Burl reviews My Favorite Brunette! (1947)

Hi there all you mugs, and happy summer solstice! It’s Burl here to review a film noir comedy, a spoof of the genre that came out as noir was still in its fairly early days: yes, it’s a Bob Hope picture called My Favorite Brunette!

Of course we know Hope from Son of Paleface, and here he plays baby photographer Ronnie Jackson, a chatty coward who harbors dreams of becoming a real private eye! He tells his tale in flashback from death row, and it goes as follows: his office is connected to that of a genuine private dick, who is played in surprise cameo fashion by a just-leaving-town Alan Ladd, the wee actor who may or may not have been in Island of Lost Souls, ha ha! When the beautiful Dorothy Lamour, well known from Creepshow 2, walks into the detective’s office, Ronnie Jackson takes advantage of Ladd’s absence to step into the role of detective himself! (Lamour’s character is called Carlotta, which immediately puts the viewer in mind of Vertigo!)

Immediately Ronnie becomes embroiled in a kidnapping case, and soon finds himself facing down a gallery of classic nogoodniks! These include Peter Lorre (from Muscle Beach Party), Lon Chaney Jr. (from House of Frankenstein), John Hoyt (from Desperately Seeking Susan) and Ann Doran (from Them!)! Hope dispenses great zingers all the while, and there are comic set pieces as when Lorre moves an important piece of pseudo-evidence all around the room, in hopes that the incompetent, unobservant Ronnie will find it and thereby be mislead! Ronnie and Carlotta take a detour to a bughouse, where Ronnie must act loco! Ha ha, he doles out plenty of funny business here! And others dole it out on him, as when a cop threatens to punch Ronnie in the nose so hard, it’ll look like other people’s noses!

Then we come to the events which lead to death row! A professor is murdered, and the evidence points to Ronnie! Of course, the knife-waving Lorre is the real killer, and he’s part of a conspiracy that operates much the way James Mason and the boys did in North By Northwest! They take over a big house whose owners are away and make it their lair, then when Ronnie escapes their clutches and comes back with the police, they’ve changed everything around to make it look as though Ronnie’s a crazy man! Ha ha, Hitch went to see this one, that’s for sure, or Ernest Lehman did at least!

It’s a funny picture, but the great thing is, it’s also a genuine noir! It was photographed in reasonably moody chiaroscuro by Lionel Lindon, who had already shot both Road to Utopia and The Blue Dahlia, so he was well qualified for the gig! Peter Lorre does well by the comedy, but works hard to convey a genuine menace, and he succeeds! Hope spends the whole picture calling him names, like “gremlin” and, most often, “cupcake,” and it just makes Lorre more and more angry!

Unfortunately there’s not much of a payoff - we never even learn if the bad guys (whose plot I confess I never really understood) were caught or not! But that’s okay, because at the end we get another comedy cameo, this one from Der Bingle himself, who plays the executioner disappointed that he doesn’t get to pull the switch on Hope! Ha ha!

In the end, My Favorite Brunette is a fine evening’s entertainment, the more so if you’ve got an appreciation for Bob Hope’s tiger growl! I give it three McGuffin maps!

Burl reviews Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome! (1985)

Vroom vroom, it’s Burl, here to review one of those Mad Max pictures that we all love so well! Now, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is not the best of them, and in fact is almost certainly the worst! It’s certainly the most off-brand, as there’s hardly any car racing in it at all, relative to the other entries at least!

But for all that, I’m fond of the picture! Certainly the scenes in the thunderdome itself are dynamic and exciting, and what chase material there is toward the end is darned enjoyable! Plus we have a dynamic performance from Tina Turner, looking great in a chain mail dusset, and a fine twilight appearance from the great and small Angelo Rossitto, from Smokey Bites the Dust and The Dark!

The problem really is that the movie engages too freely in this trend known as “world building,” and while this is always assumed to be a positive and worthwhile effort in series pictures, I don’t myself believe it necessarily is, and moreover I feel it can be a real drag on the stories they’re trying so hard to expand upon! I prefer Max and his world to be a sort of abstraction, I think! He and his stories should be simple and suggest much!

