Burl reviews Nightforce! (1986)

Well hoot-n-holler, boys, it’s Burl, here to review some Reagan-era action! Ha ha, the picture is called Nightforce, all one word according to the title card, and politically speaking, it’s about as Reagan-era as you can possibly imagine! That’s not exactly the kind of thing I like to watch on its own merits, but I do like to laugh at them! Ha ha!

Story-wise it’s a kind of proto-Collateral Damage! We are introduced to a group of college-age pals, most of them a bit jerky in one way or another! One of them, Christy, is the daughter of Senator Cameron Mitchell, an actor whom we know from so many pictures, from Without Warning to Raw Force! Anyway, there’s some soap opera stuff, and then Christy is kidnapped by a vanful of burly guys in fatigues - it’s South American terrorists again!

Cries Senator Cameron Mitchell, “Gnarr! There’s nothing I can do!” So it’s up to Christy’s buddies and secret boyfriend to go and rescue her! Among them are a goofball mechanic, a macho gun freak who brings along his bazooka, a sort of random cool dude guy, and Linda Blair from Roller Boogie! The secret boyfriend is a burly fellow with a bad case of Resting Idiot Face, and he’s ready to do what it takes to get Christy back despite the drunken, insecure ravings of the social-climbing brother from whom he stole Christy’s affections on the very day she and the brother were to be married! (Ha ha, I told you there was soap opera stuff!)

Once they’re in South America and looking for the terrorists’ encampment, the kids hook up with flute-playing, serape-wearing ex-soldier Richard Lynch, whom you probably know from The Premonition, but won’t recognize here ‘cause he isn’t wearing clown makeup! Meanwhile Christy sits naked in a cage in the middle of the camp, repeatedly brutalized perhaps, but treated with kindness by the potato-faced midget who guards her! There’s a climax of exactly the sort of action you expect when renting a low-budget 80s, and then the 82 minute picture is over!

This isn’t a Ridiculous Action movie despite the direction by Lawrence D. Foldes, whose Young Warriors very much is, and the presence of Mitchell, who seemed pulled to RA pictures by some sort of gravitational force! Foldes, evidently the kind of auteur to order a box around his name in the opening credits, was obviously trying to play serious here, and even, judging by the sympathetic potato face, a little bit nuanced! It’s nevertheless shot through with Ridiculous Action moments, but not of a high enough concentration to qualify it for the larger Ridiculous Action genre!

I still recommend it to the RA completests though, because it’s really only a few punji sticks and a crate of New York Seltzer away from Deadly Prey! It could use a few more novelty killings and some more tomato paste too! But on balance I feel confident giving Nightforce one and a half comfort-serapes!

Burl reviews Dirty Work! (1998)

Hi there! It’s Burl, here to review one of the forgotten 90s comedies, and no, it’s not Chairman of the Board! Ha ha, this one is Dirty Work, which was supposed to be Norm Macdonald’s shot at movie stardom, but I guess it didn’t take! I suppose in one sense I can see why - it’s hard to imagine Macdonald’s particular shtick traveling beyond this one exact movie, the way Bill Murray’s did from Meatballs into Stripes, and Ghostbusters, and beyond!

He plays one note, and you’ve got to like that note! I happen to like it, and so I hold Dirty Work in much higher esteem than perhaps it deserves! On the other hand, because it hardly lives up to what I see as its potential, I am just as likely to feel more harshly about it than an average moviegoing citizen might! Ha ha, I guess we’ll see in this review! My money’s on a swirling, expansive whirlwind of both feelings simultaneously!

Norm plays Mitch, a fellow who, as happened to Murray in Stripes, loses his job, his girlfriend and his apartment all in one day! Instead of joining the army with his best pal, he decides to open a business with his best pal - a business perpetrating revenge tricks on behalf of anyone willing to employ them! Mitch’s best pal is Sam, and there are additional complications involving Sam’s dad Pops, played by good old Jack Warden, and the heart transplant he needs in order to survive and continue his campaign of curmudgeoning!

But the bits that really work are the revenge tricks and the little associated bits, as when Mitch has to take work as an experimental brownie tester and suffers an hallucination of Gary Coleman, from The Kid With the 200 IQ, in the role of the devil, cackling with evil glee! There are all sorts of bizarrities, which I always appreciate in an apparently straight arrow comedy picture! It captures about thirty percent of what’s funny about Norm Macdonald, which is actually higher than one might expect with a mid-budget studio comedy!

