Burl reviews Bullies! (1986)

Biff bang boom it’s Burl, ha ha! I’ve got a review of a vengeance picture for you – and not just any vengeance, but, as in the delightful Rolling Vengeance, the vengeance we’re talking about here is purely Canadian vengeance! The picture is called Bullies, and whatever other faults it may possess, faulty advertising is not one of them, for the movie certainly contains no shortage of bullies! And nobody likes bullies, ha ha!

The bullies are a family of louts called the Cullens, who lord it over the other denizens of their small British Columbia ski resort town! They’re both rich and violent, though neither condition is properly explained! At the beginning of the picture, they use their big truck to run an elderly couple right off the road, and some time later, a city family who were related to the old couple (but don’t realize they were murdered) come to take over their shop and house!

The city family has problems of their own even before they arrive in this benighted hamlet! The mom has a teenage son, but has divorced his father and remarried a rather milquetoast individual! The stepdad and the son don’t really get along, and after the nasty Cullen family begin their campaign of cityfolk intimidation the gulf widens further, since the son believes his stepdad to simply be a wimp!

Naturally the son befriends a Wise Old Indian, and I thought for sure this character would either be killed or reappear at a critical moment in the climax! I don’t want to spoil anything for you, but it turns out that neither happens – the Cullens burn up his totem poles and administer a savage punchdown, and he beats feet like any normal human would! I also thought maybe the craven townsfolk would rise up and help, but they don’t!

But you know who does help out, strangely enough? Thick Wilson! Ha ha, that’s right, the co-star of Sex With the Stars and Strange Brew appears as the town sheriff! He doesn’t want anything to do with policing the Cullens until the end of the picture, when he decides to heroically take a stand for about thirty seconds before they blast him to kingdom come! Ha ha, I’ll tell you, I sure wasn’t expecting Thick Wilson to appear! Plenty of other people maybe, but not Thick Wilson!

Anyway, the Cullens get really nasty before the movie’s over, stooping so low as to perform a rape on the mom! I really dislike those sorts of scenes in movies, but here at least it’s filmed as tastefully as it could be! Still pretty unsavory, though! That’s enough for the son, and he goes on a vengeance hunt, giving the Cullens a taste of their own nasty medicine! And the stepdad, who has been captured, helps out, proving he’s not the wimp everyone thought he was!

Ha ha, this is a violent picture, to be sure! There’s a nasty burnup, an impalement and some pokings! Naturally popguns come into play as well! But this is only the last part of the picture; the first hour or so is mainly a lot of chatter set against the mountains of B.C.! Paul “Humongous” Lynch, the director, is not as good at this sort of thing as his contemporary and countryman, William Fruet, who made a Canadian Vengeance picture called Baker County U.S.A.! (He also made Spasms, ha ha!) Nevertheless, Bullies is a little better than you might expect it to be, and the vengeance itself is pretty satisfying! I give it two hood antler racks!

Burl reviews Parasite! (1981)

Hi, it’s Burl comin’ at ya! Ha ha, yes, I’m here with a review of a movie, and this one goes by the name of Parasite! It’s an early picture from the mind of the man with the miniature obsession, Charles Band, the auteur behind Head of the Family and so many others! In his day, Band was a sort of late-model Roger Corman, and though I’ve never cared much for his pictures, I admire the fellow nonetheless!

Parasite, in its theatrical release at least, was a 3-D picture, and Band later followed it up with another dimensional epic, Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn, which I’ll review for you if I can ever find a copy to watch! Ha ha, haven’t seen that one in years! Both of these were a part of the early-80s 3-D boom which brought us Jaws 3-D, Friday the 13^th part 3, Silent Madness and Treasure of the Four Crowns, among others!

Parasite opens with a dream-flashback sequence which fools you into thinking it’s going to be a much more interesting picture than it actually is! A perpetually-sweaty scientist played by Robert Glaudini (the playwright who would later script Jack Goes Boating) has created a pair of parasites, which look like someone put a snake and Mayor McCheese into a telepod! A lab accident leads to one of them nestling inside his abdomen; he packs up the other in a thermos and hits the road! He drives a stolen ambulance through the desert and ends up in a little town called Joshua!