I guess what it comes down to in this case is that, whereas the gangs in Mad Max movies (headed by The Lord Humongous in The Road Warrior and The Immortan Joe in Mad Max: Fury Road) usually claim to be a civilizing influence while in fact operating as neo-fascists, Turner’s Aunty Entity, and her pop-up city of Bartertown, genuinely are a step forward in this post-apocalyptic wasteland! This undercuts their menace a great deal, as does, incidentally, the picture’s PG-13 rating!

The movie opens with Max caravanning across the desert when suddenly Bruce Spence (playing a post-pockyclypse aeronaut just as he did in The Road Warrior, but a different post-pockyclypse aeronaut) swoops down out of nowhere and steals all his stuff! Max ends up in Bartertown, meets Tina and the Master Blaster (which is Rossitto piggybacking on a big guy’s shoulders), and some terrific side characters played by Frank Thring and Edwin Hodgeman! After his big thunderdome fight, Max busts a deal and faces the wheel, which decrees that he be gulaged out into the wasteland! Ha ha, this involves plunking him on a horse and sticking a Big Boy mask on his head for some reason! Anyway, he comes across a civilization of children who live in a verdant crevasse, then comes into conflict with the Bartertownians again, which leads to the final chase, and Angry Anderson hanging off a speeding train and dodging ironbars! Ha ha! 

On this most recent viewing of the movie, which I watched with my son, I was not as scornful of the kids as I had been previously! Before I’d considered them no better than Ewoks, but now, with a child sitting beside me, I could appreciate their power and how desperately they cling to storytelling as a way to maintain their humanity! I especially liked the 2.35:1 ratio portable frame they use to help dramatize their origin story!

So it’s no action classic like Road Warrior, and it tries too hard to situate Max in a plausible environment (the plausibility of which is undercut by the array of pointless, arbitrary accoutrements that would in truth be low priorities for apocalypse survivors), but Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome has on the other hand a wealth of entertaining details, a terrific score from Maurice “Dreamscape” Jarre, fantastic photography from Dean Semler, a nice dollop of wit, and some miniature model work at the end! I give it two and a half Angry Andersons!

Burl reviews Mission Impossible II! (2000)

Ha ha and sportscars, it’s Burl here, reviewing a John Woo picture I don’t think about very often! It’s called Mission Impossible 2, and, well, I’ll say it up front: it’s not very good! Certainly I would say it’s the weakest of this series of actionblasters!

But they’re not strictly actionblasters, are they! No, these are spy pictures, and by design are meant to have as many whispered conversations and meetings with the boss as they do car chases and wild stunt-leaps! So John Woo, a director of uncommon technical skill, may not have been the man to hire for this one, as his heart just doesn’t seem to be in the non-action material! Maybe there was studio interference involved - ha ha, there usually seemed to be on Woo's American pictures!

Here we have that Tom “Edge of Tomorrow” Cruise again, not the clean cut teen agent he was in Brian De Palma’s opening installment but now a longhair who likes free climbing cliff faces! Ha ha, his employers - personified here by Anthony Hopkins for some reason - send him a message by sunglasses and soon he’s on the case again, chasing a rather generic bad guy, a rogue agent who will unleash a deadly viral plague upon the world unless he is paid - now get this - £37 million! Ha ha, calling Dr. Evil! I have a feeling the countries of the world would get together to pay this strangely modest and specific sum rather than send out their best agent on a risky, nay impossible, mission!

But be that as it may, Ethan Hunt, mister spy boy, is on the case! Not only must he face down the rogue agent, but his lieutenant, who is depicted, if I read the performance right, as sporting a powerful if resentment-frosted crush on his boss! That touch somehow seems borrowed from the Hong Kong action movie casebook, though I can’t remember where exactly I saw the dynamic before! Ha ha, maybe in Last Hurrah for Chivalry! Hunt must also sneak in somewhere to steal something, as he so often must, and he's also asked to dodge an awful lot of pigeons!