It’s a pretty 1990s picture! Mitch’s shirtwear choices alone locate it firmly in that decade! Chevy “Fletch” Chase and Don “Beach Blanket Bingo” Rickles anchor the old guard, but much of the cast is 1990s comedians, like Artie Lange as Sam, and Chris Farley as the half-nose barfly and skunk-looser! And it sure was nice to see George Chuvalo, the ill-fated arm wrestler in The Fly and a champion boxer in his own right, as the ring announcer!

Ha ha, it has a very 1990s soundtrack too! Of course it has Semi-Charmed Life by Third Eye Blind and Tubthumping by Chumbawumba, and songs by Better Than Ezra, Green Day, and The Reverend Horton Heat, and there’s an ironic use of Escape (The Pina Colada Song) and a heartfelt one of AC/DC’s Dirty Deeds (Done Dirt Cheap)! How the Spin Doctors escaped this playlist I don’t know! Ha ha, this isn't the stuff I was listening to back then, but it fits the picture well enough! They should have found a use for that Steely Dan song that shares a title with their movie, though!

I can’t say I love this picture, but I am fond of it, even though I wish Macdonald, his co-writers and director Bob Saget had found it within themselves to do something with a little more danger to it! It’s littered with funny bits, so I’m going to give Dirty Work two and a half bearded ladies!

Burl reviews Witchboard! (1986)

Ha ha and hello, you’ve conjured up Burl, here to review another movie for you! This time it’s Witchboard, an earlier movie from the maker of Witchtrap! Ha ha, the fellow had witches on the brain!

Well before I get into the plot, I’ll tell you that this is one of those movies that managed to get a theatrical release in my town, despite them being cheap and dirty little genre pictures! Time Walker, Deadtime Stories, Strange Invaders and Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot all fit into this category! (Galaxy of Terror would be in there too, if I hadn’t been kicked out of the cinema, ha ha!)

I saw Witchboard at my beloved Park Theater with a couple of pals, sneaking in past the crabby lady who usually demanded to see ID and settling in to watch the story of a young couple, Linda and Jim, who get tangled up with a Ouija board brought into their lives by a slick frenemy named Brendon! Brendon is deeply into Ouija, and he’s made a little ghost friend called David, whom he calls up at a party the couple are holding! Brendon is very obviously played by a soap opera actor, so along with the Ouija board he brings a bunch of soap opera drama, which occupies a good deal of the picture’s running time! Brendon loves Linda, you see, and believes Jim, his former best friend, stole her away from him! Ha ha!

But there’s spooky stuff too! Soon Linda is hooked on Ouija, talking with someone she believes to be the ten year-old David, but who proves after some investigation to be the ghost of a Portuguese axe murderer! A few Omen-style accidents occur: Jim’s pal Lloyd is smushed by sheetrock at a construction site, and a goofy Valley Girl psychic played by Kathleen Wilhoite from Road House is sliced across the neck and hurtled out the window to land on a decorative yet pointy sundial! After this the murderous boogaboo reverts to his old ways and simply puts a chopping on his victims; but how he, a simple shade, is able to tote his axe around and deliver his chops with it is never satisfactorily explained!

Despite the chopping and the slicing I’ve described, the picture is pretty talk-heavy! Luckily the acting is not too bad or this would be truly intolerable! The soap opera guy is a little soap opera-y, and Tawny Kitaen, as Linda, is a bit Tawny Kitaen-y, but they all seem like part of the package, so it works fine for the picture! The main guy, Jim, played by Todd Allen from Django Unchained, is somehow very laconic and So-Cal while still burning with rage and cigarette embers, and by the end he learns to love again; and the cop on the case, one of those movie eccentrics (played by Burke Byrnes from Prophecy, he gobbles down grapefruits and tells long, rambling stories about magic) is pretty artificial! Again, however, they work for this particular picture!

Poor old Rose Marie plays the landlady, and she isn’t given much to do except clean up the mess at the end! Ha ha, the climax she’s cleaning up after is underwhelming, but worth waiting for nevertheless, as it involves the most direct and least sensical way of disposing of a Ouija board that anyone could conceive, dramatized by an hilarious special effect that reminded me of Forever Evil! (There are newer Ouija board movies, I’ve heard, but I haven’t seen them and can only hope they’ve copied this disposal method!) While Witchboard’s occasionally witty script, functional acting and acceptable production serve as feathers in its cap, the lack of ambition and abundance of blab are certainly black eyes! I give the picture two goofy hammerhatchets!

