Burl reviews Echo Park! (1985)

Welcome, friends, welcome to my neighbourhood! Yes, it’s Burl, here to review a picture that fits into a few subgenres! Ha ha, it’s called Echo Park, and, set as it is in that patch of Los Angeles by the same name, it’s one of those movies named for and defined by the neighbourhood, or district, or borough, in which their action takes place! I suppose Wicker Park, A Bronx Tale, City Island and many others would fit into this loose category!

Another subgenre into which Echo Park fits is the Eccentric Dreamer movie! UFOria is one of those pictures, and Melvin and Howard is another! The director of this movie, Robert Dornhelm, made another Eccentric Dreamer picture too, Cold Feet, starring my buddy Tom Waits! Ha ha, I’ll have to review that one sometime!

The story concentrates on three properly eccentric inhabitants of Echo Park, which back in the mid-80s was a little more downmarket than it is now, ha ha! Susan Dey, the famous TV law-lady, is the single mother who works in a bar while dreaming of being a waitress! Tom Hulce, who was in Slam Dance (a combination Eccentric Dreamer film and crime picture, also emphatically set in L.A.), is the pizza man who delivers his pies in a car shaped like a neon piece of pizza, but dreams of being a songwriter, and of entering into a romantic relationship with Dey! And Michael Bowen from The Wild Life plays the pongid bodybuilder who lives in the other part of the house, an Austrian émigré who dreams of becoming the next Arnold and who quickly does enter into a relationship with Dey!

And these three interact in various ways, surrounded by friends and employers, and go through a series of small, episodic adventures! Dey becomes a singing strip-o-grammer, ha ha, and Hulce is punched on by bikers! Dey’s son changes his name from Henry to Hank, and Bowen plays a Viking in a deodorant commercial He’s later thrown out of the German embassy for trying too hard to meet his idol, Schwarzenegger! Hulce’s boss, played by the great fartiste Timothy Carey, from Beach Blanket Bingo and The Long Ride Home, dispenses pizza-based wisdom! A Burt Reynolds lookalike wanders around! And then everyone goes to the beach!

The supporting cast features plenty of Groundlings, like John Paragon in the role of Hugo, and Cassandra Peterson from Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold! Ha ha, it’s a wonder Pee Wee doesn’t show up! Cheech Marin from Fatal Beauty makes a friendly appearance too, and gets the last word in a scene where Bowen goes nuts and can only be restrained by other bodybuilders! The saddest scene comes when Hulce, delivering pizza to a recording studio, is encouraged by the producers and musicians there to expand on one of his songs that he’s been absently singing, but he suffers nerves, and flees!

It’s a nice, enjoyable movie, with a fairly realistic indie-picture magic realism and a peculiarly 80s indie vibe! The acting is pretty good, and it looks very nice and very L.A. and very 80s, but it suffers at times from contrived situations, sitcom logic, and Bowen’s occasionally shaky Austrian accent! (Why couldn’t they find an Austrian to play the part? It was an Austrian production, after all!) It all ends somewhat inconclusively, which I like, but the version I watched included an extended ending in which the main cast all stand on top of an Austrian mountain, sniff eidelweiss and do handstands! This did not provide clarity, ha ha, but it did provide scenery! And I suppose it also satisfied the Austrian funding bodies who helped finance the picture!

Anyway, I give Echo Park two and a half bum-cakes! Ha ha! You won’t want to miss that bum-cake!

Burl reviews Live and Let Die! (1973)

Ha ha, it’s Burl, plain Burl, here to shake and stir you with a James Bond movie review! This one is Live and Let Die, which I believe was the debut of Sir Roger Moore in the superspy role; and frankly, with this one as the first, I wonder how Sir Roger lasted as long in the part as he did! How did he even get to Moonraker? The only thing longer in the part than he was, by the time he was done, was his tooth! Ha ha!

Well, maybe that’s not a very good joke! But neither is this a very good movie! I used to think kindly upon it, it being buoyed in my memory by the voodoo elements of the plot and the crude scarecrows that frightened me so much as a youth! I was and am a horror movie fellow, so those things attracted me! But they’re just not as scary now, and the movie is consequently less entertaining!

I think I’ve nailed down what it is that makes Moore my least favourite Bond: he just can’t deliver the smarmy lines without seeming smarmy himself! And I don’t necessarily think this is Moore’s fault; to the contrary, I think it might be to his credit! Maybe, being a gentleman, he just wasn’t able to inhabit that aspect (as written by the 70s-era screenwriters) of Bond’s character! This level of strutting sexism was cartoonish even then, and it would take a real true believer to sell this stuff in earnest!

