Burl reviews The Worm Eaters! (1977)

Haghh haghh, it’s Burl! Yuck, I’m here to review a movie about worm eating, and yes, it could only be called The Worm Eaters! And yes, it’s about people eating worms! Oh, they gobble those vermiforms up with the greatest of gusto! Ha ha, and you can bet that it’s as gross as it sounds!

It seems there’s a small town in California, and there lives a clubfooted German eccentric named Herman Umgar, who runs a grimy restaurant, who keeps worms and has special names for them all, and who has built a little castle for them all to live in! He sure does love his worms! Though they patronize his restaurant, the townsfolk don't like Umgar very much, and the evil mayor is trying to steal the deed to Umgar’s land, which includes a lake near which three fisherman had something strange happen to them at the beginning of the picture! We also learn that the mayor had at some earlier point killed the wormkeeper’s father and buried him in concrete!

Well, in his slow-witted, weirdo, vaudeville way, Umgar seeks revenge! He discovers that if he feeds his worms to the townspeople at his horrible little restaurant, they will turn into wormpeople themselves! Ha ha! After they gobble on worms for a while, the victims begin to cough and choke like they’re hacking up a hairball; then they emit paste; and finally their lower halves become slimy, segmented worm bodies, and they crawl around on their bellies making yick-yack sounds! Umgar’s victims include all manner of townies, perhaps most memorably two girls obsessed with hot dogs! Well, they get their hot dogs, but not without a little extra protein added in, ha ha! By the end, of course, Umgar himself is a worm, and he becomes the victim of the three fishermen, who catch him with a hook tossed out from the lake!

If you like gross close-ups of people’s mouths as they suck up and chew on worms, this is the picture for you! It’s one of those movies that seem to have been made by an experimental theater company on their dark days, much like Futz or Godmonster of Indian Flats! Really though, it seems largely the creation of a guy named Herb Robins, well known from his appearance in The Funhouse, who wrote and directed the picture, plays the part of Umgar, and happened to know a lot of people who didn’t mind eating worms! The movie was produced by, of all people, Ted V. Mikels, a bare-chested satyr of a man who lived in a small castle near Las Vegas and kept multiple wives!

The movie has long, boring stretches with Umgar soliloquizing and/or talking to his worms, scenes I suppose Robins thought were amusing, but which really aren’t! The vermipeople in their rubber segmented bodies are pretty entertaining though, and there are some performances (the head fisherman, the mayor, a black woman who is far and away the most intelligent and likable person in the picture) that are quite splendid! Other actors ham it up terribly - you’d see more convincing performances at your local fringe festival! The bottom line, though, is there’s an awful lot of worm eating to suffer though here, and I confess I wasn’t equal to the task! I had to look away several times, just as I had to press mute on the movie’s insufferable theme song, which occurs over the opening titles, the closing titles, and once, in a vastly overextended form, during the body of the picture! Like me, by the time you get to that point in the film you’ll probably wish someone would sneak up behind you and press a chloroform rag over your face! Ha ha, I give The Worm Eaters two hell of a lakes!

Burl reviews Collateral Damage! (2002)

Burl here to fill you in on action-drama! Yes, the picture I’m reviewing for you today is Collateral Damage, an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, one of the last he made before taking his hiatus from movies and becoming a ho-hum governator! This is one of those movies that was made before 9/11 and came out afterward, and it achieved a modicum of notice thanks to its scenes of bombs going off in public places and victims lying around covered in bloody sheets! For the briefest of moments the public mood was against such pictures, and the makers of Collateral Damage were not sure what to do! In the end they released their movie, but played down the terrorist elements in the advertising so as not to upset people! However I’m sure they toyed with the idea of playing them up instead: here, they might have insisted, you will see Arnold going after proxy versions of the real-life terrorists who have so upset America, and making them pay, pay, PAY!

That could have meant big box office bucks, I suppose, but the gang at Warner Bros., under the shadow of a history-making terrorist attack, chose to resist looking like tasteless mercenaries for the sake of a few dollars! Perhaps, too, they knew they had a bit of a clam on their hands, one which would have hardly satisfied the action junkies looking for cathartic vengeance!