Burl reviews Godzilla! (1998)

Grr grr and growl, it’s Burl, with a review of the Godzilla picture they made in the 1990s! Yes, it’s simply called Godzilla, and when it was announced that this would be the next movie from the fellow who brought us Independence Day, the world’s response was “Ha ha, of course it is!”

Now, this one took a different approach from the 2014 Godzilla and its more recent sequel! In those pictures, the G man seems to be part of a cabal of god-like Ancient Ones who ruled the world until they decided they would rather live underground, like Titans! There’s a bit of that in the old Toho pictures too! In this 1998 version however, he’s just a big lizard, grown size large because of nuclear testing conducted by the French! Ha ha!

Our unlikely hero is a fellow who’s been studying worms for three years, called Nick Tatopolis, played by the open-faced actor, Matthew Broderick! Ha ha, great sport is made of his supposedly complicated Greek name, which I suppose is in tribute to the monster designer, Patrick Tatopolous, who works regularly for this director! Another dubious tribute the script attempts is to hire Michael Lerner, well known from Class Reunion and Strange Invaders, to play callow Mayor Ebert! I suppose Roger Ebert must have given this guy a bad review for something, so he chose this non-clever revenge, over-extending the gag to include a scene in which his very Siskel-like assistant rates the mayor a thumbs down!

There are a few other characters, some of them played by voice actors from The Simpsons, which is a pretty 90s thing to do! Ha ha! Broderick, wearing a beret for some reason, is carrying a pretty unconvincing torch for a lady who would like to be a reporter, played by Maria Pitillo from Wise Guys; and some non-Godzilla drama results from her stealing Broderick’s secret research materials!

None of the bad guy types - not Mayor Ebert, not the nasty anchorman - get squished by Godzilla, or even get particularly close to him! I assumed both would feel the weight of Godzilla’s bottom, but I was wrong! I guess I have to give it to the picture - it surprised me! Ha ha, I’ll bet they thought about squashing both characters, but just couldn’t fit it those scenes around all the stuff they borrowed from Jurassic Park!

I try to be a positive sort of fellow, so here are a few things I liked about the movie, ha ha! There’s a good deal of carnage, so the picture keeps its end of that bargain; and the trick effects have not dated as much as we might expect! Also, and I’m an easy touch with these things, they did manage to create some empathy for the lizard, and some pathos when he dies! I’m usually on the monster’s side in these things, and so it was here!

On the other hand, the characters were a bunch of nundinckers, not a one of them with much to offer the discerning viewer! Broderick is a likeable enough fellow I suppose, and Jean Reno is the only interesting fellow on view here, and that just barely! The whole thing shuts down for a while to do the raptor scenes from the Jurassic Park movies, and spends so long with the baby dinosaurs in Madison Square Garden that I was reminded of Gremlins 2!

It achieves no surprises except in how narratively unambitious it is! Ha ha, maybe I’m just bitter, because this came out the same day as a movie I made, and it made a lot more money than mine! Well, that was no surprise! I give Godzilla one cup of poor American coffee!

Burl reviews The House on Tombstone Hill! (1988)

It’s Burl with another cheap horror movie for you! This one is called The House on Tombstone Hill, but it’s really called Dead Dudes in the House! Ha ha, but I’m going to call it The House on Tombstone Hill, simply because I much prefer that title!

Nevertheless, Dead Dudes in the House is a fairly accurate summation of the goings-on in this picture! One dude has bought himself an old house, and has somehow convinced a number of other dudes, along with two ladies, to come and help him fix the place up! But, ha ha, when the biggest jerk among the dudes breaks a small tombstone he finds outside the place, he awakens the spirit of a dude in old lady makeup, who I think was supposed to be an actual old lady, or anyway the ghost of one! Supernatural forces are truly at work here, ha ha! Quickly the doors close, the windows become unbreakable, the shutters flap shut, and all the dudes and dudettes are trapped in the house with the old manlady!

