Burl reviews The Grand Budapest Hotel! (2014)

Ho ho, it’s Burl here, reviewing a new Wes “Moonrise Kingdom” Anderson picture, The Grand Budapest Hotel! I was really looking forward to this one, because its particular milieu, which is to say Central Europe between the wars, is a time and place which fascinates me and always has! Ha ha, such rich and marbled tales have come out of this twenty-year period: curdled fairy tales arising from a new era of fatalism!

Evidently Anderson feels the same way, because he’s plunged into this storied environment with the enthusiasm of Steve Zissou exploring a sea cavern! Ha ha, like some other stories I know and love, specifically Roald Dahl’s “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” The Grand Budapest Hotel contains stories within stories, each of them reaching farther back in time! (Ha ha, I suspect this movie to have been influenced as much by Dahl as it was by Stefan Zweig and Bruno Schultz!)

The core story, told by F. Murray “Inside Llewyn Davis” Abraham to Jude “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows” Law, concerns the legendary, perfumed concierge of the titular hotel, M. Gustave H,. played by Ralph “Skyfall” Fiennes! He takes on a protégé, young lobby boy Zero, and is promptly accused of the murder of an old lady, one of the many old ladies with whom he dallies! Soon he’s on the run, and a veritable galaxy of characters are either chasing him (the old lady’s savage, greedy son, Adrien “Midnight in Paris” Brody, his murderous factotum Willem “Streets of Fire” Dafoe, and a policeman played by Edward “Fight Club” Norton) or helping him (young Saoirese “How To Catch A Monster” Ronan, a baker’s assistant; Jeff “Into the Night” Goldblum, a lawyer; Mathieu “Cosmopolis” Amalric, a butler; Harvey “Mean Streets” Keitel, a prisoner; and Bill “Meatballs” Murray, another concierge and a member of The Society of the Crossed Keys)!

A curious thing about many of these actors is that almost all of them have worked for David Cronenberg at one time or another! Ha ha, I found that curious and amusing! At any rate, the picture is fast-paced and madcap and as overstuffed as a goochie-cake! It may lack the immediate engagement invited by some other Wes Anderson pictures, but there sure is a lot to look at! Ha ha, I liked the (ostensibly) old-style trick effects, straight out of Guy Maddin’s great picture Careful or even Ernst Lubitsch’s Eternal Love, both mountain movie like this one; the funicular train (which didn’t get enough screen time if you ask me!); the sudden moments of violence or gore; the performances; and the great scene with all the concierges calling one another!

Altogether a fine and entertaining night out at the movies, and I’m certainly going to see this one again, just to catch all the details and gags I must have missed the first time around! I’m going to give The Grand Budapest Hotel three and a half severed fingers!

Burl reviews The Lost Continent! (1968)

Ha ha! I reviewed this twice by accident! Here are both reviews, starting with Review 1:

Que pasa, es Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to review a real samolean of a motion picture, the 1968 Hammer Films quandary The Lost Continent! This is such an oddball movie that I’m not sure how to even begin talking about it, ha ha!

Probably the best place to begin is the theme song, which sounds like a parody version of what a theme song to a movie like this would be! It’s a louche, loungy number, sung in a confessional tone that suggests we all, at one time or another, have found ourselves trapped on a lost continent! Not metaphorically, either, ha ha!

Anyway, it’s a great way to start off this picture! It’s a boat film and also, like Casablanca and Wages of Fear, a motley-gang-of-stateless-fugitives picture, two microgenres I’m fond of! The boat, leaving Africa and bound for Caracas, is captained by grumpy Eric Porter, well-known from Hands of the Ripper, and all of its passengers have voluminous backstories that would take too long to detail here! Suffice it to say they’re all desperate, and many of them are outright criminals!

Well, turns out the boat is carrying a bunch of explosives which blow up on contact with water, and wouldn’t you know it, there’s a hole in the side of the boat and a hurricane coming just as they’re about to enter the mysterious Sargasso Sea! Naturally there’s a mutiny – the crew is led by the great Michael “The Reptile” Ripper, who really ought to have played the bartender instead so he could get more screen time, ha ha – and after some fighting and action and a damp night in a lifeboat, our captain, the passengers and a few loyal crew find themselves back on the ship, but trapped in voracious, man-eating seaweed, which is apparently the continent of the title!

