Burl reviews Red Planet! (2000)

Ha ha and Mars-men, it’s Burl, here to review a picture that takes us on a forgettable journey to the fourth planet from the sun! I know it’s forgettable because, despite seeing it (I think!) in the theatre on its initial run back in 2000, I couldn’t recall a single thing about it, except that it involves astronauts flying to Mars and things not going well for the crew! Ha ha, am I talking about Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars? Nope, the other one: Red Planet!

Well, I watched it again the other night and I figure I’d better review it quick, before the particulars disappear from my mind again as they most assuredly will! Already they’re fading! But I can tell you this much: the year is 2057 or thereabouts, and humans have wrecked and degraded the planet Earth to such a degree that we’re casting around for an alternate world on which to live! Ha ha, sound familiar? Well, Mars is the obvious candidate, and to that end, Earth scientists have been bombarding the crimson planet with algaes in the hope that this will create a breathable atmosphere! However, the algaes have not taken, and an all-white crew of astronauts has been assembled to travel there and find out why!

Val Kilmer, well-known from his roles in Top Secret and Real Genius, plays the space janitor, and the ship is captained by Carrie-Anne Moss, whom we recall from Pompeii! Other crew members include Tom Sizemore, famous for his role in Passenger 57; Benjamin Bratt from Demolition Man; Simon Baker from Land of the Dead; and Terence Stamp, whom we all celebrate for his role in Link! Stamp speaks in the same barbiturated cadence he used in Alien Nation - ha ha, I guess that’s the acting style he reserves for middling, forgettable sci-fi pictures!

Everything goes wrong for this bunch almost the very second they reach the planet - before that, even! A fire breaks out on the ship, and Moss is left to deal with that as the fellows jettison to the surface of Mars! They crash land, their habitat (built, I wonder, by whom, as these are supposedly the first humans on the planet) is all busted and the supplies gone, one of them dies of a busted spleen and another by taking a header off a precipice, and a robot dog becomes angry at them! And still this is only the beginning of their trials!

Thanks to some mystical pronouncements early in the film made by Stamp’s character - by name Chamomile, or Cantinflas, or some such - one assumes there’s some kind of galactic metaphysical hocus-pocus at work here, but the explanations, when they come, are fairly science-based! But truly, nothing seems to go right for the gang! One of the good parts of the movie comes when they crash land on the planet and some special balloons deploy! They get a pretty good shake up when the balloon ship rolls off the edge of Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system! Ha ha!

But good parts are fairly few and far between in this picture! Other than Kilmer harboring a crush on Moss, and Stamp’s avuncular flakiness, there’s not much to these characters! One guy reveals himself to be a jerk - not a full-on bad guy, just a jerk - but then immediately tumbles off a cliff! The Kilmer and Sizemore characters both have the same laid-back persona, and are fairly interchangeable! The robot dog  proves their greatest foe, but it’s not a very thrilling one! There are also some space fleas!

All in all, I remember now why I forgot this movie! Ha ha, I fully intend to do so again, in fact: completely and utterly! It’s not terrible I suppose, and the trick effects are good, and the photography by the always-solid Peter Suschitzky is fine; but for all that, the locations still look like Australia with a red filter over the lens! All in all it’s pretty baloney, so I give Red Planet one and a half talking space suits!

Burl reviews Darkman! (1990)

 

Biff, bash, bang and boom, it’s Burl, here to review a comics-based superhero picture! But it’s not your everyday superhero picture, thank the business! No, this is a Sam Raimi picture, and not the Raimi who made all those Spider-Man pictures either! Though, to be fair, it’s not the Raimi who made The Evil Dead, either! No, this picture is more from the Raimi who made Army of Darkness, and yes, ha ha, I’m talking about Darkman!

I had a good time at the movie theatre with this one, as I recall! Like Army of Darkness it’s a studio picture, but it has lots of the stylistic quirks we remember and love from pictures like Evil Dead 2 - the zooms and tilts and the weird montages and all of what have you! But you also get a cast of familiars, like Liam Neeson from Next of Kin and Taken 2 as the driven scientist looking for a way to make artificial skin, but frustrated because it always goes bloop at the end of ninety-nine minutes when exposed to the light!