Well, the manlady gets to work, luring the dudes one by one down shadowy corridors or up rickety ladders, and when she gets them where she wants them, it’s time for sadism! Yes, she’s a particularly mean old slasher ghost, pinning down her victims with scratch awls, chopping off half their hands before spearing them with pipes, that sort of thing! Ha ha, thanks to the work of Ed French, who startled us also in C.H.U.D., Breeders and Creepshow 2, it gets pretty gory, and they really go the extra mile on the spurting blood in this picture!

More dudes show up, more or less randomly, and have their own encounters with the old manlady! Meanwhile her victims come back to life as murderous talking zombies, who are just as eager to kill the live dudes and dudettes as the old lady is! Like her, they seem imbued with a supernatural strength and resilience, but they are not invulnerable! Neither, as it turns out, is the old manlady, but she holds up pretty well!

The back half of this picture is a slightly repetitive series of fights between the dwindling gang and the ever-increasing cohort of zombies! Luckily the zombies never attack en masse; it would be a much shorter, but probably more thrilling, movie if they did! There is an awful lot of bopping and thwacking and biffing and clobbering, and one fellow carries a four wood around with him as his weapon! Ha ha, I guess they are after all a pretty preppie bunch of dudes!

The picture proceeds with the teensiest amount of wit and a ha’penny’s worth of style, but that’s still more than I was expecting, and is enough to set it apart from other cheapie scare pictures! The location they used was pretty good too - the house is big enough and old enough and ugly enough to make itself a character, though every room on the inside looks alike, which contributes to the decidedly repetitive nature of the film! But we feel trapped in there as much as the characters do, and when one of the sash windows does finally open, we know, having seen Superstition and The Boogey Man, that one shouldn’t linger half in and half out of a haunted house window! Ha ha, the window gets tired of the guy’s dawdling and simply eats him!

It’s got some entertainment value, and the old manlady, as relentless as the Terminator, is a daunting creation! For punching above its weight, even if slightly, I give The House on Tombstone Hill two homemade saw blade knives!

Burl reviews Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood! (2019)

Ha ha and Dykstraflex, it’s Burl, here to review a new picture from Quentin Tarantino, who brought us Django Unchained and a number of other pictures! Now he’s got a movie about Hollywood at the hard fall the 1960s! It’s a fable, and by this time in our culture it’s a fairy tale, and so it’s called Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood!

It’s a simple and quite sweet movie! It’s about Hollywood and the 1960s, yes, and it’s a little bit about Charles Manson and his family of kookoo nuggets, and it’s almost about their crime, but really it’s a portrait of male friendship and the loss of puissance! (Ha ha, as if to discourage Freudian takes on that, or hook it up to simple aging, the only man explicitly stated to be having sex in the movie is Bruce Dern, who must be a hundred and five by now!) As a sort of sideline, the movie shows us the process behind the transformation of a star into a character actor, and for those with any interest in this kind of career trajectory, it’s a fine old pumpernickel of a bonus!

In the story we mostly stick with either Rick Dalton, a TV star who has aged out of the roles that made him popular; or else Cliff Booth, Rick’s stunt double, dogsbody, and pal; or else, most often actually, both of them! Around them revolves a large cast, from celebrity lookalikes (the Steve McQueen suggests an uncanny melding of McQueen and Gene Wilder) to old ringers like Bruce Dern and Al Pacino and even Clu "Tapeheads" Gulager, to the younger actors who have real parts, like Margot Robie as Sharon Tate (who gets some nice moments watching herself in a Matt Helm picture) and Emile Hirch, who plays Sharon’s hairdresser pal Jay Sebring!

The picture winds pleasantly through the Hollywood Hills, spending time also in Musso & Frank’s (where I too have sat and listened to tales of Tinseltown’s underbelly while drinking whiskey sours, and had to leave through the back door because in front the cops had shot some poor addled street person waving a Swiss army knife around!) and along the Sunset Strip (though I was surprised none of the characters went to any clubs!), and Cliff, played by Brad Pitt, even drives along Yucca once, with the 7-11 visible in the background, past the building where Ed Wood lived out his declining years!

Of the climax of the picture, which involves a home invasion by the Manson gang, I will say nothing, except that it doesn’t go down exactly like you read in the papers, ha ha! There’s something about the wish-fulfillment aspect of it that doesn’t quite sit right; also the merciless violence of it; but on the other hand it’s a fine wish, and it’s a lot of fun to watch in an animal brain sort of way!