Arnold plays Gordie Brewer, Los Angeles firefighter: once again a heavily-accented man with a mysteriously Anglo name! (This incongruity, so easily accepted in Schwarzenegger pictures by now, is put into sharper focus later in the movie, when Arnold briefly goes undercover as “Heinrich Beckmann,” German mechanic!) Gordie’s workaday world is shattered when his wife and young son are blown up by a Colombian terrorist known as The Wolf, who issues threats using a voice-altering device that makes him sound like André the Giant and who has targeted some US and Colombian officials! Once the chaos subsides, Gordie’s family are simply dismissed as, you guessed it, collateral damage!

Well that’s not good enough for Gordie! Forsaking his razor he makes his way to Colombia, and after several misadventures, and a stint in a South American jail, and encounters with John "Barton Fink" Turturro (playing the world most unlikely Canadian) and John "Die Hard 2" Leguzamo (playing a manufacturer of mind drugs) he finds The Wolf’s compound! But The Wolf finds him too, and in the course of their conflict there occur several explosions, some engineered by Gordie and others by CIA spook Elias “Some Kind of Wonderful” Koteas! Our tale ends in Washington, where there will be further explosions and an action climax involving indoor motorcycle riding and violence fights!

As in so many of the Arnold movies in which he’s supposed to be a more or less everyday fellow, the picture works overtime in establishing his quotidian qualities, and tries manfully to resist turning him into a superman in the action scenes! For me, Arnold is better off in his more unflappably robotic roles, like Commando or Predator or most especially, and literally, The Terminator, in which he’s less likely to issue the panicked bellow that always bursts forth whenever he’s playing an everyday man in trouble, falling down or being blown through the air by an explosion or whatnot!

At times Collateral Damage, with its confused geopolitics and cake-and-eat-it-too view of American foreign policy, seems like a holdover from not just the 90s, but from further back still, right to the darn Reagan era! The action is middling at best, the story unsatisfying, and the execution plodding! It’s a forgotten mediocrity, and I almost regret reminding you of it here! Ha ha, sorry ‘bout that! I give Collateral Damage one Metallica t-shirt!

Burl reviews D.A.R.Y.L.! (1985)

Hi, it’s your good pal B.U.R.L. - Badly Underpaid Reviewer Lad! Ha ha! I’m here to review a kiddie sci-fi picture from the 1980s which you may or may not remember: D.A.R.Y.L.! It’s the sort of movie that wants to be E.T. or WarGames, but would probably settle for being Short Circuit or Flight of the Navigator, and doesn’t even manage that! As 80s kidventure pictures go, it’s pretty dry – it tastes like a mouthful of wicker!

It does open with a car chase, however! Actually it’s a car being chased by a helicopter, and the car soon goes off a cliff, but not before depositing a young, brown-haired boy, D.A.R.Y.L.! D.A.R.Y.L. is soon picked up by the Barkington Youth Center, and he just as quickly becomes the foster child of Barkington residents Mary Beth Hurt and Michael McKean! With his unmatchable manners, his ability to hit home runs, and his thrilling aptitude at Pole Position, D.A.R.Y.L. is soon the toast of Barkington! No, D.A.R.Y.L. is someone the good people of Barkington will not soon forget!

But of course D.A.R.Y.L. is no ordinary moppet! Ha ha, his name’s an acronym for starters, and then there’s that computer in his head! The movie is a bit vague on what sort of robot he is - is he a Terminator, a Roy Batty, a Bishop, a Data? - but he’s a robot of some kind, and when his new family and real-boy best friend Turtle eventually find this out it hardly even makes them blink! Such are D.A.R.Y.L.’s powers of ingratiation!

D.A.R.Y.L. was created by laboratory scientists because for some reason the Pentagon wanted to create armies of polite little boys who excel at video games! The scientists, in the guise of D.A.R.Y.L.’s real parents, take the artificial lad away from his foster parents, which makes everyone sad, but the main scientist, played by Josef Somer of Target, quickly decides that he has become a real boy after all, and, like his colleague at the beginning of the movie, smuggles the lad out of the research facility and absconds with him! A ludicrously trigger-happy cop puts an end to this relationship (the most touching of the film), but D.A.R.Y.L. simply steals America’s most sophisticated fighter jet and flies home to Barkington!