And of course that brings us to the true heart of this picture: monster attacks! Ha ha, the seaweed is bad enough, but then up pops a giant octopus creature, which grabs and gobbles up a weird moustacheman; and then we have a giant crab creature with the most grotesque chitter-chatter mouth you could ever imagine! It grabs an unfortunate guy in its claws, then fights a giant scorpion! And of course we have the band of Spanish conquistadors, ruled by a teenager and a guy in a funny hat, who toss their enemies into a pit that contains nothing but a horrible chomping mouth, sort of a mini-Sarlacc! All of these beasties were created by Robert Mattey, who, having made the squid in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and who would go on to make the shark in Jaws, knows a bit about seamonster creation!

The conquistadors and all the other people stuck on this floating seaweed patch used shoulder-balloons to walk around without getting sucked down, and I must say that’s every bit as absurd-looking as it sounds! But in a picture as absurd as this, it fits in nicely!

I like a good goofnugget from time to time, and this one fit the bill! So what if it’s silly, so what if it has a little more soap opera than I would like, and seems stuck in the weeds as much as the freighter it’s set upon! Ha ha, it’s still a more adult version of those Doug McClure fantasy pictures that came along a decade later, and that counts for a lot in old Burl’s crazy book! I enjoyed this picture, and would like to give The Lost Continent two and a half shoulder balloons!

 

Now here's Review 2!

 

By all the seaweed, it’s Burl, here to tell you about a strange movie of swampy proportions! It’s a Hammer picture, but you’ll look in vain for Dracula or the Frankenstein! No, the creatures here are of a more fanciful nature, and we don’t find them in the mountains of Carpathia or the castles of old Austria! No, we find those bizarre monsters on… The Lost Continent!

Now the first thing we should clarify here is that we’re not talking about a continent, but more of a small atoll connected by a huge floating patch of carnivorous seaweed! Ha ha! Now, with that out of the way, here’s the story - and it’s a pretty simple one! We’re aboard a small ship of fools, which flees a North African port on its way to Venezuela! Everyone on board has a solid reason for not wanting to be in Africa any more, as they’re a collection of unfortunates, ne’er-do-wells, dipsomaniacs and complainers!

Eric Porter from Hands of the Ripper is Captain Lansen, desperate to keep his old tub afloat; the most prominent passenger, meanwhile, is played in a key of sad regret by Hildegard Knef from Fedora! The rest of the passengers and crew are a collection of famous British film faces, including Suzanna Leigh from The Deadly Bees and Lust for a Vampire as an oversexed heiress; Nigel Stock from The Great Escape and Young Sherlock Holmes as the doctor/father she hates; Tony Beckley from Revenge of the Pink Panther and When A Stranger Calls as the perpetual drinker who sobers up and does a 360-degree personality change; James Cossins from The Horror of Frankenstein and The Man With the Golden Gun as the chief engineer; and of course Hammer staple Michael Ripper from The Reptile and Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb and so many others!

For quite a while this motley gang sails, argues, drinks, fights, and loves, but the discovery of dozens of barrels of high explosive triggered by contact with water causes some consternation, and the lifeboat flight of most of the crew! Then the boat is mired in seaweed and the captain and his passengers become aware that a strange civilization of conquistadors, led by a teenager called El Supremo, who is in turn controlled by a guy in KKK headwear, want to take their supplies and feed them to monsters!

Yes, monsters! After the interminable soap-opera lead-up, the last half hour of the picture is all biting seaweed and Aiiii, scungelli! A creature that seems to be all mouth lives in the conquistador’s bilge; a tentacle beast steals away a creepy moustacheman; and the insufferably chipper bartender finally loses his jollity when he’s grabbed by a large biting crab! Ha ha! I have to say, these disgusting monsters really captured my heart, and they were built by none other than Robert A. Mattey, who went on from this experience to build the equally convincing shark in Jaws!