At any rate, the action scenes here, replete with Woo-ian touches as they are, bat about .500 for me! The script, by Robert Towne of all people (though based on a story written by others), salts in a bit of Churchillian sexism for Hopkins to excrete for no particular reason except maybe that Towne was arguing with his wife that week! There’s a sort of deflated quality to the story, and meanwhile, like visits to the stations of the cross, the narrative dutifully brings us at intervals to a point where Cruise can ride a motorcycle through an explosion or something along that line! It’s all decidedly ho-hum!

Things improved after this one, though not mightily, with Mission Impossible III, then hit a higher level of entertainment with the next three installments! The fact is, except for some goofy transitions and all those birds, this picture is pretty machine-tooled, and doesn’t have a tenth the appeal of something like Hard Boiled! I give Mission Impossible II one and a half flapping birds!

Burl reviews Eddie Macon's Run! (1983)

Watch out, here he comes… and there he goes! Ha ha, it’s Eddie Macon’s Run, and it is I, Burl, here to talk about it! This is a chase picture, mainly, and for me was one of those movies that I was aware of thanks to the ubiquity of the VHS box, but never had any interest in seeing… until now!

In fact I can’t claim any real interest in seeing it, but, having spotted the tape lurking in my basement, I watched it anyway! The picture was an early effort from Jeff Kanew, who later gifted us with Gotcha!, and Kanew wrote and edited it as well! Ha ha, kanew believe it! I guess the mastermind behind Revenge of the Nerds was once a sort of auteur!

He began a relationship with Kirk Douglas (well known from The Fury and Out of the Past) on this picture too, which he would continue later with Tough Guys and I think some kind of Kirk tribute documentary! Ha ha, it must have been pretty great to be a filmmaker who became friends with Kirk! And Kanew uses him pretty well in Eddie Macon’s Run!

John Schneider, well known from The Curse and of course for essaying the role of that shine-runnin’ Bo Duke, plays the title character, a fellow who’s been thrown in the pokey for doing virtually nothing beyond having put a punching on John Goodman, from C.H.U.D. and Matinee, who plays a nasty man entirely deserving of it! He’s chased by cops and pulled over and railroaded right into slam, and away from the family he loves so well! Immediately he escapes and is re-caught by a professional chaseman played by Douglas, but not before he smites Douglas a sound clobbering upon the pate! Now Eddie Macon is facing a nickel’s worth in the pen, and boy howdy he doesn’t like it!

Now, all of this background business is delivered throughout the picture in the form of flashbacks, which is too bad! Eddie Macon’s major escape occurs right at the top of the picture, which initially cheers the viewer - ha ha, she thinks, here is a picture that begins right away! Then the flashbacks start popping up and the heart sinks, for we know this flashbackery will continue until the proto-story is told! But front-loading all this background would have been bad too, of course; much better would have been to find the most economical way possible to deliver the necessary information and get on with the chase itself, which after all is the topic of the picture, and even of the picture’s very title! We don’t need to be persuaded of Eddie Macon’s relative innocence, or have it laboriously spelled out for us, because Schneider’s performance is sufficiently solid and goodhearted to meet that need!

Aside from Kirk and John, the picture features performances from a pair of slasher movie ladies: Leah Ayres from The Burning and Lisa Dunsheath from The Prowler! The former is Eddie Macon’s beloved wife, who sets out a backpack full of escape supplies for him! The latter plays a member of a demented ranching family, which also includes menacing tallmen Tom Noonan from Wolfen and F/X and Jay O. Sanders from Hanky Panky and JFK, who-all capture Eddie and attempt to lynch him right in the middle of their living room! Ha ha, this is quite a sequence all right, and serves as a nightmarish centerpiece to the picture; quite at odds with the rest of it, frankly! Ha ha, but I was glad it was in there!