Oh, this movie! I wish the darn thing was better, because it had some potential! But the direction, I’m sorry to say, lacks any style at all, and barely any pep! There’s one car stunt and a lab set that briefly hit the mark, but that’s about it! The performances are pretty lifeless, with the actor playing D.A.R.Y.L. conveying D.A.R.Y.L.’s uncertainty about human ways by wearing a constant expression of imbecilic bewilderment! It feels like chunks were cut out because the scriptwriters could not figure out how to deliver narrative points in an efficient way! (In this it resembles contemporaneous Paramount product like Blue City and Summer Rental, and helps undercut the studio’s mid-80s reputation as a slick and ruthlessly efficient entertainment factory!)

If it’s supposed to be Pinocchio, they left out all the traumatic temptation and lesson-learning undergone by the wooden lad, and whatever blue fairy is meant to hasten D.A.R.Y.L.’s transformation to a real boy is here left offscreen! There also seems to be a great deal of geographical confusion: is Barkington in the Pacific Northwest, or maybe is it in Florida? Ha ha, there’s evidence to suggest both! (In fact, much of it was shot in the U.K.!) It’s always nice to see an 80s movie with the military-industrial complex portrayed as the unalloyed baddies they are, though, but this bright spot alone is not enough for me to give D.A.R.Y.L. anything more than one round of Pole Position!

Burl reviews Night Screams! (1986)

Burl here! Yes, I’ve got a mystery slasher for you today, a little-discussed cornelius out of Wichita, Kansas called Night Screams! Ha ha, and of course as a little public service I like to place these pictures into very specific categories so that the unwary watcher may become wary, or at least go into their viewing with a surfeit of information in hand!

One thing I like to let the people know is whether the movie in question contains any actual Special Makeup Effects in its killings or not! Ha ha, many a slasher pic skimps on this critical ingredient, relying instead on shots of poking knives and a few drops of stage blood! (The only movie that gets away clean with this approach is Halloween! Ha ha, and Psycho too, I suppose!)

Now, the funny thing is that Night Screams cheats a bit in this regard, because it opens with a couple sitting on their couch and enjoying a viewing of Graduation Day! We see a couple of killings from that picture, and the movie’s surprise ending is revealed, so fair warning if you haven’t seen Graduation Day! But it’s a sly way for Night Screams to fit a few more killings and a little extra tomato paste into its running time!

It’s an apt way to open the picture too, because Night Screams is very Graduation Day! The gang of superannuated sports teens we meet here are on the foot-ball team, or are girlfriends of the foot-ball team, and the action is centered on a big post-game party held for all these jerks by foot-ball hero David! But David wants no part of his BMOC status, though his bear of a dad revels in it by proxy, and we learn as the picture goes on that, without his special medication David is prone to fits of violence, and he’ll throw down a Cornish Hen flipout fit on his friends at the drop of a hat! His ladyfriend meanwhile feels that she doesn’t fit in, and at the same time all the girls are angling for a piece of David, who seems awfully Jersey Shore for a guy stuck in Wichita!

David’s not the only red herring here, to be sure! A religious maniac named Snake has broken out of Leavenworth, along with a couple of his pals, and they’re hiding in David’s basement! At the party, victims pile up: a fireplace poker through the sternum; a trouble light dropped into a hot tub; a neck crushed with a pool cue; a head chopped with an axe; a man’s face grilled alongside his own hamburger; and a few garden variety pokings and stranglings! (Of these, only the face-grilling and accompanying neck-poke required any substantial effort from the picture’s one-woman Special Makeup Effects team!)

As so often, it’s the marginal details that provide the most profound enjoyment! There is a pleasing entr’acte in which our victims-to-be go out to the club, where they observe the gyrations of six bespangled ladies called The Sweetheart Dancers! There’s a tubby jokester character straight out of Friday the 13th part 3, but this particular tubby jokester, called Russell, is given less to practical jokes and more to jarring bursts of bizarre behavior which the movie stops cold to observe! Are these incidents meant to be funny, or are they presented as evidence of incipient psychosis? Ha ha, the glory of Night Screams is that one simply cannot be sure!