Meanwhile, his lawyer girlfriend, played by Frances McDormand from Moonrise Kingdom, gets mixed up with gangsters through no fault of her own! These baddies, on the quest for an incriminating document, invade Neeson’s lab, kill his assistant, and blow him and his research sky-high! He ends up floating in the river with the complexion of a well-done coppa steak, an uncontrollable grumpy streak, and an inability to feel pain! The front-line bad guy responsible for this is Durant, played by Larry Drake of Dr. Giggles and Dark Night of the Scarecrow! He’s the sort of heavy who for some reason likes to collect the fingers of his victims, which he chops off with a cigar guillotine and keeps in a cigarette box - ha ha, presumably he takes these severed digits home and smokes them in the privacy of his den after his family has gone to bed!

Colin Friels, who returned to the dark later in Dark City, plays the bad guy behind the bad guy, dancing among the girders of a skyscraper under construction! But leading up to this is Darkman’s journey from crispy, wounded scientist to a rage-filled superhero wearing false faces as he disrupts the business affairs of the Detroit mob!  There are some fine action scenes in here, climaxing in a grand helicopter war, and several henchman expirations along the way!

All sorts of familiar faces show up in the movie’s margins, from Jenny Agutter, of An American Werewolf in London, as a heartless, pin-poking doctor, to Julius Harris from King Kong as a gravedigger, to Professor Toru Tanaka of Dead Heat as a Chinese warrior! And we get more director cameos than in a John Landis movie, including one from John Landis himself, along with William Dear, who directed Timerider, William Lustig, who directed Maniac Cop, and both Joel and Ethan Coen, who directed many fine pictures like The Hudsucker Proxy! Producers like Sean Daniel and Stuart Cornfeld also get a look in, as do Raimi cronies like Josh Becker, Scott Spiegel, and of course Bruce Campbell, who appears at the end as a Final Shemp!

There’s no wasted time in this scrappy picture, and though disbelief must frequently be suspended throughout its running time, the viewing experience is fun enough to make that effort both worthwhile and painless! Ha ha, it’s safe to say I’m a Raimi supporter, though I never have seen his baseball picture, nor his Oz sequel neither! Maybe one day! And although Darkman is not my favourite of his works, I did and do enjoy it, and so I give it a robust three dipping birds!

Burl reviews Gymkata! (1985)

 

Hi-ya and yakmalla, it’s Burl, here to review a well-loved classic of le bad cinema! I’ve owned a big-box MGM/UA VHS tape of this entry for a long time, but until the other night had never bothered to sit down and watch the thing! (I’ve also never watched Ninja III: The Domination, another legendarily enjoyable bad movie released by MGM/UA, but then again I don’t own a copy of that one! One day I’ll catch up to it, though!) And, though you may already have guessed it, the picture I’d like to talk about today is Gymkata!

Yes, ha ha, Gymkata! I think we all know this movie! Evidently, in the wake of the 1984 Olympics, someone, somewhere, decided that gymnast Kurt Thomas should become an action hero, and developed a story in which he becomes the master of a gymnastic martial art called gymkata! (I don’t recall them ever saying the word “gymkata” aloud in the movie, but that’s neither here nor there, I suppose!) And the big secret of gymkata is to be sure there’s a bar or a pole or a pommel horse close by so that you can swing around it and kick people in the head! And if there happens to be no athletic equipment close at hand, you can do a bunch of flips, somersaults, and cartwheels! Ha ha, economy of movement is evidently not a central precept of this particular defensive art!

The plot is, quite simply, a crazy nonsense! The little nation of Parmistan, famed for its citizens' love of hard cheese and their constant cries of “Yakmalla,” is also known for its harsh immigration policy: every newcomer must undertake the inevitably fatal “Game,” which consists of being chased across the countryside by commandos and negotiating such obstacles as a steep gorge, a sheer cliff, a confusing forest, and a town populated exclusively by maniacs who keep a carved-stone pommel horse in their square! The US wants to put a secret Star Wars radar base in the country, but diplomacy has failed to achieve this end, and straight force is out of the question!