Joshua’s population consists of one elderly café proprietor; a gang of punks led by a featherhair named Reekus; a grumpy pump jockey; a farmer played by Demi Moore (later to become famous in No Small Affair and other films); and Miss Vivian Blaine, who plays an ex-showgirl innkeeper, and whom you might recall from the alien zombie picture The Dark!

It’s the future, apparently – 1992, ha ha! – so everyday things like gas pumps and coffee makers have little Plexiglas accoutrements stuck on them; but otherwise Joshua seems pretty resolutely stuck in the early 1980s! Glaudini flashes his ingratiating smile around town a bit, then sets up shop in Miss Vivian Blaine’s rooming house! After this there’s trouble involving the gang, a Lamborghini-driving bad guy, and, too infrequently, the parasites!

It would be great if there were more parasite attacks and much less dialogue like “Maybe a little rattlesnake tea will loosen your tongue a little!” It’s a very badly-directed production, but there are at least some comfortingly familiar faces in the cast! Rainbeaux Smith, from The Pom Pom Girls, Massacre at Central High and others, appears as a topless lady at the beginning of the picture, and we also get an appearance from Cherie Curie of The Runaways and Twilight Zone: The Movie! Reekus the gang leader is played by Luca Bercovici, who later directed the pretty terrible Gremlins rip-off Ghoulies!

The best thing about the picture is a sort of amorphous 80s quality you can’t pin down or properly explain, but only feel! The grainy, layered quality of the photography is appealing somehow, and the parade of objects or slimeballs launched into the camera make me wish I could see it in its original three dimensions! But it’s really a pretty terrible movie in the end: a plodding, repetitive, badly-written expansion on the dinner scene in Alien! I give Parasite one and a half pipe impalements!

Burl reviews Attack of the Killer Squirrel! (198?)

Hi, Burl here to review another of the strange home-made movies I found in a video store bin a decade ago, and am only getting around to watching now! This one is called Attack of the Killer Squirrel, and judging by the cars and clothing, it appears to have been made some time in the middle 1980s, likely somewhere in Ontario! (There's one more of these left to review, it should be said - and that one is probably the strangest of them all! Ha ha!)

This squirrel picture is similar to one of the other tapes I found, Attack of the Flesh Eating Tree!!, in that it depicts the unexpected aggression of a species previously considered harmless, but is different in many other key aspects! For instance, where the tree picture was shot on video, this one is a Super-8 production all the way! The filmmakers are clearly younger as well – of driving age, but only just! And these fellows had a bit more imagination than the tree filmmakers, though they still aren’t examples of protean cinematic genius as far as I can tell!

The picture begins with people being attacked by a renegade squirrel out in the woods! The little rodent manages to decapitate one of its victims, ha ha, so we get to see a mannequin head rolling around the forest floor! The victim, a policeman, collects his head and runs back to civilization, where he pops his head back on, dons an ascot, and teams up with a grizzled, curmudgeonly squirrel hunter named Quint! Ha ha, that’s where Attack of the Killer Squirrel follows the lead of Grizzly, Blades and Tentacles, and many other such univerbal titles, and becomes a rip-off/spoof of Jaws!

After more attacks and much hubbub involving a pair of craven, comic-relief constables, Quint and the policeman – who frequently removes his head or has it knocked off to humourous effect – drive out to an abandoned playground for a final encounter with the voracious little beast! The squirrel can fly at high speeds, so he’s truly a dangerous adversary! After the failure of a bazooka-like “secret weapon,” the pair must improvise a solution! They take a giant slingshot and fire the policeman’s head at the squirrel, and this flattens the rodent so that it may never kill again! The pair walk off into the sunset, exchanging murmured quips!