The picture is never very scary, of course, though Snake demonstrates some admirably violent tendencies; and the solution to the mystery makes remarkably little sense, even for a movie like this! (Ha ha, this is yet another aspect it shares with Graduation Day!) The regional players, who include some almost-familiar faces like Ron Thomas from The Big Bet and Janette Caldwell from Body Double, do a competent enough job, and there are just enough flourishes of wit, bizarre moments, and uber-80s aspects (oh those Sweetheart Dancers!) to make it all worthwhile! I give Night Screams one and a half Yoda impressions!

Burl reviews The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou! (2004)

Ahoy-hoy, it’s Burl, here to review a picture that underwhelmed me a bit when I saw it in the cinema, but which has doggedly, or dogfishedly, risen in my estimation ever since! That picture is The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and to say that this is one of the most artificial movies Wes Anderson has yet made is to accuse it of no little artifice!

As I watched this recently with my son, he asked me what the movie was about, and ha ha, for him I had no answer! We simply follow Steve Zissou, a self-hating American version of Jacques Cousteau, as he and his international band of misfits search, and film their search, for the enormous jaguar shark that chewed up his friend Esteban! There are many complications, including the appearance of a young man who may or may not be Steve’s son; a bond company stooge along to keep the budget in check; pirates; a pregnant journalist; a crabby wife; and a rival superstar ocean scientist!

But that’s just the plot stuff! Ha ha, the real joys are conceptual or visual or detail-based! All the made-up sea creatures and phenomena, and the crayon-coloured animations of same, are simple delights! The idea of Steve Zissou and his ship, the Belafonte (which is shown to us in great detail thanks to an amazing set), and the extracts from his films, and movie posters for older pictures like The Battling Eels of Antibes and Shadow Creatures of the Lurisia Archipelago, enchant us still deeper into this aqua-centric world!

And the cast is large and spectacular! Bill Murray makes a good Zissou, and Owen Wilson seems to be channeling Val Kilmer’s performance in Tombstone, but with less cynicism and coughing! There’s Willem "Streets of Fire" Dafoe, hamming it up as a needy German; Jeff "Into the Night" Goldbum doing it up right as the part-gay rival; Anjelica Huston underplaying to a fault as the wife; Michael Gambon smooth as paste playing the type of producer most of us in the movie business have met; But Cort as the bond company stooge; and Cate Blanchett all nervy as the reporter! There’s a sweet cameo from Seymour "Eye of the Tiger" Cassel in the role of Esteban, which makes you wish there were more of him in the movie, maybe in flashback form!

Of course none of the characters seem quite real, which makes it hard to connect with the personal drama in the story! Anderson’s patented attempts at pathos through slow timing and understated delivery might do the job in the moment, but they don’t manage much depth, or hit home on an emotional level, except occasionally! “I hated fathers and never wanted to be one,” says Steve at one point, and one can sort of understand that sentiment even if one doesn’t share it!

The picture may not plough deep, but it ploughs smoothly and provides many joys along the way! It tries a little too hard to put an emotional punching on us, but that’s something Anderson has gotten better and subtler at as he goes along, so it didn’t bother me much here! Ha ha, I guess I applied some kind of latent maturity filter to my viewing! Anyway, it’s a fun picture and a very funny one too, and piled high with good music, fulsome performances, and an end credits sequence charmingly borrowed from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai! Ha ha! I give The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou three rubber tides!

Burl reviews The Car! (1977)

Beep beep, it’s Burl, here to review one of the great concoctive movies of the 1970s, The Car! It’s like someone saw Jaws and The Exorcist, and heard about the then-upcoming Smokey and the Bandit, and said ha ha, let’s do it! Let’s mix ‘em all up and see what we get!

What they got was a picture about a small desert town terrorized by a devil-possessed sedan, a concept which I consider sort of brilliantly stupid! Ha ha! The dastardly auto, a big ugly thing of indeterminate make, roams the mesas and barrancas around Santa Ynez, a little community with a seemingly inexhaustible police force! The hero of the piece is James Brolin, well known from Von Ryan’s Express, looking very Marlboro Man as deputy sheriff Wade Parent! (Boy, Brolin had a great run in the 1970s! Westworld, The Car, Capricorn One, The Amityville Horror: none of them great movies, but all pop gems in their own right!)