Finally Lee Purcell, whom we know from Necromancy and Mr. Majestyk, shows up to play Jilly Buck, who becomes Eddie’s last-act guardian angel and helps see him to a happy ending! Kirk does his bit too, of course, but only after a car flip scrambles his molecules! Ha ha, the chase at the end is okay, and the rancher scene is pretty unsettling, but otherwise the picture is not as thrilling or exciting as it would like to be! The performances are fine and we all want Eddie’s run to be successful - and it is literally a run, as Eddie's preferred method of escape principally consists of jogging - but in the end there isn’t a whole lot of hossmeat to the picture! It comes in, does the job, and takes its leave with a courtly bow and a curt “good day!” I give Eddie Macon’s Run two games of Gorf!

Burl reviews The Dead Don't Die! (2019)

Everyone dial Z for zombie and join me, Burl, in a little chat about Jim Jarmusch’s latest picture, The Dead Don’t Die! Yes, that’s right, Jim Jarmusch made a zombie movie, ha ha, but in a way you might say that, with their slow paces and barbiturated acting, all his movies have been zombie movies! By the end of this picture, I was convinced that it was a vehicle for Jarmusch to make this very same comment about his work!

Somehow it still seems a novelty for Jarmusch to be making such an unadulterated genre picture, but he’s been doing it for quite a while now! Westerns with Dead Man, samurai movies with Ghost Dog, vampire pictures with Only Lovers Left Alive - ha ha, many’s the time Jarmusch has taken an established form and bent it into his own shape! But the Jarmusch pictures I like best, Down By Law and Mystery Train, are their own thing, and maybe that explains why I wasn’t so much taken with The Dead Don’t Die!

He’s never made a movie quite so arch as this one, and I’m afraid that’s not meant as a compliment! The story - well, not story, but more a sort of portrait - is of a small town overwhelmed by zombies which are presumably part of a worldwide plague unleashed by the earth having been shaken off its axis by polar fracking! Bill Murray, who is well-known from Meatballs, and previously dealt with the undead in Ghostbusters and Zombieland, is the low-key town cop, and his deputies include Adam Driver from Frances Ha and Inside Llewyn Davis, and Chloë Sevigny from Gummo! They drive around the town as things get stranger and the zombies more plentiful, and Sevigny is the only one who reacts at all realistically, and she therefore seems quite out of place in this town and more especially on this police force!

As all this happens, the picture’s theme song, a country tune from Sturgill Simpson, plays as relentlessly as “You Put A Spell On Me” did in Stranger than Paradise! Simpson himself is discussed so much that I thought he was going to somehow turn out to be responsible for the whole disaster! Meanwhile my pal Tom Waits, well known from Wolfen, lurks in the woods; otherworldly town coroner Tilda Swinton, from The Grand Budapest Hotel, gives zombie heads the chop with her katana; and Danny Glover plays the poor soul who finds a couple of ladies who’ve been gruesomely eaten to death by Iggy Pop and Sara Driver! Meanwhile Steve Buscemi plays a racist, boneheaded redneck, and for his sins catches quite a biting!

Something about the picture seemed comfortably familiar as it went on in its rambling, shambling, small-town way, with its homely non-characters and chonky mise-en-scene; and finally it hit me: I was watching nothing more or less than a big-budget Bill Rebane picture, or an unusually star-studded Don Dohler joint! It was Invasion From Inner Earth or Fiend writ large and played by pros, ha ha! And once I made this observation, I began enjoying the picture a lot more!

It’s true that the movie works a little too hard at irony and not at all at horror, and that Jarmusch appears to have no interest in scaring people and no discernable ability to either! There’s some bloody stuff though, and the director seems to have had fun with some of the gore gags, which is nice; but the head-choppings, with their spumes of dust released from the zombie bodies, get a mite repetitive! On the other hand, RZA from Due Date shows up at a comic shop to drop a bit of wisdom, something like “The world is perfect, pay attention to the details!” At that moment I noticed some of the background set dressing included a small poster for that greatest of pictures, The Thing! And I realized that RZA was correct, and that this was the best way to approach the movie itself! That revelation, too, led to greater enjoyment!