Another thing: The picture’s bad guy, Yaphet “Eye of the Tiger” Kotto , at one point accuses Bond of being a poor loser, and do you know what? He is! Every time a lady gets an ERA-era zinger over on him, Bond pulls a sour face and immediately tries to reinstate his masculine superiority by some petty act of revenge! And indeed he does come across as something of a dunder-klumpen whenever things don’t go his way!

The female lead here is Domino, played by Jane Seymour from Lassiter, who reads Tarot cards and indeed seems to have some kind of supernatural power! About the best bit in the picture, cinematically speaking, is the cross-cutting between Bond’s flight to New York and Domino’s totally accurate prognostications of his visit and what it will bring! I guess it’s the only time this series ever trafficked in the uncanny, and it’s one of the few distinguishing aspects of the picture!

Another such aspect is the great gallery of distinctive black actors, like Julius Harris and Geoffrey Holder and Gloria Hendry and Earl Jolly Brown! And, ha ha, not to mention the terrific Kotto! They help the picture mightily, despite the sour tastes of colonial-era racism that occasionally intrude! And too bad that Southern-fired sheriff had to be shoehorned into the already too-long bayou boat chase, calling people “Boy-y-y-y” like some hick Angus Scrimm! And it was this same ‘baccy-spitting ultramaroon whom they decided to bring back in the next installment, The Man With the Golden Gun, even though they had a perfectly good stinger at the end of this one: Geoffrey Holder, sitting on the front of the train and laughing his uncola laugh! Ha ha! So why not bring Holder back, at least for the pre-credit sequence in the follow-up?

Well, that wasn’t what they chose to do, but at least they hired Christopher Lee and put an extra nipple on him, ha ha! Anyway, Live and Let Die gives us Bond on the trail of a heroin smuggler who’s been killing the agents previously on his trail, and who has grander plans than the usual drug lord, and uses voodoo trappings as well as murder to spook people away from getting too close! We get action in New York, some fictional Caribbean country, New Orleans, and the bayous of ‘weeziana, which is where that sheriff comes in! None of it’s terribly exciting, and though there are some okay moments here and there, and a unique, if silly, demise for the bad guy, I can give this nought but one and a half inflating leather sofas!

Burl reviews Black Mask! (1996)

Well chop my socks, it’s Burl, here to review up some all-new nonsense action! Now, I say nonsense action, but doesn’t Black Mask, the movie under review today, really fit into the Ridiculous Action category, I hear you ask? Shouldn’t it be mounted along the Via Appia with its fellows, among them the equally guilty Raw Force and Deadly Prey? Ha ha, no I say, and I say again no! While certainly ridiculous in parts, and not lacking in pep, Black Mask, for better or for worse, lacks that certain extra edge of Total Ridiculousness!

But enough of trying to categorize it! Black Mask is a Jet Li extravaganza featuring Jet as an extraordinarily bifurcated character: at once an inhumanly violent, chemically altered supersoldier unmade and re-created in a lab so as to be free of pain, empathy, and emotion of any kind, while capable of killing enemies by the dozen in a thousand different ways; and a soft-spoken, peace-loving, flower-sniffing librarian who only wants to be left alone! Ha ha! And the split between his dual natures seems to trouble him not a whit!

But his fellow supersoldiers are not so complacent! They feel the urge for revenge upon those who experimented on them, and for this they seem to blame just about everybody! So the drug lords, the cops, random doctors and nurses, and really just anyone who gets in the way are destined to become the victims of the special commando squad! Ha ha, and they come up with some pretty gruesome ways of dispatching their victims, like the heart-bomb, or the acid sprinklers!

There are also plenty of punchfights, of course, and very dynamically enacted and filmed they are too, with lots of funky moves! When I saw this picture in the theater with my friend Pellonpäa, we practically stood up and cheered: the action sequences were extremely effective, and they still hold up well today! They’re cartoonish, but not as extremely so as we find in some Hong Kong action pictures! And they get pretty gory too, which, I’ll admit, always brings an action picture up a notch or two in my esteem! Ha ha, I guess it’s the Fangoria kid in me! (I didn’t care for the gift the commandos send to the drug lord King Kao, however!)

The bulk of the story involves Jet’s character, Michael, trying to stop the evil plans of the supersoldiers and their long-haired, Lennon glasses-wearing leader! In this he’s helped by his friend, the cop with whom he plays chess, and also a lady from the library, a flibbertigibbet type who proves her mettle, but not without screeching a lot!

Well, if you like goofy high-octane action and Jet Li at his fastest and most charming, you’ll probably like this picture! I certainly feel an affection for it! You’ll forget the plot details immediately upon finishing with it, but you’ll have had a good time! I’m going to give Black Mask two and a half exploding drug lords!