The police force also includes alcoholic deputy Luke, played by the fine Ronny Cox from Total Recall and Beverly Hills Cop! The boss sheriff is leathery John Marley, and then there’s my favourite character Chas, another deputy, played by Henry O’Brien! Ha ha, I won’t be breaking a confidence to reveal that one or more of these gentlemen may end up flattened by the car! There’s also a nasty, abusive demolition man played by R.G. Armstrong, who would reunite with Cox five years later to battle The Beast Within, and whose fate in this picture will surprise you! And Wade Parent’s girlfriend is played at once winningly and hammily by Kathleen Lloyd from Best Seller!

The sequence of events is very Jaws, with the car claiming its first victims right off the hop, and then on the reg after that! Unlike the shark, however, the car begins targeting specific people, at one point jumping through a house Grand Theft Auto-style to wheel-butt someone it has a grudge against! Ha ha! The car starts exhibiting supernatural abilities, like going into a barrel roll, crushing a couple of police cars, righting itself and cruising on without so much as a dented fender! It also demonstrates a disinclination to drive on hallowed ground, which apparently cemeteries are! Yet for all this, most of the force refuses to believe they’re dealing with anything but a maniac driver!

Ha ha, the Santa Ynez police force has a rough go of it here, suffering untold personnel losses beneath the wheels of the constantly honking vehicle! But a series of events involving truckloads of dynamite, a motorcycle fleeing from the car, a big cliff, and a dodging out of the way at the last moment (the oldest trick in the book), conspire to lead the car into a fiery explosion supposed by some to contain a demonic face, though I’ve never been able to see it in there!

To my great enjoyment The Car is a desert picture, the sort of thing Jack “Tarantula” Arnold should have been doing in the 70s instead of Black Eye! But director Eliot Silverstein does a fine job in Arnold’s stead, keeping the car as scary and imposing as he can under the circumstances, ha ha, the circumstances being that he’s making a movie about the devil’s towncar! The car design helps: King of the Kustomizers George Barris did a good job here; and there’s some marvelous photography from Gerald Hirschfeld of both the car and its environs!

But the killer car idea, dusted off later for Christine and one segment in the anthology Nightmares, is pretty silly! Points go to all participants for taking it seriously and making it more or less work! The car hardly ever claims victims at night, probably because it was difficult to photograph in the dark; but even with this restriction the movie manages an aridly creepy atmosphere! I’m fond of this picture and I’m not afraid to admit it! I give The Car three French horns!

Burl reviews Friday the 13th! (2009)

Chuff-chuff-chuff, por-por-por, ha-ha-ha, it’s Burl, here to review a Friday the 13^th picture! But not any old Friday the 13^th picture; no, this is the attempt they made about a decade ago to bring Jason and his antics into the new century, to make his slicings, his dicings and his pokings relevant to a new generation of thrill seekers!

It’s called simply Friday the 13^th, but it’s not exactly a remake of the 1980 Friday the 13^th, just another variation on the theme! It plays, I guess, like Friday the 13^th part 2 would have if they’d tried (pointlessly) to inject more logic into the saga instead of bringing in a long-dead character and putting a bag over his head! But of course they sacrifice different logic in doing so!

It opens with a restaging of the original picture’s climax, with Mrs. Voorhees catching a head-chop from a surviving girl! But her severed head instructs Jason to Kill For Mommy; and so if Mrs. Voorhees is issuing orders to her son, that means he didn’t drown, and she knows it; and if that’s the case, why was she taking out her revenge on these camp counselors? What’s everybody so mad about? Ha ha, who knows, and who cares!

This picture has a very long pre-title sequence involving the demise of a whole group of college-age kids, of the type you’d never want to hang out with in real life! They are quickly gotten rid of by a ragheaded Jason, whose methods have become more sadistic than they used to be! No longer for him the simple poking, but now a slow campfire roast in a sleeping bag, or a bear trap to the leg! But of course one of the girls resembles Mother, and so as the picture wears on we can be assured of the same gambit used in part 2, and also of course in Humongous!