And all this leads me to my final point, one I hinted at in the first paragraph: while it’s obvious that Jarmusch made this picture more because he could than because he wanted to, and true too that his satire is mostly broad and shopworn, sold in bulk at the Monroeville Mall some forty years ago, and that his fourth wall-breaking is lame, he didn’t waste the opportunity for a little sharp self-criticism! I mean, after all, though almost everyone else turns, we never get to see Murray or Driver in zombiefied form, and this I believe is because Jarmusch was worried we might think we’d accidentally started watching Broken Flowers or Paterson instead of The Dead Don’t Die! Jarmusch is no dummy; he knows the score! Ha ha! So while this is very much Jarmusch Lite, a half-baked comic book adaptation of his usual fare, I’m still going to give it two and a half Cleveland hipsters, which is how many there are by the end of the picture! Ha ha!

Burl reviews The Bad News Bears! (1976)

Ha ha, everybody, play Burl! I mean, play ball! I’m Burl! And I’m here to review a baseball picture, one of the best of them for my money! No, it’s not Fear Strikes Out! Or The Natural! In fact it’s The Bad News Bears!

Now, this isn’t the remake I’m jabbering on about! Ha ha, I’ve never even seen that! This is the original with the foul-mouthed kids; the picture that promised, as its posters said, to show Kids As They Really Are! Does it? Well, I saw this movie at the age of five or six, and I remember thinking they were really sophisticated and funny kids! Ha ha, and they fell down a lot, crashing into each other chasing a pop fly, and the ball dropping in the midst of their feet as they lie splayed out and prone! And it all took place to the strains of classical music for some reason! Anyway, those were the memories of the picture I carried for years, full stop!

When I started to appreciate Michael Ritchie for his talents beyond Fletch and The Island, I began to see the picture in a different light! This, I realized, was one of a series of Ritchie films criticizing specifically American culture and competition, circling around Little League baseball the way Smile revolves around beauty pageants! Hal Ashby was sort of doing the same thing around this time, and so I’ve always grouped the two directors together in my mind! 

Walter Matthau, well known from Bigger Than Life and the Grumpy Old Men pictures, is Buttermaker, the coach of the Bears, a pool cleaner and ex-ballplayer, and a dipsomaniac of the highest order! Perhaps only Albert Finney in Under the Volcano outpaces him drink for drink, ha ha! The kids in his charge, played by the likes of Alfred Lutter (from Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore) and Gary Lee Cavagnaro (from Drive-In), and eventually Tatum O’Neal from Little Darlings and Jackie Earle Haley from Damnation Alley, seem to have no illusions about Buttermaker, but we are confident that he will finally rise to the occasion! And he does, by not rising but more sort of just slumping down! And he doesn’t give any big speech about it either!

That’s what I liked most about the script by Bill Lancaster (Burt’s son, who also wrote The Thing): the speeches are infrequent and all in the right places, not necessarily the expected places! Things are kept simple, too - no conspiracies or double-dealings at city hall, and a bad guy who’s one of the most realistic, and therefore both simple and complicated, in popular film!

Vic Morrow from Curse of the Black Widow, playing the hard-case father who wallops his own son in front of a crowd, is as good as I’ve ever seen him! Ben Piazza from Nightwing is the city councilor who presses Buttermaker into service and pays him on the sly, and Joyce Van Patten simply plays Cleveland! Matthau too gives an excellent performance, and none of the kids let the side down either!

The movie is funny and charming and all of that, and shambling and a bit repetitive too, but the nice Hollywood-natural atmosphere, the simplicity and specificity of the script (the movie rarely strays far from the diamond) and the convincing baseball scenes all add up to goodness! I give The Bad News Bears three and a half chocolate-covered balls!

Burl reviews Graduation Day! (1981)

Hi, and how’s that mortarboard? Ha ha, it’s me, Burl, here to celebrate Graduation Day with you! Well, not celebrate it exactly - more like tell you what a cantaloupe it is! But there are a few things to celebrate in this mid-period slasher picture too!