Burl reviews The Lost Boys! (1987)

Ha ha and hemogobblers, it’s Burl, here to review a goofy movie about cool vampires! Yes, of course I’m talking about The Lost Boys, which many consider one of the key vampire pictures of the 1980s, alongside Fright Night, Near Dark, and to a lesser extent, Vamp!

But as silly or juvenile as those movies can occasionally be, they at least seem more or less made for adults, whereas The Lost Boys, its R rating aside, is, to me, a close cousin to The Goonies or something like that! Frankly, even back when I went to the theater to see the movie in the summer of ’87, having been primed by the exciting-looking stills in Fangoria magazine, I didn’t care much for it!

Watching it again as a putative adult, it’s still neither a good vampire movie nor an effectively scary movie, nor a terribly good movie at all! It has an entertaining, empty slickness to it though, and some good-looking photography from, of all people, Michael Chapman; and the horror end is held up somewhat by some nice makeup trick effects from Greg Cannom (who does the same vampire cheekbone and eyebone makeups he did in Vamp)! There’s even a little bit of gore, though would-be treats like the exploding head are cut away from very quickly and subsumed in showers of sparks while they’re happening! But this is one of those pictures that can be handily summed up in a single image, and that image is of an oiled-up shirtless guy playing the saxophone on a beach!

Aside from that guy, the cast has some ringers! Dianne Weist from It’s My Turn plays the single mom forced by circumstance to move herself and her two sons to the town of Santa Carla, “murder capital of the world,” where her eccentric dad, Barnard Hughes, dwells in a large folk-art cabin! Jason “Keyhole” Patric, going full mannequin, plays the older brother who first comes into conflict with, then is seduced into joining, the local vampire club! Jami Gertz is the token lady in the gang, and there’s a kid too, but the potential of a vampire kid, a bitter and ageless being in a child’s body, so compelling and horrifically realized in Near Dark, is completely ignored here! Kiefer Sutherland, playing just about the same character he did in Stand By Me: that is, a bully with pretensions to suavity, runs the club, and they like to race dirtbikes, hang from bridges, and generally fly around putting a biting on the good people of Santa Carla!

Of course the two Coreys are present and accounted for: Haim from Watchers, and Feldman from Friday the 13^th part 4! Corey plays the younger brother, while Corey of course plays one of the Frog brothers, a fraternal order of pubescent Van Helsings who know the town is full of vampires and would like nothing better than to vanquish them! And then of course there’s the local video store owner, played by the famous milquetoast from Death Valley, Edward Herrmann, who sports the movie’s most hilarious 80s fashions and who may know more about the bloodsucking than he’s ready to tell!

The vampires, meanwhile, hang out in an old hotel that sunk into a crack or something, where they hang upside down and worship Jim Morrison! They’re a squirrely bunch, and one is pleased when they go down much more easily than most movie vampires do! A few squirts of holy water here, a stake in the heart there, and these frilled-shirt laddies are done like dinner! Ha ha! And there’s a death by stereo too!

When I first heard this movie was being made, I thought the title implied a rich new rethinking of the vampire legend! Ha ha, how wrong I was! It’s a fashion show as much as it is a movie: fun, if you like that sort of thing, but desperately inessential! I give The Lost Boys two garlic T-shirts, and even that feels a bit too generous!

Burl reviews Smile! (1975)

Hey, it’s Burl here with a review of another great Michael Ritchie picture! Like The Bad News Bears, this one concentrates on, and dissects in sublime, satirical detail, one of Americaland’s favourite competitive pastimes! The picture is Smile, and the subject, ostensibly, is beauty pageants!

But like so many Ritchie films, the real subject is middle-class America! Ha ha, as the picture begins we find ourselves plunk in the middle of Santa Rosa, California, which is hosting the Young Miss America statewide finals, featuring winning girls from all across the state! The town is in a tizzy, and we follow some of the young ladies and a number of the townsfolk through a week of life’s rich pageant! Ha ha, the approach is Altmanesque, or you might say it was if the key Altman films of this sort had come out earlier; but can you imagine, this picture and Nashville were shooting at exactly the same time in the summer of ’74! So is Smile Altmanesque, or is Nashville Ritchie-esque? Ha ha, both, neither!

Our biggest star in the film is Bruce Dern, well known from Django Unchained and so many other films; but he’s not exactly the main character! Well, he’s close, but the focus is mainly on the girls, and in particular a girl called Robin, played with great appeal by Joan Prather from The Devil’s Rain! Robin is the one who can’t quite get into the pageant spirit, and for this reason she seems the most sensible and intelligent characters!