Ha ha, this is a weird movie, and seems a bore here and there, but redeems itself with the monster parade of the last third! The acting is earnest, the theme song ridiculous and wonderful (it would fit well on a mix tape with the song from The Green Slime), and the photography is colourful and lurid, if frequently too reliant on clouds of bilious fog for its atmosphere! I declare The Lost Continent a bad film that’s very much worth watching, and I award it two shoulder balloons!

Burl reviews The Malibu Bikini Shop! (1986)

Ha ha, bikinis! Yes, it’s Burl here, reviewing up a little bikini action for you with a carefree funtime picture called The Malibu Bikini Shop! Ha ha, this is a real balletomaniac of a picture, straight-up manna for people who enjoy looking at ladies in bikinis! It’s not an especial passion of mine, but I also certainly don’t mind it, and so when I put on The Malibu Bikini Shop the other night, I was ready for whatever it had to offer!

But we should start with that title, because it’s pretty obvious the movie takes place in Santa Monica or Venice, and certainly not in Malibu! Ha ha, I guess someone thought The Bikini Shop was a pretty bland title – and it is – but then couldn’t think of anything better than to stick “Malibu” in there! Or maybe Malibu was the hip, happenin’ place to be in 1986, and the very mention of it assured box-office success; or maybe someone was a big fan of that great picture Malibu Beach! Ha ha, who knows!

Whatever the case, this partcular lighthearted laff-fest begins with a fatal drowning accident! Yes, frisky Aunt Ida putters off on a jet ski into riptide territory, and that’s the last anyone sees of her! She wills her house and her beachfront bikini shop to her two nephews, Alan and Todd! Alan, played by Michael David Wright from No Small Affair, plays a button-down, uptight business major, who has just collected his degree and is preparing for a life with his shrill, princess fiancée Jane, and a job with his plutocrat father-in-law-to-be! Ha ha, seems pretty horrible! (Wright, by the way, became a real-life executive later on, so maybe his performance was not so fictional!)

Todd on the other hand is played by Bruce Greenwood from Star Trek Into Darkness, and he’s a slap-happy beach bum with no business acumen or respect for traditional values! He’s quite happy to spend the rest of his life running the bikini shop and creepily watching ladies change through two-way mirrors he’s had installed; while Alan, at the behest of Jane, wants to be rid of it with a quick sale and then move on with the rest of his boring, ordered life! Ha ha, therein lies the central conflict in this picture!

But the plot hardly matters, because the true foundation of this picture is bikinis! Ha ha, it’s bikinis all the way down! There are all sorts of scenes of ladies trying on skimpy bikinis, or displaying them in ad-hoc shows! And there’s a crazy little music video that pops up toward the end of the picture, and of course, ha ha, it’s bikini-centric!

But the plot occasionally reasserts itself, as when Jane suddenly appears in the middle of all the bikini action and makes a dreadful, whining nuisance of herself! I have to give credit to Debra Blee, well-known from The Beach Girls, who throws herself into the thankless role of Jane and becomes exactly what I imagine she’s supposed to be: intensely annoying, almost unwatchable!

Of course there are some big party scenes and other shenanigans, and the picture positively overflows with bikini shots! It has a mostly harmless funtime atmosphere, except for some of the less-savory aspects, and nothing about it is surprising or challenging in any way, or very funny either! It’s brightly shot and has a reasonable amount of pep, and with all this studiously taken into consideration, I’m going to give The Malibu Bikini Shop two dashiki-wearing Sonny Bono lookalikes!

Burl reviews The Hunt For Red October! (1990)

Ha ha, be glorious, our age-old motherland, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m here to review a submarine picture, The Hunt For Red October! Now, I like a submarine picture, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t say I like them as much as I thrill to a good dirigible movie! And I have a friend who counts submarine movies as his very favourite genre of them all, and so I have additional sympathy for them on that account!

This picture, based on the only Tom Clancy book I ever bothered to read – ha ha, flag-waving technothrillers are not so much my thing – begins with Soviet silver-fox sub driver Sean Connery guiding his new super-secret extra-fat submarine out into the sea with the intention of never taking it back! Marko Ramius is his name, and he wishes to defect, ha ha! (The whole movie, it should be noted, was a bit out of date geopolitically speaking by the time it came out in 1990!) His officers are of similar mind, so the only thing he’s got to do is evade the entire Soviet navy, ditch the crew and persuade the American he means them no harm!