It’s the modern tale of a hard-nosed track and field coach (played by Christopher George from Mortuary and Grizzly and City of the Living Dead, of course!) and his team of teen runabouts, many of whom appear to be well past their teen years! In fact there was a mild but inconsequential mist of confusion laid over the whole movie for me: was this a high school with a spectacularly well-financed athletics program? Or was it some kind of elite sports college? I suppose it was the former, which is why a sold half-hour in the late middle of the picture seems to be scenes of the principal, Michael Pataki from The Bat People, fielding calls from worried parents wondering why their kids haven’t come home!

Turns out it’s because they’ve been murdered! It all starts when a young track star drops dead after finishing a thirty-second run! (How long are you supposed to be able to run in thirty seconds, I wonder? A quarter-mile? Ha ha, maybe Roger Bannister could do that, but not ol’ Burl!) Soon an unknown killer is clicking his stopwatch and performing a series of serious pokings on the rest of the team! Who is the killer? Why, is it the person you suspected the very first time they were shown on the screen, but rejected as a potential culprit for being too obvious? Ha ha, yes it is!

Now, it has to be said: there’s an awful lot of space between these pokings! There’s some unnecessary family drama when the dead girl’s sister comes back home from a navy tour in Guam and argues with her stepfather; there’s a ton of school office business, like those phone calls and the principal being a bad boss to his secretary; there are plenty of sports, of course, enough so that you might believe you’ve turned on Fatal Games by accident; and there’s the lounge lizard music teacher and further material unrelated to pokings; and I haven’t even mentioned the gangster rock, ha ha!

I’m not one who automatically complains about the space between murders in a slasher film - often those are my favourite parts; but not here! There’s just a feeling of mild disorganization that seems to overlay the whole enterprise from the script up, exemplified in details like the ostensible heroine dropping out of the picture for a huge chunk in the middle, until she’s needed again for the climax!

But thankfully things get a little peppier in the last act! I’m glad to report, too, that there are some familiar faces salted into the cast, like Virgil Frye from Garden of the Dead and Hot Moves, Linnea Quigley from Witchtrap and Innocent Blood, and even Vanna White from the spinning wheel show! There are some honest-to-goodness Special Makeup Effects (a rapier through the neck, a decapitation, a slit throat), though not many of them, and they are not well shot! And then there’s the gangster rock, howled by a good-time rock combo called Felony, which they certainly may have committed here! Ha ha, what must be the super extended dancefloor remix of their gangster rock seems to go on for ten minutes, keeping company with some disco rollerskating and a couple of pokings that are meanwhile taking place in the same stretch of woodsy path the students seem to spend most of their time on, walking or jogging up and down it, making out in the bushes beside it, or just plain killing whoever happens along it! Ha ha, the gangster ro-o-o-o-ck!

There are a couple of novelty theme deaths too, like the pole-vault punji stick gag or the old spear-in-the-football trick! There’s not much suspense and almost no fright, though a couple of moments at the end try to make up for that! Altogether it’s hardly one of the better early-80s maniac pictures, but it’s a sort of exemplar of this mediocre strata of the genre, and that has to count for something! I give Graduation Day one and a half white-guy breakdancers!

Burl reviews Raw Force! (1981)

Hello hello hello, it’s Burl, back again with another review! This time I’ve got a picture that’s banana-monster from the word go: that famous and much-loved mulebender Raw Force! I like to think of it as the early-80s exploitation movie that aliens would make if they’d had early-80s exploitation movies described to them, but had never actually seen one themselves, ha ha!

Of course, having had goodies like Without Warning, Deadly Prey and Action U.S.A. described to them the aliens would hasten to hire Cameron Mitchell for their picture! They’d sprinkle in a few other familiar faces, like Jillian Kesner from Starhops and John Dresden from Final Mission and The Dark, and they’d certainly want Vic Diaz, from Beast of the Yellow Night and a thousand other Filipino extravaganzas, to play a cannibalistic monk who grins and claps to express his delight!