Ha ha, speaking of murmured quips, the soundtrack to this peculiar movie demands some attention! You’ve probably seen a few Robert Altman pictures and noted his technique of overlapping dialogue in a naturalistic way: Attack of the Killer Squirrel goes him one better by featuring a constant cacophony of utterances, some of which is intelligible and much of which is not! It’s as if you’re attending a cocktail party at which people are only talking about squirrels, but you have some water in your ears so you can’t properly hear what’s being said! Combined with the stutter and grain of Super-8, this bizarre post-dubbing produces an avant-garde, almost hypnotic effect!

It keeps you watching, I’ll say that much for it! It’s another production made by amateurs for fun, so ha ha, it would be unfair to heap a whole bunch of criticism and negative vibes on it! There’s some imagination here (the death of Robert Shaw in Jaws is recreated on a playground slide, for instance, though this Quint doesn't get eaten), some effort put into the trick effects, and some good-natured playfulness; and on top of all this it was actually shot on film, so I’m going to give Attack of the Killer Squirrel two visible squirrel propulsion wires!

Burl reviews Hollywood High! (1976)

Hi, Burl here to review a Teen Sex Comedy! Ha ha, I remember being thrilled driving past Hollywood High on my first visit to Los Angeles, which after all was the alma mater for movie stars from Judy Garland to Lon Chaney Jr. to Alan Hale Jr! And the whole concept of a “Hollywood High” seemed both unreal and deeply enviable to someone who’d suffered through three years at a boring old regular high school!

Was an even suntan or a wickedly-painted boogie van good for extra credit at Hollywood High? Ha ha, did the students go on field trips to the movie studios and the beach? This truly must have been a unique and exemplary place to get an education, and what better way to get the real story than to watch a movie called Hollywood High!

The movie began just like any old cheerleader or carhop movie, with four girls driving around in a convertible yammering inanities; and ha ha, I have to admit my heart sank a little! But I kept watching! Beer helped (real beer, not the water the characters in this movie drink!), as did the fact that the four ladies – Jan, Candy, Monica and an especially dumb one named Bebe – made their way immediately to the beach to splash around in the surf for minutes on end, clad in the teeny-weeniest string bikinis the mid-70s had to offer! They meet an irritating Mexican stoner stereotype named Frasier Mendoza, and together they all smoke some pot, in a scene with all the solemnity, but none of the consequences, of an After-School Special! Then everybody dances!

Eventually some boyfriends show up, and one of them is called “The Fenz,” and he spends a good deal of time saying “Ayyy!” and “Fenz needs another beer!” and “There can be only one Fenz!” The girls’ adventures involve trying to find a private place to make love with their fellas; orbiting about this stunted spine are encounters with a midget garage mechanic called Big Dick (shades of Malibu Hot Summer!) and a sassy old movie star named June East; classroom scenes with the über-flamboyant Greek History teacher Mr. Flowers or the horny French instructress Miss Crotch; a food fight; and multiple run-ins with a cop! When the cop’s interference becomes too much to bear, they spray him with whipping cream, stuff a banana in his mouth and pickles up his nose, and break a watermelon over his head! Then they pants him, and he turns out to be wearing garters and runs away in fast motion! Ha ha! After that, it’s back to June East’s mansion in the hills, where first The Fenz and then the rest of the boys are treated to a marathon session of geriatric lovemaking! The whole saga ends with the girls running around topless, then turning to the camera and saying, in succession, “This” “Is” “The” “End!”

Ha ha, but even with all of this going on, Hollywood High is a particularly dull and boring 70s Teen Sex Comedy, and it didn’t even provide much insight into what going to Hollywood High in that era was really like! It was the only movie ever directed by the late, legendary Patrick Wright, the actor so familiar from pictures like If You Don’t Stop It… You’ll Go Blind! and Roller Boogie, so for that reason it has some real curiosity value! There’s also a sequel, which I might review for you some time soon! But for now, I’ll just have to give Hollywood High one hydraulic car lift!

Burl reviews Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade! (1989)

Ha ha, yi-yi-yi-yi, it’s Burl! I’m here to review the third and should’ve-been-final Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade! This is the one that features a delightful performance from Sean Connery as Indiana Jones’s father, one of the most perfect pieces of casting (Scots accent notwithstanding) since Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl in Popeye!