Finally we meet a whole new gang of teens, a completely unlikely group of pals, and most of them boneheaded jerks! They’re spending the weekend at the remote country house of the biggest jerk of them all, a shrill, possessive colungus who’s constantly remonstrating with his guests about scuffed tables and spilled beer! There’s also a character imported whole from Friday the 13th part 4, the handsome backpacker searching for his missing sister! But where the heck is Crazy Ralph?

While there are a couple of nicely set-up moments, like one involving a shower curtain, the movie is on the whole remarkably free of tension or frights! It’s clearly trying for an intensity never reached by the older episodes, but doesn’t manage any better! There’s a flatness to the whole enterprise; while the poking scenes come with a bran-fuelled regularity, the rollercoaster momentum the movie wishes to have never gets going! If the movie hits a sweet spot, it’s in the meatiness of its killings, which are gory but not excessively or cartoonishly so!

Jason’s lair, which is somewhere beneath Camp Crystal Lake, or maybe underneath his old house, features trophies from his past adventures in killing! This would be a nice touch if it weren’t so obviously, well, obvious! Better the energy should be spent on creating real characters to murder, or actual suspense, dread or terror in the execution of said murders! It’s altogether a pretty tired enterprise, filled with terrible songs, and I can’t muster the energy to give this Friday the 13^th more than one field of leafy greens!

Burl reviews Escape from L.A.! (1996)

Ha ha, it’s me - call me Burl! Yes, I’m here to review not the first, but the second adventure of Snake Plisskin, which is to say the time he had to Escape from L.A.! Now, like just about everybody, I’m very fond of his first go-round, Escape from New York! That’s just a terrific picture! But I remember going to the theater to see the new one when it came out back in 1996, and I came reeling out with my brain full of skunkfire! It was a terrific disappointment!

Watching it again more recently, I found more to like in the movie, but not much! It’s certainly on the bottom level of John Carpenter pictures, along with Ghosts of Mars and The Ward, and so very remote from the heights of The Thing and Halloween!

Snake Plisskin is still the monocular man of action we know and love from 1982! It seems there’s another godly hypocrite in the White House, played by Cliff Robertson in Malone mode, and he’s made L.A., that heathen city, into a dumping ground for everyone he doesn’t like: atheists and so forth! Ha ha, Los Angeles is a big city, but I don’t think it could fit everybody this joker doesn’t like! Ol’ Burl, for example, would be sent there immediately, and I would probably set up shop in the Academy screening room and just watch movies all day!

Of course Snake has no time for that: he has to get back some important trinket from Robertson’s rebellious daughter, who has set up shop with notorious gangster-terrorist Cuervo Jones; and for Snake there’s a countdown clock (referred to even more insistently than it was in New York) and gangs to fight, and, as in the previous picture, a terrific supporting cast! As before, everyone he meets either knows him or has heard of him, but now, instead of everyone thinking he was dead, they all thought he’d be taller!

There are also lots of really ropey CGI trick effects (that shark!) and a lugubrious mise-en-scene that drains the action scenes of any pizzazz! Oh John, how did it come to this! You’re a terrific action director! It doesn’t help that so much of the movie plays as a pale imitation of the earlier movie’s highlights! Instead of gliding onto the World Trade Center, Snake submarines onto a freeway ramp! When he’s captured by the bad guys, he doesn’t fight their biggest man in a ring, as he did in New York; no, he must play basketball! At least the doo-dad he’s after is a mini disc instead of a tape cassette, ha ha!

The general reduction in amazingness extends to the supporting cast, which, as I said, is terrific! Just not as terrific! Stacey Keach is fine, but he’s no Lee Van Cleef! Steve Buscemi is a wonderful actor, but he’s not Harry Dean Stanton! Peter Fonda is great, but Ernest Borgnine is greater! And George Corraface is most assuredly no Isaac Hayes! We also get Pam Grier and Bruce Campbell, wonderful performers both, but somewhat underused here!