And what sort of plot did these extraterrestrial exploiteers cook up for their epic? Well, it seems there’s an island in the Far East where all the disgraced martial arts masters go to die, and a tribe of monks who exchange the big lumps of jade they mine in exchange for ladies of the evening, whom they barbeque to obtain the power to revive the kung-fu masters as zombies! They barter for these lovely comestibles with a gang led by a big greasy guy with a Hitler moustache and an ice cream suit, who kidnap them back in Manila or wherever and fly them in their float plane to Warriors’ Island!

Into this situation comes a little cruise ship whose passenger roster seems comprised largely of martial artists - ha ha, but it’s also a love boat, naturally! This ship is, of course, bound for Warriors’ Island, and once the Hitler simulacrum, Mr. Speer, gets wind of this, he decides he must kill everybody on the ship before his secret is discovered!

Our heroes aboard the kung-fu ship include a couple of dudes from the Burbank Karate Club; a lady police officer; the ship’s cook; and a mustacheman played by a guy whose last acting job for this had been Plan 9 From Outer Space! Ha ha! There’s also Captain Cameron Mitchell, of course, and the brassy lady who owns the ship and serves as cruise director! Some of the greatest scenes in the picture involve random passengers, like for instance one fellow, celebrating his 30^th birthday, who is apparently the result of Jeff Goldblum going through his teleporter and fusing with Richard Benjamin instead of a fly! Ha ha! There’s also Camille Keaton in a bathroom with a fellow trying to unzip her fly, and a most gnarly bartender who atomizes a huge block of ice with his fivehead!

 But much of the movie is made up of kung-fu battles! There are in addition lots of naked ladies, some moments of goofy gore, some disco dancing, a number of explosions, and a scene where the monks very thoroughly baste one young lady in preparation for the barbeque! There’s a happy ending though, and then, as in Buckaroo Banzai, a title card announces a sequel that has yet to materialize! All in all, though it certainly isn’t a good movie, it’s a pretty terrific picture! It’s hard to know what sort of a rating to give this one, which is why I’ve always given ratings against my better judgment; but on reflection I suppose I’ll give Raw Force three axe attacks! Ha ha, thanks, alien moviemakers!

Burl reviews The Puppet Masters! (1994)

Ha… ha… it… is… me… Burl. Do not be alarmed. I am still… hu-man. I have not been… replaced by a… superior alien consciousness. I am still your same jolly old friend… Burl. Ha… ha.

Ha ha! No, I’m just kidding around! I’m as Burl as I’ve ever been, and I’m here to review a movie about insidious alien takeover, The Puppet Masters! No, it’s not a movie about pod people: the takeover method on display here involves not pods, but slimy alien starfish that can shoot out whips and pull themselves around the room, to slap in your face as they fly by if you’re not careful, or, worse still, to attach themselves to your back, dig in like a giant tick, and bond with your nervous system to achieve complete full-body puppetism!

Right off the bat I have to give this picture some props! The takeover begins right away, and the authorities display a level of good sense and speed of action that forestalls the usual frustrations viewers might feel on waiting for the movie characters to catch up to where we, the audience, have been since seeing the title flash on the screen!

Our main characters are members of some kind of elite CIA-adjacent science force, and the boss of them is a characteristically crusty Donald “Billion Dollar Brain” Sutherland, resplendent in a silver cocksman's beard! Sutherland gets to throw a little action, bopping possessees with his silver-tipped walking stick and pulling a gun on his own son when he suspects the lad to have been taken over!

Sutherland’s son, an agent in this action-science agency, who of course doesn’t get along so well with his dad, is actually the picture’s hero, alongside a lady who serves as a scientist, action partner, and love interest! I recognized neither of the actors and have never seen them since, but they acquit themselves tolerably well!