There are plenty of familiar faces among the other girls! Annette O’Toole, who has always struck me as extraordinarily beautiful, is excellent as a girl who knows a few pageant tricks; and we also have such pretty and talented lasses as Melanie Griffith from Fear City, Caroline Williams from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Maria O’Brien from Protocol, Colleen Camp from Track 29, and Denise Nickerson, Violet Beauregard herself from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory!

There are terrific performances from the townsfolk too, especially that of Barbara Feldon, Agent 99 herself, as a housewife who takes on organizational duties with an almost supernatural fervor! We also get Geoffrey Lewis from ‘Salem’s Lot as another organizer, Dennis Dugan from Night Moves as a janitor’s assistant, and three horny kids who seem like the prototypes for any number of 80s teen sex comedy gangs! Ha ha, that redheaded kid was a particular laff-riot!

Dern’s character is a local car salesman and clubman, an eternal optimist and a true believer in the pageant and its principles! There’s a scene in the middle of the picture in which Dern and his aging fratboy clubmates have a big party in the woods, in which they dress in sheets for some reason - not KKK sheets, but only just - and smash eggs on each others’ heads, and watermelons on their own! Frankly it looks like the absolute last sort of party I’d ever want to attend, and that of course is the point! The picture looks at middle class amusements and mores with the same acid eye of someone like John Cheever!

The movie is shapeless in the best 1970s way, frequently very funny, and has a nice little punchline! Ha ha, and the punchline undercuts what I was seeing as a certain naïveté or willful blindness in its attitude, so I was glad of that! Maybe it wasn’t the most realistic look at the exploitation angle of these contests, but that’s okay! Ha ha, it doesn’t have to be everything! Smile was great just as it was, and I give it three wooden feet!

Burl reviews It Happened Here! (1965)

Sieg ha ha, it’s Burl once again, and I’m here to review a movie on a pretty somber subject! That’s right, it’s a What If picture, and, as usual, the question is What If Those Horrible Nazis Won? The movie is called It Happened Here, and it’s a British semi-amateur production that took almost ten years to make!

Ha ha, the story behind the making of it is one worth telling! The picture was made by the famed historian and reconstructurist Kevin Brownlow, who became something of a legend to me around the time he was working so hard on Abel Gance’s Napoleon! He co-directed it with Andrew Mollo, whose devotion to accuracy in war costuming is known across the world! And these two worthies were but teenagers when they began this project! (Ha ha, Mollo was the brother of John Mollo, the famous costume designer, who also was obsessed with period military garb! Ha ha, two of them in one family!)

Brownlow and Mollo weren’t old and grey when they finished it, but they must have felt it at times! With a star whose age visibly fluctuates over the decade-long shoot; stylish work from the very talented cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, who later shot The Empire Strikes Back and many David Cronenberg pictures, like A Dangerous Method; and a little post-production financial and logistical help from friends, they finally completed and released the movie in 1965, and it got plenty of attention!

The shooting conditions certainly informed the storytelling, which is episodic and sometimes appealingly choppy! Our main character is Pauline, a nurse, whom we meet in an England that has been beaten and occupied by Hitler’s armies! After a partisan attack on German soldiers claims a number of Pauline’s friends, she ends up in London and decides to tread as central and apolitical a path as she can! She joins the Immediate Action group (“a name that sounds like a laxative,” one of the more sympathetic characters opines) and engages in nursing work - a job that eventually turns nightmarish!

Pauline, played by a non-actor also called Pauline, has a compelling face and an accent that, when the poor sound recording allows, gives charming hints of her Irish background! The style of the film, and the way the action scenes, and Pauline’s reactions to the horrors of fascist occupation, are presented, are impressionistic and decidedly modern; one can’t be sure at which points the talents of Brownlow and Mollo end and the exigencies of a paltry budget begin! The movie has a few professional performers in it, notably Sebastian Shaw playing an antifascist doctor! Ha ha, if he looks familiar it’s because he would go on to play the unmasked Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi! And yes, John Mollo designed that mask, and yes, he based it on German army helmets! Ha ha, and so the wheel turns!

It Happened Here has a newsreel authenticity to it (little wonder Suschitzky went on to shoot Peter Watkins’ The War Game, ha ha!), but this verisimilitude tips into creepiness when we realize that Brownlow and Mollow found some genuine Oswald Mosely-style British fascists to play some of the collaborators, and spew some of their actual loathsome views! Others are merely actors who are frighteningly good at pretending to be people who’ve embraced the twisted cross and all that comes along with it!