The Indiana Jones movies are one of those series in which each entry is just a little bit (or, by the time you get to the Crystal Skull, a lot) worse than their predecessor! But all of them, or the first three anyway, qualify as robustly entertaining, if hocus-pocus filled, slabs of primo Hollywood entertainment! Ha ha, ever since I sat in the theatre and stared wide-eyed at the spiders and snakes and melting faces of the original chapter (while idly wondering how Indy could ride a submarine out into the middle of the ocean), I’ve been an unabashed fan of the series!

This installment is as propulsive and spectacular as any of them, while leaning even more on the hocus and the pocus and the soggy scenes of myth-swallowing! It’s all about the search for the Holy Grail, which you’d think would be slightly dangerous territory given the spectacular Monty Python treatment of the same subject just fifteen years earlier! But the Indy picture negotiates that obstacle simply by being very exciting and frequently funny! For a movie which features Nazis, book-burning and a cameo by Hitl*r, it really is quite amusing!

There are lots of glances back toward the other Indy pictures, like a reference to the Ark of the Covenant and a scene involving not snakes or bugs but rats! There are even references to future Spielberg pictures – for example, he does an early version of that gag from Schindler’s List in which a single bullet is used to kill several people standing in a row!

There’s a whole opening sequence in which River Phoenix, star of Stand By Me and Explorers, plays a young Indy, and demonstrates how he collected his chin scar, his fear of snakes, his taste for the whip and his signature headgear all in the same eventful day! Then the movie gives us a few relatively quiet scenes showing Indy in teaching mode and hanging out with Denholm Elliot – I was fond of these scenes in Lost Ark and felt their absence in Temple of Doom – and after that it’s off to the races!

There’s something very 1989 about this picture, as opposed to the staunch 1982ness of the first one, and for that reason alone Last Crusade stands as a lesser entry! The villains, too, are a little weak, even though one’s a N*zi! But I still can’t help but enjoy it, particularly when we get a wonderful zeppelin scene, or Connery says, apropos of his diary, “I should have shent it to the Marxsh Brothersh!"

For these delights and others, I award Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade two and a half Xshs marking the shpot!

Burl reviews Death Warrant! (1990)

Ding-bong-wao, it’s Burl, here to review you an action picture! This is one of those Jean Claude Van Damme movies, but an earlier one! Ha ha, he’s fairly young here, not an old and depressed robot like he was in Universal Soldier: Regeneration! He’s as vigorous a punchfighter as ever in this particular picture, which is known by the title Death Warrant!

This is one of The Muscles From Brussles’s leaner and meaner productions, clocking in at an even 90 minutes just like Commando! It also features a credit for Special Makeup Effects, which I always like to see in an action picture! And indeed there are a few Special Makeup Effects on view here, though in fact the movie wasn’t quite as violent as I expected it to be! That’s all right with ol’ Burl, since violence in pictures isn’t exactly my first priority!

In these earlier Van Damme movies it was always fun to see how they’d explain away his accent! Sometimes he was a French Foreign Legionnaire and sometimes a Cajun, and the logical allez-vite-la-twists reached a sort of apotheosis in Sudden Death, in which he sported an accent merely because, as a lad, his character had spent his summers in Quebec! Ha ha!

Here he plays a Mountie, which is pretty great, because near the beginning, when he’s going rogue in L.A. to catch the nefarious Sandman, a local policechief shouts “This is Los Angeles, ha ha, not Canada! We have procedures!” Ha ha, Rodney King will be glad to hear that, Mister Policechief!

Well, Van Damme ignores this and shoots the Sandman about a half a dozen times, then says “Ha ha, you’re under arrest!” A little while later, those very same Angelinos ask our intrepid Mountie to go undercover at the local prison, where inmates are being spiked through the back of the head! His job is to pretend to be a prisoner and find out who’s behind these brutal pokings!