Clearly a secret agent-gymnast is the hero required for this mission, and the government, represented here by Edward Michael Bell from The Premonition, has one on standby! It’s Jonathan Cabot, a hoppy-jumpy dwarf unburdened by personality, who’s willing to master The Game by learning new techniques from a series of teachers! These techniques include flip-wrestling and walking up the stairs on his hands! He also receives counsel from the Princess of Parmistan herself, played by the comely Filipina Tetchie Agbayani, well known from The Money Pit!

Once he arrives in Parmistan and begins to play The Game, Cabot finds enemies around every corner! Richard Norton, who did about a million low-rent action pictures and also showed up in Mad Max: Fury Road, plays Commander Zamir, in charge of both maintaining The Game’s rules and subverting The Game’s rules! Bob Schott from Vamp and Head of the Family plays Thorg, a rival player determined to kill Cabot for his propensity to spring about like a leprechaun!

And then there’s The Khan, the country’s leading shouter of “Yakmalla!” and a personage unaccountably played by muscle-bound homunculus Buck Kartalian, from Please Don’t Eat My Mother and The Outlaw Josey Wales! Ha ha, he wears a big fur hat and plays The Khan like a conventioneer at a costume party, and seems never to stop shouting “Yakmalla!” He’s a good guy, as it turns out!

Robert Clouse, who directed The Pack, was in charge of all this lunacy, and indeed one must admit that the fights, as dumb as they are, contain some impressive athleticism from Kurt Thomas! I liked that there was some 80s action gore sprinkled here and there, which is something that always improves a picture; and of course the convenient, horselaugh-inducing presence of the pommel horse and other gymnastic necessities provides plenty of entertainment value! The performances stink, and there’s a backbreaking cape of stupidity draped across the whole thing, but that’s to be expected! I’m glad I watched it, I suppose, and I look forward to Ninja III! In the meantime I give Gymkata one and a half reverse faces! Yakmalla!

Burl reviews The Capture of Bigfoot! (1979)

 

Fellow Rebaniacs, ho! It’s Burl here to review one of the Wisconsin auteur’s more polished works! Ha ha, do you know who I’m talking about? Can you name any famous filmmakers from Wisconsin? Well sure, there’s Orson Welles, but today I’m talking about Bill Rebane, who came from Latvia and settled in the snowy wastes of the Upper Midwest, and was never shy about showing off the area in all its wintery goodness in his films! And he does so in spades with this picture, The Capture of Bigfoot!

Like Invasion From Inner Earth, The Demons of Ludlow, and several other Rebane movies, this one was shot in the dead of winter with the actors all wearing parkas, issuing plumes of steam with every exhale, and crunching through calf-deep snow! I don’t know why Rebane made so many of his movies in the winter, because it’s really hard to do - believe me, I know! Ha ha, I saw somebody go crazy on a winter night shoot once, just fall down on the ground and run in circles jabbering in tongues like Homer Simpson! I suppose Rebane just likes the look, or perhaps that was simply when people were available!

Anyway, The Capture of Bigfoot is a very snowy picture, and frankly a very enjoyable one as well! First of all it’s a Bigfoot movie, and you know how I like those! Ha ha, I made one myself once! Also, it’s got some pretty good small-town atmosphere and some moments of uproariousness, as when the bad guy, in response to a sasquatch-related setback, punches one of his henchmen right out of a window! You have to see it to properly appreciate it, ha ha! There’s also a terrific dance club scene with some truly wonderfully awful songs and a fire crackling merrily in the hearth! Snowbeast, for all its virtues, would have benefited from such a scene!

It takes quite a while to get to the titular capture, and while some viewers may consider self-administering a dose of strychnine as they wait, they would be wrong to do so! Getting there is half the fun in a Rebane movie, after all! Here we have a town made up of woodsmen in earflap hats, swingin' young folk, humdrum cops, and greedy businessmen, or at least one greedy businessman, who through the course of the narrative is driven mad by his own ambition! Ha ha!