On the plus side - and Burl always looks for that, ha ha! - Kurt Russell doesn’t miss a trick in his Snake Plisskin shtick! A couple of the fights are pretty good, and there are pleasing ideas or bits of design lurking in the margins! There’s a little cavalcade of Rick Baker makeups in the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills scene, which is always nice! And, as with every movie about the destruction of L.A. made by people who live there, there’s a certain glee taken in the city’s demise, with potshots aplenty taken at its ways and its people!

And of course, in its depiction of the demagogic Robertson, the picture has a certain prescience; enough, maybe, to serve as a cautionary tale along the line of Sinclair Lewis’s book It Can’t Happen Here! And even at his worst, John Carpenter is still John Carpenter, and there’s some pleasing carpentry throughout the movie! I give Escape from L.A. one and a half full-court free throws!

Burl reviews Francis the Talking Mule! (1949)

Hee haw, it’s Burl, here to review a movie about the most famous talking mule there is, Francis! Now, fame-wise I’m not sure how he stacks up against Mr. Ed, his greatest competitor, but I’m pretty sure these days, seventy years after his cinematic debut, he’s still better known than Don, the horse that was voiced by John Candy in Hot to Trot!

Of course there was only one Hot to Trot, and there must have been a half-dozen Francis movies! The picture I’m reviewing for you today was the first of them, and while it doesn’t explain how the irascible mule gained the power of speech, it does detail the initial meeting between Francis and the human who would become his closest chum, 2^nd lieutenant Peter Stirling, played by the amiable hoofmeister Donald O’Connor! Ha ha!

Now, O’Connor is of course best known for his spectacular work in Singin’ In the Rain, but a little-known fact is that he can also be seen in The Big Fix, palling around with Francis in footage from Francis Joins the Navy! He’s really the perfect guy for this role - halfway between Mickey Rooney (who got his own horse movie later, The Black Stallion) and Eddie Bracken! Of course Rooney and Bracken were both fine comedians capable of playing exactly the sort of gormless milquetoast Stirling is meant to be, but somehow O’Connor hits those notes while still projecting a sort of protean competence that leads you to believe he actually might have risen to the rank of Lieutenant during wartime without being either fragged or simply killed in combat! Even Don Knotts couldn’t have pulled that one off!

We first meet Stirling in his post-war occupation as a bank teller, but there is a whisper campaign being conducted against him, and his boss threatens to fire him! The boss gives Stirling a chance to tell his tale, which occurred when he was stationed in Burma during the war! On getting separated from his patrol, and under heavy enemy fire, Stirling comes across a placid army mule who gives him advice on how to survive, and then, when Stirling receives a minor shrapnel wound to the leg, carts him to an aid station!

From there the picture adopts a structure of repetition, in which Stirling tries to persuade his colonel that a talking mule saved his life; Francis refuses to talk to the colonel; Stirling is thrown into the psychiatric ward and made to weave baskets by jolly nurse Zasu Pitts; Francis gives Stirling some crucial bit of information about a Japanese observation post, or a hidden patrol, or a sneak air attack; Stirling becomes a hero but is pressured to tell the colonel where he got his information; rinse and repeat! Ha ha, with its host of eccentric characters, its focus on the impenetrable logic of rear-echelon army brass, its dazed hero caught in the machinations of illogic imposed by war, it almost reminded me of Catch-22! Eventually, Francis, to prevent his new friend being tossed in the booby hatch for life, deigns to talk for someone other than Stirling - a three-star general, in fact , played by John McIntire from Psycho, Cloak &Dagger, and Herbie Rides Again - but it only causes more trouble!

The perpetually irascible Francis speaks in the voice of Chill Wills from Fireball 500, and his attitude is essentially that of the dogfaces in a Bill Mauldin cartoon: grousing about army brass in general, and 2^nd lieutenants in particular, for whom he seems to have a particular hate-on! But at the same time he’s a hyper-patriotic equine and wants to do his bit to win the war! Eventually the picture concludes with what seems like a tragic denouement, but director Arthur Lubin (who would later go on to direct a hundred and fifty episodes of Mr. Ed - ha ha, talk about a niche!) and novelist/screenwriter David Stern have one last trick up their sleeves! After all, if Francis died in a plane crash, how could he ever join the WACS? Ha ha!