The picture has many entertaining digressions, a ton of beguiling period details, and is pure joy for the movie lover! The visual effects by none other than John Dykstra are seamless and superb! Brad Pitt’s character is a bit of a black hole, but he’s an amiable one, and Leonardo Di Caprio, in the role of Rick, cries a lot! I thoroughly recommend Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, and give it the three Georges, Peppard, Maharis and Chikaris! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Beach Blanket Bingo (1965)

Hey hodads, it’s Burl, here to review one of the A.I.P. beach party pictures from well back when! This one is Beach Blanket Bingo, which I think may have been the third in the series! Ha ha, it’s hard to tell, because they really cranked ‘em out around that time! And it wasn’t just A.I.P., but you had things like The Girls on the Beach, Ride the Wild Surf, Beach Ball, and so many others!

This one has the same plot as all the others: a beach full of kids on vacation, with Frankie and Annette holding hands and singing to each other on the beach, but they have the same old problems as ever! Annette thinks Frankie should grow up, and Frankie thinks Annette is a bit of a fuddy-duddy! Plus they both become interested in other people, namely skydiving instructors played by Deborah Walley and John Ashley!

Meanwhile there are other things occupying the beach gang! Bonehead (who until this picture had been called Deadhead), the size-tall lummox, falls in love with a girl from the sea who turns out to be a mermaid! This affair du coeur is followed in great detail, installing itself as the emotional backbone of the whole picture! Meanwhile there’s a pop singer called Miss Sugar Kane whose publicist, Paul Lynde, is thinking up big publicity stunts for her to do; and these stunts involve a skydiving school run by Don Rickles (well known from Innocent Blood, but approximately the last person I’d want to learn skydiving from) and the gang itself, when they too become interested in both skydiving and Miss Sugar Kane! In the background of all this lurks Buster Keaton, stonefacing with a lady in a fur bikini, dancing, and even getting into a fight!

But then, unfortunately, come regular doses of Erik Von Zipper! This is the idiot biker character played by Harvey Lembeck in a manner suggesting Morty Tashman from The Errand Boy became a biker! Ha ha, thankfully he spends at least some of his screen time playing pool with Timothy Carey (from Echo Park), in a performance that’s weird even for Timothy Carey, as a pool shark called South Dakota Slim! Slim stands there glaring over his surroundings with an imperious, squinty gaze, waiting his turn to make a shot, calling everybody “bubby!”

Boy, sorry Harvey, ha ha, but I sure hate Von Zipper! If I ever decided to make a list of my most to least favourite Beach Party movies (I never will), the top entry would be whichever one had the least Von Zipper! I find the Von Zipper character and all his scenes desperately unfunny, and ha ha, regrettably this one is very heavy on the Von Zipper! He falls in love with Miss Sugar Kane, and, to show his devotion, kidnaps her and takes her to the gang’s clubhouse, where she too will know the pleasure of playing pool with Timothy Carey!

Carey, the great fartiste, kidnaps the singer in his turn, announcing his intention to take her to his bubby house! Ha ha, Carey turns out to be a crazed psychotic who lives in a sawmill - his bubby house - and proposes to tie Miss Sugar Kane to a log and cut her in half! Apparently still intending to cut her in half at some later date, Carey instead spirits her to an upstairs room, where he cries “I’m gonna give ya some en-ta-tain-ment!” and starts shivering so violently that the still bound actress hops away from him in what appears to be genuine alarm! This part alone makes all the Von Zipper stuff worth wading through, because South Dakota Slim is a monstrous and memorable creation, sort of a Hannibal Lecter of the mid-60s!

There are a few lively beach tunes, some okay gags, and some nice work from Buster Keaton, who is a performer I think everyone adores! The mermaid stuff is stupid but tolerable, the Frankie and Annette scenes half-baked, and the picture as a whole seems to go on for a very long time! But how deeply can you dislike a movie that ends with Buster Keaton being covered in kisses? Ha ha, I give Beach Blanket Bingo two bisected bikers!

Burl reviews Niagara! (1953)

Hi, Burl here, and welcome to the falls! Yes, I always wondered if the movie Niagara had much to do with Niagara Falls themselves, and I’m here to report that the answer is boy, do they! Ha ha! The great falls feature so heavily in this move that they had to invent a special device to place over the camera lens to keep it clear of mist! It’s true!