It all begins with some loutish trappers who’ve caught a strange creature and have it in a box on their dogsled! But a big tall snowsquatch pops out of the bushes and tosses these fellows around like rag dolls in an SCTV skit, and it turns out that the creature in the box is a teenage bigfoot with a kindly-old-man face! The local robber baron conceives of a plan: recapture the cryptids, put them on display, and make bank! Ha ha, it’s a misguided scheme as old as Carl Denham, and of course it ends with explosions!

There are a few more recognizable faces than we usually see in a Rebane project! Stafford Morgan, who later appeared in Die Hard 2, plays the local lawman who ends up freeing the captured Bigfoot from the cave cage he's been put in! Richard Kennedy from Holy Wednesday essays the role of nasty Mr. Olsen, who just gets meaner as the picture goes on! Otis Young from Blood Beach and John Goff from The Fog, Alligator, and The Candy Tangerine Man are Olsen’s hapless henchmen, Jason and Burt! And of course the great George “Buck” Flower, well known from pictures like Teen Lust, Cheerleader Camp, and Pumpkinhead, is a sympathetic local oaf! As with so many regional genre pictures, the cast here skews to the older side, and while they’re not quite as elderly as we find in, say, Bog, they’re up there!

It moves at its own pace and to its own logic, but I enjoyed the picture! Maybe it helped that I watched it most recently just a few days ago out in the snowy winter wilderness, in an actual cabin in the woods with the dim outlines of snow-fringed pines receding into a dusky enfilade! Bigfoot might have peeked in the window at any moment, ha ha! But if you’re a Rebaniac, and I assume you are, you’ll enjoy the thing to some degree wherever you watch it! I give The Capture of Bigfoot two red jumpsuits!

Burl reviews Rushmore! (1998)

 

Sweet school greetings, it’s Burl, here to review a marvelous little picture! It’s an early work from the dapper fellow who brought us such equally dapper pictures as The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Grand Budapest Hotel and Moonrise Kingdom! But this is a smaller-scale work than any of those, and probably I’m fonder of it than I am of the bigger pictures! Ha ha, the movie in question is Rushmore!

I saw this picture on a date, as I recall, and it was the single and only date I went on with this particular lady, as it turned out! But that wasn’t the movie’s fault, since we both enjoyed it heartily! In fact it was no one’s fault - ha ha, it was just one of those things, and for the best too, as right after that each of us started going out with the person we would end up marrying! So I guess Rushmore has the important distinction of being the last movie date I was on with a person not my wife! Ha ha!

And so to the movie itself! We’re all familiar with these Wes Anderson pictures by now, and I for enjoy them quite a lot, though not everybody does! Back when Rushmore came out his style was still very fresh, and had not yet been dismissed as overstyled, mannered, or twee! Moreover he was able to show Bill Murray, still best known at that time as part of the famous team of Ghostbusters, in a new comedeo-dramatic light, and that’s an achievement worthy of some good will!

Rushmore tells the tale of Max Fischer, an ambitious overachiever and academic underperformer at Rushmore Academy, who battles for the affections of a comely teacher played by Olivia Williams from Maps to the Stars! Max, played by a young Jason Schwartzman, who would later appear in such pictures as CQ and Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, can be an annoyingly obsessive twerp, a condescending jerk, and a monstrously self-centered diapersman, but he’s not a bad sort in the end, ha ha - just a teenager!

Olivia Williams from Maps to the Stars plays the pretty teacher on whom Max sets his cap, and Seymour Cassel, well-known for his roles in Eye of the Tiger, Best Seller, and any number of John Cassavetes pictures, plays his barbershop dad, who delivers his gemstone dialogue in a totally endearing deadpan! Brian Cox from The Ring is the Rushmore Academy principal, and Mason Gamble from Bad Moon gives one of the all-time great kid performances as Max’s little buddy! The waxing and waning of Max’s relationships with all these characters provides the dramatic impetus for the picture, and the comedy comes from all the details packed in like M&Ms all around!