And all the Americans do believe he means them harm except for one: Alec Baldwin! He plays a boffin called Jack Ryan who apparently has his PhD in Marko Ramius Studies! He also talks to himself a lot, which Baldwin sells as well as he can, but still comes off as a little silly! Anyway, there’s a long series of scenes in which Ryan tries to convince everyone from Admiral James Earl Jones (whom we recall from Conan the Barbarian) right through to sub captain Scott “The Keep” Glenn, and everybody in between!

This was John McTiernan’s next picture after Die Hard, so I remember going to see it in breathless anticipation of a thrilling action picture! It’s certainly not that, because model submarines just aren’t that exciting to watch! There’s a big explosion at the end, and a bit of a shootout too, but the movie is mostly lots of chatting! Still, it’s slickly done in the grand Hollywood style, so I won’t claim it’s not entertaining!

And as you know, I’m much more “ha ha” than “rah-rah,” so I was cheered to realize that, while the picture was certainly a grand celebration of all that was tough and manly about the military and intelligence forces, and of their hardware and their deep, abiding brotherhood, it was much less so, and much less stupidly so, than many other pictures! So it had that going for it! It’s still pretty kooky in parts, though!

The real attraction? Ha ha, that cast! You’ve got Connery and Baldwin, both solid, and Glenn and Jones giving fine support, and then other ringers like Sam “Jurassic Park III” Neill giving a touching performance as the Russian officer who only wants to live in Montana, and Peter “Lifeforce” Firth as a nasty Rooskie, and Joss Ackland and Courtney B. Vance and of course the Legend himself, Tim Curry! It’s a talented bunch, ha ha!

It tries very hard to make the situation as hair-raising and suspenseful as possible, but that means everything stops periodically so Jack Ryan can remind everyone of the dreadful stakes involved! This eventually begins to have the opposite effect of what is intended, and you’re left with a bunch of people standing around in an attractively-lit metal tube! Ha ha, it’s an okay Hollywood bunticulation, but on the whole I’m going to give The Hunt For Red October just one and a half caterpillar drives!

Burl reviews Susanna Pass! (1949)

Yippee-ki-yay, it’s Burl, roundin’ up another movie review for you! Ha ha, this one is, delightfully I feel, called Susanna Pass! It’s a Roy Rogers picture, which means of course that it co-stars both Dale Evans and The Smartest Horse In The Movies, Trigger!

I guess this is a Western – well, no doubt about it, actually! The thing that caused me a moment’s hesitation is that it’s a contemporary Western, with cars and trucks and radios and so forth! That’s always a bit strange! Ha ha, the action takes place in and around the beautifully-named Susanna Pass, where a kindly old man named Russell runs a fish hatchery, a nasty old man named Martin – Russell’s brother, as it happens – runs the local newspaper, and Roy Rogers is the game warden!

Meanwhile two escaped convicts arrive in the area! Bob is out for revenge against Martin, who set him up, and he also wants to get his hands on a vast reserve of oil he suspects is located beneath the fish hatchery lake! Roberts, the other convict, is just along for the ride, but happens to be a shady oil engineer! The two have a fight and Bob catches a poking! Ha ha, and after that there are a lot of plot details, several explosions and plenty of murders! Yes, this is perhaps one of the most murder-happy Roy Rogers movies ever made!

It’s the poor fish who take the most casualties, however! The bad guys keep blowing up the lake with dynamite, and fish are floating everywhere! Meanwhile Roy and a kung-fu ichthyologist named Doc, played by Dale Evans, appear perpetually close to having a romance, but it doesn’t ever happen! There are plenty of songs though, and a passle of fisticuffs, and at one point the whole movie stops to become a Jean Painlevé-style nature documentary so we can learn about how fish hatcheries work! Ha ha, and all of this is packed into about sixty-seven minutes!