The picture is done in the Universal low-budget house style, which is a comforting style to ol’ Burl! Those Burmese jungles are probably the same palm fronds later prowled through by the Creature from the Black Lagoon, ha ha! Though there’s a lot of unfortunate talk about “Japs,” and that same casual racism you find in many pictures of the period, particularly war pictures, it wasn’t ladled on quite as heavily as I’d feared! The picture is a bit slow and talky for a children’s comedy, and anyway the intended audience seems more to be men for whom wartime service was still a recent memory, who can chuckle and nod along with Francis’s jabs at army life and the officer class! I give Francis the Talking Mule two tails standing at attention!

Burl reviews Forever Evil! (1987)

Hi everybody, it’s Burl here with a new movie review! It’s high time I reviewed Forever Evil for you: a movie which, with its 107 minute running time (epic for a little regional low-budget horror picture) and its endless scenes of chat, well earns its title!

The tale is set in and around Houston, Texas, because that’s where the filmmakers lived! Our main character, Marc Denning, is played by Red Mitchell from The Outing and Night Game, and looks a little like Patton Oswalt mixed with Samwise Gamgee from The Lord of the Rings, with just a touch of Jack Black sprinkled in! Marc and his friends are making a weekend retreat to celebrate the completion of some new device invented by Marc and his brother, but the weekend turns sour when everyone but Marc is killed!

It’s pretty gruesome actually, because the first victim is Marc’s pregnant ladyfriend, who is found in the shower with the fetus ripped out of her! Ahh, yuck! The other pals are found with various fatal cuts and gouges, and some unseen creature with glowing red eyes seems to be prowling about! Marc gets his jeans shredded by the beast and must run around for the next fifteen minutes with hilariously shredded pants flapping around his legs! A zombie wearing a string tie appears and gets his eye gouged out, and finally Marc escapes - only to be run over by a car! Ha ha, but he survives!

In the ensuing investigation, Marc makes a new friend named Leo, who, true to his name, is a Law Enforcement Officer! He also meets a lady named Reggie, who, it transpires, is the sole survivor of an earlier, very similar massacre! And now comes the investigation, which should be the most boring part of the picture, but I love this kind of thing when it’s shot on 16mm film and acted out by competent regional players! Marc and Reggie, in the company of the skeptical Leo, discover the whole crazy thing revolves around a Lovecraftian Old God called Yog-Kothag and a local realtor who appears to be murdering people in an attempt to bring this evil demon back to life!

By now Marc has a head full of cracklin’ bran and a new look in which he wears a suit jacket, a pullover and a long black scarf, and limps around on a cane! Leo, who wears a three piece suit without a tie, declares “You’re lettin’ this Yog-Kothag thing get to you! Ha ha!” Shortly thereafter  the forces of evil first steal Leo's nice old car and then kill him, so Marc trades in his college instructor style for olive drab weekend warrior garb, grabs some popguns, and straps on his invention, which turns out to be a grappling hook that shoots out from a Batman-style wrist contraption! Ha ha, Reggie dons her khakis too, and they’re ready for anti-Yog action!

The string-tie zombie reappears, and the evil realtor admits that the zombie, at his direction, has been the one putting a poking on folks! “I’m a busy man,” he explains! “I don’t have time to go around killing people!” Ha ha! Though Marc and Reggie dole out a good deal of punishment to this cracker zombie, it proves hard to get rid of! Well, then there’s a small twist at the climax and the forever evil finally comes to an end!

Now, I can’t say this is a good movie exactly, but, like some other nominally boring regional horror pictures I could name (The Devonsville Terror comes to mind, or Fiend), it’s perfectly enjoyable if you enter into it in the proper spirit! There’s some inventiveness to the plotting, though not much, and a nice variety of spooky effects; but on the down side there’s perhaps a bit too much fetus-ripping for ol’ Burl’s taste! The trick effects involving the demon fetus are fakey enough that it’s not too bad, though! There's also a fantastic moment involving a paperweight that you will know when you see it! Altogether it’s a nicely ambitious bit of semi-amateur genre filmmaking, and I give Forever Evil two worthless old Stu-dee-bakers!