Of course there is much sad relevance to our situation today! A number of European countries, and our fair neighbours to the south with their loopy, pan-fried president, seem engaged in flirtatious dances with, or indeed outright embraces of, this troublingly inhumane ideology! More and more we hear something close to the rants of O’Brien from 1984 coming from the lips of authoritarian goofballs! And while this picture has an ostensibly happy ending, it’s a barbed one, both for our character and for the future of humanity! “The appalling thing about fascism is that you’ve got to use fascist methods to get rid of it,” says Shaw’s doctor. “We’ve all got a bit of it in us. It doesn’t take very much to bring it to the surface.” And therein lies the message of the film, and its warning! It’s an extraordinary work in many ways, and I give It Happened Here three and a half boots stamping on a human face - forever!

Burl reviews Ghoulies! (1985)

Ha ha and bottombiters, it’s Burl! I’m here to review a movie that’s no doubt most famous for its apparent fealty to Gremlins and its crudely evocative VHS cover, depicting what looks like a miniature green Tor Johnson goblin arising from the bowl of a toilet! Ha ha!

Well I can assure you that I was in no way seduced by this video box cover, for you see friends, I had already seen this movie during its theatrical run! Yes, it’s true - along with such abercrombies as Saturday the 14^th, Time Walker and Deadtime Stories, this stands as one of the lowest-rent pictures I ever had the pleasure of seeing on the big screen!

Directed by Luca Bercovici, an actor who was in Parasite, the movie tells the story of Jonathan, who was rescued as a baby by a wizardly old caretaker from the clutches of his diabolist father, who wanted to sacrifice him in a ritual, and now, twenty-five years later he’s played by Peter Liapis from Starhops, and has inherited his dear old dad’s mansion! The caretaker-sorcerer, played by the excellent Jack Nance (well-known from all his work with David Lynch, like Dune, and then of course many other fine pictures like The Blob), disappears for the bulk of the movie, but occasionally pops up on the soundtrack to narrate the proceedings!

In tow are Jonathan’s girlfriend Lisa Pelikan, who had trafficked in this sort of thing before, in the Carrie rip-off Jennifer, and a whole group of his jerky friends! These boxwines are played by the likes of Ralph Seymour, an 80s fixture in pictures like Fletch, Surf II, Killer Party and Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure; Scott Thomson from RoboCop; and TV fixture Mariska Hargitay! Ha ha, one can hardly wait for the ghoulies to appear and shred these klingfields!

But one must wait, for the ghoulies only pop up intermittently, and are in no sense the main antagonists of the story! Ostensibly the bad guy is Jonathan’s father, played by British softrocker Michael Des Barres, but for my money the picture’s biggest jerk is Jonathan himself, who, upon discovering his black magikal patrimony, dons robes and begins muttering incessantly in a cod-Latin style, and becomes a liar, a scoundrel and a complete chowderhead! Meanwhile his pals roam the house, giggling and occasionally engaging in the worst white-guy breakdancing ever committed to film! Yes, even worse than that depicted in Graduation Day!

Jonathan conjures up first the ghoulies, then a pair of tiny, steel-helmeted helpmates played by Tamera de Treaux (who did some time in E.T.’s costume) and Peter Risch (the cigar-chomping, serape-wearing midget from Malibu Hot Summer), and finally the old man himself, who rises from the grave zombie style! Ha ha, he briefly assumes the form of Bobbie Bresee, from Mausoleum and Armed Response, in an attempt to seduce one of the lummox houseguests! After a few scenes of the friends finally being attacked, then doing the worm around the house and being wrapped in sheets, the whole thing concludes once Jack Nance reappears and engages Des Barres in a wizard battle straight out of The Raven!

The ghoulies and other trick makeup effects come courtesy of the late John Buechler, a hard-working trick effects man who somehow always managed to make his creatures look vaguely like himself - ha ha, the monster in Cellar Dweller is a pretty good example of that! In Ghoulies it’s the little green ghoulie which most resembles its creator, while, as mentioned, also calling to mind the facial features of Tor Johnson! But Buechler is let down by both his budget and the poor direction, and the creatures come off as stiff afterthoughts! They sure aren’t scary!

I will say there is one effective moment involving a big clown doll, and then a subsequent scene involving the clown doll that isn’t effective but is certainly entertainingly goofy! In its best moments, which are few, Ghoulies actually reminded me of the low-budget The Demon Lover or the recent horror picture Hereditary, both of which were a lot scarier! In the end, which is of course where the ghoulies will get you, and where the movie itself seems to have originated, ha ha, I give Ghoulies just one single eye zap!

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!