He does this by immediately asking everyone in the prison who could be behind the brutal pokings, which doesn’t make him look like an undercover policeman at all, ha ha! And then, when the Sandman turns out somehow not to have died when Van Damme blasted him, and is transferred to the prison, the poor Mountie has a lot more trouble all of a sudden! Punchfights aplenty ensue!

There’s a not-bad supporting cast here! George Dickerson, the always-smiling actor from Blue Velvet, plays a character who turns out to be just the sort of fellow anyone who’s seen that film would expect him to be! Benson himself, Robert Guillaume, plays the Wise Old Black Lifer! The nasty head guard is played by Art La Fleur from Cobra and Zone Troopers! Naturally Al “Die Hard” Leong shows up! So it’s a pretty fun gallery of familiar faces!

It’s not a memorable picture, and the director, Deran Serafian, who made Alien Predators, and whose dad made Eye of the Tiger and also the great Vanishing Point, isn’t all that marvelous an action director! The punchfights are a little drab, despite the flashy lighting from DP Russell “Pet Sematary 2” Carpenter! Altogether, I’m going to give Death Warrant one and a half hilarious furnace jumpouts!

Burl reviews It's My Turn! (1980)

It’s Burl’s tur-r-r-rnnn… to review a new picture for you, ha ha! It’s actually an older picture, made somewhere around 1980! I’ve lately been interested in middlebrow pictures from this period, the late 1970s into the early 80s, and I think I’ve finally figured out why! I was a kid at that time, and the adult world was mysterious to me; so maybe somewhere deep inside I believe I can solve all these long-forgotten mysteries by watching what the adults were up to, in films at least, as an adult myself!

It’s a pretty hair-brained theory any way you slice it, but it’s my excuse for watching pictures like It’s My Turn! I imagined this would be a boring, pastel hunk of Self-Actualizing Woman-slash-Woody Allen-lite: An Unmarried Woman meets Annie Hall, done without any taste, talent or verve! Well, I was right to a point – it does seem at times to be a very purposeful amalgam of those two movies, featuring as it does Jill Clayburgh acting like Diane Keaton; but beyond that it actually had some pleasant surprises in store for ol’ Burl! Ha ha!

Clayburgh stars as, if I’m recalling this correctly, Kate Gunzinger, a mathematics whiz who leaves her home in Chicago, and her boyfriend, Charles Grodin (who frequently ended up in roles like this, didn’t he, ha ha – Seems Like Old Times for Grodin once again!), to spend a weekend in New York! She’s there to take a job interview for an academic position in the Big Apple, and also to attend her father’s wedding to Beverly “Gunslinger” Garland! Ha ha, Gunslinger Marries Gunzinger! Turns out that Beverly’s son is Michael Douglas, an ex-ballplayer, and Clayburgh and Douglas spend the weekend getting to know one another better, ha ha, before they become step-siblings!

The movie is a series of quite long, dialogue-heavy scenes, which makes it seem like it was adapted from a stage play even though it wasn’t! It attempts, and surprisingly often succeeds, at a sort of flibbertigibbet honesty about matters of the heart, and on top of all this there’s a scene in a circa-1980 hotel games room, complete with foosball and tabletop computer baseball! Ha ha, it’s in moments like that you forget that there’s just about zero romantic chemistry between Jill Clayburgh and Michael Douglas!

It’s nice to see Beverly Garland in a different sort of a role than I’m used to, and there’s also an appearance by Daniel Stern, famed for his role in C.H.U.D., as another math whiz! But I think the Stern role should have been played by Keith “Christine” Gordon, ha ha – he would have been perfect! Even so, this was a surprisingly compelling little movie that rarely went exactly where you thought it would go, and ended in a fairly abstract and unresolved manner, which ol’ Burl always likes! Ha ha, “rerouting through Toronto” is used as a euphemism for something, but you can’t be quite sure what! I give It’s My Turn two and a half daddy-daughter haircuts!