The picture has a welcomingly familiar supporting cast though! You’ve got stalwarts like Keith David from Road House, Will Patton from Road House 2, and Yaphet Kotto from Truck Turner, whose talents the filmmakers manage to mostly waste! And the Vagrant himself, Marshall “Stand By Me” Bell, is in it too, as an army general who catches a little backdoor parasite action! Ha ha, he ought to be used to sporting rubbery hangers-on - he hosted Mr. Kuato in Total Recall!

But everyone gets a chance to be possessed: all three of our leads take an unwilling turn, and things get a little repetitive! The picture starts spinning its wheels about halfway through, and eventually there are a couple of climaxes and a happier ending than we find in Sutherland’s other body snatcher picture! For many years I had the impression that this was even more bloodless and MOR than it actually is, and in the second half it almost lives down to that assumption!

But I will say this: the creatures are neat! I always like it when the trick effects gang take the time to put together an alien with some biological plausibility - these guys reminded me a bit of the face huggers from Alien, because as with those crustaceous delights in the Ridley Scott picture, The Puppet Masters gives us a dissection scene featuring some realistic-looking organs and glop! Ha ha, so kudos to you, Greg Cannom and Larry Odien! But the movie is more middling than its monsters, so I give it an even two naked shower meltdowns!

Burl reviews The Strangeness! (1980)

Ha ha and cave paintings, it’s Burl! Yes, it’s my first review in a while, but I’m aiming to get back in the game, and no mistake! Today’s review is of a cave monster movie called The Strangeness, and of the cave monster pictures - a sub(terranean)-genre that includes The Boogens, The Descent and something called simply The Cave, which I’ve never seen - nobody would call it the best! In fact it’s a little drab, and is badly in need of some extra pep!

Of course, movies set in caves or mines are in natural jeopardy of looking dark and feeling samey - ha ha, it’s the rock wall again, the dimly-lighted passage, the stalactites and stalagmites, the false way out! All of these (aside from the rock formations, maybe) are present and accounted for in The Strangeness, along with a tentacled goober monster who roams his way casually through the subterranean labyrinth and gives a good foaming to anyone he meets!

I’ll back up and give you a bit of the storyline, ha ha! It seems there’s a troublesome mine with a history of goober-murders (two of which we witness in an egregious prelude), and a motley gang is assigned by the owners to check it out! We have the nerdy writer, the writer’s good lady wife, a couple of goodtime, meat-and-potatoes pitcrawlers, a lady geologist, an expert on mines imported from England, and the officious company representative! These geniuses manage to trap themselves in the mine immediately on entering it, and spend the rest of the movie moving about various catacombs, which all look like the same one because they probably were! Ha ha, the sets are sometimes convincing, and at other times sport a distinctly canvassy look!

I don’t want to be too hard on the picture, though! It was made by a group of students, and I always like it when students take it upon themselves to mass their resources and produce a genre feature! (Ha ha, I’m looking at you, Dark Star!) And the movie becomes more effective as it wears on, and the trappees become ever more aware of the direness of their situation! It should be noted that some people really do like this picture, and though I can’t say I’m one of them, their position is worth considering!

Much of the affection drizzled over this below-ground affair is aimed at the goober monster, which is a stop-motion ‘mungus who looks a close cousin to the carpet-based spacefarers of The Creeping Terror! But as I say, it’s stop motion, and I’ll always give a pixillated critter like this the time of day, ha ha, even if we don’t see it nearly as much as might be preferred! That goes along with my general complaint that the picture lacks pep! Yes, as so often, here is a movie which could really use some exploitive elements and the willingness to employ them brazenly! Well, at least the death of the company man, who goes bozo a la Fred C. Dobbs and becomes the human bad guy, gets the hideous foaming he deserves!

It’s not the best movie in any of the categories in which it might be fitted into, and in fact, ha ha, in some of those categories it might be the worst! But no 80s low-budget horror completest should fear watching the movie - you may love it, you may not, but the odds are you’ve wasted your time with much direr cinema than this! I give The Strangeness one and a half foaming fits!