I enjoyed the picture quite a lot, I must say! Roy maintains his pleasant, smiling veneer even through all the murders and double crosses! Also, the Trucolor photography is very lovely, and the locations are much prettier than the usual dusty Iverson’s Ranch trails we see in such pictures! I liked the whole fish hatchery thing too, and the fact that Roy was a proto-environmentalist battling nasty oilmen! In many ways it’s the flip side of the coin to Thunder Bay!

It’s a terrific little programmer, and even the comedy-relief Mexican father-daughter team were not as bad as one might expect! To my recollection, neither of them ever says “Ai-yee-yee-yee!” or talks about cucarachas! Dale Evans’ character is pretty progressive too – she’s a smart scientist who can take care of herself, and doesn’t fall simperingly in love with the cowpoke Roy the moment she sees him! Altogether I’d like to give Susanna Pass two and a half Riders of the Purple Sage!

Burl reviews Some Kind of Wonderful! (1987)

Hello, and a good day to you – it’s Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to review a movie that’s, curiously, quite close to my heart! That doesn’t mean I think it’s particularly good, or that I’d go so far as to recommend it to others, but I have a real soft spot for the thing! It’s a John Hughes picture – one he wrote and produced but did not direct, it should be noted – and it’s called Some Kind of Wonderful!

I recall seeing the picture on a double bill with something else, maybe that ape movie, Project X! I really should have been on a date to see that double feature, but I don’t think I was! Maybe I couldn’t think of a girl whose taste would encompass both movies; but that would have been a complete failure of imagination on my part, and a woeful underrating of the young ladies with whom I was schooled!

The main thing I loved about the picture was Mary Stuart Masterson, who may not have made a very convincing drummer, ha ha, but who looked terrific in a chauffeur suit! Heaven Help Us indeed! She plays Watts, presumably named after Charlie Watts, a young lady who speaks in goofy pseudo-epigrams (“Ha ha, don’t mistake paradise for a pair of long legs!”) and, judging from her drum head, is a Love & Rockets fan! In the 90s I knew and was powerfully attracted to a number of ladies with cropped, bleached-blonde hair, and I believe this character is to thank for that particular romantic avenue!

Anyway, if you’ve seen Pretty In Pink, the plot will seem familiar to you! (I hadn’t, and still haven’t seen that particular movie, so the repetition didn’t bother me!) There’s a young fellow, a working-class rapscallion named Keith, who has the aforementioned Watts for a best friend, but pines for a blowdry beauty called Miss Amanda Jones, just like in the Stones song, ha ha! The big twist is that, though Amanda moves among the rich and has a wealthy, perfidious boyfriend she herself lives in a literally wrong-side-of-the-tracks neighbourhood! Watts, meanwhile, secretly loves Keith, but he’s blind to that fact, and also to her infinite superiority to Miss Amanda Jones, to the point of seeming a little dull-witted!

Eric Stoltz, well known from The Wild Life, plays Keith, giving a strange, soft-spoken performance that’s out of place in a teen film, but welcome for precisely that reason! The twist with his character is that when he unveils his portrait of Miss Amanda Jones, it's hilariously misproportioned and generally terrible! Ha ha, I love Movie Art! John “Beverly Hills Cop” Ashton plays Keith’s dad, who’s obsessed with getting him into a business college, but Keith is more interested in being an artist than any post-secondary education! (Ha ha, art school seems never to have occurred to him!) The twist with his character is that he’s not on the whole a bad guy, and also that he doesn’t give up his pro-business school stance at the end of the picture!

The other thing I really liked about the picture was the soundtrack! Ha ha, plenty of great tunes, and a really great pennywhistle version of the Elvis standard “Can’t Help Falling In Love!” It was also quite nice to see the threatening thug characters led by Elias Koteas, who I suppose are meant to be punkrockers (a caste Hughes never successfully grappled with!), turn out to be extraordinarily helpful, nice guys! Ha ha, as an art-class punkrocker myself, I quite appreciated that!

Howard “Grumpier Old Men” Deutch was the director, and he manages to pull off a reasonable, if bland, simulacrum of the Hughes style! It might have been interesting to see a little more pep in the thing overall, but I guess you can’t have everything! It’s hardly a groundbreaking picture, but it hit me in the sweet spot back in my happy schooldays, and so I give Some Kind of Wonderful two and a half mongers!