Burl reviews Edgar G. Ulmer – The Man Off-Screen! (2004)

Hi, Burl here, to review a documentary about a fine director of olden times, Edgar Ulmer! The movie is called Edgar G. Ulmer – The Man Off-Screen, and it purports to give us a portrait of the man behind such wonderful motion pictures as The Black Cat, Detour and of course Strange Illusion!

The picture certainly has a lot going for it! Ulmer’s daughter participates – she was one of the producers in fact, I believe – and has a lot of insight, of course! And then there’s a wide range of interviewees, like Joe “Matinee” Dante, or John “¡Three Amigos!” Landis, or Wim “Lightning Over Water” Wenders! These are engaging and intelligent fellows, and they have plenty to say about Ulmer from an informed film fan’s remove! Ann Savage, the star of both Ulmer’s Detour and Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, shows up too, and gives a pretty good account of the making of Ulmer’s classic six-day wonder! The lead actor from Strange Illusion is also in there, and it’s great to see him too!

But the movie is hampered by various attempts at style which don’t really come off! Presumably inspired by the road movie ethos of Detour, many of the interviews take place in moving cars, which is hardly fatal, but is both distracting and a little misleading! It’s not as though Ulmer was so well known for his love of filming in cars or anything! You may as well film an Ingmar Bergman doc entirely in a car just because he made Wild Strawberries! Ha ha!

There are other location choices that are mildly off-putting, like the big Vienna Ferris wheel! Ha ha, I’m not saying that should only be used in a documentary about Carol Reed, but that should only be used in a documentary about Carol Reed! And there are two movie nerds who get interviewed in a Hollywood graveyard, and that doesn’t really work either! The bits with the car in the studio in front of a back projection don’t work they way they’re supposed to either – something about the way they’re shot totally fails to bring us back into that creaky Monogram studio in the mid-Forties the way it’s intended to! A noble idea, but the execution just doesn’t make it!

I don’t want to be too down on this documentary production, though! As I say, there are many interesting interviewees and fascinating facts! The filmmakers may have ended up with a bit of a dog’s breakfast style-wise, but at least they tried to mix it up a bit and go beyond the standard talking-heads-and-clips thing! And they deserve kudos for making a documentary on Ulmer at all, I say! And an extra bonus is that the DVD of this documentary includes an entire Ulmer picture, Isle of Forgotten Sins, as a bonus feature! Ha ha, look for a review of that one some time soon!

Well, maybe Edgar G. Ulmer – The Man Off-Screen didn’t rise quite to my exacting standards of documentary bio-pics about B movie directors, but there’s nevertheless much to admire here, not least the fact that it exists at all! I give this picture a hearty two Hollywood strip malls!

Burl reviews Mean Streets! (1973)

Ha ha, paisano, it’s Burl here! I’d like to review the first fully-formed Martin Scorsese picture, Mean Streets, which I recently watched for the first time in many, many years! Turns out it’s a pretty good picture, even better than I remembered!

Yes, it’s a low-budget movie, and was at one time going to be an exploitation picture for Roger Corman, like Scorsese’s previous movie Boxcar Bertha! Ha ha! But Corman wanted to make the characters black, because that was big at the time, and Scorsese decided that wasn’t in keeping with his vision of the picture, which was meant to be a memoir of his own youth in Little Italy!

It’s a strange movie without much narrative drive – a hangin’ out picture, as some might describe it! It’s set in a section of New York whose inhabitants seem to be perpetually celebrating some saint or another’s feast day! Against this background we meet a quartet of, for lack of a better word, friends, who all seem to operate on the fringes of the mob world we see so much more of in other Scorsese movies!

That was something that surprised me, actually! The rascals in this picture – Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro and a couple of other fellows – are mostly just peeking in through the venetians at the real mobsters, and engaging in their own extralegal struggles like children playing at imitating the adult world! Keitel’s character is the most mature and likeable of the pals, but he’s plagued by insecurity, indecisiveness and some vague but powerful feelings of guilt! He’s taken on De Niro’s volatile Johnny Boy as a sort of project whereby he can achieve some kind of redemption! But Johnny Boy is a difficult project, since he owes money to just about everybody and seems, in his cavalier refusal to pay any of it back, almost to have a crazy death wish!