I like the weird behavior that no one remarks upon, like the depressed industrialist and precocious teenager who easily and naturally become best pals, and later romantic rivals! I like the escalating prank war Schwartzman and Murray engage in! Ha ha, I like the little kid who makes the picture of the jellyfish! I like Mr. Littlejeans and the way he steps back as Bill Murray’s out-of-control car rolls toward him! I like Max’s plays and that nobody associated with the production cared how impossible they would be for high schoolers to stage!

The story takes place from September through January, which we know thanks to some little curtain cards, and I like those too! The songs used on the soundtrack are well-chosen, and though this picture, as most Wes Anderson pictures, leans a little heavily on them, borrowing what emotion it can from them rather blatantly, it’s heard to take issue with that because the songs are so good! All in all, it would be fair to say I like this picture and don’t mind the heavily-ladled artifice! Ha ha, I give Rushmore three and a half handjobs by the pool!

Burl reviews Un Flic! (1972)

 

Eh bonjour, est bonne année, c’est Burl! Today I have a review of the last feature made by the great Jean-Pierre Melville! Now, he’s best known for his crime pictures, of course, but he worked in other genres too, like the French Resistance genre! But this picture, Un Flic, or, in English, A Cop, is most certainly a crime picture! Ha ha, with a dirty street Santa popping up at one point, it’s also in part a holiday picture!

But it’s a slightly oddball one! For starters, although the movie is called Un Flic, and although the big star Alain Delon, known from his appearance as a pilot/stickman in The Concorde… Airport ’79, plays the titular taciturn flatfoot, it’s the criminals who get more screen time! And Delon’s cop character, Edouard, is a pretty robotic and unpersonable fellow, driving around, forever receiving calls on his police radio, being handed the phone by his partner, and intoning the exact same little phrase every time! I guess the idea is that being a police detective is not the glamorous world the earlier films of Jean-Pierre Melville had led us to believe it might be! Ha ha!

Richard Crenna from First Blood and Summer Rental plays the main thief, Simon, and things kick off with a bank heist set in a stormy off-season beach city, and though the thieves get some of the boodle they sought, they don’t get it all, and not only that but one of their number catches a bullet! By garr! However, the purpose of this heist was merely to finance another heist, and on this point it is successful enough!

We spend time alternately with Edouard and with Simon, and occasionally with both of them, because it turns out that they’re pals! Not only that, but the share the same sweetie pie, a radiant blonde played by Catherine Deneuve, that classy hemogobbler from The Hunger! Then we get the picture’s showpiece, which is Simon’s second heist! Ha ha, he climbs from a miniature helicopter to a miniature train, changes from his boiler suit into a debonair housecoat, then bonks a drug courier about the head and takes his narcotic-filled suitcase before shinnying back up to the miniature helicopter! Ha ha, it’s a terrific sequence!

The whole picture is shot in the sort of steel-blue patina we may recall from Playtime, and indeed the bank building at the beginning looks like a leftover set from that Tati classic! The picture is consistently engaging, with well-managed suspense and drama scenes, all leading up to the sort of ending popular in French crime pictures since Breathless, or for that matter since Pépé Le Moko! It’s pretty thin gruel so far as characterizations go, however, and the sense of doomy inevitability it’s trying to foster never really takes hold! But it’s a fine crime feature, and, even if not up to Melville’s finest work, a decent capstone to his career! I give Un Flic three curly-cord carphones!

Burl reviews First Blood! (1982)

 

Ha ha and hambones, it’s Burl, here with a review of the good Rambo picture! Yes, that would be the first one, and its general solidity as a motion picture, especially as compared to the other entries in this series - ha ha, and in particular the last one, Rambo: Last Blood - is evinced by its title, which does not contain the name Rambo at all, but is the simple and succinct First Blood!