Burl reviews The Banker! (1989)

Hi, it’s Burl here with a review of a pretty goofy thriller! Ha ha, it’s called The Banker, and it’s about a killer investment banker who spends his days in the corner office and his nights all slicked up with facepaint and a crossbow, liquidating assets! Ha ha!

It’s a police procedural-meets-psychokiller picture, along the line of goofberries like Too Scared To Scream, Fear City and The First Power, with just a touch of Delirium! The banker of the title is a big muscleman guy, played by the dracula from The Monster Squad, who for some reason adopts a fake British accent when he’s on the prowl! When he gets the urge to kill, he calls up one or another of a pair of pimps (ha ha, one of them is played by none other than Leif “God’s Gun” Garrett!) and organizes the company of a lady, whom he then stalks and crossbow-hunts! After that he scrawls some symbols on the wall in blood, because he’s just that kind of guy!

Pretty soon the shout-happy police captain played by Richard “Maniac Cop” Roundtree – of course, who else, ha ha! – puts Detective Robert “Alligator” Forster on the case! Again, ha ha, who else? (Ha ha, Forester was a terrific guy, and he gave me a letter opener once!) The movie gets pretty repetitive at this point – it brings in a crusading news lady just as we saw in The Dark; and also the pimps get curious about what’s happening with their ladies; and there are many scenes where the banker’s secretary tries to prevent people from bursting into his office without an appointment! Ha ha, sadly we never get the scene where she is told her boss, to whom she has always been so loyal, is a crazyman killer!

Ha ha, any effectiveness this picture has comes from its extraordinarily hateful villain! If you thought you couldn’t dislike slick financial players any more than you already do, if the sight of Wall Street-style slicked-back hair makes you want to spit in it, or if you thought the fellow from American Psycho was just about as low as murderous yuppies could get, let me introduce you to this banker, Big Osborne! Ha ha, just wait until you hear his rationale for all the killings! But he deservedly gets a brutal sendoff, almost but not quite in the style of that mad axeman in Cobra!

Otherwise, the movie’s a pretty damp horseblanket! There’s little to no pep in the execution, and though the actors are mostly pretty game, they can’t do much with all the clichés they’ve been given! There’s an attempt at visual style, which is appreciated, but that’s fairly hackneyed too, I’m sorry to say! The picture comes from the same fellow who made the not-quite-a-movie California Girls, so it was actually a lot better than I expected it to be!

It tries, let’s put it that way! Exploitative elements are present and accounted for, the cast has a strong B picture flavor, and there’s a late-80s vibe that, if that’s the sort of thing you like, you’ll like a lot! But at the same time it should have been a lot better, or at least not such a flatty! I’ll give The Banker – boring title too, ha ha! – one and a half ill-fated ethnic partners!

Burl reviews Herbie Rides Again! (1974)

Beep beep, it’s Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to review a motor-vehicle classic for you, the second Herbie picture (after The Love Bug), Herbie Rides Again! Ha ha, I’ve never been quite clear on why Herbie was known as a love bug, but I suspect it has to do with the hippie times in which his first picture was released!

He does perform some love-related duties here, mostly by not interfering with the burgeoning romances offered up by the plot! Now, it’s been a while since I saw the first picture, but I seem to recall it involved racecar driver Dean Jones discovering to his amazement the sentience and unbelievable physical abilities of the little gray 1963 Volkswagen Bug, which he then employs to win both races and hearts!

Jones is forgotten in this sequel, and Herbie’s ownership papers have somehow been transferred to a little old lady, Mrs. Steinmetz, who lives in a former fire hall in the middle of a wasteland somewhere in San Francisco! The wasteland is there because nasty developer Alonzo Hawk, played by the great Keenan Wynn of Piranha and The Dark, is preparing to build a soulless double-tower edifice on the site! But Mrs. Steinmetz, who lives in the firehouse with a young lady named Nicole (played by Stefanie Powers, who is of course well-known for her part in Palm Springs Weekend), won’t sell, and that makes old Alonzo, who’s blustery at the best of times, so red-faced and apoplectic that you'd think he’s like to burst a valve, ha ha!