The location photography is only one of the charms of this picture! Henry Hathaway directed it, and I confess that I always associate his name with Westerns, even though he made plenty of films noir and other types of pictures too! Ha ha, he’s one of those journeymen, all right! And he does a fine job on this movie, which I guess you might call a sort of film noir, although it was shot in rich, three-strip Technicolor by the marvelous Joe "Bigger Than Life" MacDonald!

I didn’t know much about this one before watching it, except that Marilyn Monroe was in it! And indeed she is, but she’s not really the star! Except of course she is the star; how could she not be? She looks stunning here of course, and her performance as a lady unhappily married to Joseph Cotten, is solid enough to transcend her status as an icon!

Monroe and Cotten are staying at the Rainbow Falls Motel, one of those places Humbert and Lolita might have stayed in on their own trek through America! Except the Rainbow Falls Motel is in Canada, and most of the action takes place there, or in a tower near the bridge across the river, or in those tunnels and balconies that surround the Canadian falls! The unplaceable accents of the police who investigate the goings-on mark them as Canadian, ha ha!

And just what are these goings-on? Well, at the same motel as Monroe and Cotten are a sensible young wife and her dope of a husband, who get mixed up in the other couple’s drama, realizing that Monroe is having an affair with some other fellow; and we viewers learn that Monroe and her boyfriend are planning to get rid of Cotten by bopping him and tossing him into the cataract! A bell tower playing a certain tune will indicate that the plan has come off, but in fact everything goes sideways, and matters come to a head with Cotton and the young wife heading to their doom over the great falls themselves!

Ha ha, it’s all very Hitchcock, and one can imagine old Sir Alfred having a crack at this story! But he’d have added some wrinkles to it, a few extra suspense setpieces, more detecting from the detective, and more humour! As it is, there are some marvelous moments, like the bell tower murder and the final scene at the falls! Unfortunately there are no scenes at the Niagara Falls Museum, which I once toured, finding oddities like a Zulu warrior accouterment called “Penus Cover” and a fierce, towering stuffed bear with a little card in front of him reading “Grizzle Bear - He Killed Six Men!” Ha ha, the museum is now gone, and its collection in the hands of a Toronto millionaire’s estate, but I’d like to have seen it on film, that’s for sure!

Anyway, Niagara was great fun, if occasionally stagy (some of the dialogue scenes in the motel rooms go on a bit long) and not always up to the full potential of the story! It’s great to see this tourist mecca the way it was in the 1950s, before the hotel towers and the sketchy attractions! I recommend a viewing of Niagara, and I give it two and a half records crumbled up in anger!

Burl reviews The Manhattan Project! (1986)

Hi, it’s Burl! Do you like movies about science lads? Ha ha, I sure do! And there was no greater boom in this little genre than in the mid 1980s, when movies like Weird Science, My Science Project, Real Genius, Deadly Friend and Flight of the Navigator came out! And don’t forget D.A.R.Y.L.! Well, one of my favourites of the bunch is a lesser-known one, not as goofy or fantastical as most of the others, but very sciencey! It’s The Manhattan Project, a picture made by Woody Allen’s one-time crony Marshall Brickman!

The film is set pleasantly in Ithaca, New York, where atomic laser scientist John Lithgow has just set up shop to secretly make plutonium for the government! Meanwhile a local science lad, named Paul as so many of them are, catches wind of this operation when the affable Lithgow starts asking his mom out on dates! Ha ha! In concert with burgeoning girlfriend Cynthia Nixon, Paul decides to expose the true workings of “Medatomics Company” by stealing some of its plutonium and constructing his own nuclear bomb! Oh, ha ha!

In its first half the picture offers up a quite decently done heist in science lad clothing! Paul may be a little cleverer than is realistic - his heist, which is quite complex, is conceived of, planned, equipped and pulled off all in the time it takes for a thunderstorm to pass through town - but the writing, and the performance by Christopher Collett as Paul, keep things reasonably grounded!

And as with all the best of the science pictures, this one offers up some not-so-veiled criticism of America, the Reagan administration, and the military-industrial complex to which they were all in thrall! By the time army man John Mahoney and his legion of snipers come busting in, not in the least reluctant to kill Paul in order to get his nuclear device from him, one is as unsure of Paul’s motivations as ever, but is nevertheless convinced he’s somehow in the right! And ha ha, while there’s a happy ending in which Mahoney lets Paul go and just flies away, we can’t escape the conviction that he’s looking at more than a few years in the federal pokey!