Sylvester Stallone, who later returned to the mountains in Cliffhanger, is as ever the star, the profoundly damaged Green Beret John Rambo! He’s out for a stroll, looking for an old army buddy, and is dismayed to find that his friend has died from the cancer, thanks of course to the Agent Orange he inhaled back in ‘Nam! Rambo then makes his way to a nearby mountain town and runs into a big bear of a sheriff played by Brian Dennehy from Ants! and F/X and Best Seller! Well, the next thing you know, the sheriff is power trippin’, Rambo is flashbackin’ to his wartime torture days, and deputies are a-flyin’ left and right and Rambo’s out the door and away into the mountains!

The scene with him beating up all the deputies is pretty satisfying, I must say, and later, when the meanest deputy of them all, played by Jack Starrett, who directed The Losers and Race with the Devil, plummets from a helicopter from which he’s shooting at Rambo, we get even more satisfaction! Then the whole gang of deputies is wounded by Rambo and his forest traps, and that’s pretty all right too! This gang of bozos is played by a gallery of familiar faces, like Bill McKinney from Cannonball, Chris Mulkey from Quiet Cool, Michael Talbott from Vacation, John McLiam from Sleeper, with good old Alf Humphries from My Bloody Valentine as the goofball cop and David Caruso from Without Warning as the nice-guy rookie!

But Dennehy’s Sheriff Teasle - ha ha! - is the biggest bozo of all, increasingly bent on getting the mumbly, misunderstood ex-soldier despite the fact that he, Teasle, was the one who started it by not letting Rambo eat lunch in his town! Richard Crenna from Summer Rental and Un Flic appears as Rambo’s old commander, and regales Dennehy with tales of the things Rambo could eat that would make a billy goat puke! Soon the National Guard is called in, and Rambo makes his way back to town and begins a campaign of gunfire and blowups! And despite the explosions and the flying bullets and the crashing cars, the only one who ever gets killed is that nasty deputy who fell from the helicopter!

It’s a fair action meller and a pleasantly cathartic exercise for viewers who are not much enamoured of the police forces in America! In that sense it’s a lot more relevant than the later Rambic exercises in commie-blasting, ha ha! It’s solidly directed by an old pro, and Rambo’s teary breakdown scene near the end is affecting! Plus, like Stallone’s later Cobra it’s a stealth Christmas picture, as evidenced by the sad desktop trees on view in the police station! I give First Blood two and a half grimy canvas ponchos!

Burl reviews A Christmas Story! (1983)

 

Ho ho, it’s Burl, here to review a seasonal classic for you! It’s a Christmas picture from Bob Clark, and I know what you’re thinking: Black Christmas, right? Ha ha, no! I’ve already reviewed that one! This is Bob’s other twinkle-light extravaganza, the well-beloved cornball nostalgia-comedy A Christmas Story!

You all know the story, because, ha ha, there is no story! Well, I suppose there is: a boy in 1940s Cleveland desperately wants a BB rifle for Christmas, but encounters resistance from all the authority figures around him, and even from Santa himself! Purfling the edges of this narrative are all the details of schoolboy life in a mid-century December: weirdly obsessive fathers, annoying little brothers, neighbourhood bullies, triple-dog dares among chums, radio giveaway gimmicks, and so forth!

Our hero is Ralphie, a bespectacled cherubim played by Peter Billingsley from Death Valley! It’s of critical importance that he convince his mom, played by Melinda Dillon from Staying Together, that the Red Ryder repeater is a necessary toy, and that there will be no accidental de-oculation! Dad, or rather The Old Man, is played by Darren McGavin from Raw Deal and Dead Heat, and indeed he is an old man, in fact perhaps a touch too old so to be playing this character; but then he does such a darn good job in the role that any such complaint is moot!

The Christmas season is ever-present, and all the attendant rituals are checked off: the buying of the tree, the visit to Santa and his elves! There’s a freewheeling structure reminiscent of Kenny and Co., and in many cases it’s the non holiday-specific segments which linger longest in the memory! Ha ha, the triple dog dare at the flagpole, for example, or Ralphie’s beatdown of the dreaded Scut Farkus, or his accidental cry of “Fudge!”, or, of course, the whole saga of the leg lamp! Ha ha, I need hardly go into further detail on these or any other episode in the picture, as it will no doubt be playing on a loop this Christmas day on some network or other!