Enter Ken Berry, a man so radiating earnest good-naturedness that he might have been machine-tooled to be a Disney hero, who plays Alonzo Hawk’s naïve nephew Willoughby! Willoughby starts out trying to convince Mrs. Steinmetz that she should give up the firehouse, but after Nicole beats him with a lobster he realizes the error of his ways and commits himself to protecting the firehouse from his uncle’s depredations!

With all the pieces in place, Herbie himself rather belatedly swings into action! There are marvelous trick effects as the little bug pops wheelies and screeches through parking garages and fancy restaurants, and up the sides of gullies, buildings and the Golden Gate Bridge itself, where he has chased a passel of lawyers! The climax sees Herbie raise an army of fellow Herbies to go after the heavy construction machines which have the firehouse surrounded and are about to bash it to flinders!

I’m pretty sure I saw this picture at some impressionable age, because it really helped form my opinion of real estate developers (don’t care for ‘em!) and San Francisco (attracted to it!), while also giving me an abiding fondness for Herbie himself, who consistently looks great while never being too cute; and also an appreciation for the steely, grainy, richly contrasted look of late 60s / early 70s Disney cinematography!

And the cast is terrific! Berry and Powers are perfectly adequate, but Helen Hayes is marvelous as the old lady, and Keenan Wynn shouts too much perhaps, but he’s always a treat! There are nice turns from John McIntire, who was the sheriff in Psycho, and such performers as Huntz Hall (from Gas Pump Girls) and Chuck McCann (from Lunch Wagon)! And Don Pedro Colley turns up wearing an expensive suit and puffing cigars in the role of “Barnsdorf!” And guess who cameos as a surprised surfer? The Baby himself, from that movie The Baby! Ha ha, wow!

It’s an entertaining little kiddiepic, with the highlight being Keenan Wynn's epic Herbiephobic dream, in which the sheep he is counting to fall asleep become first Herbies with Jaws-teeth, then chanting, hatchet-tossing headdress-wearing Herbies, and finally a buzzing swarm of flying Herbies which surround the now-gigantic, finally aphasic Wynn as he growls and bats away at them from atop the Empire State Building, until he is blinded by their jets of oil and spins downward with a final, maniacal death-scream! Ha ha! I’m going to award Herbie Rides Again two and a half extra-wide building ledges!

Burl reviews The Sugarland Express! (1974)

Yee-ha-ha, it’s Burl, here to review the picture Steven Spielberg made just before he tackled Jaws! Yes, it’s The Sugarland Express, and it’s a movie I’d never seen before, ha ha!

I think the reason I’d always avoided it was that it promised a not inconsiderable number of Goldie Hawn moments on screen, and if you’ve ever read my review of Protocol, you know that ol’ Burl can surfeit of Goldie Hawn moments pretty easily! Not that I really dislike her or anything; it’s just that my Hawn reservoir, being perennially untapped, overflows at the slightest refill!

But when the picture came on the old-movie network, I thought it was finally time to have a look! Ha ha, it was apparently Goldie’s first dramatic role, and though there are many of her goofette traits on display, she also gets to cry and rage and play sly and other things Laugh-In just didn’t allow for! She’s not bad, overall, though the character comes off as being really not so very bright at all!

She plays a young lady who’s just come out of the hoosegow, and her husband, a fellow named Clovis, happens also to be in the pokey, though he’s got a few months left to go! (Clovis is played by William “Ghostbusters” Atherton, back in the day before he was known mainly as a guy who played jerks!) But the couple’s little baby has been handed off to a foster family, and to prevent the lad from being lost to them forever, Goldie’s plan is to break Clovis out of the pokey and for them to somehow then go get the wee lad! This leads to a police chase and the kidnapping of a young officer, and then an ever-escalating mega chase led by courtly Ben “Terror Train” Johnson!

The young officer is played by Michael Sacks, who was also the lead in the movie version of Slaughterhouse-Five! It turns out he was only ever in a grand total of twelve movies and TV shows, the last of them in the mid-80s! But he was a good actor with a very appealing presence, so that makes me wonder just what happened to the poor guy!