The picture is a solid piece of craftsmanship, well acted and laced with plenty of welcome humour! It probably benefits from not trying to be Spielbergian in any fashion - the chase through the New York hotel with science lads pursued by feds recalls E.T. only by accident, and doesn’t involve BMX bikes! Otherwise the picture doesn’t rely on action shenanigans at all, and spends a lot more time debating ethics than Spielberg or his acolytes would have!

I saw this one in the movie theater, and enjoyed it! I’ve been watching it lately with my son and it’s still a good-natured bit of brinksmanship! Ha ha, I give The Manhattan Project two and a half television T-shirts!

Burl reviews Friday the 13th part V: A New Beginning! (1985)

Heh-heh-heh, ha-ha-ha, it’s Burl; and how can there be two Friday the 13ths in one month? I don’t know, but here’s Friday the 13^th part V: A New Beginning for you! It’s one of the lesser-loved installments, and I can certainly see why! It’s fairly terrible, although, and I must stress this, ol’ Burl has seen worse!

I don’t recall the words “Crystal Lake” being uttered once in this chapter, nor a lake being shown on screen, but I suppose we can assume the action takes place somewhere not far from that storied summer camp! We join Tommy Jarvis, no longer the chippy-cheeked kid he was in Friday the 13th part 4 (after all, they could only afford Corey “Gremlins” Feldman for a single day’s shooting), but now played by John Shepherd from The Hunt for Red October, as he arrives at his new way station, the Pinefield Youth Development Center! This is a halfway house with an impossibly broad mandate, caring for an aggregation of youths with afflictions ranging from the mild, like stuttering or being a goth, all the way up to serious cases of full on, bug-eyed, murderous psychosis!

This latter comes into play when a harmless, chocolate bar-loving buffoon is chopped up by an axe-wielding buggy-wug, the aforementioned psychotic! As the other inmates (clients? patients? campers?) wail and cry, and the police cart the nutter to the pokey, two ambulance men arrive to haul away the buffoon’s corpse, which has been sectioned and neatly stacked like cordwood! Roy, one of the paramedics, reacts to this sight like Dracula being shown a crucifix, and there are several lingering close-ups of Roy’s face in a rictus of disordered passion! Ha ha, and why could this be?

Well, the pokings start in earnest then! Is the traumatized Tommy behind it all, having somehow inherited Jason’s murderous inclinations by killing him in the previous, so-called final, chapter? Or is it Jason himself, resurrected again? Or is the killer someone completely random, like, say, Roy the paramedic? Ha ha, no, that would be ridiculous!

And yet the outrages carry on unabated, a tidal wave of homicide that carries up any and all in the area! Two objectionable greasers find themselves eating a road flare and receiving a throat-slice, respectively! An itinerant handyman, who for the briefest of moments fills the role of red herring, catches a machete in the stomach! The impossibly unpleasant bumpkin family next door receive a decapitation and a face-chop! Eyes are poked out with shears, heads crushed with leather straps, and an unfortunate soul singer is transfixed by a pole while relaxing in the outhouse! There’s a lot of mayhem, but most of it is implied, or seen after the fact, or hardly seen at all; the ratings board people, then at the zenith of their restrictive powers, did their shearwork as ruthlessly as Jason (or is that Roy the paramedic) himself!

So of all the Friday the 13^th pictures, it has the most murders while being one of the driest of them gore-wise! That’s fine I suppose, but in addition to gore it lacks suspense, horror, terror, frights, emotional, psychological and logical sense, solid performances and competent mise-en-scene! What it doesn’t lack is salty language, which it wields like a child who’s just been introduced to the concept, and fecal references, which it positively wallows in! Ha ha!

All the killings at least keep it lively! And if the conclusion, in which, yes, Roy the paramedic proves to be the killer, because he was traumatized when the chocolate-bar oaf who was chopped up turned out to be his son (and even the characters who are explaining this, as if it’s the last ten minutes of Psycho and Roy is Norman Bates, just sort of shrug at that motivation), indeed disrupts the Friday the 13^th timeline which some people apparently hold dear, at least it’s something different! I give Friday the 13^th part V: A New Beginning one giant pot of watery, horked-in soup!