This being in essence a Canadian movie, there are some familiar northland faces in the cast! Ralphie’s teacher, Miss Shields, is played by Tedde Moore whom we may recall from Rip-Off and Rolling Vengeance, and the Christmas tree man is none other than Les Carlson from Videodrome, The Dead Zone, and even some non-Cronenberg pictures! The whole thing has an appropriately fog-filtered Norman Rockwell look courtesy of cinematographer Reg Morris, who shot Bells and all sorts of other pictures!

I could have done without the Chinese restaurant scene at the end, or at least without the singing, but otherwise the movie goes down like a smooth nog! It’s funny here and heartwarming there, and sometimes it’s just there, playing on your TV, but it remains a repeatedly watchable holiday candy cane crunch, and I think, low-key as it is, Bob Clark really pulled something off here, and only a year after he made Porky’s too! I give A Christmas Story three strangled cries of “Notafinga!”

Burl reviews Tampopo! (1985)

 

Noodle-slurpers, hello, it’s Burl! Ha ha, when I was a younger man, working in a video store in the late 80s and early 90s, there were certain movies of which I was aware, and which I knew were supposed to be good, but which were so ubiquitously on the shelves that they became a sort of wallpaper, and I never watched them! Many of these were the sort of 80s international or independent popular favourites that would have played in art houses to sweet acclaim - ha ha, I guess something like My Dinner With André or maybe Babette’s Feast would be other examples of this sort of movie! But the one I’m talking about today is quite simply Tampopo!

Well, I recently caught up with it, and while I’d always known is was a quirky film that mixed together genres the way its characters mix together broth, I wasn’t aware of just how eccentric and culturally specific it was! I found these elements quite delightful, and at times the episodic surreality of the thing reminded me a bit of something like Holy Motors!

And like Holy Motors, this is a movie that’s highly aware it’s a movie! Ha ha! It begins in a cinema, with a white-suited gangster type, played by Kôji Yakusho from such great Kiyoshi Kurosawa pictures as Cure and Charisma, who upbraids fellow patrons for eating noisy chips, and then discovers and addresses the camera to issue a similar admonishment and to talk about the autobiographical “movie” one sees of one’s life at the moment of death! Then the story proper begins: two truck drivers, one an older, taciturn cowboy Goro, played by Tsutomu Yamazaki, known for his appearances in such Kurosawa pictures as High and Low, the other a younger fellow in white called Gun, essayed by none other than Ken Watanabe from Godzilla, stop for ramen in a little restaurant run by a widow named Tampopo, played by Nobuko Miyamoto, the Taxing Woman herself!

But Tampopo’s ramen is unsatisfactory, and so Goro and Gun embark on a quest to help the flustered woman perfect her cooking and turn her struggling business into an all-time blockbuster of a noodle shop! As in The Magnificent Seven, or, more properly, The Seven Samurai, they gather together a group of experts, all men, to help not just with the ramen recipe but with renovating the shop and refining every detail of Tampopo’s hospitality strategy! Meanwhile Goro and Tampopo seem destined from the beginning to be together, but their budding romance is remarkably tentative!

Well, that’s the main tree trunk of the plot, but branching off it regularly throughout the picture are food-centric vignettes, sometimes involving the gangster in white, at other times featuring total strangers: a group of executives scandalized by their junior’s independence, for instance, or an old lady with pinchyfingers gone a-marketing! Some of these are moral tales, others fables, and sometimes they’re just filmed jokes in the manner of If You Don’t Stop It…. You’ll Go Blind!!! I must say I particularly liked a digression involving a gang of hobo gastronomes, and I think you’ll like that bit of the movie too!

With the exception of a scene showing the slaughter of a turtle, which I most certainly didn’t like, it’s mostly a very delightful a study of kindness and generosity between humans! But it has some sharp edges too, along with punchfights, low-key pictorial beauty, and a touch of bohankie too, making it in sum a good, heady brew of noodles and broth! The attention paid to detail, and the gorgeousness of the comestibles on view add still further to the pleasures of the whole! Ha ha, it’s an invigorating filmic experience, and I give Tampopo three shared egg yolks!