In the meantime, Keitel is having an af*air with the young lady who lives next door, who happens to be De Niro’s cousin and a sufferer of ep*lepsy! He’s got to keep this a secret from everybody, since his Moustache Pete of an uncle disapproves of dating ladies who are, as he puts it, “sick in the head!” Of course it all comes to a violent climax, which is notable for being one of the few gun-violent scenes in the picture! Ha ha, speaking of gun violence, there’s an amusing apropos-de-rien sequence in which a drunken David “Armed Response” Carradine is gunned down by a longhair played by his own brother, Robert “The Pom Pom Girls” Carradine, and for a while simply refuses to die!

It’s an excellent picture, rich and atmospheric, with all the kinetic energy we’d expect from Scorsese! It’s certainly for the best he didn’t do the blaxploitation Corman version, but I do admit I’d like to see how that one would have turned out! Ha ha, for its verve and accomplishment, I give Mean Streets three and a half spraying neck wounds!

Burl reviews Weird Science! (1985)

Fats, man, ha ha, it’s me, Burl! Yes, the picture I thought I’d review today is that gem in the John Hughes cineverse, Weird Science! Ha ha, a lot of people will tell you their favourite is Curly Sue, but not me! Of course, I’ve never seen Curly Sue, so who knows, maybe when I do I’ll think it’s just great!

But we are here to talk Weird Science, which is apparently facing a Full Metal Jacket-style soap-beating in the form of an impending remake! Ha ha, I know I’ve promised to review all the movies, but I’m not sure I’ll ever bring myself to watch that one! Not that the original is my most beloved picture ever or anything, but still, most anything enjoyable about it stems directly from either its 80s provenance or its performances!

Gary and Wyatt are two high school buddies in the Hughesian kingdom of Shermer, the fictional Chicago suburb in which most of his movies take place! Nobody likes these two geeks, and they’re pretty hopeless with the ladies! But they have a little sleepover and manage to use computer power, hocus-pocus and just a dash of weird science to create a full, life-sized lady, whom they name Lisa! And Lisa has magical powers in the bargain! Ha ha, not bad for a Friday night in Shermer!

Well, Lisa is played by the lady from Hard to Kill, and the first thing she does for these young hufnagels is to take them to a blues bar, the sort of club you only find in movies like this and, apparently, Adventures in Babysitting! (Ha ha, that’s a picture I’ve never seen! Should I give it a look, do you think?) There we suffer through a long, drawn out Old Bluesman impersonation from Anthony Michael Hall! Ha ha, crazy insane? Insane? Crazy? Answer: yes!

Well, the rest of the plot involves Gary and Wyatt suffering humiliations at the hands of Robert Downey Jr. from The Avengers and Due Date, and Robert Rusler from A Nightmare on Elm Street part 2 and Vamp, and then having a big party where they find their inner courage after a biker attack (ha ha, the terrific Michael Berryman shows up, of all people!) and learn it’s best to try and just be themselves! Blech, ha ha! They also defeat the mighty Chet, played by Bill Paxton! He’s pretty funny, and it’s nice to see those gun-toting jarhead type of guys get the treatment they deserve!

It’s an expensive looking picture because of all the crazy destruction that happens at the party, and the supernatural reversal of that destruction later on! Thanks to the cast it’s often very funny too, though not for the reasons it thinks! Downey get a ha ha from me just for saying “You do!” so brightly in response to a question from Lisa, and Paxton gets one for the line “What are they doing in there?!?!” It’s all in the delivery, ha ha! I also liked Gary’s explanation of his father’s profession!

There’s certainly not much to the movie, and it’s frequently very dumb, and not once does it come close to making any sense whatsoever! But ol’ Burl can roll with that, ha ha! I’ll always enjoy it for reasons that are entirely my own, and I guess that on reflection I’ll award Weird Science two and a half Rex Harrison hats!