell Scott from Singles and The Daytrippers! The relationship between these two, which is platonic but suffused with tender regret and longing, as well as a fond formality which has them addressing one another as “Mrs. Parker” and “Mr. Benchley,” is the emotional spine of the movie, and was to me a stirring one!

The centerpiece of the film, ha ha, is of course the Algonquin Round Table, which we see the genesis of as Parker, Benchley and the many witticists of their acquaintance gather at the storied Gotham hotel for lunch, filling a booth as more and more of them arrive and causing the exasperated maître d’ (Wallace Shawn, back in a restaurant again as in My Dinner With Andre, but not a patron this time) to finally roll in a big round table and let this gang of tongue-runners do their thing!

The verbosophisticates include Lili Taylor from Mystic Pizza as author Edna Ferber; Sam Robards from Fandango as magaziniste Harold Ross; James Le Gros from Phantasm II as music critic Deems Taylor; Nick Cassavetes from Quiet Cool as playwright Robert Sherwood; Tom McGowan from True Crime as Alexander Woolcott; David Gow from Pin as Donald Ogden Stewart, and Martha Plimpton from The Goonies as Jane Grant! Ha ha, it’s quite a gallery! We also get Jennifer Beals from In the Soup and Vampire’s Kiss as Benchley’s undemonstrative wife Gertrude; Matthew Broderick from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as Charles MacArthur, who breaks Parker’s heart; Andrew McCarthy from Weekend at Bernie’s as Eddie, the drugs-addicted war veteran whom Parker married twice; and Keith Carradine from Thieves Like Us aw-shucksing it up as Will Rogers!

The picture follows Parker through her numerous heartbreaks and increasing reliance on the bottle, and includes many examples of her mordant wit and her difficulties in writing what, and for whom, she wanted! The drama is broken up, unnecessarily I feel, with monochromatic interstitials in which Leigh drawls bits of Parker doggerel! I suppose these were justified by Rudolph and Leigh as opportunities for people unfamiliar with Parker’s work to experience it, and therefore understand why they should be watching a two-hour tribute film about her, but I can’t agree with this logic! However, hearing that funny, sad, alarming verse is never a bad thing, so it’s not a fatal problem!

Leigh’s performance is a highly affected one, but after all she’s playing a highly affected person! It’s altogether very skilled work on Ms. Leigh’s part, and indeed the entire cast seems to have caught the spirit of the thing! Plenty of credit for this must surely go to the director, Alan Rudolph, who must have worked hard to create the sort of atmosphere in which these sorts of performances - naturalistic portrayals of highly artificial people - may flourish! My favourite is Scott’s performance as Benchley, though, possibly because he reminds me of a friend of mine, and because, as I said, his friendship with Mrs. Parker truly is touching! And he pulls off the Treasurer's Report beautifully!

Ha ha, Rudolph has made plenty of pictures, and some of them are very much Rudolph movies while others, like Endangered Species or an early number called Premonition, are not so much! Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle is perhaps the Rudolphiest of his movies however, and it’s no surprise to find Robert Altman’s name in the credits as a producer! Montreal does a very creditable job of standing in for New York, and Rudolph’s evocation of the period is exemplary! I liked Jan Kiesser’s cinematography too, and on the whole there’s something very sweet and cozy and lunchtime about this movie! Ha ha, I give Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle three banquettes!