Burl reviews Corpse Eaters! (1974)

Ha ha, I’m not crazy, I’m no-o-o-ot! No, ha ha, I’m Burl, here with a movie review that might make you think I am crazy! But, just as a character in the movie itself screechily claims at the end of the picture, I’m not! I'm no-o-o-ot! The movie is real, and it is called Corpse Eaters!

This is one of those little regional zombie pictures of the early 1970s, very much in the same category as something like Garden of the Dead or Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things! For that matter, I guess it’s a pretty direct, if badly mutated, offspring of Night of the Living Dead, itself a penny-poor regional zombie picture, but one pulled off with a lot more professionalism and flair than Corpse Eaters! Ha ha! But I certainly don’t mean to imply that Corpse Eaters is entirely lacking in charm and zombie interest - no sir, it most certainly has a measure of that!

The story takes place somewhere near the mining community of Sudbury, Ontario, and features characters with Canadian accents so thick they sound Irish! Initial scenes are set at the Happy Halo Funeral Home, where a scruffy old grump runs the show, but doesn’t think much of his customers! He seems to have a real grudge against dead people in fact, which is bad, because he works with them every day! In any case, a mustachioed corpse comes in who needs some special facial reconstruction work done, and as his mortician gets to work, the Happy Halo owner strolls around his boneyard, musing nasty thoughts in voice-over!

Ha ha, dissolve to the lake, and to a little hard-boating action! A little gang of pals, including Ritchie (whom I didn’t realize until later was the corpse delivered to the Happy Halo in the opening scenes), zoom about in their watercraft, then repair to the shore to guzzle a little Molson Ex and engage in bohankie! Well, one of the couples does at least, which is to say Ritchie and his good-time gal Julie; the other pair, a fiveheaded hoser called Alan and his perpetually grouchy girlfriend Lisa, can only watch this sloppy, beer-soaked bohankie from the sidelines! Before too long, and over the strenuous, and as it turns out, well-justified objections of Lisa, the quartet end up in a remote graveyard, hiding from the rain in a handy crypt!

Ritchie is keen on enacting a satanic ritual he learned from his uncle, and this is where it all goes pear-shaped! Zombies unearth themselves and come to put a biting on the foursome! Julie is quickly overwhelmed and the flaky-skinned cadavers have a good old belly-munch; Ritchie, the fool who caused it all with his hocus-pocus and mumbo-jumbo, catches a heavy biting, and the other two drag him to the car (a Challenger or a Cougar from about 1970 - I couldn’t tell which in the grainy 16mm murk, but it was sure sweet!) and drive him to the hospital! Ha ha! But nothing the medicos do can help Richie, and he ends up at the Happy Halo, as Lisa meanwhile endures terrible zombie nightmares and is consoled in the most jerkish, responsibility-dodging manner possible by the gormless Alan!

The Happy Halo man, deep in his cups, is startled by noises, and when he sees a zombie pulling out a guy’s eyeballs, his mind simply snaps! There’s no real conclusion to the story save the funeral home director being roughed up by orderlies (and, charmingly, you can actually hear one of the actors apologize during this scene - ha ha someone must have accidentally stepped on someone else's foot) and left in a room all strait-jacketed up and howling that he’s not crazy! He’s no-o-o-ot!

Well, after 57 minutes of crude but heartfelt Sudbury moviemaking, the picture ends with the viewer’s goodwill intact! Ha ha, that’s an achievement in itself, and one worth celebrating! Corpse Eaters is not a film for everyone, and the little gimmick of the warning siren and the barfing man, meant to signal an upcoming sequence of grotesque and sickening gore, is not required for those who might be enthusiastic to make its acquaintance! If it’s a diamond in the rough, there’s an awful lot of rough, but those who might appreciate it most definitely will! Ha ha! I give Corpse Eaters two Evinrude outboards!