In any case, the movie is very nicely done, though not the most thrilling and original thing ever made! It looks good, thanks to Vilmos “The Witches of Eastwick” Zsigmond, and it has some funny bits and plenty of nice performances! Ben Johnson is a particular delight – I’m always cheered up when he comes on screen, ha ha! I recall that, after seeing Jaws, some friend of Pauline Kael’s told her that Spielberg was the first director to come without a proscenium arch hovering over his head, and while that’s obviously not true, you can certainly see what he meant when you watch his early work!

It’s a nice little picture even if the John Williams score too often sounds like a Christmas carol (I forget exactly which one, ha ha), and so I’m going to give The Sugarland Express two and a half Louisiana lunkheads!

Burl reviews Star Trek Into Darkness! (2013)

Boldly going where no Burl has gone before, ha ha, it’s Burl, here to review the biggest and newest and loudest Star Trek picture, Star Trek Into Darkness! Ha ha, I’m not what you’d call a big fan of this particular cultural behemoth; if I were, my card would have to be removed and my insignia torn from my chest the moment it was discovered that I’ve maybe seen three or four episodes of the original show, fewer still of the New Power Generation, and none of the various other TV shows, whose lineaments I could barely discern even in their heydays!

But I’ve seen most of the movies, so I’ve got that going for me, ha ha! And like many people, I consider the Wrath of Khan one just about the best of them, overflowing as it is with Rich Corinthian Leather! Apparently there was some question as to whether the bad guy in this one would be Khan or not, and I’m not sure why there was ever any doubt, or why anyone would care much one way or another! But for those still not put wise and who actually do care, I’ll let you in on the big secret: yes, the bad man in this is the same bad man, more or less, whom Mr. Roarke played in Wrath of Same! Ha ha!

Well, now that cat’s out of the bag, what can we say about the picture itself? I’ve always enjoyed seeing these movies in the theatre, because the spaceships always look so great on the big screen when they crash or blow up or do other things! I’d certainly have enjoyed this one better in the cinema, no question, because that’s mostly what this picture has going for it: big spaceships doing things!

The interplay between the cast is pretty good too – it’s a bunch of talented people, all of them hitting pretty much the right notes required to pay homage to the old characters (and actors) and at the same time make something slightly new out of it! It’s certainly a change of pace for the fellow who played the title role in Dredd, for example, but he has a blustery good time with his role as Dr. Leonard Bones! Simon “Paul” Pegg makes a fine Scotty, John Cho is a grand Sulu, and so on! Even little Anton Yelchin, well known from the Fright Night remake, does a decent Chekov! And we have a surprise appearance from Robocop himself, Peter Weller, and a terrific performance from the star of The Malibu Bikini Shop as Captain Pike!

Behind the camera is the fellow who made Super 8, and I certainly have to applaud his technical skills! I have read criticisms of his love of lens flares and always dismissed it as some kind of crazy nitpicking; but I do have to admit that the darn things are everywhere and get a bit distracting! I suppose the hard mattes and perhaps the entire matte box never made it into the camera package – ha ha, some equipment rental schlub must certainly have gotten an earful for that little blunder!

Anyway, like all big action pictures these days, there are about three endings, maybe four, and by garr, why they don’t just dissect that Khan into little pieces and be shut of him, I just don’t know! But no, they store him in a tube! He’s never a very scary villain, and he’s never less scary than when they reveal his ultimate goal, which is to kill almost everybody! Ha ha, this is done in such an offhanded way that it either presupposes great knowledge of this character and his plans, or just had to be shoehorned in among all the exploding junk after someone pointed out the generally low stakes while it seems all he wants to do is beetle off with his 72 friends, for whom he feels a ridiculously strong love!

I won’t go on about the other things I found ridiculous or implausible in this picture, because nerds have already been all over it like scarabs! I will say that it was more or less enjoyable while it was on, though there were some longuers and some moments in which the silliness slopped up over the edges and into my seat! But for its technical dazzletry and eagerness to entertain, I’ll go ahead and give Star Trek Into Darkness two tribbles!